Half as Interesting
S2022 · E11 — How to Start Your Own Town
S2022:E11 · How to Start Your Own Town
76 episodes in this season
Why Don't Artificial Flavors Taste Accurate?
6 min
The Bug That Created "Free Public Wifi" Networks That Didn’t Work
The Fake Buildings That Hide LA's Massive Oil Industry
5 min
Why The Letter Q Has Only Been Legal In Turkey For 8 Years
Why Flights Through China Take Such Weird Routes
The Software Bug That Blacked Out the Entire US Northeast
Why There is a Giant Floating Prison In New York City
Why So Many Jails Are Painted This Exact Color
How Disney Legally Issued its Own Currency for 29 Years
Why There’s An Empty Skyscraper In The Middle Of Times Square
7 min
How to Start Your Own Town
The Glitch That Kept Sending The FBI To A Tiny Kansas Farm
Why Hundreds of Mazdas Tuned to 94.9 Broke Simultaneously
Why Chicago Secretly Bulldozed Its Own Airport Overnight
Why April 11, 1954 Is The Statistically Most Boring Day Ever
Why Do Americans In Old Movies Sound British?
Why This Sound is Illegal to Play
You've Sent 124,882 Topic Ideas. Here are the Worst Ones.
Why You Never Take a 90-Degree Turn in Casinos
Why Farmers Can’t Legally Replant Their Own Seeds
Why So Many Airport Runways Cross the US-Canada Border
The Man Who Broke The Internet By Deleting 11 Lines of Code
Why You Can’t Be Fired in China If You Have This Stamp
How Stenographers Type at 300 Words Per Minute
The 360-Page Proof That 1+1=2
Why Steel from Before 1945 is Weirdly Expensive
⍼ - Why Nobody Knows What This One Unicode Character Means
How New Cars Trick You With Pre-Recorded Engine Noise
Why Cancun is the Mathematically Perfect Vacation Destination
How Sommeliers Can Taste Which Year Wine is From
Why Thousands of Chinese Tourists Started Coming to a Random British Village
Why Almost Every Microwave is Made by the Same Company
How Coca Cola (Actually) Keeps Its Secret Recipe Secret
Why All U-Hauls are Registered in Arizona
Minitel: France’s Alternate Internet That Survived Until 2012
Why The NYPD Has An Office in Singapore
Why GPS Automatically Shuts Itself Down Above 1,200 mph
How an Australian Senator Won With 0.51% Of The Vote
Why the United Nations Runs Its Own Airline
The High Five Was Invented in 1977 (Yes, Really)
The CIA’s Manual on How to be Annoying
The ATM Glitch That Gave Out Infinite Money
Why the US Keeps Trying To Buy Greenland
The Single Australian Farm That’s Bigger Than 49 Countries
Russia’s Terrible New Offbrand McDonald’s
Why There’s a Massive Runway in the Middle of Florida’s Swamplands
Why The London Underground Makes Itself Hotter Every Year
Why The Vatican Has A Giant Research Telescope in Arizona
Why Chess Strategy Changes Every Year
The Shoe So Good the Olympics Declared It Cheating
We Ranked Every Mistake We Made This Year
The Science Behind Why Friends Smell Like Each Other
Why You Don’t Want To Live On the US-Canada Border
The Man Who Owns All The Bread In Israel For Eight Days A Year
How To Design A Completely Unbreakable Encryption System
Why National Parks Can’t Figure Out What To Do With Your Poop
Why The Ringling Bros. Operated A Secret Spy Agency
Why It Takes Pixar 3 Years To Render A Movie
Why No One’s Sure If This Is Part Of The US Constitution
Why It Was Illegal For 47 Days to Slice Bread in the US
The US Army’s Universal Camouflage: A Terrible Mistake
Why US Signs Look Different Than The Rest Of The World’s
Why There Are No Ambulances In Jerusalem
Somaliland Is Independent. So Why Does No One Recognize It?
Why DC's Shaped Like That
Why This is The World’s Most Dangerous Dam
All The Very Real Passports Not Issued By Countries
The NFL’s Secret Plan For If All The Players Die
Why One Company Technically Owns Every Stock in the US
The McDonald’s McPizza: A Huge Failure
Roosevelt Island’s Pneumatic Trash System
Spotify’s Mathematical System For Determining Your Music Taste
Toki Pona: The Language You Can Learn in a Day
The Weirdly Massive Problem of Blocked Public Land
Why Cardboard Cops Work (Even If You Know They’re Fake)
How the US Sends Top Secret Information Around The World
