The best detective story of the year is about satellites

We are all blessed with different gifts, and different curses. Such is our lot.

Me, I happen to be exceptionally good at Hungry Hungry Hippos. My kid will confirm this. I am working on starting a league and we are currently seeking both players and brand sponsorship (looking at you, Nike).

My curse is maps. Or directions. Really anything involving a structured attempt to get from point A to point B. So when GPS first arrived and work started sending me to LA, I signed up immediately for the Hertz NeverLost system, a product doomed from the moment somebody put the words “never” and “lost” in the title. And for the record, LA driving is genuinely hard, all volume and turns and sudden decisions, and I spent most of those early trips staring forlornly out the windshield trying to work out what I had done to deserve yet another strange cul-de-sac.

NeverLost fixed that, right up until it did not. I had to be at a recording studio at 7 for the RENO 911! DVD commentary. I followed the directions the whole way, actively enjoying the fact that this was no longer something I had to think about, and arrived at a large strip mall. I spent the next half hour walking through said strip mall looking for a production company that was, it turned out, a solid thirty minutes away in an entirely different part of the city. My GPS remained extremely confident about this the entire time.

An episode from this week’s pick really brought me back to that moment.

Decoder Ring comes out of Slate and has been running since 2018, hosted by Willa Paskin. The format is one question per episode, and they go deep and narrative, which is what makes it so fun. Why does every Australian know the same line dance? What happened to Florida oranges? Why do we even have encores? Reported via interviews and archival tape, really lovely production values and very real answers at the end; it almost has a bit of a Radiolab vibe to it (smart, immersive storytelling).

The episode that I have decided to treat as retroactive vindication for the strip mall is from July 15 and is called Weapons of Map Destruction, which is a terrible pun that I respect enormously. Bad puns are hard to do well. Paskin says on tape that when the team heard there was a new book about GPS coming, their honest first reaction was that it sounded dry. I had the same initial take (thought we’d focus on a different episode) but this one has been one of my favorites from the past few months, fascinating, funny and genuinely unexpected. A lot of crazy stuff goes on in the world around GPS and maps. One to grow on and all that.

Outside of my connection to the material, the tape is strong. A gas oil tanker in the Black Sea, an engineer watching a blue dot leave his house without him, and the thing that turned out to be causing all of it.

Enigmatic closing! Paywall! Click on through and let’s get into some crazy map world kinda stuff.