Remember being a teen and coming up with “cool” ways of spelling common words? Well, just like the teenager it was, the United States in the 18th century was annoying their mom, England, with the hip words that were being edited and added to their lexicon. The antagonistic pair of nations on the brink of the Revolutionary War were always competing to prove their superiority and independence in small cultural battles, and words themselves were no different.
Fellow word-nerd Gabe Henry, author of Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell, joins Sarah as they chummily pun their way through the story of the 18th century Dictionary Wars, the story of the publishing battles fought between a handful of eccentric word-lovers in The US and England, all vying for the future supremacy of their own spellings. Digressions include crop circles from Unsolved Mysteries, dishonest detergent marketing, and old fashioned sock puppet accounts.

More Gabe Henry:

gabehenry.com

Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell

Produced + edited by Miranda Zickler

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Listen now to the first episode of Sarah's new 8-part series with CBC Podcasts, The Devil You Know.

In the 1980s and 90s, Satan and his followers were accused of brainwashing children, sacrificing babies, and infiltrating North American society on a massive scale — yet these thousands of alleged Satanists were nowhere to be found.

In this all new series, host Sarah Marshall explores the tangled web of the Satanic Panic, in a journey that will take you everywhere from Victoria, B.C. to rural Kentucky to San Antonio, Texas. This is a show about the people who experienced the panic in real-time — the believers, the skeptics, the bystanders, and the wrongfully-convicted.

Click here for more episodes

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What do you get when you combine a horror movie audience, a spiritualist séance, and a haunted house attraction? Beginning in the 1930s and lasting into the 1960s, midnight ghost shows were ghoulishly chaotic, wonderfully campy 4D theater performances that accompanied the scary movies of the era, beloved by a mostly-teenage audience who often became a part of the show themselves. Schlocky showman Chelsey Weber-Smith tells Sarah about how magicians-turned-ghostmasters used paranormal parlor tricks, gory skits, and marketing gimmicks to create a new form of vaudevillian dark comedy. As horror obsessives, Sarah and Chelsey muse about what it would have been like to attend one of these late night wacky fright fests that paved the way for the happily trashy theater camaraderie of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Digressions include the resilience of the horseshoe crab, dollar store competition, and plot holes in the movie High Tension (2003).

More Chelsey Weber-Smith:

Listen to American Hysteria

Original music in this episode is produced + performed by Magpie Cinema Club

(except for Harry Belafonte's Zombie Jamboree which is, in fact, from 1962.)

Listen to their cover of Season of the VVitch

Produced + edited by Miranda Zickler

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Are you a survival pessimist or a survival optimist? Blair Braverman surprises Sarah with a harrowing, heartening, and sometimes hilarious tale of love and endurance in the face of certain death, but you’ll have to listen to find out the seemingly impossible circumstances our subjects had to overcome. Digressions include Sarah’s flight simulation skills, David Goggins' morning routine, and the best way to design your character in The Oregon Trail computer game.

More Blair Braverman:

Blair's new picture book, "The Day Leap Soared"

Advice for Sarah from Blair

Blair on Instagram

More of Blair's work

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Sarah's other show, You Are Good

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Who really ended the Cold War, Ronald Reagan or a ten-year-old girl? Eighties correspondent Maris Kreizman joins us for a heartfelt conversation about America’s Youngest Ambassador, Samantha Smith, a child who wrote a letter to Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov in hopes of cooling nuclear tensions. Then, Andropov wrote back. Maris and Sarah discuss the burden we place on the youth to “change the world” while simultaneously scolding them for their naivety. Digressions include the millennial urge to cut up plastic soda can rings, Christina Applegate’s SNL infomercial, and an important lesson from the Golden Girls.

More Maris Kreizman:

Buy the book, I Want to Burn This Place Down

Subscribe to the newsletter, The Maris Review

Maris on Bluesky

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What do John Hinckley Jr. and a jazz age tuberculosis patient have in common? Legal correspondent ​​Mackenzie Joy Brennan takes Sarah through some of the strange cases that helped make—and break—the insanity defense in America. Our story includes a woman who carried her (alleged) victims’ bodies around in a suitcase, and the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan—carried out with the intention of impressing a young Jodie Foster.

More Mackenzie Joy Brennan:

http://www.mkzjoybrennan.com

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Can you find your way out of the maize? The corn maze has become an enduring attraction of the American autumnal experience, seen at touristy family farms next to pumpkin patches and haunted houses. But what are the historical roots of this iconic living puzzle? Sarah guides the eternally-lost Chelsey Weber-Smith through the twists and turns of the corn’s corridors and reveals the hidden architects that walk behind the rows.

More Chelsey Weber-Smith:

www.americanhysteriapodcast.com

Mr. Jeff's Labyrinth Typology Hand Out:

https://www.labyrinthos.net/Labyrinth%20Typology.pdf

The Labyrinthos Labyrinth and Maze Resource Photo Library and Archive:

https://www.labyrinthos.net/index.html

Listen to Magpie Cinema Club:

linktr.ee/magpiecinemaclub

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In the second part of our series, pop culture historian Jamie Loftus takes us through the meteoric rise of Pee-wee Herman and the withering of Paul Reubens' world as dubious allegations surface that threaten to turn a beloved children’s character into a real life villain. Jamie tells us about his struggle to reconcile the character of Pee-wee with the real Paul Reubens, and how his longtime friendships became his sanctuary until the very end.

Content Warning: This episode contains discussion of explicit materials involving minors

More about Jamie Loftus:

https://www.jamieloftus.xyz/

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