{"podcast":{"title":"Slow Burn","slug":"slow-burn-474574","podcast_index_feed_id":474574,"rss_url":"https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/6965759d79fe7d554545528a","website_url":"https://slate.com/slowburn","image_url":"https://assets.pippa.io/shows/6965759d79fe7d554545528a/1778157374914-ae3ee4b6-49a1-4ca8-b5ab-9ddd01fce140.jpeg","author":"Slate Audio","episode_count":226,"summary":"Slow Burn illuminates America’s most consequential moments, making sense of the past to better understand the present. Through archival tape and first-person interviews, the series uncovers the surprising events and little-known characters lurking within the biggest stories of our time. Join Slate Plus to unlock full, ad-free access to Slow Burn and your other favorite Slate podcasts. You can subscribe from the Slow Burn show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Or visit slate.com/slowburnplus to get access wherever you listen. Season 11: Becoming Justice Gorsuch How Neil Gorsuch laid the foundation for a SCOTUS supermajority and then became its most unexpected wild card. Season 10: The Rise of Fox News How a cable news channel became a cultural and political force—and how a whole bunch of people rose up to try and stop it. Season 9: Gays Against Briggs A nationwide moral panic, a California legislator who rode the anti-gay wave, and the LGBTQ+ people who stepped up and came out to try and stop him. Season 8: Becoming Justice Thomas Where Clarence Thomas came from, how he rose to power, and how he’s brought the rest of us along with him, whether we like it or not. Winner of the Pod…","last_synced_at":"2026-07-01T18:18:26.361960+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/slow-burn-474574"},"episode":{"title":"Decoder Ring | The Red String Board Conspiracy","slug":"decoder-ring-the-red-string-board-conspiracy","published_at":"2025-10-22T07:50:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/slow-burn-474574/decoder-ring-the-red-string-board-conspiracy","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/slow-burn-474574","url":"https://shows.acast.com/slow-burn/episodes/696575d475c092ac4e169108","audio_url":"https://sphinx.acast.com/p/open/s/6965759d79fe7d554545528a/e/1000732859862/media.mp3","summary":"There’s a ubiquitous prop in just about every police procedural and conspiracy thriller: a cork board pinned with documents, newspaper clippings, and Polaroid photos, all connected by a web of red string. They go by many names, including pin boards, string boards, evidence boards, investigation walls, conspiracy walls, and walls of crazy. These boards can be vehicles of insight or manifestations of madness—and in many cases, both. But where did they come from? And can they really solve a crime? In this episode, we try to unwind the red string board all the way to its center. To aide in our investigation, we enlist the help of Aki Peritz, a former CIA analyst and the author of Disruption: Inside the Largest Counterterrorism Investigation in History . You’ll also hear from Shawn Gilmore, editor of The Vault of Culture and creator of the Narrative String Theory project; and Dr. Anne Ganzert, author of Serial Pinboarding in Contemporary Television . And we learn about the intricacies of building a string board from production designers Michael Scott Cobb ( It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia ) and John D. Kretschmer ( Homeland ). This episode was written and produced by Evan Chung, Decoder Ring’s supervising producer. It was edited by Willa Paskin. Decoder Ring is also produced by Katie Shepherd and Max Freedman. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at DecoderRing@slate.com or leave a message on our hotline at (347) 460-7281. Sources for This Episode Benson, Richard. “Decoding the Detective's 'Crazy Wall',” Esquire, Jan. 22, 2015. Coley, Rob. “ The case of the speculative detective: Aesthetic truths and the television ‘crime board’ ,” NECSUS, May 28, 2017. Ganzert, Anne. Serial Pinboarding in Contempor…","meta_description":"There’s a ubiquitous prop in just about every police procedural and conspiracy thriller: a cork board pinned with documents, newspaper clippings, and Pola…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":2811,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/slow-burn-474574/episodes/decoder-ring-the-red-string-board-conspiracy/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/slow-burn-474574/decoder-ring-the-red-string-board-conspiracy.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}