Endless Thread

The internet is the great connector. Talk with nearly anyone at any time about anything. But that kind of freedom can lead to misunderstandings. Maybe your neighbors discover your cruder, less friendly persona online. Maybe a debate over holiday lore becomes a battle front.

Endless Thread producers Grace Tatter and Frannie Monahan bring two stories to remind us that the internet is a morass of information that no one can ever control.

Show notes:

"How I became the villain of El Cerrito’s Nextdoor" (Oakland Review of Books)

Bomellida FAQ (GitHub)

This content was originally created for audio. An auto-generated transcript is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.

Get out your graphing calculators, because today's episode of Endless Thread is about a math problem.

Specifically: wt(π1, . . . , πm) = m−1 ∑ i=1 wt(πi , πi+1)

Now, pencils down. Stumped? So were mathematicians for decades. That is, until the equation was solved in a thread on 4Chan about watching the anime The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. 

Show notes:

A lower bound on the length of the shortest superpattern (oeis.org)

Sa-Shi-Su-Se-So: The Secret of Japanese Cooking Basics (Umami Insider)

This content was originally created for audio. An auto-generated transcript is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.

Mo lives in Aden, an ancient city in southern Yemen. Built on a volcanic crater, it has castles and beaches set against mountains. It's beautiful. Like the rest of the country, it is also in the midst of an ongoing civil war. This summer, protests broke out over living conditions and basic services in the city -- like electricity, which can be shut off for 18 hours at a time.

But despite these conditions, for the last five years, Mo has been fighting for a persistent dream of his –– a video game internet cafe for his neighborhood. This week on Endless Thread Ben and Amory tell the story of how Mo, against all odds, has kept the lights on (quite literally) at his gaming cafe thanks to his persistence, and the help of internet strangers across the world.

This content was originally created for audio. An auto-generated transcript is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.

Ben can make a roaring, rumbling sound with his ears that no one else can hear. He never thought much about it — whether only he could do this, or whether everyone could do this — until he discovered a subreddit called Ear Rumblers Assemble: a whole community devoted to the mysterious and understudied ability to voluntarily tense one of the miniscule muscles in our ears. 

We go into Ben's ear with Dr. Anand Devaiah, and raise questions about how everyone experiences the world differently and the enduring mysteries of the human body.

 

Show notes:

r/earrumblersassemble (Reddit)

Thanks to Reddit, a New Diagnosis Is Bubbling Up Across the Nation (KFF Health News)

This episode was produced by Grace Tatter and edited by Dave Shaw. It was co-hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson. Mix and sound design by Paul Vaitkus.

This episode was originally published on March 10, 2023. 
In 2022, freshmen at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill got a new neighbor: an owl. What wasn't clear was whether the owl was trying to befriend them, or catch them.

Sometimes the owl seemed to be chasing students. Other times, it seemed to come in peace. A popular campus Instagram account reported that a woman had actually raised the owl herself. After she was spotted feeding it, the owl sightings stopped, much to the disappointment of students who'd come to consider it as a sort of mascot. Where had the owl come from, and where did it go?

Endless Thread host Ben Brock Johnson and producer Grace Tatter talk about how the owl gained online campus fame, and get a surprise update from the person who knows the owl best.

Show notes

"Animal Instincts" (Criminal)

"The Real Killer in The Staircase Might Be … an Owl?" (Vulture)

"Column: Hinton hears a hoot — the Class of 2026 vs. the HoJo Owl" (The Daily Tar Heel)

Instagram post of owl chasing student Kaleigh Wilhite (UNC Chicks)

Instagram post of owl confrontation at a basketball court (UNC Chicks)

Instagram post with other campus owl sightings (UNC Chicks)

Instagram post of Barb with the owl (UNC Quirks)

Reddit post on r/wellthatsucks about an owl attack

"An owl twice attacked a Washington woman. A biologist says it's becoming more common" (NPR)

This content was originally created for audio. An auto-generated transcript is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.