Slow Burn

Chicken Soup for the Soul was the brainchild of two motivational speakers who preach the New Thought belief system known as the Law of Attraction. For more than 30 years, the self-help series has compiled reader-submitted stories about kindness, courage, and perseverance into easily digestible books aimed at almost every conceivable demographic: Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul, Chicken Soup for the Grandmas Soul, Chicken Soup for the Golfers Soul, and on and on. Since 1993, these books have sold more than 500 million copies worldwide, becoming the best-selling non-fiction book series of all time.

But in recent years, the company has become many other things that seem lightyears away from inspirational publishing: a line of packaged foods, a DVD kiosk retailer, and a meme stock. In this episode, with the help of journalist Amanda Chicago Lewis, we tell the story of how this feel-good brand went from comfort food to junk.

This episode was written by Willa Paskin and Max Freedman and produced by Max. It was edited by Evan Chung, Decoder Rings supervising producer. Our show is also produced by Katie Shepherd. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director. Special thanks to Rachel Strom.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at [email protected], or leave a message on our hotline at 347-460-7281.

Want more Decoder Ring? Subscribe to Slate Plus to unlock exclusive bonus episodes. Plus, youll access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts by clicking Try Free at the top of the Decoder Ring show page. Or, visit slate.com/decoderplus to get access wherever you listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The infamous annual ritual of spring break—where thousands of college students head to the same warm location and go crazy—can seem like it’s always been here. But it hasn’t. The spring break phenomenon is a holdover from midcentury teen culture that has endured by changing, just enough, to be passed from one generation to the next. In this episode we’re going from the beaches of Fort Lauderdale to Daytona, from the movie screen to the TV set, from MTV to Instagram reels, from its start to its surprisingly recognizable present, as we follow the evolving, self-reinforcing rite that is spring break.

You’ll hear from former MTV staffers Doug Herzog, Salli Frattini, Alan Hunter, and Joe Davola, along with John Laurie, Kaylee Morris, and Slate writer Scaachi Koul.

This episode was written by Willa Paskin and Katie Shepherd and produced by Katie. It was edited by Evan Chung, Decoder Ring’s supervising producer. Our show is also produced by Max Freedman. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director.

Thank you to Bob Friedman and Allan Cohen, producers of Spring Broke; David Cohn, Derreck Johnson, and Ivylise Simones.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at [email protected], or leave a message on our hotline at 347-460-7281.

Want more Decoder Ring? Subscribe to Slate Plus to unlock exclusive bonus episodes. Plus, you’ll access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of the Decoder Ring show page. Or, visit slate.com/decoderplus to get access wherever you listen.

Sources for This Episode

Koul, Scaachi. “From ‘Girls Gone Wild’ to ‘Your Body, My Choice’,” Slate, Dec. 13, 2024.

Laurie, John. “Spring Break: The Economic, Socio-Cultural and Public Governance Impacts of College Students on Spring Break Host Locations,” University of New Orleans Dissertation, Dec. 19, 2008.

Mormino, Gary R. Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida, University Press of Florida, 2008.

Schiltz, James. “Time to Grow Up: The Rise and Fall of Spring Break in Fort Lauderdale,” The Florida Historical Quarterly, Fall 2014.

Spring Broke, dir. Alison Ellwood, Bungalow Media + Entertainment, 2016.

Thompson, Derek. “2,000 Years of Partying: The Brief History and Economics of Spring Break,” The Atlantic, March 26, 2013. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Look in the nonfiction section of any bookstore and you’ll find dozens of history books making the same bold claim: that their narrow, unexpected subject somehow changed the world. Potatoes, kudzu, soccer, coffee, Iceland, bees, oak trees, sand, chickens—there are books about all of them, and many more besides, with the phrase “changed the world” or something similarly grandiose right there in the title. These books are sometimes called “microhistories” or “thing biographies” and they’ve been a trope in publishing for decades. In this episode, we establish where this trend came from, figure out why it’s been so persistent, and then we put a bunch of authors on the spot, asking them to make the case for why their subjects changed the world.

The writers you’ll hear from include: 

Simon Garfield (Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World)

Mark Kurlansky (Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World)

George Gibson, publisher of Cod and Dava Sobel’s Longitude

Historian Bronwen Everill

Slate writer Henry Grabar (Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World)

Gastropod co-host Nicola Twilley (Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves)

Tim Queeney (Rope: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization)

Leila Philip (Beaver Land: How One Weird Rodent Made America). 

This episode was written by Willa Paskin and produced by Evan Chung, Decoder Ring’s supervising producer. Katie Shepherd and Max Freedman also produce our show. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director.

Thank you to Joshua Specht, author of Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America; Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World; Tina Lupton; Dan Kois; and Nancy Miller.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at [email protected], or leave a message on our hotline at 347-460-7281.

Want more Decoder Ring? Subscribe to Slate Plus to unlock exclusive bonus episodes. Plus, you’ll access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of the Decoder Ring show page. Or, visit slate.com/decoderplus to get access wherever you listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The final installment of our series explores the conversations that most of us dread, like frank discussions of our differences or a negative performance review at work. We often anticipate that these chats will go badly—and end in hurt feelings or embarrassment—but there are proven ways to make them easier to navigate.

Host Charles Duhigg talks with psychologist Jay Van Bavel about strategies for having the hardest conversations. And: Vernā Myers, Netflix’s former vice president for inclusion strategy, tells the story of what happened inside the company after an executive was fired for using a racial slur. 

This Slate miniseries dives into the art and science of meaningful conversations, inspired by Duhigg’s bestselling book, Supercommunicators. The guides we mention in this episode can be found at charlesduhigg.com/tools/

Supercommunicators was produced by Sophie Summergrad and Derek John, who also did the sound design. Our technical director is Merritt Jacob and our supervising producer is Joel Meyer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Truck Nutz is a brand name for the dangling plastic testicles some people affix to the bumpers or hitches of their vehicles. Also sold as Bulls Balls, Your Nutz, and other brand names, these plastic novelties have a powerful symbolic charge and are often associated with a crass, macho, red state audience. But truck nuts are a surprisingly complicated signifier whose symbolic power is increasingly divorced from their real-world usage.

On this episode, we talk to owners and users of truck nuts, investigate the origins of the accessories, and deconstruct the meaning of these oft-joked-about symbols. We’ll also take a tour of other novelty testicle products, including Bike Balls (testicular bike lights), Gunsticles (plastic testicles for guns), and Neuticles (prosthetic testicles for neutered pets), to better understand the maligned symbolism of truck nuts.

Links and further reading on some of the things we discussed on the show:

Ad for Monster Truck Nuts 

Truck Nutz Prank Call 

Elie Mystal’s writing on truck nuts for Above the Law 

Austin Vasectomy in Austin Texas 

This episode was written by Willa Paskin and edited and produced by Benjamin Frisch. Decoder Ring is produced by Katie Shepherd and Max Freedman. Evan Chung is our supervising producer.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at [email protected]. Or you can also call us now at our new Decoder Ring hotline at 347-460-7281. We love to hear any and all of your ideas for the show. Want more Decoder Ring? Subscribe to Slate Plus to unlock exclusive bonus episodes. Plus, you’ll access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of the Decoder Ring show page. Or, visit slate.com/decoderplus to get access wherever you listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices