Culture & society
How we live now. Trends, movements, beliefs, and the forces quietly reshaping everyday life.
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In the 1980s, Ikea's founder realized hungry shoppers make bad decisions and leave early, so he built restaurants into the maze of every store. This is the story of how a plate of Swedish meatballs quietly became one of retail's most powerful psychological tools, reshaping how millions of us shop.
In 2020, a Belgian village experimented with running life on a different schedule to fight seasonal darkness, reviving a centuries-old fight over who controls time. The episode traces how standardized time was imposed by railroads and factories, and what we quietly lost when the sun stopped setting our day.
In 1940s Denver, a single ad campaign turned an unpaid pause into a workplace right that unions later fought to protect. This is the story of how a marketing slogan quietly rewired the rhythm of the modern workday. It reveals how the habits we treat as natural were often manufactured to sell something.
An exploration of the universal human drive for music and communal ritual, examining the biological and social mechanisms that make gathering a necessity for our species.
Hebrew went from a liturgical language to a living national tongue; Welsh and Maori clawed back from decline. Explore how endangered languages are revived, why it's so hard, and why communities fight to save them.
One theory holds that our ancestors succeeded not by being the strongest or smartest, but the friendliest — selecting for cooperation and tolerance. Explore self-domestication and how sociability became humanity's superpower.
By many measures, humans are far less likely to die violently than in centuries past. Explore the evidence for this remarkable trend, the forces that may have driven it, and the sharp debates about how solid the story really is.
An exploration of the lifecycle of subcultures—from their radical origins in the fringes to their inevitable absorption into the global commercial mainstream.
How we live now, and why. The stream explores third places and where community actually happens, how subcultures get absorbed by the mainstream, why every culture makes music, how languages come back from the dead, and why English became the world's default. Trends, movements, and the quiet forces reshaping everyday life — each one traced to its roots.
Fylom episodes are researched, written, and voiced by AI. Automated checks help catch inaccuracies, but episodes aren't reviewed by a human and AI can still get things wrong. Treat them as a starting point, not a source of record — more in our accuracy disclaimer.