Sexy spines or literary red flags?

Maybe you can't judge books by their covers. But can you judge people by their books? Reddit's bookshelf detectives say yes. Producer Kalyani Saxena guides hosts Ben and Amory through the stacks and offers a picture of her own bookshelf to the Reddit detectives as tribute. r/BookshelvesDetective https://www.reddit.com/r/BookshelvesDetective/ (Reddit) Started seeing this guy. What does it say about him?? https://www.reddit.com/r/BookshelvesDetective/comments/1r6dzki/started_seeing_this_guy_what_does_it_say_about_him/ (r/BookshelvesDetective)What do my wife's bookshelves say about her? https://www.reddit.com/r/BookshelvesDetective/comments/1rburkv/what_do_my_wifes_bookshelves_say_about_her/ (r/BookshelvesDetective) What’s his bookshelf say about him? https://www.reddit.com/r/BookshelvesDetective/comments/1r7bb4r/whats_his_bookshelf_say_about_him/ (r/BookshelvesDetective) Snoop our bookshelves! https://www.reddit.com/r/EndlessThread/comments/1ry23w0/snoop_our_bookshelves/ (r/EndlessThread) This episode was produced by Kalyani Saxena and Grace Tatter. It was co-hosted by Kalyani Saxena, Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson, and edited by Meg Cramer. Mix and sound design by Marquis Neal. *** Sponsor message: INCOGNI: Take back your personal data with Incogni! Use code ENDLESS at the link below and get 60% off annual plans: https://incogni.com/ENDLESS

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. A recent episode explores how AI is reshaping our schools. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Support for Endless Thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

• 0:33Speaker 02

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• 1:18Ben Brock Johnson?

  Amory Seabritson, can you read?

• 1:23Amory Sivertson?

  Yeah, last I checked, I can still read, although I read before bed, which means I make it two paragraphs and then.

• 1:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's what happens to me.

• 1:33Amory Sivertson?

  We never get anything read around here, except for emails from listeners, which we got one recently from a guy named Seamus in Sydney, who told us about a subreddit that caught our attention.

• 1:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  Seamus says, "Hi, team," which I really like. He's on the team, we're on the team, everybody's on the team, I love it. I would love to hear you dig into the subreddit, "Bookshelves Detectives."

• 2:01Amory Sivertson?

  Hmm. He says, "I love looking at my friends' books when I go to their houses for dinner, seeing what we have in common and the selections that reflect something about their personalities."

• 2:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  An episode on this subreddit is an opportunity to talk about the assumptions we make about one another and their accuracy or lack thereof.

• 2:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  All right, so we wanted to look into this, but given our lack of ability to finish books by our bedsides, apparently, we asked someone else on our team, who is a huge reader, to take the lead. Producer Kalyani Saksena, please stop lurking in the shelves and get into this conversation.

• 2:37Speaker 05

  Hi, I'm happy to be here. I'm sorry I'm late. I had to book it to the mic. Dun dun dun.

• 2:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh.

• 2:45Amory Sivertson?

  Boy, you spent some time paging through Bookshelves Detectives, this subreddit. So what can you tell us about what this is and how it works?

• 2:55Speaker 05

  You post a picture of your bookshelves and no identifying details, nothing else, just the picture and your books. And based on that, people try to guess things about you and your life.

• 3:06Ben Brock Johnson?

  I have to say, Kalyani, this sounds a lot like Fridge Detectives, that subreddit, which, you know, is also popular. If you don't know what Fridge Detectives is, it's people posting pictures of their fridges and Redditors try to guess things about the fridge owner's life. Kalyani, how popular is the book version of this?

• 3:28Speaker 05

  It seems pretty popular. I mean, I don't have a huge frame of reference, because I did have to make a Reddit account for this episode.

• 3:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, my God, get in.

• 3:38Speaker 05

  I know. I do look up Reddit.

• 3:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  Your book reading is about to nosedive.

• 3:43Speaker 05

  Well, I'll just log Reddit, my Reddit posts on Goodreads. But it's a pretty popular subreddit. I looked at it today and it said about 54,000 weekly visitors and about 2.9,000 weekly contributions. And those numbers seem to fluctuate. Like, a couple of weeks ago, it was lower than that. But, I mean, it's in the thousands. And to me, it makes a lot of sense, because I'm sort of a maniac about the way that I organize and curate my shelves. I spend a lot of time thinking about it, stroking the, like, the spines of the books on my shelf. And I'm sure that, you know, other people are freaks like that, too.

• 4:18Amory Sivertson?

  Wow, stroking the spines. This is... I can tell you're a romance reader, Kalyani.

• 4:29Amory Sivertson?

  You're a spine stroker.

• 4:33Amory Sivertson?

  Wow. Okay, so new to the subreddit yourself.

• 4:35Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 4:36Amory Sivertson?

  New to Reddit, it sounds like, but new to the subreddit. Have you posted your own bookshelf on there yet?

• 4:41Speaker 05

  I did. I was so excited. I set up my Reddit account. I took some glamour shots of my shelves. You can take a look at that post if you would like.

• 4:49Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, I would like.

• 4:50Speaker 05

  You too can make assumptions about me and my life and um.

• 4:54Amory Sivertson?

  I got, oh, I saw this post.

• 4:57Speaker 05

  Oh, you did? You're probably like, that loser. No one commented on our post. I only got two comments and one person deleted their comment, so.

• 5:08Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, wow. The color scheme is like black and magenta, which again, to me screams you're a romance reader, which is great.

• 5:18Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 5:19Amory Sivertson?

  You know?

• 5:19Speaker 05

  I mean, that, if you were, if you were guessing, if you were a detective on this subreddit, you would be correct. I actually, the two shelves that I've posted, one is like a curated shelf of like my fantasy favorites. And then the other one is like everything that doesn't fit in that other shelf is stacked on there. But yeah, I have a lot of romance. I have a lot of fantasy, so a lot of colorful, colorful spines.

• 5:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  You got one comment on your post. This one says, "A hopeless romantic with a penchant for the fantastic." Does that feel accurate?

• 5:53Speaker 05

  I think it does. I mean, I definitely am a hopeless romantic in the sense that I love love stories. I love consuming romance. I love talking about romance. I don't know that I'm that like fantastical. I don't know if I've got that dog in me, and by that dog, I mean whimsy. I just, I had a big imagination when I was a kid and now I think I'm a little more cynical. But I do read a lot of fantasy because I think it's an interesting mirror to our world, even though it is fantastical.

• 6:21Amory Sivertson?

  I have heard some avid readers say, "You're not supposed to have anything but books on your bookshelf." Whereas you have. I don't remember who. Maybe we're not friends anymore. Maybe this is what drove us apart.

• 6:34Speaker 05

  That's a red flag.

• 6:35Amory Sivertson?

  But like, the fact that you have a little Bluetooth speaker and a little stuffed animal and some cameras, that to me is, and a candle, that's more similar to my bookshelf. We're like, there are books, but there's also a lot of, it's where the knickknacks go to kind of,

• 6:51Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 6:52Amory Sivertson?

  You know, little, little pops of, of personality among the books that, that also contribute to the, the whole person in bookshelf form.

• 7:03Speaker 05

  That's so interesting because for me, my bookshelves are a place to like, curate vibes. I mean, you can't see it, but at the very top of the bookshelf, there's like a big vintage typewriter that one of my colleagues gave me and I've got like little framed prints of Boston. Like it's, to me, it's all about like, making a space that looks like me, feels like me. And then also when people come to visit me, I can torture them by giving them a tour of every single thing on my shelf. It's a great personal hobby of mine.

• 7:32Amory Sivertson?

  So what are some of the other common themes in the subreddit itself? What kinds of posts are you seeing and how accurate are people's? Well, I guess we don't know how accurate they are.

• 7:44Speaker 05

  We can get to the accuracy in a bit because I think there's also just like so many interesting commonalities that pop up if you spend enough time on the subreddit. I mean, I, I looked through as many bookshelves as I could. And one of the things you see, like if people have fantasy on their shelves, generally it tends to be like a lot of, I mean, for lack of a better word, like classic older white man fantasy, a lot of George R R Martin. Dune is on the shelves. You are the target demographic, Ben. Poppycock. There's a lot of Lord of the Rings, so many Lord of the Rings. I've actually never read Lord of the Rings. And one thing that's really interesting is that there is, like you don't, if you see someone who has a lot of fiction on their shelves,

• 8:27Speaker 05

  people will take it upon themselves to say like, oh, you should read nonfiction. I mean, I saw one Reddit post where, yeah, there's a lot of like morality, or not morality judgments, but more just like, it's like looking at one of these Reddit posts where someone had a lot of Dune, a lot of George R R Martin, somebody wrote, you're someone who's afraid of individualism. Whoa dude.

• 8:52Speaker 05

  Someone who's afraid of individualism and reads what's popular. If this is your entire collection, you should branch out beyond this. It's okay to read something that hundreds of thousands of other people are not reading.

• 9:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, that feels judgy to me, but I also, but what I like is the, I like the idea of red editors, like encouraging each other to expand each other's horizons. And like seeing the empty spaces in the bookshelf, you know, from other posters and being like, you know what, it looks like you're reading a lot of X. You might try branching out in this way. I like that.

• 9:28Speaker 05

  Totally. I mean, I think you, you really, there's a whole universe of types of comments. Folks saying like, yeah, you should broaden your reading taste, right? Like someone's reading a lot of fiction. They're like, oh, well, you only read what's popular. But then you see someone who's reading a lot of nonfiction. Everyone in the comments is like, oh, well, you're being really performative. That's not, nobody reads like that. So there is a little bit of a, like a,

• 9:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  Whoa.

• 9:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's like a jet, it's kind of like a lose lose or like an assumption that if you're reading too much of one kind of thing, you must be one type of person. But then sometimes the guesses get like really crazy and are surprisingly accurate. Let me pull up one of these posts that I thought was so funny. Someone posted their wife's bookshelves and said, what do my wife's bookshelf say about her? And one of the comments said, she loses her car keys a lot and likes going to the zoo. And the person responded, strangely, yes, this is accurate.

• 10:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  Wow.

• 10:23Speaker 05

  Likes going to the zoo. What gave away the zoo part? Well, somebody asked, somebody asked, how did you figure the first part? And another person replied, not the person who made the original correct guess and said, ADHD with little sparkle emojis. So there's like a certain playfulness, I think, that people have. And you're trying to guess like what kind of vibe people have. And sometimes that leads to like random, random guesses, like you like going to the zoo and she does.

• 10:50Amory Sivertson?

  On the one hand, it's kind of sweet that this person posted their wife's bookshelf. And, you know, they can share any positive comments that, that they got and not share any negative ones. But on the other, that feels personal to share.

• 11:06Amory Sivertson?

  Just shit like, I don't think I would post my own bookshelf. So I don't know. I don't want my husband posting my bookshelf.

• 11:13Speaker 05

  It's actually more common than you would think. People post pictures of other people's bookshelves all the time on this subreddit, including the bookshelves of the people that they're dating.

• 11:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, man, I can't wait to hear more about that.

• 11:27Speaker 05

  I'll tell you all about it in a minute.

• 11:48Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. How should employers measure real skills in the age of AI?

• 12:00Speaker 06

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• 12:09Speaker 00

  Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts. And stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of a recent episode on rethinking academic and job assessment when AI can do the work.

• 12:27Speaker 07

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• 13:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay, Kalyani, we're in the shelves. We're amongst the shelves together. And you were telling us about people posting their dates shelves on the subreddit?

• 13:48Speaker 05

  Yes, and these are some of the most popular posts that I saw on the subreddit. I mean, for example, there was one post, the title is, "Started seeing this guy. What does it say about him?" This post has 825 comments. People just love going in on these bookshelves. And on this particular person's bookshelf, you can see a book called Unlocking the Bible? And then Watchmen? So there's like a real variety of vibes.

• 14:20Amory Sivertson?

  Ooh, you can really zoom in and see.

• 14:23Speaker 05

  You really can. You can, you can lock in. And people love posting their potential partner's bookshelves on the subreddit. And people love weighing in. There's certain things that pop up again and again. If you're a woman and you're posting a shelf about a guy that you're seeing, and he's got like a bunch of self-help and like, "How to Catch a Date", and "Money Success Gym", like all of those books, people are sounding the alarms. Like, that sets them off immediately in the comments.

• 14:54Amory Sivertson?

  Ooh, this person is a philosopher. Got braiding sweetgrass.

• 14:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 14:59Amory Sivertson?

  The organized mind. Yeah, definitely a philosopher. But also, what do we think of this stacking technique? We've got, we've got horizontals, we've got verticals, we've got both on the same shelf. It's, this is chaos to me. Like, how are you getting that book at the bottom?

• 15:17Speaker 05

  That's a big part of the subreddit, is people won't just comment on the books on the shelf, but they'll comment on the way that they're put on the shelf. Like, if you've put all these books in a way that makes it seem like it's hard to get the book out of the shelf, people will say like, "Oh, you're not actually a reader. You're like, you've just got this for show." Or like, maybe your books are stacked like that because your mind is so like, full and crazy. I mean, it's, people will make all kinds of leaps and bounds based on the organization of the shelf, too.

• 15:46Amory Sivertson?

  So what did people say about this, this person? Were they like, yeah, stick with this, this person who owns this shelf? Or were there any red flags? What's the analysis in these 825 comments?

• 16:03Speaker 05

  I think people were really struck by like, the variety on this person's shelf. Braiding Sweetgrass is always a green flag for thoughtfulness. So someone says they had a negative impression, but once they saw that book, they thought he was okay. People love this kind of post and some folks even try to like, reverse engineer the energy. I saw one post that asked like, what are your top green flag books for a single 40 male? And everybody in the comments of that post was like, ripping this person to shreds because they thought like this, if you, if you want to have a bookshelf, like you should actually read the books that you're going to put on it. Like, don't try and source what's the best looking from this subreddit. People did not sit well with that post in particular.

• 16:45Amory Sivertson?

  I wonder how long this subreddit has been around.

• 16:48Ben Brock Johnson?

  February 17th, 2021.

• 16:51Speaker 05

  It's a pandemic, baby.

• 16:51Amory Sivertson?

  2021? Okay, that makes so much sense to me because what happened during the pandemic? We all started getting on video calls and what was our backdrop? Our bookshelves. I mean, not, not so much mine, but I feel like the art of the bookshelf didn't matter as much until everyone started being invited into our virtual spaces. And the bookshelf became, became the backdrop by which you were judged. Like, the color scheme, the variety. And so it makes perfect sense to me that this is a, this subreddit is a pandemic baby.

• 17:25Speaker 05

  I think you're on to something because, you know, when I was looking into this, it really reminded me of that, I think it was a Twitter account that was like RoomRater, that used to rate the backgrounds behind people who would appear on TV, online. And this reminded me so much of that. I mean, I think it's like, your home is a private space in a lot of senses, but when it's visible, there's a certain like, there's a, it's like an added level of a space in which you're performing that maybe you wouldn't have been before. Hmm. Although I don't know how true that actually is. Because I feel like as a person who's been a reader all my life,

• 18:10Speaker 05

  I'm always thinking about how my bookshelves look to other people.

• 18:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's interesting. The it's it's a lot of it is not like, here's a picture of my shelf. It's here's somebody else's shelves. Tell me more, which I find very fascinating.

• 18:24Amory Sivertson?

  I'm also seeing another example of this, a snapping a surreptitious photo of the person you're dating's bookshelf. And this particular bookshelf. I'll just read some of the titles. I don't know many of these books or the authors, but we've got The Art of Seduction, Mastery, Money Mammoth, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Lots of books with money and power in the title.

• 18:57Amory Sivertson?

  Strength Training Book. Bigger Learner. Nope, Bigger Leaner Stronger. Very different than Bigger Learner Stronger. Tell us what the analysis was of this bookshelf.

• 19:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, this this one was not. The crowd, the crowd wasn't feeling too hot about this one. I mean, one of the comments says, he's not that curious about the world around him and mostly cares about money. Another person just wrote, girl, run.

• 19:29Speaker 05

  Concise, but and then, you know, another person said, money, success, bodybuilding. This is an entitled vein individual that is convinced they're smarter, stronger, tougher than everyone else. So, you know, it can be very easy to kill the vibe. If you post a bookshelf of someone you're dating and people are like,

• 19:51Speaker 05

  I don't like it. But maybe we all have our own set of bookshelf red flags, red bookmarks, maybe.

• 19:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  Just dismembering bodies for beginners.

• 20:01Speaker 05

  Oh, God.

• 20:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  That would.

• 20:03Speaker 05

  I think instead of girl, run. Girl, run and call 911 if you see.

• 20:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  How to pickle human flesh?

• 20:15Speaker 05

  Do you have these books? This is getting oddly specific.

• 20:20Amory Sivertson?

  I need an update on this post. I need to know if this person did run as a result. Like, are we getting real results out of this subreddit? Or are we just trying to get an, get an analysis here?

• 20:31Speaker 05

  For what it's worth, I, I have scrolled pretty far and I haven't seen OP in the comments at all. So it's possible she ran and she's, she's still running to this day.

• 20:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  So I, I just sent you guys my bookshelf.

• 20:47Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 20:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  Do you want to take a look? Tell me what you think.

• 20:52Speaker 05

  The first title Ben and I see is Please Kill Me.

• 20:55Ben Brock Johnson?

  Please Kill Me is a great book. It's a, it's an oral history of the punk scene of New York City in the 1970s and 80s. Um, and also I think Detroit, it's not as creepy as it sounds.

• 21:07Speaker 05

  I find it fascinating that you also have a dictionary on your shelves. I don't think I own a dictionary.

• 21:12Ben Brock Johnson?

  Really? Well, maybe that's an analog, that's a reflection of my analog life. I, I have, um, my family is, always used to have like an open unabridged dictionary in the living room. Just to, cause we be, cause we be looking upwards.

• 21:29Speaker 05

  Cause you be looking words, you be looking upwards.

• 21:33Ben Brock Johnson?

  I also should admit that I don't have Lord of the Rings on this shelf, but I definitely have Lord of the Rings. I also have like another very like.

• 21:40Speaker 05

  You have The Hobbit.

• 21:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  I, yes, I have The Hobbit. I also have another very kind of like dude centric, uh, sci-fi. Uh, the internet loves this thing, which is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but it slaps. It's, it's still slaps, I'm just saying. Uh, and then I also have The Watchmen. Do you have any reading suggestions for me, Kalyani?

• 22:05Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, if you enjoy.

• 22:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  What are your most judgmental comments? Your most judgmental comments?

• 22:11Speaker 05

  My most judgmental comments, okay. All right, I'm ready.

• 22:15Speaker 05

  This bookshelf, it looks to me like someone who spent a lot of time in the 90s. Like it very much the, the type of.

• 22:24Speaker 05

  That sounds like you were a time traveler who took a vacation during the 90s.

• 22:28Ben Brock Johnson?

  How dare you, madam.

• 22:31Speaker 05

  I mean, even the type of woods that you- Needs updating is what you're saying? Needs updating. Needs updating, needs updating, needs, um, maybe like-

• 22:40Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, man.

• 22:41Speaker 05

  One to two more fiction books on the shelf.

• 22:45Speaker 05

  You haven't read a book since 1992.

• 22:53Speaker 05

  Well, no, there's Where the Crawdads Sing is, I think, the newest book that I can spot on this shelf. So I'll give you that.

• 22:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, God. Okay, fair.

• 23:00Speaker 05

  And I do like Watchmen, so I will, one more point for that. Um, but I, I would look at this book and guess like, this person has not been to a bookstore. Well, maybe spends a lot of time in used bookstores, which there's nothing wrong with used, used bookstores. I love used bookstores, but they typically tend to have older titles. That would be my big takeaway. I'm sorry.

• 23:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  Here's the other thing that's like hard, right? So I'm, I'm, I'm married to a librarian. And so like, a lot of books never end up on the shelf. Because we basically don't buy books in my house, but I've got, I've got full on libraries flying through my house at all times. Most of, most of the time they're being read by my wife and my children and not me, because I'm reading Reddit. But, uh, but I feel like, uh, but I feel like there's, you know, the books that we do have, listen, it's outdated, but it's, you know, there's been some newer books coming in, but they're library books. And they sit next to our bed and I don't read them, so.

• 24:00Speaker 05

  I mean, I'm a big library reader too. And it's curious to think also about like, the books that you, you choose to have physical copies of and you choose to have on your shelves. Maybe people gave them to you, but like, for me, I know that I only buy copies of books that I've already read and loved for the most part.

• 24:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  Should we start a subreddit that's my library checkout pile?

• 24:21Amory Sivertson?

  Spoken like a true husband of a librarian. You're working for big library and I support it. Because you know what? Libraries need all the love that they can get and deserve all the love they can get.

• 24:34Ben Brock Johnson?

  Damn skippy.

• 24:34Amory Sivertson?

  So if that gets people to go to the library, the same way that the pandemic and bookshelves being in backdrops inspired people to post their bookshelves and thus maybe care about them a little bit more and invest in them a little bit more. Again, just my theory, but I think it's a good one. Then I'm all, I'm all for it.

• 24:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  I was in a library the other day that was close to where I live, which is far from the subject matter of this, but they had like a new display up. And it was either called Swamp Core or like Swamp Fic. And it was just fiction that just like took place in the swamp.

• 25:13Amory Sivertson?

  My friend just read an ogre romance for charity. So it is, it exists, it's out there. My friend just read-

• 25:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  Just read an ogre romance for charity.

• 25:26Amory Sivertson?

  That's the name of this episode.

• 25:28Speaker 05

  Can't say more than that.

• 25:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  The rest is a secret.

• 25:35Amory Sivertson?

  You know what, Caliani? Same, same.

• 25:39Speaker 05

  That's the important detail.

• 25:40Amory Sivertson?

  My friend also just read an ogre romance for charity.

• 25:43Ben Brock Johnson?

  If anybody would like me to read an ogre romance for charity, I am available.

• 25:49Speaker 05

  I'll send you the title.

• 25:50Amory Sivertson?

  Your ogre romances.

• 25:52Speaker 05

  We'll do book club after this and it's going to be only ogre romances.

• 25:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  Love that for us.

• 26:00Amory Sivertson?

  Oh, man. Well, Caliani-

• 26:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  That seems like a good place to close.

• 26:03Amory Sivertson?

  Thank you for this. Thank you. Thank you for perusing the shelves, perusing the digital shelves of Bookshelves Detective. And this was joyful and, and a little judgy, but hopefully in a good way.

• 26:19Speaker 05

  Thank you for coming to the swamps with me.

• 26:25Amory Sivertson?

  Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was produced by Kalyani Saksana and Grace Tatter and hosted by me, Amory Sivertson.

• 26:35Speaker 05

  And me, Kalyani Saksana and Ben Brock, Brock Johnson. It was edited by Meg Cramer, mix and sound design by Marquis Neal.

• 26:44Amory Sivertson?

  The rest of our team is Dean Russell, Chiosna Bernado, our production manager, Paul Vikes, Emily Jankowski, and our managing producer, Suma Tijoshi.

• 26:52Speaker 05

  Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between online communities, dusty shelves, and sexy spines.

• 27:00Amory Sivertson?

  Do you have an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or some other wild story from the internet that you want us to tell? Hit us up, [email protected].

• 27:37Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questrom School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts, and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Janet Kang, executive director of the Just Horizons Alliance, on who stands to benefit from AI in education.

• 28:00Speaker 09

  I am absolutely in favor of AI in learning in the right context.

• 28:05Speaker 00

  And just to explain why you're excited about it.

• 28:07Speaker 09

  Oh, my gosh, individualized support, right? Personalization, and to be able to scale quality education in places where it was historically impossible. So for certain kinds of learners with different kinds of learning styles and disabilities, for example, speakers of different languages, there are amazing ways AI can boost learning. It just has to be with the right context. And age appropriateness is something we do a lot of work in because it is very different depending on where in that maturity cycle you are in terms of how your brain develops.

• 28:38Speaker 00

  Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business Markets and Society at ibms.bu.edu.

• 28:57Speaker 07

  Whenever fall comes back around, it always feels like a fresh start. This year, I've been layering in some styles from the new Lululemon fall drop because the weather is shifting and I find I have to be ready for the entire day and not just one part of it. Lululemon's fall line has some really versatile transitional pieces, so I can just wake up, throw on a matching set, add a jacket or a fleece, and head out, knowing that I'll feel comfortable enough to go wherever the day takes me. Check out the new fall arrivals in store and online now at lululemon.com.

• 29:26Speaker 08

  Now at Kroger, your points add up to more ways to save every trip. Use them your way to take dollars off groceries at checkout or save at the pump. You can even save up to $35 on your next fill-up. Same points, more choices. And with low prices on fresh, quality food, plus digital and personalized offers tailored to how you shop, your dollar goes further. Redeem your points online or in the app. Kroger, fresh for everyone. Restrictions apply. See site or store for details.