Decoder Ring

You know the Tootsie Shot. It’s that image that pops up all the time in movies set in a dense city: a really busy midtown street, everyone going somewhere—and smack in the middle of it all is the protagonist. You can find it in Working Girl, Midnight Cowboy, Wall Street, Heartburn, Elf, Bridget Jones’s Diary, The Devil Wears Prada, The Wolf of Wall Street, and so many more. But while it’s one of the most recognizable camera shots in all of film, it only amounts to a short, transitional moment, often in the middle of a montage, and sometimes lasting for a couple seconds. It is, after all, just someone walking down a crowded street. So why is it so sticky?Some of the voices you’ll hear in this episode include James Sanders, author of Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies; cinematographer Adam Holender; producer Anna Wenger; assistant director Joe Reidy, author Christopher Bonanos, media and entertainment lawyer Sam Bayard, and location manager Mara Alcaly. Also thanks to Jason Bailey, Sam Levy, Glenn Kenny, Carlo Mirabella-Davis, J.D. Amato, David Sims, Bill Parker, Doug Brody, Sean Fennessey, and Jody Rosen.This episode was produced by Willa Paskin and Benjamin Frisch. Decoder Ring is also produced by Max Freedman and Evan Chung, our supervising producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director.If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at DecoderRing@slate.com or leave a message on our hotline at (347) 460-7281.Get more of Decoder Ring with Slate Plus! Join for exclusive bonus episodes of Decoder Ring and ad-free listening on all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe from the Decoder Ring show page on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/decoderplus for access wherever you listen.Need to set up your Slate Plus feed? If you subscribed through Slate.com, check out our FAQ at slate.com/podcastfaqs for easy instructions. Members subscribed via Apple Podcasts get automatic access—no setup required. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Videomate: Men was a VHS tape released in 1987 featuring 60 single men pitching themselves as dates to women on the other side of the TV screen: “The love of your life could be on your TV tonight!” the box reads. In retrospect, Videomate: Men is a bizarre and hilarious time capsule, but at the time it was one of many manifestations of what was known as video dating. To find out how anyone thought this was a good idea, Decoder Ring examines the weird and forgotten world of video dating in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s to find out why video dating once seemed like the future—and if that future is still yet to come.On this episode, originally released in 2019, we talk to the creators of the Found Footage Fest, VHS collectors who unleashed Videomate on the internet; ask the creators of video dating services like Videomate’s Steve Dworman and Great Expectations’ Jeffrey Ullman what they were thinking; and talk to participants who used these services but not necessarily in the way that was intended. We’ll also discuss the future of video dating with Coffee Meets Bagel co-founder Dawoon Kang and former host of The Longest Shortest Time Andrea Silenzi.This episode was written by Willa Paskin and was produced and edited by Benjamin Frisch. We had research assistance from Cleo Levin. Decoder Ring is produced by Katie Shepherd, Max Freedman, and Evan Chung, our supervising producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director.If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at DecoderRing@slate.com, or leave a message on the Decoder Ring hotline at 347-460-7281. We love to hear any and all of your ideas for the show. Get more of Decoder Ring with Slate Plus! Join for exclusive bonus episodes of Decoder Ring and ad-free listening on all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe from the Decoder Ring show page on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/decoderplus for access wherever you listen. Need to set up your Slate Plus feed? If you subscribed through Slate.com, check out our FAQ at slate.com/podcastfaqs for easy instructions. Members subscribed via Apple Podcasts get automatic access—no setup required. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hark, the holiday season is upon us—and with it the most solemn of festive traditions: a gift guide! In this video and podcast special, Slate hosts Dana Stevens, Chris Molanphy, and Willa Paskin beam-in from their collective hearths to deliver unto the internet their favorite gifts for culture lovers this holiday. In addition to sharing gifts, they also discuss the cultural artifact that is the “holiday gift guide,” and its history going back to the early 20th century, up to the modern day. See the entirety of the 1910 gift guide Our Special Holiday Gift-Book from Greenhut-Siegel Cooper, and Esquire’s ultra-mod gift guide from 1961.Check out our gift recommendations below:Dana Stevens’ Cozy Movie Night-In: The Salbree Collapsible Silicone Microwave Popcorn Popper & Amish Country Popcorn L'agraty Chunky Knit Blanket Throw The Adventures of Antoine Doinel, The Criterion Collection Box SetChris Molanphy’s Hit Parade Collection: The Beatles’ Revolver CD Box Set Mad Men Blu-Ray Box Set Can't Slow Down: How 1984 Became Pop's Blockbuster Year, by Michaelangelo MatosWilla Paskin’s Fruit-Themed Trompe-l'œil Housewares: Cantaloupe-shaped bowls in the style of Bordallo Pinheiro 4-Pack Orange-Shaped Candle Stocking Stuffer Cherry-Shaped Toilet BrushThe Slate Culture Gift Guide is produced for Slate Studios by Benjamin Frisch and Micah Phillips, with Meryl Bezrutczyk and Andrew Harding. Need to set up your Slate Plus feed? If you subscribed through Slate.com, check out our FAQ at slate.com/podcastfaqs for easy instructions. Members subscribed via Apple Podcasts get automatic access—no setup required. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There’s a ubiquitous prop in just about every police procedural and conspiracy thriller: a cork board pinned with documents, newspaper clippings, and Polaroid photos, all connected by a web of red string. They go by many names, including pin boards, string boards, evidence boards, investigation walls, conspiracy walls, and walls of crazy. These boards can be vehicles of insight or manifestations of madness—and in many cases, both. But where did they come from? And can they really solve a crime?In this episode, we try to unwind the red string board all the way to its center. To aide in our investigation, we enlist the help of Aki Peritz, a former CIA analyst and the author of Disruption: Inside the Largest Counterterrorism Investigation in History. You’ll also hear from Shawn Gilmore, editor of The Vault of Culture and creator of the Narrative String Theory project; and Dr. Anne Ganzert, author of Serial Pinboarding in Contemporary Television. And we learn about the intricacies of building a string board from production designers Michael Scott Cobb (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) and John D. Kretschmer (Homeland).This episode was written and produced by Evan Chung, Decoder Ring’s supervising producer. It was edited by Willa Paskin. Decoder Ring is also produced by Katie Shepherd and Max Freedman. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director.If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at DecoderRing@slate.com or leave a message on our hotline at (347) 460-7281.Sources for This EpisodeBenson, Richard. “Decoding the Detective's 'Crazy Wall',” Esquire, Jan. 22, 2015.Coley, Rob. “The case of the speculative detective: Aesthetic truths and the television ‘crime board’,” NECSUS, May 28, 2017.Ganzert, Anne. Serial Pinboarding in Contemporary Television, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.Gilmore, Shawn. “Narrative String Theory,” The Vault of Culture.McGarry, Andrew. “Did Orwell's nightmare Nineteen Eighty-Four inspire the Snowtown murders?” Australian Broadcasting Corporation News, May 21, 2019.Peritz, Aki. Disruption: Inside the Largest Counterterrorism Investigation in History, Potomac Books, 2021.Peritz, Aki. “The FBI Is Going Crazy-Stringboard Crazy,” Slate, Feb. 1, 2022.Stiehm, Jamie. “My So-Called Bipolar Life,” New York Times, Jan. 17, 2012.Get more of Decoder Ring with Slate Plus! Join for exclusive bonus episodes of Decoder Ring and ad-free listening on all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe from the Decoder Ring show page on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/decoderplus for access wherever you listen. Need to set up your Slate Plus feed? If you subscribed through Slate.com, check out our FAQ at slate.com/podcastfaqs for easy instructions. Members subscribed via Apple Podcasts get automatic access—no setup required. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When an actor opens their mouth to sing in a movie, chances are high that the voice you hear will be their own. Even in music biopics, movie stars without much singing experience regularly go to great lengths to impersonate the most beloved vocalists of our time. Why not simply play Johnny Cash or Bruce Springsteen’s actual recordings, the reasons why we care about them in the first place? When the world is full of beautiful singing voices, why force Pierce Brosnan to bray his way through Mamma Mia?What you hear when an actor unhinges their jaw is a matter that Hollywood has been negotiating since the dawn of sound. So in this episode, we’ll learn about the “ghost singers” of classic Hollywood musicals, find out why they went extinct, and why today’s music biopics so often fudge the music. Then we leave Hollywood for Bollywood, where the rise of the celebrity “playback singer” shows what can happen when good singing is the highest priority.In this episode, you’ll hear from Slate’s pop music critic Jack Hamilton; musicologist Dominic Broomfield-McHugh, editor of The Oxford Handbook of the Hollywood Musical; Stephen Cole, co-author of a memoir by the ghost singer Marni Nixon; Isaac Butler, longtime Slate contributor and scholar of American acting; and Nasreen Munni Kabir, who has written several books on Hindi cinema and curates Indian films for the UK’s Channel 4.If you want to listen to any of the songs you heard in this episode in full, you can find them all on this Spotify playlist.This episode was written and produced by Max Freedman. It was edited by Willa Paskin and Evan Chung, our supervising producer. Decoder Ring is also produced by Katie Shepherd. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at DecoderRing@slate.com or leave a message on our hotline at (347) 460-7281.Sources for This EpisodeBasinger, Jeanine. The Movie Musical! Alfred A. Knopf, 2019.Beaster-Jones, Jayson. Bollywood Sounds: The Cosmopolitan Mediations of Hindi Film Song, Oxford University Press, 2015.Butler, Isaac. The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act, Bloomsbury, 2022.Hamilton, Jack. “The Problem With Music Biopics Is Bigger Than Just the Cliches,” Slate, May 17, 2024. Kabir, Nasreen Munni. Lata Mangeshkar ...in Her Own Voice, Niyogi Books, 2009.Nixon, Marni with Stephen Cole. I Could Have Sung All Night: My Story, Billboard Books, 2006.Robbins, Allison. “‘Experimentations by Our Sound Department’: Playback Stars in 1930s Hollywood.” Star Turns in Hollywood Musicals, edited by Chabrol Marguerite and Toulza Pierre-Olivier, Presses universitaires de Paris Nanterre, 2017.Srivastava, Sanjay. “Voice, Gender and Space in Time of Five-Year Plans: The Idea of Lata Mangeshkar,” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 39, no. 20, 2004.Get more of Decoder Ring with Slate Plus! Join for exclusive bonus episodes of Decoder Ring and ad-free listening on all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe from the Decoder Ring show page on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/decoderplus for access wherever you listen. Need to set up your Slate Plus feed? If you subscribed through Slate.com, check out our FAQ at slate.com/podcastfaqs for easy instructions. Members subscribed via Apple Podcasts get automatic access—no setup required. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In 1982, the Jane Fonda Workout became the best-selling home video of all time. Over decades, it and its 22 follow ups would spawn a fitness empire, sell more than 17 million copies, and transform Fonda into a leg-warmer-clad exercise guru. And 40 years after its initial release, when the COVID pandemic hit, the workout had a moment yet again. People began doing it alone and on Zoom, tweeting about it, writing about it. So when Jane Fonda agreed to talk to us, we set out to do an episode about it—but it did not go as planned.On Part 1 of a special two-part Decoder Ring, originally released in 2020, we explore the decades-long relationship of Jane Fonda and Leni Cazden, a fraught friendship that birthed the VHS workout that changed the world. It’s a story of creation, fame, forgiveness, trauma, betrayal, survival, politics, and exercise. You’ll hear from Jane Fonda and Leni Cazden, the brain behind the workout, and Shelly McKenzie, author of Getting Physical: The Rise of Fitness Culture in America.In two weeks we’ll return with Part 2: the nitty gritty story of the bestselling VHS tape of all time.This episode was written by Willa Paskin. It was edited and produced by Benjamin Frisch. We had research assistance from Cleo Levin. Decoder Ring is produced by Katie Shepherd, Max Freedman, and Evan Chung, our supervising producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director.If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at DecoderRing@slate.com, or leave a message on the Decoder RIng hotline at 347-460-7281. We love to hear any and all of your ideas for the show. Sources for This EpisodeBurke, Carol. Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane, and the High-and-Tight, Beacon Press, 2005.Fonda, Jane. My Life So Far, Random House, 2005.Hershberger, Mary. Jane Fonda's War: A Political Biography of an Antiwar Icon, The New Press, 2005.Lembcke, Jerry. Hanoi Jane: War, Sex, and Fantasies of Betrayal, University of Massachusetts Press, 2010.McKenzie, Shelly. Getting Physical: The Rise of Fitness Culture in America, University Press of Kansas, 2013.Perlstein, Rick. Nixonland, Scribner, 2009.Rafferty, James Michael. “Politicising Stardom: Jane Fonda, IPC Films and Hollywood, 1977-1982,” Queen Mary University of London Dissertation, 2010.Get more of Decoder Ring with Slate Plus! Join for exclusive bonus episodes of Decoder Ring and ad-free listening on all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe from the Decoder Ring show page on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/decoderplus for access wherever you listen. Need to set up your Slate Plus feed? If you subscribed through Slate.com, check out our FAQ at slate.com/podcastfaqs for easy instructions. Members subscribed via Apple Podcasts get automatic access—no setup required. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.