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Hackers frequently release insecure information to demonstrate the vulnerability of new technologies. It's a novel approach, but certainly not new. Bob talks to New Scientist's Paul Marks, who tells the story of Nevil Maskelyne, and magician and inventor who, in the interest of exposing the technology's insecurity, hacked Guglielmo Marconi's first demonstration of the wireless telegraph.

Quantic And His Combo Barbaro - Cancao Do Deserto

Author, Journalist, historian, and activist Stetson Kennedy began his long career collecting oral histories for the US government's Federal Writer's Project during the great depression. Kennedy passed away last Saturday at the age of 94. Peggy Bulger, director of the American Folklife division of the Library of Congress, talks to Bob about Kennedy's life and accomplishments.

In 1994, three teenagers were convicted of killing three second graders in a supposed Satanic ritual. Last week, the men now known as the West Memphis three made a plea deal that secured their release. Brooke talks to Mara Leveritt, author of the book The Devil's Knot about the "Satanic Panic" that precipitated the case, and the media's involvement after their conviction.

Song: Dial

Artist: Deaf City

Covering the Civil Rights movement for Time's Atlanta bureau taught reporter Calvin Trillin some important lessons. How to report in a place where you're not liked (he says he felt 'a little like a foreign corespondent' in the South), the importance of knowing the subject (race) of your reporting very well, and the importance of not just giving every side of an argument equal weight. Brooke talked with Trillin about his piece "Back on the Bus" which will appear in the July 25 issue of the The New Yorker.

In the summer of 1897 the story of a dismembered body and a sordid love triangle wasn't likely to dominate the papers.  But William Randolph Hearst saw the story as an opportunity for his newly launched New York Evening Journal to beat out its major competition, Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, and a tabloid war ensued.  Bob spoke with Paul Collins, author of The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City and Sparked the Tabloid Wars.  He says that in their quest to cover the story, the papers employed tactics reminiscent of today's News of the World phone hacking scandal.

Earlier this week, Rupert Murdoch joined a long list of powerful people who’ve had pies thrown in their face. Thomas Friedman, Bill Gates, and Anita Bryant have all been victims of the classic prank. Brooke talked with Jacques Servin (a.k.a. Andy Bichlbaum) of The Yes Men, a group with a long history of executing public pranks on the mighty, about why pie-rs pie and what pie-ing does to the pie-d.

Marshall McLuhan, born 100 years ago this week, became an academic celebrity by examining our relationship with media. He argued “that we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” WNYC’s Sara Fishko looks back at the hugely influential ideas of an enigmatic man.

As a Brit sitting here in New York watching News International implode I found myself reliving a bit of my youth. Murdoch’s influence was so pervasive, and so intertwined with my memories of growing up in London in the 80’s. In those days the nightly news was all IRA bombings, the miners’ strike and of course, Wapping.

On the centennial of Marshall McLuhan's birth, Paul Levinson, professor of communication & media studies at Fordham University and author of Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millenium, discusses McLuhan's work and legacy.

Long before Facebook friends, RSS feeds and online shopping became part of everyday lingo, the Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan studied the development of mass communication and the effects it would have on America's social landscape.

Sometimes it feels as though there's an element of moral panic to the introduction of any new technology. Video Games, Social media, any time there's an innovation, a small but vocal minority stands up to say "won't somebody please think of the children?"

In an interview in The Wall Street Journal's Tech Europe blog yesterday, Genevieve Bell, the director of Intel Corporation’s Interaction and Experience Research, illustrates how moral panic over technology is almost as old as technology itself, and "it is always played out in the bodies of children and women." In studying moral panics of the past, she has developed a three point formula for what technology will cause this kind of fierce backlash.

The original Nintendo console, the NES, turned 25 this year. OTM producer PJ Vogt reports the cautionary tale of Nintendo’s rise and (relative) fall, and why both were good for video games.

Over the past 9 months, writer, director, and editor Kirby Ferguson has been releasing episodes of Everything is a Remix, a video series about how appropriation, borrowing, and adaptation are inherent in, well, everything we as a culture create. The third installment of the four-part series just came out last week, so we thought we'd ask him a few questions about the project and his personal opinions on copyright and fair use.

During debate last weekend on the health care bill, Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas) yelled out "It's a baby killer!" on the House floor and, in doing so, joined legions who have invoked this powerful defamation. American University professor Allan Lichtman says the phrase holds a prominent place in the catalog of ...

On March 18th, a public auction will be held in Midtown Manhattan. On the block? Sex.com, one of the most coveted pieces of internet real estate, ever. But be warned. Sex dot com comes with a long and troubled past. It’s all chronicled by Kieren McCarthy in

Schizophrenia has appeared in each edition of the DSM, but its definition has undergone significant change. While once seen as a disease for docile white women, by the 60s and 70s schizophrenia was a diagnosis increasingly used for violent black men. Psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl argues in

In recent weeks Toyota has struggled with the mechanics and the mea culpas of a successful product recall. What’s a global company to do when faced with a high profile consumer crisis-of-confidence? Veteran PR crisis manager Gene Grabowski says look no further then the ur-successful ...

For five scandal-ridden years in the mid 1950’s, Confidential was the most popular, pulpiest, dishiest, Hollywood-shaking, gossip rag in the nation. And it insisted that its stories, no matter how sensational, be true. Confidential defied the studios, exposed the foibles of Hollywood brightest stars and laid the groundwork ...

25 years ago the Russian computer programmer Alexey Pajitnov created the ur-video game Tetris. Simple to play, hard to win and ubiquitous, the game continues to frustrate and entertain the masses. We speak with Pajitnov about how he started the shapes falling.

In a recently published memoir, a New York Times Washington-Bureau editor makes a shocking revelation: the Times had a scoop about the Watergate story months before Woodward and Bernstein. Amazingly, and mysteriously, the Times never followed up on the tip. Robert M. Smith, the Times reporter who received ...