Jasper Maskelyne

Jasper Maskelyne

Author: Citation Needed Media May 20, 2026 Duration: 30:23

Jasper Maskelyne (29 September 1902 – 15 March 1973) was a British stage magician in the 1930s and 1940s. He was one of an established family of stage magicians, the son of Nevil Maskelyne and a grandson of John Nevil Maskelyne. He is most remembered for his accounts of his work for the British military during the Second World War, in which he claimed to have created large-scale ruses, deception, and camouflage in an effort to defeat the Nazis.[1]


Ever wondered how confidently incorrect a person can become after a ten-minute internet deep dive? Citation Needed is a comedic exploration of that exact phenomenon. Each episode, the hosts from Citation Needed Media pick a topic-which could be anything from the history of a bizarre invention to the biography of a semi-forgotten public figure-and their sole source material is a single Wikipedia article. They then proceed to discuss, dissect, and wildly extrapolate from that one page, adopting the unearned authority of online experts. The result is a hilarious and often insightful collision between earnest curiosity and total improvisation, revealing just how fragile our shared understanding of culture and society can be. You’ll hear genuine attempts to parse dense, dry information immediately derailed by personal tangents, absurd hypotheticals, and the inevitable realization that the wiki text itself might be deeply flawed. It’s a podcast that celebrates the joy of learning something new while simultaneously mocking the platform where most of us go to do it. The conversations are loose, funny, and surprisingly informative, not because the hosts are actual experts, but because they’re so willing to follow a strange fact down a rabbit hole and see what they find. Tune in for a unique blend of casual research and comedic commentary that holds a mirror to our own online habits.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

Citation Needed
Podcast Episodes
Guy Fawkes [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 52:50
Guy 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.…
Enshit*ification [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:01:34
Enshit*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 use…
Sputnik [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 33:27
Sputnik 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…
Competitive Watersliding [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:00:48
https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/maximum-speed/ Taken from this article from Outside Magazine.
Freedom House Ambulance Service & Bessie Coleman [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 33:46
Freedom 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 Blac…
The Super Bowl [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 44:29
The 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…
Feral Children [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 34:01
A 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 t…
Failed Constitutional Amendments [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 41:14
Hundreds 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 a…