Stuff You Should Know: An Incomplete Compendium of Mostly Interesting Things

by Josh Clark, Chuck Bryant

Overview

From the duo behind the massively successful and award-winning podcast Stuff You Should Know comes an unexpected look at things you thought you knew.

Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant started the podcast Stuff You Should Know back in 2008 because they were curious—curious about the world around them, curious about what they might have missed in their formal educations, and curious to dig deeper on stuff they thought they understood.

As it turns out, they aren't the only curious ones. They've since amassed a rabid fan base, making Stuff You Should Know one of the most popular podcasts in the world. Armed with their inquisitive natures and a passion for sharing, they uncover the weird, fascinating, delightful, or unexpected elements of a wide variety of topics.

The pair have now taken their near-boundless "whys" and "hows" from your earbuds to the pages of a book for the first time—featuring a completely new array of subjects that they’ve long wondered about and wanted to explore. Each chapter is further embellished with snappy visual material to allow for rabbit-hole tangents and digressions—including charts, illustrations, sidebars, and footnotes. Follow along as the two dig into the underlying stories of everything from the origin of Murphy beds, to the history of facial hair, to the psychology of being lost.

Have you ever wondered about the world around you, and wished to see the magic in everyday things? Come get curious with Stuff You Should Know. With Josh and Chuck as your guide, there’s something interesting about everything (…except maybe jackhammers).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250268501
Publisher:	Flatiron Books
Publication date:	11/24/2020
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	5,350
Product dimensions:	7.50(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant are the duo behind the award-winning tri-weekly podcast "Stuff You Should Know." The pair have been working together on the show since it began in 2008, and it has gone on to become one of the most downloaded podcasts in history. They are currently based in Atlanta.

Editorial Reviews

2020-09-16
Two popular podcasters opine on topics skewed—intentionally or not—toward real or stereotypical masculine interests, such as cars, guns, and military derring-do.

About two-thirds of podcast listeners are men, typically ages 25 to 49, and slightly more than half are White, so perhaps it’s natural that in their first book, Stuff You Should Know co-hosts Clark and Bryant gravitate to topics likely to appeal to that demographic. What’s harder to fathom is why they omit or underrepresent so many others—female, Black, and LGBTQ+ readers among them—in breezy essays on pop-cultural miscellany laced with hit-or-miss humor. With ghostwriter Parker, the authors set the tone in an early section called “How To Start or End a Facial Hair Trend,” which follows 13 thumbnail sketches of a youngish White man showing varied beard and mustache styles. Then come chapters on traditionally male interests—cars (“Demolition Derbies”), guns (“The First Gun(s)”), and military exploits (“Kamikaze”)—and on things men invented or popularized: “Mezcal,” “Do(ugh)nts,” “Backmasking,” “Mr. Potato Head,” “The Pet Rock,” and more. “Dog Smells” begins with the intriguing fact that dogs’ feet often smell like Fritos (which were “invented” by Charles Elmer Doolin), a phenomenon known as “Frito Feet” that occurs when paws pick up yeast and bacteria on walks, but the chapter soon turns adolescent: “Poop smell…generally carries the message that it comes from some kind of poopy pathogen and we should, therefore, move along and not hang around said poop.” The only chapter that focuses primarily on a woman, “The SCUM Manifesto,” deals with Valerie Solanas, Andy Warhol’s mentally ill lesbian assailant. Monardo partly masks the problem with her cartoonlike illustrations, which represent women and minorities more fairly than the text does. For readers other than White men under 50, however, this brand extension remains—as the authors might say—“kind of a bummer.”

Infotainment short on diversity for fans of jejune humor and pop-cultural curiosities.

Kirkus Reviews