Why'd You Push That Button?

Why'd You Push That Button? starts from a small, slightly embarrassing question and refuses to let it go. Why keep a Close Friends list? What does a verification badge actually mean? Why slide into someone's DMs instead of asking for a number? Ashley Carman and Kaitlyn Tiffany, of The Verge, treat each of these as a real subject, with real consequences for how people date, work and keep in touch. Instagram looms large, and by the pair's own account it is one of their favorite topics. The Close Friends conversation is the show at its most playful. A list of 43 names draws the protest that nobody has 43 close friends, and then the admission that acting offended is mostly for fun. It turns warm from there, with the pair calling a curated list a kind of 'radical honesty' and reflecting on how lucky they are to like the people they work with. The verification episode, a season finale, is the show at its most pointed. It follows the badge from a simple proof of identity to something closer to an endorsement, and to the trouble Twitter got into when accounts linked to the far right, including a Unite the Right organizer, carried it. Other voices do a lot of the work. In the episode on Gmail smart replies, a writer named Liz treats email as a chore to clear in a few clicks, while Sarah Hagee, another writer, hates the feature. Along the way, one voice notes that people have been hearing promises about AI writing for a long time and that the glorious version still has not arrived. The Snapchat episode leans on younger voices, including one about to start college who expects Instagram DMs, not streaks, to keep her friendships going. It also revisits the perennial parental panic over what teenagers might send each other, with one blunt school story the pair quickly rein in. Dating comes up more than once. The DMs episode hears from a Los Angeles dater who finds a slow Instagram flirtation less exposing than asking someone out, and who is worn out by dating apps. Someone else in that episode once slid into someone's DMs and came away with a job offer. A pandemic one-off, made after almost a year without a new episode, follows a woman whose match in Hong Kong taught her the term social distancing a couple of weeks before she was told to stay home, and whose inbox then filled with check-ins from exes and former flames. Some episodes open on a quick run of different people answering the question before the pair take over. Sign-offs credit producers Andrew Marino and Zach Mack. What a listener gets is less a tech explainer than a social one: why people do the odd things they do with their phones, told with humor and, when it matters, a straight face.