
Show overview
Citation Needed has been publishing since 2017, and across the 9 years since has built a catalogue of 478 episodes. That works out to roughly 320 hours of audio in total. Releases follow a weekly cadence, with the show now in its 455th season.
Episodes typically run thirty-five to sixty minutes — most land between 35 min and 43 min — and the run-time is fairly consistent across the catalogue. The publisher flags most episodes as explicit, so expect adult themes or strong language throughout. It is catalogued as a EN-language Society & Culture show.
The show is actively publishing — the most recent episode landed 3 days ago, with 19 episodes already out so far this year. Published by Citation Needed Media.
From the publisher
The podcast where we choose a subject, read a single Wikipedia article about it, and pretend we're experts. Because this is the internet, and that's how it works now.
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S1 Ep 468April Fools' Day
EApril Fools' Day or April Fool's Day (rarely called All Fools' Day[1]) is an annual custom in many Western countries on the 1st of April consisting of practical jokes, hoaxes, and pranks. Jokesters often expose their actions by shouting "April Fool[s]!" at the recipient. Mass media can be involved with these pranks, which may be revealed as such the following day. The custom of setting aside a day for playing harmless pranks upon one's neighbor has been relatively common in the world historically.[2]

S1 Ep 467The Placebo Effect
EA placebo (/pləˈsiːboʊ/ pluh-SEE-boh) is a medicine or treatment intended to appear genuine to its recipient, but which has no pharmaceutical effect.[1][2] Common placebos include inert tablets (like sugar pills), inert injections (like saline), sham surgery,[3] and other procedures.[4]

S1 Ep 466Guy Fawkes
EGuy Fawkes (/fɔːks/; 13 April 1570 – 31 January 1606),[a] also known as Guido Fawkes while fighting for the Spanish, was a member of a group of provincial English Catholics involved in the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605. He was born and educated in York; his father died when Fawkes was eight years old, after which his mother married a recusant Catholic. Fawkes converted to Catholicism and left for mainland Europe, where he fought for Catholic Spain in the Eighty Years' War against Protestant Dutch reformers in the Low Countries. He travelled to Spain to seek support for a Catholic rebellion in England without success. He later met Thomas Wintour, with whom he returned to England. Wintour introduced him to Robert Catesby, who planned to assassinate King James I and restore a Catholic monarch to the throne. The plotters leased an undercroft beneath the House of Lords; Fawkes was placed in charge of the gunpowder that they stockpiled there. The authorities were prompted by an anonymous letter to search Westminster Palace during the early hours of 5 November, and they found Fawkes guarding the explosives. He was questioned and tortured over the next few days and confessed to wanting to blow up the House of Lords.

Ep 465Enshit*ification
EEnshit*ification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to both users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders.

Ep 464Sputnik
ESputnik 1 (/ˈspʌtnɪk, ˈspʊtnɪk/, Russian: Спутник-1, Satellite 1), often referred to as simply Sputnik, was the first artificial Earth satellite. It was launched into an elliptical low Earth orbit by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957 as part of the Soviet space program. It sent a radio signal back to Earth for three weeks before its three silver-zinc batteries became depleted. Aerodynamic drag caused it to fall back into the atmosphere on 4 January 1958.

S1 Ep 463Competitive Watersliding
Ehttps://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/maximum-speed/ Taken from this article from Outside Magazine.

S1 Ep 462Freedom House Ambulance Service & Bessie Coleman
EFreedom House Ambulance Service was the first emergency medical service in the United States to be staffed by paramedics with medical training beyond basic first aid.[1][2] Founded in 1967 to serve the predominantly Black Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, it was staffed entirely by African Americans.[3][4] Freedom House Ambulance Service broke medical ground by training its personnel to previously unheard-of standards of emergency medical care for patients en route to hospitals.[3][5][6] The paramedic training and ambulance design standards pioneered in the Freedom House Ambulance Service would set the standard for emergency care nationally and even internationally.[2][5] Despite its successes, the ambulance service was closed eight years after it began operating.[5] Elizabeth Coleman (January 26, 1892 – April 30, 1926)[2] was an early American civil aviator. She was the first African-American woman and first Native American to hold a pilot license,[3][4][5][6][7][8][9] and is the earliest known Black person to earn an international pilot's license.[10] She earned her license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale on June 15, 1921.[5][6][11]

S1 Ep 461James Damore and the Google Memo
E
S1 Ep 460The Super Bowl
EThe Super Bowl is the annual league championship game of the National Football League (NFL) of the United States. It has served as the final game of every NFL season since 1966, replacing the NFL Championship Game. Since 2022, the game has been played on the second Sunday in February. Prior Super Bowls were played on Sundays in early to mid-January from 1967 to 1978, late January from 1979 to 2003[a] and the first Sunday of February from 2004 to 2021. Winning teams are awarded the Vince Lombardi Trophy, named after the eponymous coach who won the first two Super Bowls. Because the NFL restricts the use of its "Super Bowl" trademark, it is frequently referred to as the "big game" or other generic terms by non-sponsoring corporations. The day the game is held is commonly referred to as "Super Bowl Sunday" or "Super Sunday".

S1 Ep 459Unholy Spirits: The People who Have Sex with Ghosts
ETaken from this article: From this article: https://www.vice.com/en/article/ghost-love-lust-spectrophilia/

Feral Children
EA feral child (also called wild child) is a young individual who has lived isolated from human contact from a very young age, with little or no experience of human care, social behavior, or language. Such children lack the basics of primary and secondary socialization.[1] The term is used to refer to children who have suffered severe abuse or trauma before being abandoned or running away. They are sometimes the subjects of folklore and legends, often portrayed as having been raised by animals. While there are many cases of children being found in proximity to wild animals, there are no eyewitness accounts of animals feeding human children.[2]

Ep 457Failed Constitutional Amendments
EHundreds of proposed amendments to the United States Constitution are introduced during each session of the United States Congress. From 1789 through January 3, 2025, approximately 11,985 measures have been proposed to amend the United States Constitution.[1] Collectively, members of the House and Senate typically propose around 200 amendments during each two-year term of Congress.[2] Most, however, never get out of the Congressional committees in which they were proposed. Only a fraction of those actually receive enough support to win Congressional approval to go through the constitutional ratification process. Some proposed amendments are introduced over and over again in different sessions of Congress. It is also common for a number of identical resolutions to be offered on issues that have widespread public and congressional support

Ep 456Captain Thomas Moore
ECaptain Sir Thomas Moore (30 April 1920 – 2 February 2021), more popularly known as Captain Tom, was a British Army officer and fundraiser. He made international headlines in April 2020 when he raised money for charity in the run-up to his 100th birthday during the COVID-19 pandemic. He served in India and the Burma campaign during the Second World War, and later became an instructor in armoured warfare. After the war, he worked as managing director of a concrete company and was an avid motorcycle racer. On 6 April 2020, at the age of 99 during the first COVID-19 national lockdown, Moore began to walk 100 lengths of his garden in aid of NHS Charities Together, with the goal of raising £1,000 by his 100th birthday on 30 April. In the 24-day course of his fundraising, he made many media appearances and became a household name in the UK, earning a number of accolades and attracting over 1.5 million individual donations.

The Fir-Tree - by Hans Christian Andersen
E"The Fir-Tree" (Danish: Grantræet) is a literary fairy tale by the Danish poet and author Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875). The tale is about a fir tree so anxious to grow up, so anxious for greater things, that he cannot appreciate living in the moment. The tale was first published 21 December 1844 with "The Snow Queen", in New Fairy Tales. First Volume. Second Collection, in Copenhagen, Denmark, by C.A. Reitzel. One scholar (Andersen biographer Jackie Wullschlager [de]) indicates that "The Fir-Tree" was the first of Andersen's fairy tales to express a deep pessimism.[1]