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Welcome to the Kotki Ride Home for Friday, 8th, 2021. I'm Jackson Bird.

What folklorists can teach us about the structure and resilience of conspiracy theories.

The genome of the platypus has been sequenced, and it's just as weird as you'd expect and a Swedish film festival

that's sending one person to an abandoned lighthouse on a remote island for a week-long stay

without any human contact or outside communication. Here are some of the cool things from the news today.

You know, at the end of the show yesterday, I talked about how I think of the cocky ride home as a necessary break from doom-scrolling the news, and it is, but it also doesn't exist in a vacuum.

And so without getting bogged down by this week's

news exactly, I wanted to share an interesting study about conspiracy theories that was conducted

last year by folklorists, which I read last month and has been kicking around in my head again.

It breaks down how the tradition and structure of folklore can start to explain how

conspiracy theories spread, take hold, and eventually fall apart. So every few years, terms like

the power of story and narrative storytelling are revived as buzzwords in the media, marketing, NGO, and education sectors.

And it can sometimes be a bit overdone, but there is truth to it.

You know, we as humans have always used stories to communicate,

to pass down cultural norms, and to mobilize each other towards action, for good and for ill.

Timothy Tangerlini, a computational folklorist from the University of California at Berkeley and co-author on the study,

says, quote, stories have been impactful throughout human history.

...