We enlist a very overqualified person to answer this question, writer Kelefa Sanneh, author of Major Labels: A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres. Kelefa listens to more music than practically anyone on earth, and this week he breaks down how even a normal person can find new stuff when they feel like their ears have rusted.

Check out the Search Engine newsletter for playlist recommendations from Kelefa, Search Engine's Noah John, and PJ Vogt.
 
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How do I find new music now that I’m old and irrelevant?

Named a best podcast of 2023 by Vulture, Time, The Economist, & Vogue.
No question too big, no question too small. On Search Engine, host PJ Vogt answers the kinds of questions you might ask the internet when you can't sleep. If you find the world bewildering, but also sometimes enjoy being bewildered by it, we're here for you. Edited by Sruthi Pinnamaneni.

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After stumbling on a new kind of search engine for faces, we called privacy journalist Kashmir Hill. She’s been reporting on the very sudden and unregulated rise of these facial search engines. Here’s the story of the very first one, the mysterious person who made it, and the copycats it helped spawn.
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Should this creepy search engine exist?

A listener’s brother dies by suicide, and afterwards, she finds herself angered by trigger warnings about suicide. She wants to know — are these actually helping other people? Or is it just something we do because we think we’re supposed to?
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What do trigger warnings actually do?

Since not long after the car was invented, we have wanted to stick wings on them and fly them through the sky. This week, we interview writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus about the surprisingly long history of actual, working flying cars in America. Plus, what it's like to actually fly in a modern flying car.
Read Gideon's article! Support the show!
 
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Where's my flying car?

It’s an election year and so Search Engine’s campaign desk is answering the questions you really want answers to: all the political yard signs in your neighbors’ yards … do they do anything besides make everyone like each other less?
An experiment that definitively answers this question.
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Do political yard signs actually do anything?

In part two of our story, we watch the state of New York try to pull off something we rarely see in America: a kind of reparations. A very ambitious dream encounters a thicket of details and complications. The whole time, cameras roll, broadcasting the meetings on YouTube.
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How do I find new music now that I’m old and irrelevant?

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