As my awesome podcast Squaring the Strange (co-hosted by Pascual Romero and Celestia Ward) comes upon its one year anniversary, I will be posting episode summaries from the past year to remind people some of the diverse topics we’ve covered on the show, ranging from ghosts to folklore to mysteries and topical skepticism. If you haven’t heard it, please give a listen!

What are we skeptical of this week? Pascual deconstructs the viral story about women supposedly absorbing DNA from the sperm of every man they have slept with, which is a wild (and possibly slut-shaming) misinterpretation of the actual study on microchimerism. Ben looks at the recent shooting at a congressional baseball practice and, specifically, the immediate calls to label it (and many other shootings) terrorism. Who is responsible for decreeing a specific attack as a terrorist act, and what constitutes terrorism? For this week’s main topic, Ben and Pascual unpack the concept of nostalgia and why it should be looked at skeptically. In reality, the “good old days” weren’t so good—they were piled high with horse dung, rampant disease, and other woes. Even in our own lives, memory tends to hang onto the best aspects of a remembered time and forget the troublesome details. A song from our youth reminds us of the best things we experienced at that time, not the problems we had. People also love to complain about their own lives and current problems, and nostalgia is a way to impose the “grass is always greener” lament across time. Marketers also tend to pair recent history with good cues in order to bring about a warm sense of nostalgia in audiences, while the media tends to overhype all the catastrophic aspects of today in order to grab attention. Politicians do this too, to great effect: Make America Great Again, anyone? Pascual breaks down how people complain about “today’s pop music” and reminds us that bad or “manufactured” pop music is hardly a new thing. Just like memories, though, we cherry-pick: it’s the best music and best films of any era that tend to be carried forward, while the mediocre or downright bad from bygone times is quickly forgotten.

You can hear the show HERE!

You can find more on me and my work with a search for “Benjamin Radford” (not “Ben Radford”) on Vimeo, and please check out my podcast Squaring the Strange!