48 episodes
Search Engine PJ Vogt, Audacy, Jigsaw
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- Society & Culture
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5.0 • 222 Ratings
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Named a best podcast of 2023 by Vulture, Time, The Economist, & Vogue.
No question too big, no question too small. On Search Engine, host PJ Vogt answers the kinds of questions you might ask the internet when you can't sleep. If you find the world bewildering, but also sometimes enjoy being bewildered by it, we're here for you. Edited by Sruthi Pinnamaneni.
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Should this creepy search engine exist?
After stumbling on a new kind of search engine for faces, we called privacy journalist Kashmir Hill. She’s been reporting on the very sudden and unregulated rise of these facial search engines. Here’s the story of the very first one, the mysterious person who made it, and the copycats it helped spawn.
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To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy
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What do trigger warnings actually do?
A listener’s brother dies by suicide, and afterwards, she finds herself angered by trigger warnings about suicide. She wants to know — are these actually helping other people? Or is it just something we do because we think we’re supposed to?
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To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy
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Where's my flying car?
Since not long after the car was invented, we have wanted to stick wings on them and fly them through the sky. This week, we interview writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus about the surprisingly long history of actual, working flying cars in America. Plus, what it's like to actually fly in a modern flying car.
Read Gideon's article! Support the show!
To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy
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Do political yard signs actually do anything?
It’s an election year and so Search Engine’s campaign desk is answering the questions you really want answers to: all the political yard signs in your neighbors’ yards … do they do anything besides make everyone like each other less?
An experiment that definitively answers this question.
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To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy
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Why are there so many illegal weed stores in New York City? (Part 2)
In part two of our story, we watch the state of New York try to pull off something we rarely see in America: a kind of reparations. A very ambitious dream encounters a thicket of details and complications. The whole time, cameras roll, broadcasting the meetings on YouTube.
Help support the show!
To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy
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Why are there so many illegal weed stores in New York City? (Part 1)
In 2021, New York legalized cannabis for adults. It was supposed to be the start of a legal market, led by people arrested during prohibition. Instead, a strange new market has flourished, seemingly every formerly empty store in the city now sells weed. How'd that happen? In part one, the history of prohibition and how it helps explain the mess we're in now.
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To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy
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Customer Reviews
I know what this is
This show is just a weekly dystopian sci-fi nightmare fuel. Five stars.
Trigger warning episode
This is a great podcast, just the right balance of honesty, humour and academic rigour to make it a perfect search engine episode.
The place TWs have been the most useful for me is reels/tiktoks. An algorithm is choosing the videos I watch and if I watch stuff I will get more of it. Because the videos have no titles and it’s not really subscription based, I can’t curate my feed. TW or stitch incoming makes it feel possible to choose to keep watching, and not guess and swipe based on the first 2 seconds. Eg I do want to hear a smart person discuss a complicated topic that might start with a stitch/clip of another video, but if that video is just abuse captured on camera, I value being able to swipe and discourage more of that content.
TWs also feel like a tool that enables free speech rather than preventing it. By giving listeners an opportunity to say no, it makes it so much easier to speak honestly without feeling like you’re being a dick to the person in the audience with fresh wounds on that topic.
Trigger warning
“…carrying torches or are involuntarily celibate…” the fact the group you’re accusing of being those things is the only group you dare criticise kinda proves their point doesn’t it? So fed up of this infecting every piece of media and thought. Miss Reply All.