Interesting Things with JC is a new podcast mini series, with highlight on some of the more interesting historical stories, current events as well as under-told stories.
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Interesting Things with JC #1760: "The Greek That Stayed Behind" – Muslim families in Turkey still speak a form of Greek that survived the 1923 population exchange. Now fewer children are learning it, and researchers are racing to record the people who still speak it.
Interesting Things with JC #1759: "Gestalt Language Processing" – A child repeats a phrase they heard hours, days, or weeks earlier, sometimes using the same tone and rhythm. This delayed echolalia can communicate something, but Gestalt Language Processing makes a bigger claim: that some children learn language first as whole phrases and later break them into smaller pieces, an idea researchers still debate.
Interesting Things with JC #1758: "The Oxytocin Feedback Loop" – A dog holds its owner’s gaze, and oxytocin rises in the human. The owner then interacts more with the dog, whose oxytocin also rises, creating a feedback loop between gaze, behavior, and biology across two species.
Interesting Things with JC #1757: "The Tracking Device We Carry" – Your phone tracking everywhere you go once sounded like a conspiracy. Now smartphones routinely create location records through cell towers, GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and apps.
Interesting Things with JC #1756: "What Happens When You Skip Sleep?" – Stay awake long enough and adenosine signaling increases sleep pressure while caffeine can temporarily block the feeling of it. Attention, judgment, and memory become less reliable, and eventually the brain can force seconds-long microsleeps into wakefulness even while you are still functioning.
Interesting Things with JC #1755: "How Do Dogs Know How to Herd?" – A Border Collie can crouch, stare, and move around sheep before learning herding commands. Selective breeding reshaped parts of the canine hunting sequence into herding behavior.
Interesting Things with JC #1754: "Jose Alberto Gutierrez" – Bogotá garbage collector José Alberto Gutiérrez keeps pulling discarded books from the trash until his home becomes a free library and the books begin reaching communities across Colombia.
Interesting Things with JC #1753: "Charlie" – The name is very common today, but it kept changing as it passed through different languages.
Interesting Things with JC #1752: "The Blind Man" – A blind man’s eyes are touched, and he begins to see people, but they look like trees walking around. His eyes are touched again, and his vision becomes clear, leaving a moment when what he sees is real but incomplete.
Interesting Things with JC #1751: "The Wasps That Know Your Face" – Northern paper wasps recognize individual nestmates by their faces. Change a familiar face, and the colony responds with aggression until it learns who that face belongs to.
Interesting Things with JC #1750: "Trebizond" – Ships carry coffee, copper, cloth, salt, and other goods through Trebizond while steep roads climb from the Black Sea harbor into the Pontic Mountains. The empire that once ruled from the city is already gone, but Greek Orthodox communities remain for centuries—until violence, displacement, and a compulsory population exchange remove most of them from the coast.
Interesting Things with JC #1749: "Ouzel Lake and the Dangers of Alpine Swimming" – Ouzel Lake can look inviting after a 4.9-mile summer hike, but the mountain water can remain cold enough to trigger an involuntary gasp and rapid breathing almost immediately. Stay in, and cold can begin taking away strength and coordination while you're still nearly five trail miles into Rocky Mountain National Park.
Interesting Things with JC #1748: "Follow the Leader" – August 18th, 1998 a legendary album dropped. Korn’s original Follow the Leader CD starts with twelve five-second tracks containing no music. A full minute passes before the album finally begins on track thirteen, turning the physical CD’s track sequence into part of the album itself.
Interesting Things with JC #1747: "Davy Crockett Before the Legend" – Davy Crockett was becoming a legend while he was still alive. He claimed 105 bears in less than a year, fought Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, and watched stories turn him into a frontier character before the Alamo made that character permanent.
Interesting Things with JC #1746: "Julie Newmar" – Julie had already won a Tony and trained for years in ballet before playing Catwoman, then used that same attention to movement and body shape to redesign women’s undergarments. In the 1970s, the actress who adjusted Catwoman’s costume for a more feline line secured U.S. patents for pantyhose and brassiere designs under her own name
Interesting Things with JC #1745: "The Wow! Signal" – A radio telescope in Ohio detected a powerful narrowband signal from the direction of Sagittarius for 72 seconds, matching the rise and fall expected from a fixed source in the sky. The signal vanished before the telescope’s second beam crossed the same region, and nearly fifty years of searches have never detected it again.
Interesting Things with JC #1744: "The Lemon Juice Heist" – McArthur Wheeler robs Pittsburgh banks with lemon juice on his face because he believes security cameras cannot see him. The cameras see him clearly.
Interesting Things with JC #1743: "The Dunning-Kruger Effect" – Low performers overestimated their scores, but the famous “Mount Stupid” graph wasn’t part of the study, and researchers still debate what causes the effect.
Interesting Things with JC #1742: "The Milk Hill Spiral" – In a wheat field on Milk Hill, 409 separate circles form a six-sided spiral across roughly 780 to 900 feet of rolling ground. The circle sizes change as the pattern spreads outward, but the larger geometry holds across the hillside. The formation is documented; who designed and built it is not.
Interesting Things with JC #1741: "The Night Hip-Hop Was Born" – At a Bronx party in 1973, DJ Kool Herc notices that dancers come alive during the short drum breaks, but the breaks end within seconds. He uses two turntables to keep those sections going, giving the dancers more of the part they want as the technique begins moving from party to party.
Interesting Things with JC #1740: "Forty Six and 2" – Tool’s “Forty Six & 2” starts with a shadow shedding its skin, moves through wounds being reopened, and hides a disputed idea about human chromosomes inside its title. Nearly thirty years later, listeners are still pulling apart the psychology, biology, and shifting rhythms to find what the song is actually doing.
Interesting Things with JC #1739: "R&B in the Rain" – The Temptations use rain to hide a man’s tears, but later R&B records keep putting people in the same weather for different reasons. Ann Peebles hears an absent lover in every drop, New Edition turns rain into a relationship test, and Ashanti puts it inside a story about getting away.
Interesting Things with JC #1738: "The Swiss Army Knife Parcel Hook" – A small hook on the back of many Swiss Army Knives was designed to carry heavy string-tied parcels without cutting into your hand. Long after those packages disappeared, the tool remains on millions of knives because people kept finding new everyday uses for it.
Interesting Things with JC #1737: "Susan and Phil" – A woman enters a Fort Worth topless bar because she needs money, but the bouncer watching the door decides she doesn't belong there and asks her to go rattlesnake hunting instead. That unlikely meeting leads two ninth-grade dropouts toward biology degrees, wildlife research, and a scientific career neither believed was possible.
Interesting Things with JC #1736: "NFL Training Camp" – Every NFL team starts training camp with 90 players, but every practice removes someone from the race until only 53 are left.
