831: Lists!!!
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbearped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. The People's Almanac came out in the mid-1970s. It's hard to imagine a more eccentric bestseller. Over 1,400 pages long, a Red Lake and encyclopedia written by an excited and precocious 15-year-old who loved all the obscure details of all the knowledge in all the world. There were sections on The Greatest Man made disastrous ever, and also on The Greatest Prize Fighters, a guide to buried treasure in the United States, biographies of famous and infamous scientists, a history of advertising going back to ancient Greece, and also a chapter about a minister who took over a newspaper for a week in the year 1900 and made all editorial decisions, what was on the front page, what they covered, based on what he believed Jesus would have done if Jesus had gone into the newspaper game. And at the end of the book was an address, and a note from the authors asking for suggestions for future editions and asking readers to tell them what parts of the book they liked and disliked. So we eventually received thousands of letters, each of which I read. David Walacinski was one of the authors of The People's Almanac. And because of that, I was able to determine that the most popular chapter in The People's Almanac was, was lists. Lists. Of all the knowledge in the world, people most loved 25 pages out of the 1400 page book that had some lists. Some of those lists were boring stuff like the world's 15 biggest cities and 10 tallest buildings and 10 longest rivers, but there were weirder lists, 20 historical figures who were born as illegitimate children, 15 people who had an absurd number of spouses. In this one, there was maybe a little more edgy in 1975 when this was published, 20 celebrities who had been psychoanalyzed. From letters they got, Walacinski says that they learned that one list that readers really loved was famous people who never existed but lived today, like Sherlock Holmes, Superman, Wonder Woman, Scrooge McDuck, Scrooge McDuck, not technically a person, but you get the idea. And the most popular list was nine breeds of dogs that bite the most. So based on that, we decided to do the first book of lists. The first book of lists wasn't even bigger, even more ridiculously huge bestseller, a pop culture phenomenon. It sold over three million copies, had four sequels, a short-lived TV spin-off, and a board game. I was a teenager in the 1970s, I had no interest in this kind of thing whatsoever, but I remember being one of those ubiquitous books that you could not help but know about. And looking back on it now, reading the book of lists today, I think they accidentally figured out how to give the pleasure of scrolling the internet way before the internet existed. Basically, it was a way to leaf through impossibly random stuff until something catchy grabbed your eye. We had different kinds of lists and people were responding to all of them. We had the celebrity lists, you know, where we would ask Ronald Reagan what are the events in history you wish you could have witnessed. Then there was a straight list that was statistical, you know, what were the worst airlines in the world based on deaths per mile's flown. And then my favorite kind was what we called the annotated lists, where you'd actually have to do some research and then put a paragraph describing the entry.
Transcription truncated.