In this three-part series, we uncover the strange history of the most popular personality test in the world, and how a mother and her daughter revolutionized personality testing – for better or for worse.

A visit to the last Sears in New York City, and a conversation with two people whose lives were shaped forever by the department store.

A bottle of whiskey with no online footprint. A bar that’s long been closed. An address that doesn’t exist. Can The Sporkful uncover the origins of a mysterious bottle of whiskey?

A trip to Times Square, in search of a sound.

The roadside attraction is thought to be the first enormous concrete dino in North America.

Ebony magazine was part aspiration, part representation. This episode about Freda DeKnight is part of “By Us For Everyone,” a three-part series about how Black American food is represented in media, and how those portrayals change when Black people are in charge of them.

Malcolm Gladwell has always felt like an outsider – he hates maple syrup, he calls flavored seltzer “an abomination,” and he believes Earl Grey tea is “a bridge too far.” That outsider’s perspective served him well as he became a cultural observer and trained his critical eye on food.

For decades, vocal fry was known to linguists, speech pathologists and voice coaches, but everyday people didn’t pay much attention to it. But then in 2011, people started noticing it everywhere. So what happened? What is vocal fry? Why does host Johanna Mayer use it? And is it really that bad?

A visit to Lake Karachay in Ozersk, Russia, the site of a secret – and art-inspiring – former Soviet Union nuclear facility.

At the age of 23, Jacques Pépin had cooked for three French presidents. But he left that life to work at a high-end restaurant in New York, then gave that up to cook at Howard Johnson's, making food for the masses. After a life-altering accident, Jacques found his next love: teaching other people how to cook.

Locks from everyone, from Ludwig van Beethoven to Ulysses S. Grant.

Customers would say that this wasn’t their mother’s Southern food. Alexander’s reply: “Do I look like your mama?”

Plainlanguage.gov was created by an unfunded government group of plain language activists who make it their mission to translate government communications into regular old, plain language. But jargon isn’t just a government problem. It pops up in nearly every field, and it annoys all of us. So why do we use it?

At the turn of the 20th century, 12 young men sat in the basement of the Department of Agriculture, eating meals with a side of borax, salicylic acid, or formaldehyde. They were called the Poison Squad, and they were part of a government experiment to figure out whether popular food additives were safe. Food manufacturers weren’t pleased with the findings, but one prominent ketchup maker paid attention.