Endless Thread

Video games are arguably the antithesis of nature; highly constructed worlds, synthetic, inorganic. If you grew up gaming, you may recall grown-ups telling you to shut down the console, go outside, and touch some grass.

These days, though, touching grass isn’t something you have to do outside. As gaming has grown into a 200 billion dollar industry, the boundary between screen and soil has muddied. New technologies and types of pla...

Dr. James "Butch" Rosser was a pioneer in minimally invasive surgery in the 1990s. When he credited his surgical skills to video games, people dismissed him. The prevailing narrative was that kids who played video games became killers, not doctors. So Butch set out on quest: to show how video games can help make better doctors.

Show notes:

• The impact of video games on training surgeons in the 21st century (JAMA Surgery)
• S...

Machinima — a portmanteau of “machine” and “cinema” — refers to movies filmed inside video games. The art form had a renaissance in the 1990s, and many thought it had a future in Hollywood. Among the early pioneers were the New York animation collective the Ill Clan, who puppeteered characters in real-time inside the video game Quake, bypassing traditional animation rendering. This technique exploded i...

Today, Stef Sanjati is a creator on YouTube with over half a million subscribers. Her content mostly focuses on her two greatest loves — makeup and gaming — often combining the two with her otherworldly video game-inspired beauty tutorials.

Growing up in small-town Ontario, though, Stef was a quiet, introverted kid who was bullied a lot. For one thing, she looked different from her peers. Having been born with a rare genetic condi...

For decades, the U.S. Army has been on edge about recruitment, hitting its goals for a few years, only to miss them again. As part of their strategy to combat recruiting concerns, the Army has turned its focus online: to the world of gaming and competitive eSports.

With nearly 80% of Americans between the ages of 13 and 28 playing video games weekly, the Army has identified this community as a vital demographic for potential recru...

In this second episode of Hidden Levels, Amory traces the history of the humble-yet-genius joystick — from early 20th century aviation, to 1970s video game consoles like the Atari 2600, to the Nintendo 64 thumbstick in the 1990s, to what some consider the joystick's greatest implementation: the dual-thumbstick controller.

This optimal interface has changed the game, and not just the video game. The modern dual-stick controller is ...

Welcome to our all-new collaborative series, "Hidden Levels," in which we team up with 99% Invisible to explore how the world of video games has impacted the world beyond. We’ll dive deep into how games are made and designed, exploring everything from the history of the joystick to the faithful recreation of nature in digital spaces.

Whether you are a lifelong gamer or have never picked up a controller, "Hidden Levels" uncovers ho...

Have you ever jumped on something as you're moving through the real world, and heard that Mario bouncy sound in your head? Or maybe seen someone acting like an NPC when they're a real person? Maybe you know that the first real "in-app" purchase was actually a weapons store in an arcade game version of Double Dragon 3.

Wherever you go in the real world, you can find signs of the influence of videogames. But you have to know where t...

You've heard of the "Freshman 15"... how about the "DOGE 15"? This is how some federal employees have referred to the stress associated with the establishment of the Department of Government Efficiency back in January and the "restructurings, realignments, and reductions in force" that came with it, as announced in an email sent to nearly all federal employees with the subject line, "Fork in the Road."

Federal workers have found c...

Ben and Amory share stories about potential pettiness from Reddit. Ben shares a post from r/weddinshaming post about a bride who changed her wedding to a weekday in another state. Amory counters with a teacher who used AI to foil his student's cheating. Petty or just? You be the judge.

Credits: This episode was produced by Frannie Monahan. It was co-hosted by Amory Sivertson and Ben Brock Johnson. Mix and sound design by Emily Ja...

In 2020, Jenna Marbles — one of the most popular YouTube creators of all time —posted her last video. Five years later, her devoted fanbase still wonders: where is she, and is she okay? We investigate the mystery behind one of YouTube's biggest disappearances, and why people still care so much.

Show notes:

• r/JennaMarbles (Reddit)
• The Best, Fakest, and Most Teary Influencer Apologies of 2020 (Vulture)
• How to trick people...

What is your relationship with the trash heap of digital history? Can you still connect your old hard drives? Still sifting through your old photos in the cloud? Do you ever low key snoop in the old electronics of other people, searching for treasure?

That's what Noah Simmons was doing a while back when he discovered something compelling in its simplicity: a homework assignment document, on an old laptop picked up at an estate sal...

As summer fades away, we bring you an encore episode about you shoreline companions and occasional bullies — gulls.

Gulls are not beloved creatures. Consult social media, where they are deemed relentless, dirty pests who steal our food and crowd our beaches. As one TikTok user puts it, "Seagulls are the worst animals to ever exist."

Such hatred overlooks truths about this intelligent, charismatic animal, and it is masking a big p...

Dun dun... This week, on Endless Thread... dun dun... something new is here... dun dun dun dun... a podcast mini-series about the 50th anniversary of the cinematic classic... DUN dun dun dun DUN dun dun dun..."Jaws!"

Part 1 of this mini-series, Jaws Island, is right here, right now, and it's all about the "finatics" (yes, that's what they call themselves). WBUR arts and culture correspondent Andrea Shea takes us to Martha's Vineya...

What happens when we outsource aspects of our most personal moments to machines?

In the second installment of our two-part series on AI and relationships, we hear from Rhiannon Williams, a reporter for MIT Technology Review who spoke to people all over the world about how they're using AI to relate to their loved ones, including a man who turns to it during marital disputes, a French mother who uses it to craft nightly tales for h...

Amir Mizroch spent years deconstructing fairy tales for his children — and thinking that maybe, he could create something out of his analysis and storytelling for a wider audience. In the first episode of our two-part series on AI and relationships, we hear what Amir finally created, and explore the questions it raises about connection in the digital age.

Credits: This episode was produced by Grace Tatter, and edited by Meg Cramer...

In the past few years, videos from a new kind of camp have begun circulating the internet. They feature men participating in a variety of bizarre activities: from aggressively digging holes under floodlights, to collectively wailing in a pool of water. These are man camps, where men can pay up to $18,000 to undergo extreme boot-camp-like conditioning in the name of reclaiming their masculinity.

This week...

On this week's Endless Thread, host Ben Brock Johnson and producer Grace Tatter bring us two stories about the power of livestreams – one from the Coldplay concert box seats, and another from a notorious rat corridor in Brooklyn, NYC.

Show notes:

• What's the deal with "Astronomer" CEO and CPO affair? (Reddit)
• A Crown Heights Building's Rat Infestation Gets a Livestream (Hell Gate)
• Rat cam (YouTube/Adam Schleser)
• I am a...

Kristen Sotakoun (@notkahnjunior on TikTok) says she has always been 'the FBI of the friend group' – that person you can count on to dig up the juicy details on anyone's social media.

It's a skillset that has earned her millions  upon millions of views on TikTok in a series she has dubbed 'consensual doxing.' In her videos, Kristen completes challenges from her viewers to find their birthdays, using only publicly posted informatio...