TLDR
By WNYC, New York Public Radio
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Description
A weekly podcast featuring short, surprising stories about the internet.
| Name | Description | Released | Price | ||
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1 |
Ask Leah | In the late nineties Leah Reich was working for the video game website IGN, which was the most popular website on the internet for 13 to 18 year old boys at the time. She started reading and responding to the site's mailbag, and before she knew it she | 10/23/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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2 |
#38 - Ask Leah | In the late nineties Leah Reich was working for the video game website IGN, which was the most popular website on the internet for 13 to 18 year old boys at the time. She started reading and responding to the site's mailbag, and before she knew it she | 10/15/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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3 |
#37 - Every City Gets the Hero it Deserves | On Tuesday, the Philadelphia Police released a video of some unidentified suspects in a brutal attack on a gay couple. Within a few hours, a Philly sports fan and his online friends had identified some of the people in the video without the blizzard of | 9/17/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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4 |
#36 - The Mystery of Childish Gambino | Rapper Childish Gambino (A.K.A actor Donald Glover) famously claims to have received his rap pseudonym, "Childish Gambino," from an online Wu-Tang Name generator. But investigating whether this story is true or not led TLDR host Alex Goldman on an ody | 9/15/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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5 |
#35 - Stolen Pictures | This week, hackers stole and published naked photos of female celebrities. Forbes reporter Kashmir Hill has covered stories like this before, but she says that this latest example has completely changed her mind about who to blame for these thefts and | 9/3/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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6 |
#34 - The Accidental Outing of Rwanda's Most Powerful Troll | Steve Terrill is a journalist who works in Rwanda. Or at least he worked in Rwanda, until he accidentally got the office of Rwanda's president Paul Kagame to implicate itself in a long-running online harassment campaign. Alex talks to Steve about inadv | 8/17/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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7 |
#33 - Unfollow A Man | A few weeks ago, writer Katie Notopoulos created a holiday called Unfollow a Man Day, wherein everyone (women and men) was encouraged to Unfollow a Man on social media. Men's rights activists were enraged, cable news was intrigued, and a lot of people | 8/7/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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8 |
#32 - An Imperfect Match | This week, dating site OK Cupid put up a blog post describing experiments it conducted on its users. In one experiment, the site told users who were bad matches for one another that they were actually good matches, and vice versa. Alex and PJ talk to | 7/31/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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9 |
#31 - Race Swap | Whether you think the internet is a great or terrible place is partly a reflection of which parts of the internet you choose to visit. It's also a reflection of who you are, and how people online react to you. Mikki Kendall is a writer who deals with an | 7/17/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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#30 - The Russian Troll Army | Last month, documents surfaced that showed a company called the Internet Research Agency was paying people in Russia to go to an office and post pro-Kremlin comments all day. Alex talks to Buzzfeed's Max Seddon about why they do it, and how successful t | 6/26/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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11 |
#29 - Olivia Taters, Robot Teenager | Rob Dubbin accidentally built a teenage girl named Olivia Taters who lives on the internet. She may not always communicate in complete sentences, but she's convincing enough that teenagers actually converse with her. Also, she's very, very funny. PJ talk | 6/18/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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12 |
#28 - No Trail | In February of this year, Philip Welsh of Silver Spring, Maryland, was murdered. His murder remains unsolved, largely because he didn't use the internet, and left no digital trail. Alex talks to Philip's family and reporter Dan Morse about the case. Th | 6/5/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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13 |
#27 - How Google is Killing the Best Site On the Internet | A couple weeks ago, Matt Haughey, the founder of TLDR's favorite website, Metafilter, announced that his website is dying. And he says it's because Google algorithmically stopped directing traffic to the site over a year ago. Alex tries to figure out wha | 6/2/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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14 |
#26 - A Gold Bottle of Champagne The Size of An Adult Human Man | Most people use social networks to present themselves as happier than they really are - it's hard to get an honest read on anyone. But writer Charlie Warzel believes there's a secret method you can use to find out how someone is actually feeling online. | 5/23/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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15 |
TLDR Public Service Announcement | Hello folks. This is not an episode. It is a short/urgent PSA. We've been getting reports of technical issues from TLDR fans. Apparently some people are accidentally following Alex Goldman on Twitter and then being deluged with a torrent of awful tweet | 5/12/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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16 |
#25 - Monsters | Kim Correa loves the online game DayZ, which lets you interact with other humans during a zombie apocalypse. DayZ's appeal is that it allows weird, spontaneous interactions between players. It also allows really terrible ones. Kim talks about her experie | 5/8/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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#24 - The Million Dollar Homepage | In 2005, Alex Tew was a 21-year-old entrepreneur who wanted to make a million dollars before college. The only problem was he had literally nothing of value to sell. So he made The Million Dollar Homepage -- possibly the most ambitiously garish website | 5/1/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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18 |
#23 - A Bitcoin Story for People Who Don't Care About Bitcoin | When Wired reporter Andy Greenberg read Newsweek's cover story claiming to have found mysterious Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, he was disappointed. Not so much that the mystery had been solved, but that the answer to the search was not all that inter | 4/24/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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#22 - What Happens When You Tell The Whole Internet Your Password | Earlier this week, a commenter named Y. Woodman Brown posted his online passwords in the Washington Post comments section to show just how little his online security mattered to him. It was quickly picked up by the press as an example of online security | 4/18/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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#21 - There Is No Such Thing As Silence | Continuing our expose into the very hush-hush world of Silence, we look at an app that promises to deliver you four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. PJ talks to Larry Larson, who helped design the 4'33" app. Thanks for listening. If you like | 4/10/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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#20 - Silence | Update: Vulfpeck received an email from Spotify asking the band to remove "Sleepify" from Spotify. See our update here. A band called Vulfpeck has asked fans to stream an entire album of silence on Spotify while they sleep, so the band can use the royalt | 4/3/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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#19 - Project Flame | In 1966, a bored college freshman created Project Flame, an early computer dating system that promised to pair lonely hearts. Project Flame was an overnight sensation. The only problem was that the guy who founded didn't have a computer. Or any idea how | 3/20/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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#18 - The Army's Robot Recruiter | Sgt. Star is the army’s robot. Specifically, he’s a chatbot designed to influence potential recruits to enlist in the US Army. So how do we feel about that? Alex talks to the Army and a reporter who's covered recruitment abuses to figure out if we're | 3/6/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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#17 - Hey, Guess What? I Found Truth For Us | Last fall, TLDR covered a bunch of hoaxes. Some we liked, most we didn't. On this episode, we talk to Paulo Ordoveza and Adrienne LaFrance, a couple of people who have devoted themselves to trying to debunk the innumerable falsehoods flying around the in | 2/27/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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#16 - *Win a Million Dollar Mansion From Your HOME COMPUTER* | "Sweepers" are people who spend their free time entering hundreds of online sweepstakes -- the contests most of us skip because we're sure they're all scams. It turns out, we're wrong. Some people win big. Reporter Laura Mayer takes us into the online sw | 2/20/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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#15 - Internet Time | In 1998 Swatch tried to completely reinvent our concept of time. Swatch Internet Time (or .beat time) would have been a new way to conceive of moments. There'd be no time zones, and also, no hours, minutes, or seconds. PJ talks to Gizmodo's Eric Limer an | 2/13/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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#14 - The Knowledge | Every year, a small group of sports fans scattered across the US play a game called "Last Man." The goal is to be the last man in America to find out who won the Super Bowl. TLDR Sports reporter Lisa Pollak followed the game this year, and found out just | 2/6/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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28 |
#13.5 - I'm Matthew Mills | A special mini-episode of TLDR to get your mouth watering for tomorrow's non-mini episode! This week, a man named Matthew Mills interrupted the post-Super Bowl MVP press conference to let the world know that 9/11 was perpetrated by the US Government. New | 2/5/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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#13 - Managing a Monster | The Slender Man is the internet's monster - the subject of countless remixes, tributes, and parodies. He's so ubiquitous he feels like he's been around for ages, like folklore. But Slender Man has an owner and a point of origin. Alex talks to Eric Knudse | 1/30/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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30 |
#12 - Hunting For YouTube's Saddest Comments | YouTube's infamous for having one of the worst comment sections on the internet. There's no reason to ever read them. Unless you’re writer & filmmaker Mark Slutsky. Mark spends hours scouring the comments section on YouTube, and occasionally, scattere | 1/24/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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31 |
#11 - RIP Vile Rat | This episode of TLDR contains some explicit language. On September 11th, 2012, gunmen attacked two American compounds in Benghazi, Libya, killing four Americans. Sean Smith, one of the four killed in the attack, was an IT manager in the real world, but o | 1/22/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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#10 - One Hundred Songs In A Day | One way to make money making music online is the boring way. Write one song that does incredibly well and live off the royalties for the rest of your life. Matt Farley is a musician who’s gone a different route. He's written over 14,000 songs and he ma | 1/22/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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33 |
#9 - The Second Life of Marion Stokes | Marion Stokes was a hoarder. When she died last year, her family had to figure out what to do with 9 separate residences and 3 storage locations full of stuff - everything from tens of thousands of books to decades-old Apple computers. This is the story | 12/12/13 | Free | View In iTunes |
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34 |
#8 - The Pace Picante Salsa Robot Has Gone Haywire | This episode of TLDR contains some explicit language. This has been a crazy season for internet hoaxes. This week, we investigate one we actually deeply enjoyed being fooled by -- about a social media bot for Pace Picante Salsa going insane and inadverte | 12/5/13 | Free | View In iTunes |
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35 |
What does TLDR mean? | Hello! We are taking a week off the podcast to work on some special things that you will like a lot. This episode is a Best Of*, in case you have a friend who hasn't gotten a chance to check us out who you might like to share TLDR with. It also includes | 11/22/13 | Free | View In iTunes |
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36 |
#7 - It's Rating Men | Lulu is an app that lets women rate guys they've slept with. Was he willing to commit? Was he gassy? The ratings are anonymous, and men can't see their profiles. When Lulu launched earlier this year, people didn't like it, but it also seemed more like a | 11/15/13 | Free | View In iTunes |
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37 |
#6 - Ghost Town | Before the Internet as we know it today, there were text-based bulletin board systems all over the country that people could dial into. One of those systems, M-net, happened to live in Alex's backyard, and it was his internet home base for the better par | 11/6/13 | Free | View In iTunes |
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38 |
#5 - Goodbye, Secret, Invisible Internet | Up until this fall, there was a secret internet. You probably heard about one part of it, the Silk Road, but that was just one secret website among many. This week, we talk to Gawker's Adrian Chen about the rest of the dark part of the internet, and how | 10/31/13 | Free | View In iTunes |
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39 |
#4 - The Unicorn | Millions of Americans don't use the internet at all. Some don't have access because of poverty, geography, or age. But some just never logged on. This week, Alex goes on a quest to find a unicorn -- someone who lives a life just like his, but entirely wi | 10/21/13 | Free | View In iTunes |
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40 |
#3 - JOKES.TXT | Daniel Drucker's father died earlier this year. Daniel was excavating stuff on his Dad's computer when he found a file called JOKES.TXT. It was filled with thirty one punchlines to jokes, but not the jokes themselves. So he turned to the internet for hel | 10/3/13 | Free | View In iTunes |
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41 |
#2 - Stereotyped | Christopher Hermelin has a project called "The Roving Typist," where he writes stories for people in the park on his typewriter. One day last summer, he found his photo posted to Reddit, and suddenly his image was the butt of jokes all over the internet. | 9/26/13 | Free | View In iTunes |
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42 |
#1.5 - The Bonkers Conclusion to Pronunciation Book | One last update to episode 1 of TLDR. We all found out on Monday that Pronunciation Book (along with horse_ebooks) were part of a collaborative stunt between Jacob Bakkila and Thomas Bender to promote their art project Alternate Reality Game, Bear Ste | 9/25/13 | Free | View In iTunes |
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43 |
#1 - Something Is Going to Happen in 7 Days | A YouTube channel dedicated to pronouncing words suddenly starts issuing ominous warnings, and a reporter tries to get to the bottom of it. Hey guys. Here's episode one of our TLDR podcast. We interviewed The Daily Dot's Gaby Dunn about a creepy intern | 9/17/13 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 43 Items |
Customer Reviews
Thank you for creating your own podcast...
...separate from OTM. Will you please stop putting your episodes on the OTM podcast now? Thank you!
not ready for primetime
I do feel for these guys. Their goosebump-inducing debut podcast wound up being centered around a hoax, and their sophomore effort was a defensive, somewhat indignant retraction -- not exactly a promising launch. The shadow of that troubled start has hung over the rest of their production for me: I rolled my eyes as they felt sorry for themselves about internet lies, tuned out as their expose on the deep web basically just acknowledged the sub-net's existence and then ended there, groaned as the co-host stressed needlessly about being rated by ex-girlfriends who didn't give him a second thought on some dating app, and now I just finished listening to a piece cnetered around comedian Kyle Kinane that the subject didn't bother appearing on -- his tweets were read aloud with gusto by an excitable sound-nothing-alike.
The pattern here is that the TLDR guys always seem to think they're getting into a bigger story than they really are: a grand conspiracy, a secret internet, a twisty dating history, and it always ends in anticlimax. A large part of this is because they're just starting out and trying to generate content, but it also needs to be said that they're dropping the ball in terms of journalistic gruntwork. Don't just report the most sensational angle possible; find something interesting and original to say and then check your sources and check your sources' sources. And if your story winds up not really going anywhere -- see most episodes so far -- have the discipline to scrap that story and try something else.
For these reasons, TLDR feels very out of place in the NPR podcast family. It could grow into something interesting, but it's not ready yet.
A small-town newspaper for the Internet
For those of us who see the Internet as a world unto its own (and not just a “space" where this or that takes place), this is highly pleasurable listening.
