Decoder Ring | The Red String Board Conspiracy

Summary

Decoder Ring | The Red String Board Conspiracy

Podcast: Slow Burn (Decoder Ring series, Slate Podcasts)
Host: Willa Paskin
Guests: Aki Peritz, Sean Gilmore, Dr. Ann Ganzert, Scott Cobb, John Kretschmer
Date: October 22, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode of Decoder Ring, titled “The Red String Board Conspiracy,” unravels the pervasive image of the “conspiracy board”—those crime walls covered in Polaroids and crisscrossed with red string seen in movies, TV shows, and even FBI recruitment ads. Host Willa Paskin digs into the phenomenon’s origins, why we’re so drawn to it, and whether real investigators ever use such boards, featuring interviews with experts in national security, pop culture, television set design, and narrative analysis.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Real-Life Myth of the String Board

• Aki Peritz’s Confusion (01:20–04:18):
  Aki Peritz, former CIA counterterrorism analyst, describes his shock at seeing an FBI recruitment campaign featuring an agent posed before an elaborate string board—which he had never encountered in decades of intelligence work.

  • “I've never actually seen red string in any office supply cabinet. ... Why would we have string?” — Aki Peritz (04:18)

• Pop Culture vs. Reality (15:29–20:47):
  Peritz confirms through interviews with intelligence and law enforcement veterans that the infamous string board is almost never used in actual investigations. Instead, sophisticated software does the work; only rarely does a corkboard see use, and usually only for the most mundane notices.

  • “The only cork boards we ever used were for Chinese menus for lunch.” — Reported by Aki Peritz (16:53)

2. The Two Faces of the Conspiracy Board

• Sean Gilmore’s Research (08:32–14:42):
  Sean Gilmore, English professor and obsessive pinboard chronicler, has catalogued well over 1,200 examples of such boards in media. He notes their narrative utility, distinguishing between:

  • Obsessive Walls: Signifying madness/obsession (stalker, serial killer, etc.)
  • Investigation Boards: Markers of methodical, legitimate inquiry (used by authorities)
  • Ambiguous, Unofficial Boards: The gray area between obsession and insight, often assembled by “maverick” detectives or family members driven to solve a mystery.
  • “They exist on a spectrum from sanity to madness.”—Willa Paskin paraphrasing (10:08)

• Instant Characterization (14:42):
  These boards serve as fast, visual shorthand for a character’s mental state, degree of obsession, or brilliance.

3. The Visual Language Evolves: Not from Real Life, but from Cinema

• Origins in Fiction (21:02–29:31):
  Neither Peritz’s research nor Gilmore’s archiving finds roots for the string board in reality. Paskin and Dr. Ann Ganzert (Scholar, “Serial Pinboarding in Contemporary Television”) chart the trope’s visual ancestry:

  • Early cinematic diagrams appeared as heist maps or military plans, not string boards.
  • The first cinematic string appears in Dr. No (1962), but with little narrative emphasis.
  • The classic stringboard: BBC’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1979), featuring red-ribbon org charts.

• The Proliferation—A Beautiful Mind (30:34–32:57):
  The 2001 film “A Beautiful Mind” is the major turning point, making the conspiracy wall both a narrative centerpiece and a metaphor for the blurred boundary between brilliance and delusion. Its influence leads to a boom in similar depictions through the 2000s.

  • “The stringboard in it was absolutely central ... a way to convey his mental illness cinematically.” — Willa Paskin (31:44)

4. From Satire to Meme to Misuse

• It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (38:06–42:42):

  • Production designer Scott Cobb shares insights about creating the now-iconic wall in the “Pepe Silvia” scene, which has since become a meme for wild-eyed obsession and information overload.
  • “Red string... is a good choice because you’re using images printed on paper... you want something bright to connect the pieces without it blurring in the camera lens.” — Scott Cobb (40:12)
  • The “Pepe Silvia” meme is now shorthand for frantic, hyperconnected reasoning.

• Homeland’s Rainbow Wall (43:09–47:50):

  • Production designer John Kretschmer discusses “the Carrie Wall,” conceived to visualize the protagonist’s manic mind and investigative genius. It took immense effort—over 300 individually-created documents—to bring the visual to screen.
  • “This wasn’t to be artsy. It was meant to be a window into her mind.” — John Kretschmer (45:32)

5. The Real-World Consequence: The Board Becomes Belief

• The Feedback Loop (49:53–50:57):
  As the trope saturates popular culture, it bleeds into real life: QAnon theorists, vision board enthusiasts, and even the FBI, in its recruitment ad, buy into the mythology. The visual of string and pushpins confers an aura of “truth,” complexity, or authority—regardless of actual logic or evidence.
  • “If you can put all those things in one place, maybe they are connected.” — Willa Paskin (50:34)
  • “You can just show it [the stringboard]. It looks authoritative... but if you look at it a little closely... it falls apart really fast.” — Aki Peritz (51:04)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “It's almost like abstract art at some point, where it's just a series of all these connecting lines.” — Sean Gilmore on QAnon stringboards (49:53)
• “Law enforcement doesn't need to gather around a wall of visual stuff to solve a case. But you know who does?... TV and movie audiences.” — Willa Paskin (20:07)
• “These boards are not real. They're not real at all.” — Aki Peritz, joking about the FBI ad (20:47)

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Timeline of Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment Description | |-----------|---------------------| | 01:20–04:18 | Aki Peritz’s disbelief at seeing the FBI use a stringboard in ads; personal experience in intelligence | | 08:32–14:42 | Sean Gilmore details his pinboard catalog and the spectrum of “crazy” to “insightful” boards | | 15:29–20:47 | Reality check: real investigators use digital tools, not stringboards | | 21:02–29:31 | Early pop culture cases traced by Paskin, Gilmore, and Dr. Ganzert; media origins | | 30:34–32:57 | “A Beautiful Mind” and the trope’s explosion in 21st-century pop culture | | 38:06–42:42 | Production breakdown of the “It’s Always Sunny” meme wall (“Pepe Silvia”) | | 43:09–47:50 | The making and meaning of Homeland’s “Carrie Wall” | | 49:53–51:26 | Real-world uptake: QAnon, the stringboard’s misleading visual authority |

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Additional Insights

• Stringboard Construction as Performance: Set designers describe painstakingly creating all materials from scratch, ensuring even the barely-seen details on the board are meaningful, to lend authenticity for both close-ups and audience pause-button scrutiny.
• Visual Economy: Both a narrative device and set dressing, stringboards allow film and TV to shortcut detailed exposition, simultaneously signaling a character’s state of mind and the complexity of the story.

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Conclusion

“The Red String Board Conspiracy” dissects a visual trope’s journey from obscure set dressing to pop culture cliché to real-world emblem of sense-making and madness. Through interviews, production anecdotes, and cultural history, it makes clear: the crisscrossed, string-laden boards beloved by detectives on screen are, above all, a work of fiction—a symbol for our yearning to draw meaning from chaos.

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For further reading:

• Sean Gilmore’s “Narrative String Theory Project” at The Vault of Culture
• Aki Peritz’s article about stringboards on Slate

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Summary by [YourAssistant], preserving the episode’s engaging, inquisitive tone and attributing all key insights to the original speakers.

Transcript

[Willa Paskin]

You know that feeling when someone truly has your back? Like when a friend shows up to help you move, or a colleague takes the time to recognize your work? It's those shared moments that mean the most. Because staying connected matters. That's why AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, or they'll proactively make it right. That's the AT T guarantee. So what are you waiting for? Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.comguarantee for details. AT&T connecting Changes Everything the holidays have arrived at the Home Depot and we're here to help bring the excitement with decor for every part of your home. Check out our wide assortment of easy to assemble pre lit trees so you can spend less time setting up and more time celebrating. And bring your holiday spirit outdoors with unique decor like one of our Santa inflatables. Whatever your style, find the right pieces at the right prices this holiday season at the Home Depot. In 2006, Aki Peritz was working as a counter terrorism analyst at the CIA when he was called in about an alarming report.

[Aki Peritz]

We received some intelligence that suggested that something really big was going to happen in London sometime in the summertime, but they couldn't make heads or tails out of it.

[Willa Paskin]

Aki became one of many people working to comprehend a massive plot.

[Aki Peritz]

Imagine if you're given a jigsaw puzzle but you don't get the top and you don't get all the pieces. In fact, you only get some of the pieces and you get none of the edge pieces. And the pieces keep changing and people keep throwing new pieces into the mix, which may or may not be important.

[Willa Paskin]

Agents from across the nsa, CIA, the UK and Pakistan went into overdrive. So, scrambling to put it all together in a matter of months, which turned out to be just in time, Al.

[Aki Peritz]

Qaeda came very, very, very close to blowing up several airplanes over the Atlantic over a two hour period.

[Willa Paskin]

Police believed the plan was just weeks.

[Scott Cobb]

Away from fruition when they launched the.

[Willa Paskin]

Operation to arrest their main suspects. Their goal? To kill at least 2,000 people.

[Aki Peritz]

And they almost got away with it.

[Willa Paskin]

Aki wrote about how the conspiracy was unraveled in his 2021 book, Disruption Inside the Largest Counterterrorism Investigation in History. By the time it was published, he'd left the CIA and become an associate research scientist at the University of Maryland, while continuing to work on and write about national security activities, including at the Defense Department. And then in 2022, he came across something that gave him pause, and it was coming from inside the FBI itself.

[Aki Peritz]

When I saw that I was like, I have to write something.

[Willa Paskin]

What he saw was a series of images and videos posted on the agency's website as part of a new recruitment.

[Aki Peritz]

Campaign to sell the idea of joining the FBI. You know, fight terrorism, fight bad guys in this country, do really cool stuff.

[Willa Paskin]

The ads show agents photographing crime scenes, standing in front of banks of high tech equipment, peering into laboratory microscopes. But Aki was struck by one image in particular.

[Aki Peritz]

It's a youngish man in the middle of the frame. It's this darkened room, and I guess he's deep into an investigation, trying to take notes. And behind him are Polaroid photos and maps, all connected by pieces of string. And it's all stuck on a wall.

[Willa Paskin]

He had seen this kind of thing before a lot.

[Aki Peritz]

Every time you see a TV show which has a team of detectives or spies or whoever who needs to unravel some sort of nefarious criminal enterprise, you'll always see this, this board somewhere on the wall, full of pictures, maps, photos, all tied together by string. And for some reason, it's always red.

[Willa Paskin]

They appear in thrillers, police procedurals, true crime adaptations, kids shows, even in LEGO sets of police stations.

[Aki Peritz]

It's one of these ubiquitous things that you see all the time now.

[Willa Paskin]

And now Aki was seeing it directly on the FBI's website.

[Aki Peritz]

And the more I look at it, I've been in and out of government for 20 years. I've never actually seen red string in any office supply cabinet. I've never seen it. Why would we have string?

[Willa Paskin]

In all his years of counterintelligence investigations and national security work, had Aki somehow missed the part that involved string and Polaroid pictures and printouts? The part that required a wall where investigators amassed all the information in one place, stepped back and studied it. Were these boards useful or was something else afoot? This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. I'm sure you can picture the kind of boards we've been talking about, even though they go by many names. Pin boards, string boards, evidence boards, investigation walls, conspiracy walls. I personally think of them as walls of crazy. And in today's episode, we're gonna let them drive us a bit bananas. Because we started with the simple questions. Where do these things come from? Who uses them? What are they good for? How did they get to be everywhere? And soon we had a lot of string on the board, revealing a, you guessed it, unusual pattern. People say the truth is stranger than fiction. But these boards show us what can happen when fiction starts to teach us how to organize fact. So today on Decoder Ring, how did we get tangled up in stringboards? This podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a house and more. Plus, you can count on their great customer service to help you when you need it. So your dollar goes a long way. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save on car insurance, Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. You know those little check ins like calling your grandmother to say Happy Birthday or texting your friends just to gossip. Feels good, right? It's those shared moments that matter most. Because staying connected matters. That's why in the rare event of a network outage, AT and T will proactively credit you for a full day of Service. That's the AT&T guarantee. So take a moment to connect. Make the call to your parents you've been putting off. Send a quick message to an old friend and do it all, knowing you've got AT and T behind you. Credit for fiber downtime lasting 20 minutes or more or for wireless downtime lasting 60 minutes or more caused by a single incident impacting 10 or more towers must be connected to impacted tower at onset of outage. Restrictions and exclusions apply. See att.com guarantee for full details. AT and T Connecting Changes Everything Often in TV shows or movies, when an investigator has to get to the bottom of something murky and hidden, they enlist the help of a passionate wonk, a self made expert who has taken it upon themselves to listen to all the underground chatter and obsessively document everything in a real life figure like this exists for pin boards. A guy so passionate and obsessive about them he has done everything but build one for himself.

[Sean Gilmore]

I try to avoid making my own. I feel like that's collecting them is one move.

[Willa Paskin]

Sean Gilmore teaches in the English department at the University of Illinois, and in the 2010s he started to notice these boards popping up in movies, video games, comics and TV shows that he was consuming.

[Sean Gilmore]

So the platonic ideal is the red string board in which a series of news articles or clippings or various forms of notes are all connected with actual string or yarn around push pins. And I just saw so many of them at once that I was like somebody should start keeping track of them.

[Willa Paskin]

Soon after, Sean spotted one in a video game he was playing called Sleeping Dogs.

[Sean Gilmore]

You have A detective, and he walks into the police department.

[Willa Paskin]

I'm hoping that you can bring something.

[Sean Gilmore]

More to our investigation.

[Willa Paskin]

I understand, sir.

[Sean Gilmore]

And it has a classic red string connected conspiracy board of heads of the various crime organizations with little post it notes next to all of them. I was like, yep, that's a good example.

[Willa Paskin]

Did you pause while you were playing and take a screenshot?

[Aki Peritz]

Yep.

[Sean Gilmore]

Yeah, I'm that kind of dork. Where I, like, paused and was like, we should start documenting them right here.

[Willa Paskin]

So Sean created a Tumblr and posted the screenshot to it. And then he kept on grabbing and posting more like the boards he found in Mindhunter and Godzilla and Stranger Things.

[Aki Peritz]

The answer to what happened to your.

[Sean Gilmore]

Friend, it's up here somewhere. I assure you that. I just gotta connect the right dots.

[Willa Paskin]

Once his friends and colleagues caught wind of what he was doing, they started alerting him about other examples too.

[Sean Gilmore]

I didn't think there would be so many, to be honest. I kind of thought at the beginning there were probably like a couple hundred of these things.

[Willa Paskin]

Yeah, how many do you have now?

[Sean Gilmore]

I'm like, at like 1200 or something.

[Willa Paskin]

Since we spoke, that number has grown to 1300. Hosted not on Tumblr anymore, but on Sean's own website. And his collection is expansive. It includes images of any board on which someone is trying to collect complex information by using string and pushpins, or newspaper cutouts and glue, or even just drawing lines and boxes and circles on a whiteboard. And when you affix all these images to the proverbial wall, you start to see some patterns. And one that jumps out. Imagine it circled in red marker. Is that on a fundamental level, these boards can signify two different things, two diametrically opposed things. Some are supposed to be vehicles of insight, but otherwise, others are supposed to be manifestations of craziness. They exist on a spectrum from sanity to madness. And starting at one extreme, you have what you might call the obsessive wall.

[Sean Gilmore]

Where a character is truly invested in another character. For example, for stalker reasons, for potential murder reasons. Whether it's, you know, in someone's locker because they hate the prom queen, or whether it's in someone's, you know, dressing room because they're obsessed with their star.

[Willa Paskin]

I have posters, playbills, and a closet jam packed with photographs covering every stage of your magnificent career. In my mind, those are like cutouts of the same person.

[Sean Gilmore]

Cutouts of the same person, often in a kind of surveillance fashion that someone might have taken of the person. But you get a real material quality like someone went into their, you know, art and craft box to make this thing happen.

[Willa Paskin]

And I feel like those are so often, like the reveal that like something horrible is happening.

[Aki Peritz]

Yeah.

[Sean Gilmore]

And it's probably unstoppable.

[Willa Paskin]

This kind of wall is not an attempt to comprehend some larger plot. It signifies nothing but the obsession and derangement of its creator. But on the other end of the spectrum, you have walls that are meant to be taken seriously as legitimate investigatory tools used by intell agencies or police departments to solve crimes. We might call these evidence boards or investigation walls.

[Sean Gilmore]

They have a really kind of more rigid structure in some sense, if it's an official one, like in an office with the FBI or the police looking at it, it's on a whiteboard and it has like clean ruled lines or something that someone has done with dry erase marker or has put up the tape or whatever they've done tied to tangible evidence. Often news clippings, photographs, documents from government sources. It's like something big is going on. Here are the parts.

[Willa Paskin]

First thing is, we need the names of all front Companies, Limited Partnerships, LLCs. Start with the nightclub which Barksdale owns, and on a board like that, then theoretically, like, all the information is supposed to make sense, at least, like in the world of the show, right.

[Sean Gilmore]

This is the literal conspiracy.

[Willa Paskin]

So you have your walls of pure crazy and your walls of ostensible reason. But the majority of pin boards lie somewhere in between, in the ambiguous middle, where they're the work of a person who is unusually obsessed. And maybe that's to productive ends, or maybe it's not. You can think of these as the unofficial investigation, investigation wall.

[Sean Gilmore]

This is when the detective goes to the motel because they've been kicked out by their wife or by the squad. And now they're putting together the real case, right?

[Willa Paskin]

Or perhaps like questing family member or monomaniacally focused lawyer, like someone who is not going to let the case rest. Right. I think that this is our man with the scars on his face. I don't know who he is. I don't know where he is.

[Aki Peritz]

I don't know where this whole thing.

[Willa Paskin]

Starts, but it ends with him in this case kind. It's like they're kind of letting their freak flag fly and it's like up to you in the audience to be like, are they like crazy and like, this is disturbing, or are they just obsessed? But they're right, yes, very much.

[Sean Gilmore]

Do you know how fucking crazy that sounds? It's like you've been alone too long. That's what it's there for. We can't zoom in and understand some detail from what they're presenting to us, but we definitely understand where this character is narratively.

[Willa Paskin]

This is maybe the primary virtue of all of these boards. They are character revealing. Just one can tell you if someone is crazy, scary, single minded, diligent, brilliant, or all of the above. And it can do it in just a few seconds. This is their secondary virtue, how economical they are. They communicate that investigations take time and effort when while also allowing us to skip didactic explanations and boring legwork. No wonder Hollywood loves these boards so much. No wonder they borrowed them from the real world and ran with them. Except did they borrow them from the real world? Aki Parrots couldn't imagine. They took them from people actually solving crimes.

[Aki Peritz]

I used to work at CIA and we would have to link bad guys to phones, to emails, to various places they've been. And it's really, really difficult to figure this out. And so we use pretty complex link chart analysis software to determine who did what to whom.

[Willa Paskin]

That software could ingest millions of pieces of information and did not involve pushpins, string, polaroids or printed out web articles. So when he saw the FBI itself using a board of photos connected by red string in that recruitment ad, he was skeptical. But then he started to second guess himself.

[Aki Peritz]

The more I thought about it, I thought maybe, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we actually do use it in the government. I didn't want to be held hostage by my own personal experience. So I thought, I'm going to figure this out. And so I contacted a dozen different people throughout FBI, CIA, other places, NSA. I asked people who have been working since the 70s, so now we're talking about 40 years of information.

[Willa Paskin]

What did you say to them? Like, what did you email? Like, what was the ask?

[Aki Peritz]

Literally I'm writing about this stringboard theory. Do you have an opinion about this? And I reached out to people who did major crimes. I talked to people who work on China, I worked on people who worked on counterintelligence, people who are now out of the government so they can talk about these things a little bit more freely. And I said, have you ever done this? Have you ever made this under any circumstance?

[Willa Paskin]

So what, I mean, what did people say to you when you asked them about it?

[Aki Peritz]

They all said, we've never actually used it. It's never been a thing. I talked to the chief of staff, to the CIA director at one point, and he said something along the lines of I do not know from whence this came and this is a guy who's been in the business for 40 years. I talked to FBI special agents, and they said the only cork boards we ever used were for Chinese menus for lunch. And the closest I ever really got to was an old FBI special agent who said that he was looking into a fire in the 70s. He tried for a little bit on a wall, just a little bit like, just literally writing on a blackboard. And then somebody else came by and said, like, let's. Let's professionalize this. This piece of junk you're doing.

[Willa Paskin]

To be fair, Aki did find that there are a couple of very loose historical precedents, old military operations and airplane flight plans marked with a few pushpins on a literal map. And then there's the work of a certain former U.S. attorney.

[Aki Peritz]

If it comes from anywhere, it comes from Rudy Giuliani, of all people, when he was doing a lot of Mafia prosecutions in New York City.

[Willa Paskin]

This is a great day for law enforcement, but this is a bad day, probably the worst for the Mafia.

[Aki Peritz]

When he announced the indictments of the heads of the five families, he stood literally in front of a gigantic link chart showing, like, how the bosses are connected to each other and their sub bosses, et cetera.

[Willa Paskin]

So it's just like there are headshots, essentially. Like, I mean, it's almost like a family tree or it's like an org chart.

[Aki Peritz]

Yeah.

[Willa Paskin]

The attack is at the top level, the middle level, and the lower level. And we are doing everything that we can to identify, indict, and convict the capos, the soldiers, and the associates of the Mafia as well. But even in this case, these boards were merely visual aids, a tidy shorthand to help convey information to the public. They were never used for any actual investment. And for someone like Aki, who understands firsthand the complications of intelligence investigations like the Al Qaeda plot he worked on and wrote about, it's easy to see.

[Aki Peritz]

Why, thinking back when I actually worked on the real operation, it would be terrible to use in an actual investigation.

[Willa Paskin]

Like a stringboard wall would have been totally insufficient to the task.

[Aki Peritz]

Well, number one is that. Remember that if you're in an active investigation, you're constantly getting new information all the time. And so to have a physical thing on the wall where you have to move spring around. I don't know if you've ever made an art project where you're constantly having to change it every couple of days. It's basically impossible. I mean, if somebody pulls out a pin or pulls out a photo, it could, in theory, that could really mess up your case.

[Willa Paskin]

It's sort of actually a weirdly simplistic way of being like, how are these things connected? You're like, what does the red string mean? Like that it doesn't actually convey as much information as it. It sort of seems like it.

[Aki Peritz]

Oh, yeah, it falls apart almost immediately if you think about it for more than 20 seconds. I mean, what. Let's say you're going after a bad suspect. Who cares what he looks like? You know, all you need is a name and his phone number. And are you tracking the guy? So it makes no sense, all this visual stuff, when in reality, if you're actually trying to make a case against somebody, you just. Just the facts, ma'. Am.

[Willa Paskin]

Law enforcement doesn't need to gather around a wall of visual stuff to solve a case. But you know who does need and expect visual stuff to understand what's going on? TV and movie audiences. So there's a reason neither Aki nor any of his colleagues have encountered these string. They aren't useful for investigations. They're useful as set design. The FBI, in making a recruitment ad, wasn't leaning on imagery used by law enforcement. It was borrowing a Hollywood invention. And so Aki could only laugh because.

[Aki Peritz]

They, of all people, it's like, guys, you know, you don't use this, Please. These boards are not real. They're not real at all.

[Willa Paskin]

But if Hollywood is responsible for spreading the fiction of the stringboard, well, how did Hollywood do it?

[Aki Peritz]

The more you pick at this story, the more you realize that nobody really knows what the answer truly is.

[Willa Paskin]

When we come back, we try to unwind the red string all the way to its center. Some days we celebrate the wins, like calling your best friend to congratulate them on a big promotion or texting your grandmother happy birthday. Other days, we work through the tough stuff, like calling a partner to deliver bad news. Whatever the reason for picking up the phone or sending that message, staying connected matters. That's why, in the rare event of a network outage, AT&T will proactively credit you for a full day of Service. That's the AT&T guarantee. So what are you waiting for? Send that message to someone you miss. Make that call you've been putting off, because those are the moments that matter most. AT&T connecting changes everything. Terms and conditions apply. Credit for fiber downtime lasting 20 minutes or more or for wireless downtime lasting 60 minutes or more caused by a single incident impacting 10 or more towers must be connected to impacted tower at onset of outage restrictions. And exclusions apply. See att.com guarantee for full details.

[Sean Gilmore]

Foreign.

[Willa Paskin]

This episode is brought to you by Saks Fifth Avenue. Saks makes it easy to find the perfect gifts and holiday looks that suit your personal style. The holidays can be a lot of things fun, relaxing, heartwarming, and yes, sometimes even a little stressful. That's why it's fun to go to Saks.com where shopping feels easy and exciting. Whether it's for me or my family and friends, or even the pickiest person on my list who also happens to be me, Saks actually has truly so many designers to choose from. It is an incredibly robust amount. I had a number of nice looking Vince sweaters, including one with a very wide neck that looks chic and cozy. Also, I've been toying with the idea of button downs and boy does sax.com have button downs. Everything from a classic white version from Max Mara to a Ralph Lauren Pussy Bow version to an Alice and Olivia Silk number in I'm Not Kidding Willa style. If you're looking for shopping to be personalized and easy this holiday season, then head to Saks Fifth Avenue for inspiring ways to shop for everyone on your list. So stringboards do not come out of real law enforcement investigations. They come out of fiction. But how exactly? In the spirit of our subject, we're going to get a little obsessive as we answer this question. And to help us pin every pin, we've enlisted the help of another expert, a kind of forensic analyst of crazy walls.

[Dr. Ann Ganzert]

And walls of crazy is a good term for them because they are often externalized spaces for some brain fog that is spit on these walls.

[Willa Paskin]

Dr. Ann Ganzert is a scholar based in Germany and the author of a book called Serial Pinboarding in Contemporary Television. And she got caught in the spider's web herself in 2009 while watching the short lived cult sci fi show Flash.

[Dr. Ann Ganzert]

Forward where they solved a time travel like conundrum.

[Willa Paskin]

So everyone saw the future, but did they see the same future? I mean, are these accounts consistent? Well, they certainly seem to be.

[Dr. Ann Ganzert]

They tried to reconstruct a mental time jump that all of humanity had experienced.

[Willa Paskin]

And they do all of this with the help of of a pin board. Those people, the places I saw on.

[Scott Cobb]

The board, they were part of this puzzle mosaic.

[Willa Paskin]

Look, I'm certain of it. Once she noticed this board, she couldn't stop noticing others or dissecting them. She wasn't thinking about them from a crime solving perspective, but from a narrative one. And narratively, she realized they are doing Something very straightforward. They're just a diagram for the viewer.

[Dr. Ann Ganzert]

If I put two things next to each other and draw a line between them, most people will understand these things are somehow connected.

[Willa Paskin]

Right? And there's actually a long history of cinematic diagrams conveying crucial narrative information.

[Dr. Ann Ganzert]

These walls develop out of another type of wall, which is the heist plan.

[Aki Peritz]

Manholes on the corner.

[Willa Paskin]

You drop into the manhole at 11:45, make your way up the back stairs and jump the alarm system. Any questions?

[Dr. Ann Ganzert]

You have the map of the casino and then you have all the moving parts. That way of visualizing information within the filmic image is super old. That's nothing new. Every war movie has that. Every bank robbery movie has that.

[Willa Paskin]

But what they don't have is string. In these early examples, the visualizations tend to be outlines on chalkboards or lines scribbled on maps. So I asked Sean Gilmore about the earliest appearance of string that he's been able to document. It comes in 1962.

[Sean Gilmore]

So in Dr. No, the first James Bond movie, there's actually one of these in a very early scene where someone just walks in and there's a strategy map and it's got some pink string on it.

[Willa Paskin]

W6N Kingston, Jamaica. Broken contact, sir. Just after they came up on routine transmission. Well, keep trying. Let me know as soon as I come up again. But in the film, this yarn filled map, a back wall of MI6 headquarters remains unremarked upon and unexplained. It's just a piece of set decoration.

[Sean Gilmore]

And there's no conspiracy thing added to it.

[Willa Paskin]

If this was the first instance, its impact was minimal. The few examples Sean's found from the 60s and 70s are even more insignificant.

[Sean Gilmore]

I found one in a movie called the Legend of Bigfoot from 1976.

[Willa Paskin]

We have organized and financed an expedition to search this unexplored area in hopes of capturing a Sasquatch.

[Sean Gilmore]

The map has like two little red pieces of string labels. And I was like, really?

[Willa Paskin]

A mockumentary about Bigfoot aside, this means that throughout the 1970s, the era of post Watergate paranoia, when Hollywood put out a whole cycle of conspiracy thrillers like the Conversation, the Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor, there was nary a stringboard in sight. It's not until the very end of the decade when we finally get the first known instance of what we'd recognize as a classic stringboard. It's an org chart. In the 1979 BBC adaptation of John Le Carre's espionage novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

[Sean Gilmore]

There's a document in the center of a corkboard with photographs of the actors playing each of the characters connected by red ribbon. And they're pinned down by actual silver pins.

[Willa Paskin]

Look at them. Percy Allen, Director of operations Tinker. Bill Hayden, Head of personnel, Taylor. Roy Bland, Head of Iron Curtain Networks. Soldier, Tinker, Taylor. Soldier. Spy was something of a Masterpiece Theater sensation when it aired in the late 1970s. And while it contained a prominent and genuine stringboard, it's hard to say how much direct influence it had. The idea was out there now, but its progress was relatively slow. Over the next couple decades, variants sporadically began appearing in movies. Obsessive walls in the Howling and in the Line of Fire, evidence boards in the Silence of the lambs and 12 monkeys. And in real life, an actual serial killer was found to have what he called a wall of spiders in his house, a chart of names on paper scraps and post. Its connected by pink and blue wool. But even so, well into the 1990s, string boards were far from ubiquitous on screen, even in the places you'd most imagine them to be.

[Dr. Ann Ganzert]

So there's a bunch of those where you would expect it, but it wasn't a thing.

[Sean Gilmore]

Yet.

[Dr. Ann Ganzert]

X Files is a great example.

[Willa Paskin]

No one, no government agency has jurisdiction over the truth. Yes, even in the X Files, the definitive conspiracy show, save for a brief background shot in the pilot episode, there are no string boards. Not in the entire 90s run of the original series.

[Dr. Ann Ganzert]

Yeah, wrong time.

[Willa Paskin]

The real inflection point for the stringboard didn't arrive in the 20th century at all. It comes in late 2001, after the conspiratorial 1970s, after the X Files popularized conspiracies of all kinds. And just as 9, 11 truthers were beginning investigations of their own. And the thing that really establishes these walls in our visual vocabularies is the Ron Howard film A Beautiful Mind. What exactly is it that you would like me to do? What distinguishes you is that you are, quite simply the best natural code breaker I have ever seen. A Beautiful Mind is a biopic of John Nash, a brilliant mathematician who has convinced himself and everyone who knows him that he has been tasked by the government with a secret mission to decode a Soviet plot. I'm attempting to isolate patent reoccurrences within periodicals over time. But after Nash is institutionalized, his wife takes a look at his work. I want to see what John's been working on.

[Sean Gilmore]

Alicia, you know you can't go in his office.

[Willa Paskin]

You know it's classified. Alicia, stop. What? She finds is shocking to her and to the audience. Oh, my God. All four walls are covered with newspaper clippings, handwritten notes and number sequences. There's so much material. It's pasted onto the window frames and tacked over all of it are webs of different colored string. Is this all he's been doing every day? Cutting out magazines? The top secret assignment John had been working on. It was a hallucination. All the time the audience thought John was cracking a code. He was really constructing a wall of crazy. A Beautiful Mind was a box office hit and one best picture. But maybe most importantly for our purposes, the stringboard in it was absolutely central. Unlike most that had come before, it's not unobtrusively in the background. It's one of the movie's big reveals. And in addition to commanding a lot of attention, it did something else too. It explicitly connected the stringboard to a character caught between genius and madness. The real life John Nash did suffer from schizophrenia and hallucinations, but they manifested in ways that were not so visually gripping. The conspiracy walls in the film were an invention of the filmmakers, a way to convey his mental illness cinematically. He wasn't one of the serial killers, stalkers and creeps who made obsessive walls, nor one of the orderly law enforcement officers who put together org chart like investigation boards. He was in between a man making a conspiracy board we're not quite sure is tethered to reality. And I do realize that my behavior must have appeared insane. That's okay. I think the Russians feel my profile is too high. That's why they simply just don't do away with me. And it's immediately after this point that such boards begin to wildly proliferate. In the decade that follows A Beautiful Mind. They appear in, among other things, Memento, saw, Final Destination 2, Fringe, the Incredible Hulk, and the number 23. Check this out. My birthday.

[Sean Gilmore]

Two, three.

[Willa Paskin]

Driver's license, Social Security number, everything. You can't be serious. They're in Dollhouse, Dexter, Monk, I Spy, Gothica, State of Play, Sahara, X Men First Class, the Good Wife and Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. And when the X Files got rebooted in the 2010s, guess what? Suddenly they had stringboards too. It's true, Scully. I've lost the plot. I can't find the hidden connections between things anymore. The world has become too crazy for even my conspiratorial powers. You're getting walls that go far beyond background props or one off reveals. They're becoming recurring intrinsic parts of the narrative. Of entire series. And visually they are increasingly ornate. In one episode of the show Castle, the investigators discover that an erratic character has constructed a 3D stringboard. What the hell? Like with the threads crisscrossing an entire room. Tax riots, European economic collapse, Iran invades Iraq. And as these elaborate, visually inventive walls are becoming ubiquitous, something strange is starting to happen. These compelling images of questionable sanity start to edge out the relatively understated, straightforward org chart and seep into our images of real police work. Investigators in Sherlock, True Detective, Bones, Breaking Bad, Person of Interest, elementary are all now turning to elaborate evidence boards to solve crimes. Have a look at this. He put himself in the perfect position to steal the files from Ms. White and later find a murder open shawl. And this is despite the fact that anything more than a cursory look will reveal these boards don't make a whole lot of sense.

[Sean Gilmore]

Exactly. I feel like not understanding them is a key like logic to the whole thing is they can't be super comprehensible. They seem as though they are explanatory. But the material part, even if you were to pause any one of these screens, makes very little sense.

[Willa Paskin]

But just because they don't make sense doesn't mean they aren't hard to make.

[Sean Gilmore]

I find that to be kind of the most interesting thing to sort of think about on a meta level, which is that the production design people have to replicate the effort that the character was supposed to be going through. They have to actually spend all that time making it.

[Willa Paskin]

When we come back, Stringboard Construction 101 Emmy Award winner Kerry Washington returns as Dr. Virginia Edwards in Audible's supernatural thriller the Prophecy Season 2. Also starring Giancarlo Esposito, Dulay Hill, Renzi Feliz and Ebony Obsidian. The battle between good and evil reaches new heights in this heart pounding sequel that pushes the fate of humankind to the edge. Follow every twist and turn as Virginia and her miracle son Joshua flee from Detroit pursued by the sinister Luther Bell and his Morning Stars cult. Every step of their journey is guided by Virginia's haunting visions. While Belle's forces close in as the natural disasters erupt, Virginia must embrace being both mother and chosen protector. But will it be too late? You can find all of this on Audible, which is incredibly easy to use and I use all the time to play audiobooks in the car. Do not miss Kerry Washington in Audible's new Must Listen the Prophecy Season 2. Go to audible.com prophecy2 that's the number two to start listening today. This episode is brought to you by Planned Parenthood Federation of America. In the time it takes to pour yourself a cup of coffee, reply to that email you've been ignoring, or toss your dishes into the dishwasher. You can help protect reproductive health care for millions. Every gift to Planned Parenthood helps provide high quality health care like birth control, STI testing, and abortion to people who need it. They need your support now. The Trump administration and Congress passed a law to defund Planned Parenthood, jeopardizing care for $1.1 million. People, whatever you give helps Planned Parenthood health centers provide the care patients count on. Think about it. You can do so much good in just a few minutes. And isn't that so much more rewarding than just doing the dishes? So don't wait. Pull out your phone and go to planned parenthood.org defend and give today. So we've talked about where these walls come from, but now I want to turn to how they get made. They are, as has been mentioned, arts and crafts projects, and someone has to get to crafting. And we're going to begin with the someone who helped put together maybe the most famous wall of all.

[Scott Cobb]

You never think that's going to become a meme. And look what happened. We're talking about this, you know, almost.

[Willa Paskin]

18 years later, Scott Cobb has worked as a production designer on a ton of projects. Shows like lost, arrested development, 13 reasons why. And he's had to make conspiracy boards on several occasions, but none have had the impact of one he made for a 2008 episode of the sitcom It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

[Scott Cobb]

Yeah, I think this is the one that everybody remembers.

[Willa Paskin]

In the episode, the character Charlie, an unhinged man, child with authority issues, decides he needs health insurance. So he takes a job at a nondescript corporate office, working in the mailroom, where he quickly descends into madness, becoming convinced that something is afoot. I've stumbled onto a major company conspiracy, Mac. How about that for stress? And I got a paper trail to prove it. Check this out.

[Scott Cobb]

And the camera pans to the rest of the set. And behind you is this massive wall of, like, madness behind it.

[Willa Paskin]

Take a look at this. It's covered with mail. Scores of opened letters and images of affixed to the wall and connected by bright red lines. Pepe Silvia. This name keeps coming up over and over again. Every day. Pepe's mail is getting sent back to me.

[Aki Peritz]

Pepe Silvia.

[Sean Gilmore]

Pepe Silvia.

[Willa Paskin]

I look in the mail. Well, this whole box is Pepe Silvia. So I go up to Pepe's office And what do I find out, Mad? What do I find out? There is no Pepe, Silvia. The man does not exist.

[John Kretschmer]

Okay?

[Scott Cobb]

So I decided it was an explosion of thought coming out of Charlie's mind in his kind of like psychotic, manic sort of way.

[Willa Paskin]

The thing is, Charlie is totally wrong. Despite his documentation, there is no conspiracy. Not only do all of these people exist, but they have been asking for.

[Sean Gilmore]

Their mail on a daily basis.

[Willa Paskin]

It's all they're talking about up there. Jesus. The whole thing is a joke, a parody, a send up of conspiratorial thinking and the string boards that go with it. So for the scene, Scott was tasked with making a board that would riff on all the other boards that had already become a cliche.

[Scott Cobb]

One of the creative springboards was A Beautiful Mind. You know, that was one that had a very specific kind of look about it.

[Willa Paskin]

Were there physical elements you knew you had to have?

[Scott Cobb]

Absolutely. The pushpins, you know, circling things and say, this is. This is it, you know, whatever that is. Red string, you know, and there's obvious, like, visual reasons why red string has been used kind of across the board, no pun intended, because you're using images printed on paper or photographs or things like it. And then you want something bright to connect the pieces without it blurring in the camera lens. So red is a good choice for that.

[Willa Paskin]

As Scott talked about what went into making this particular string board, it became clear that even though the board itself was part of a meta joke building, it was no joking matter. These walls require so much granular, detailed material, you have to get a little obsessive to pull one off.

[Scott Cobb]

So in terms of the mail you see on the walls, like, even though you don't really get a close up or see it, if somebody were to stop the screen and look at it, it would actually mean something, you know, so he'd write termination letters or some like, letter to the president complaining about the bathrooms. You know, it's all part of playing out the joke.

[Willa Paskin]

And I knock on her door and I say, carol, Carol, I gotta talk to you about Pepe. And when I open the door, what do I find? There's nothing. A single goddamn desk in that office. There is no Carol in hr. This whole scene is just a minute or two. And the conspiracy board itself is only on camera for a few seconds, but it's had a long afterlife. A screenshot of it has become an omnipresent Internet meme. It shows Charlie smoking and mid wild gesticulation, his hair a mess. He's standing in front of the mailroom string board, which also has the name Pepe Silvia scrawled on it in large black handwriting. This has become the image to send when you're deep in the weeds or someone else's. And maybe you all need to get out. Like so many memes, and maybe even like the wall of crazy itself, it's an image we didn't know we needed until it arrived, but that now seems essential. You can say so much with just this picture of Charlie, one that captures both the appeal, the absurdity, the humor, the danger, the feeling of being unhealthily obsessed with something. You've lost your mind. You've lost your goddamn mind, Charlie. In its way, the always sunny meme raised the bar for all the stringboards that have come after it. It announced that they had become a universally recognizable visual trope, something you could spoof. Which makes it even more of a design challenge when a serious show decides to use it anyway. Like Homeland, starring Claire Danes as Carrie Matheson, a brilliant but mentally unstable CIA officer. I've got a mood disorder. Okay, I looked it up, Kerry. Clozapine's an antipsychotic. I'm dealing with it. I've been dealing with it since I was 22. Homeland called for so many versions, versions of evidence boards over its run, that on set, they got their own name.

[John Kretschmer]

Oh, there's no doubt. They became the carry Wall. Oh, script's got a carry wall in it.

[Willa Paskin]

As the production designer, John Kretschmer was in charge of the art department and designing the sets and overall look of the show.

[John Kretschmer]

If I were very egotistical about it, I'd say anything that's not an actor is my responsibility. But I'm not.

[Willa Paskin]

That's going in. That's going in.

[Sean Gilmore]

John.

[Willa Paskin]

From the beginning, it was clear John had his work cut out for him. The premise of the series is that Carrie suspects a decorated Marine and prisoner of war may have been turned by a terrorist organization during his time in captivity. I thought that once I had some proof even suggesting that Sergeant Brody's what you think he is. No. So she starts assembling evidence to make her case. That evidence would go on a wall, and not just any wall. This first carrywall needed to reveal a key piece of information to Carrie's colleagues and the audience. But it also needed to capture Carrie's bipolar condition, her mental state.

[John Kretschmer]

So that was really the goal here, maybe for the first time, a visualization of Carrie's disorder.

[Willa Paskin]

Like Scott Cobb, John began in the expected place.

[John Kretschmer]

A lot of times, you'll bring up a reference, the Beautiful Mind. And almost always they'll say, yeah, yeah, yeah, but not that, you know, because it became so iconic, but it is a starting point. Then you learn really what they want.

[Willa Paskin]

Helpfully for him, the episode's writer, Meredith Steam, already had a clear vision developing in her head.

[John Kretschmer]

She had a family member with this manic depressive disorder that plagued Carrie, and so she was very, very exact about what she wanted. She gave me a doodle.

[Willa Paskin]

John showed me the original doodle that Meredith had sent to him.

[John Kretschmer]

Okay, we see what Meredith. It looks like she did this in her sketchbook using black pen and, you know, felt tip markers. And it's basically loosely laid out as columns, about seven or eight columns. And it kind of looks like Post its. And they're all overlapped and they're kind of collaged.

[Willa Paskin]

And most strikingly, each column of Post its is coded a different color running in order of the visual spectrum, like a rainbow.

[John Kretschmer]

So you kind of start with red on the left, and you go to orange, and then you fade in the yellow.

[Willa Paskin]

The colors we're meant to demonstrate Carrie's unique ability to suss out patterns other people just couldn't see.

[John Kretschmer]

That was the whole point. This wasn't to be artsy. It was meant to be a window into her mind.

[Willa Paskin]

From there, John took Meredith's scribble and fleshed it out, developing it into a detailed 3D rendering of the wall, which was now even more cluttered and featured in addition to Post its printouts and news articles stabbed to the board. And then they actually had to go and make it.

[John Kretschmer]

It's all hands on deck. You know, we had to provide probably, as I recall, at least 300 documents. 300 meaningful documents that the writers need to approve. And with copyright laws the way they are, anything graphic, we pretty much have to build it ourselves from scratch. Including the photography. You know, photographs aren't free.

[Willa Paskin]

So you're, like, going out and, like, just like someone on your team is, like, taking all the photographs you need.

[John Kretschmer]

It's a problem. You know, I think there's one item. There's one item. This is a classic. The script said, Carrie finds the clue in a wedding album. So guess what? We have to produce a wedding and photograph it. We had two cast members. We had to spend the whole weekend getting them married. Reception all the way through, through to the first dance, just for the darn wedding album. I mean, that's one line on the script.

[Willa Paskin]

Like, how long does it take to make a wall? Like, how long does it take to do one of these?

[John Kretschmer]

Well, I can tell you is 10 days. Because that's all we get to Prep an episode.

[Willa Paskin]

10 days to write all the copy, take all the photographs, pen all the post its, print and approve all of it, and then get all that stuff to set for the set dressers and prop teams and writers and Claire Danes for some herself to assemble. Finally made it to air on December 11, 2011. Okay. Huh? This is red and blue. It's not red or blue. In the episode, Carrie is mid mania and chaotically scribbling all over the evidence with colored markers. This whole box is dogs, really. But her mentor Saul is able to look at what appears to to be just chaos and decode the pattern within. You understand it's a timeline. Yes. The finished product is striking. One of the most memorable images from the entire a rainbow pinboard.

[John Kretschmer]

I think it looks just like my concept.

[Willa Paskin]

When this episode of Homeland aired, I was something of a stan. For personal and professional reasons, I was following the series very closely. And this particular conspiracy wall is one that jumps into my mind whenever I think about them. But now I think it should jump into your mind too. It's an example of how the two competing aspects of the pin board can be made to add up. This particular rainbow wall is both an obsessive wall, a manifestation of Carrie's mania, and an investigation board. In her instability, she's figured the whole plot out. It's Carrie's very madness that makes her so exceptional at her job. And this wall is the visual proof. Unlike in A Beautiful Mind, where it's the wall that showed us that John Nash was unreliable, it's this wall that shows us Carrie is totally reliable, even if she's not fully sane. It's walls like Carrie's that have proliferated in movies and TV walls that suggest the best way to get to reason is through conspiracy. And it's exactly this notion that has started to spread into the real world. People have begun to misidentify the usefulness of the stringboard. Instead of understanding them as visually compelling narrative shorthand, they have absorbed the idea of that evidence boards really work. I mean, the FBI itself in that ad, is telling us this is the case. And so we've incorporated these boards into our lives. Sometimes it's harmless what's Pinterest or a vision board, but a benign variant on a wall of crazy. But sometimes it's not. This looks like just a ball of yarn, but you can check these threads out and you can see that this is real. These These handful of elites are running everything.

[Sean Gilmore]

They're very popular amongst the QAnon people as various ways to explain all of the Deep State elements that are all really tied together for them. Sean Gilmore Again, it's almost like almost abstract art at some point, where it's just a series of all these connecting lines, because they have to prove that every conspiracy is tagged into every part of the Deep State.

[Willa Paskin]

I mean, everything from the. The Vatican, the House assault into Citibank into Harvard, into social media, you know, because they own stock in these and.

[Sean Gilmore]

It'S all traceable, but they're using this trope that is fundamentally not about making real logic out of the thing, but now people can actually use it and supposedly make meaning from that stuff.

[Willa Paskin]

I'll take Sean one further. I think because we're so used to seeing images like this in fiction and knowing that they are supposed to be full of decodable and comprehensive information, that the stringboard alone has come to have a kind of gravitas. If you can put all those things in one place, maybe they are connected.

[Aki Peritz]

And that's what's the beautiful, beautiful or nefarious part of this shorthand.

[Willa Paskin]

Aki parrots Again, you can just show it.

[Aki Peritz]

It looks authoritative, and it looks from the outset like it's actually something worth examining.

[Willa Paskin]

So almost like the first reaction is like, whoa, there's a lot there.

[Aki Peritz]

Yeah, there's a ton here. Wow, look at all these, like, photos and, and links and boxes and so forth. But if you look, if you examine it a little closely and say how you make that assertion, it falls apart really fast.

[Willa Paskin]

Life is imitating art, Even though art isn't actually useful for life, even though art might be distorting life, the best way to analyze real complex information has nothing to do with how artfully it can get tacked to a board. Even if our particular conspiratorial cultural moment keeps providing us with more and more occasions to show off our ability to do exactly that. Has it slowed down? You get more all the time.

[Sean Gilmore]

You get more all the time.

[Willa Paskin]

Do you foresee a day when it will slow down? Like, it can't be infinite? Like, it's not?

[Sean Gilmore]

Like, have you met culture? Culture might be infinite.

[Willa Paskin]

I don't know. This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. If you aren't already a Slate plus member, please subscribe now from the Decoder Ring show page on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or visit slate.comdecoder ring+ to get access. Wherever you listen, Slate+ members get access to our bonus episode and they get to hear our show and every other Slate podcast without any ads, including our brand new series When We all get to Heaven, the story of how a queer church in San Francisco survived the AIDS crisis. Presented by Slate's podcast Outward, this episode was written and produced by Evan Chung, our supervising producer. It was edited by me. We produced a cotering with Katie Shepard and Max Friedman. Merrick Jacob is Senior Technical Director. Sean Gilmore's Narrative String Theory project can be found on the website the Vault of Culture, and you can read Aki Peritz's original article about stringboards on Slate. We'll link to them both on our show page. We'd like to thank our listener John Dazzle, who suggested stringboards as a topic. And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at Decoder Ring. You can also call us now at our new Decoder Ring hotline. The number is 347-460-7281. We love to hear from you guys and we appreciate all of your suggestions. We'll see you in two weeks. This episode is brought to you by Saks Fifth Avenue. Saks makes it easy to find the perfect gifts and holiday looks that suit your personal style. The holidays can be a lot of things fun, relaxing, heartwarming and yes, sometimes even a little stressful. That's why it's fun to go to Saks.com where shopping feels easy and exciting. Whether it's for me or my family and friends, or even the pickiest person on my list who also happens to be me, Saks actually has truly so many designers to choose from. It is an incredibly robust amount. I had a number of nice looking Vince sweaters, including one with a very wide neck that looks chic and cozy. Also, I've been toying with the idea of button downs and boy does sax.com have button downs. Everything from a classic white version from Max Mara to a Ralph Lauren Pussy Bow version to an Alice and Olivia Silk number in I'm not Kidding Willa Style. If you're looking for shopping to be personalized and easy this holiday season, then head to Saks Fifth Avenue for inspiring ways to shop for everyone on your list.

[Aki Peritz]

Limu Emu and Doug.

[Willa Paskin]

Here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us. Cut the camera, they see us.

[Aki Peritz]

Only pay for what you need@liberty mutual.com Liberty.

[Willa Paskin]

Liberty. Liberty, Liberty. Savings vary. Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company Affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.