Stuff You Should Know

The VW Beetle is the best selling car of all time. The story behind its creation is a bit complicated though.

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Child prodigies are unique in that they achieve adult levels of achievement, but do not typically excel in adulthood. Why? Who knows.

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The food we eat – especially the junk food – is a highly engineered technical marvel that’s designed to make you want nothing other than more! more! more! Learn about how food scientists make that possible by hijacking our brains.

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This is not about smoking or lawsuits or lung cancer. This is about the cigarette itself, a truly unique and destructive invention.

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He’s been called the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb and a real-life Bond villain and depending on where you’re from, he’s a national hero or was the world’s most dangerous arms dealer - who made a career of selling his knowledge of nuclear weapons.

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We have boycotts coming out of our ears these days, but did you know they go back a couple centuries? And that it’s named after the first poor sap to be boycotted? We follow the history of boycotts up today’s boycott superstars and ask how well they work.

Alchemy evokes sorcerers working by candlelight combining potions to create magical items, real Dungeons & Dragons stuff. But alchemy gets a bad rap. Alchemists had lofty goals like curing poverty and their work laid the foundation for science to come.

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Bengal cats are gorgeous animals, but they are bought and sold on the designer pet market, so booo. Learn about these hybrid kitties today.

Child labor is no laughing matter. Even though we've taken care of it in the USA (mostly), it's still an issue around the globe. Listen to this classic episode and learn!

8 tracks were during vinyl, but preceded cassettes. Why? So people could listen to their music on the go. Check out this antiquated medium today.

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Sherlock Holmes is perhaps the most famous fictional character in the world, and for good reason. More than a hundred years on, Arthur Conan Doyle’s 60 Holmes stories are still in print and he is the most portrayed human literary character in history.

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Coelacanths are incredibly interesting as far as fish go. For one, they were thought to have gone the way of the dinosaur, along with the dinosaur. They also give birth to live fish and tend to dwell more than 800 feet below the ocean's surface.
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There was a time – a glorious time – when you could turn the dial in any city in the US and hear popular songs rearranged to be the most pleasant version of themselves. This was the Beautiful Music format and we are spiritually poorer for having lost it.

Sadly, Phil Hartman may be best remembered for being murdered in his sleep by his wife. This episode covers that, but mostly aims to stoke the memories of the legendary talent's life and work.

Sunset Blvd is a long road, but is most known for the 1.7 mile stretch called The Sunset Strip. But it's much more than that.

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The Oedipus complex is probably Sigmund Freud’s most famous theory – that every little boy or girl goes through a phase where they want to kill one parent and, well, do things with the other. Good thing Freud just made it up.

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During Vietnam, the U.S. lowered the IQ standards for the draft in order to bulk up their front lines. This put thousands of men in harm's way and was a complete disaster. It was called project 100,000.

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The story of the Zizians is an unusual one. Are they a cult? Or are they simply a group who wants a better world? And why have six deaths in three states been linked to them?

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How long was the shortest war in human history? Under an hour. Hard to believe? Not when you hear the story.

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When England privatized its commons – lands that by custom belonged to all English to work and support themselves for centuries – it began the modern era, industrialization, wage labor, industrialization, or all of those things and more.

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Are anacondas big? For sure. Are they able to crush and consume a human? Maybe, but thankfully they don't really do that. Don't believe everything you see in the movies.

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Wild stories about a crazy party after Andrew Jackson's inauguration have been around since the weeks after it went down. But how wild was it really?

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All those to-go cups and food containers aren’t actually Styrofoam but those cups and Styrofoam are both forms of foam polystyrene, one of the rare materials that isn’t biodegradable. Which is a problem, because we make – and throw away – so much of it.

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We all in some way care about what other people think of us. At our core we all have a fear of saying something dumb or embarrassing ourselves somehow. One sociological theory says that our effort to prevent those embarrassments is the basis of society.

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All sorts of exotic and often terrible stuff runs through our heads when we think of genetic mutations, but the vast majority of them are caught before they happen thanks to the crack teams replicating our DNA in our cells.

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Today Chuck and Josh celebrate Canada and their art through the lens of the Group of Seven.

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William A. Mitchell invented some iconic snack foods and candies. Learn all about him today!

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Face it, when things get desperate we all consider faking our death as an easy way out. But what they don’t tell you in school is that it’s much harder than it looks, it’s way less glamorous, and you have to pull it off perfectly to not get caught.

When a man named Cliff packaged book summaries in yellow and black booklets he changed the way kids learned. But was he just creating a cheat code?

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