The Simpsons Secret: A Cromulent Guide to How The Simpsons Predicted Everything!

The Simpsons, the longest running scripted series in history, has seemingly predicted the future on numerous occasions. Poulteney and Hicks, creators of the YouTube channel The Simpsons Theory, examine the most famous examples (Donald Trump’s presidency, murder hornets) and lesser-known ones (robot librarians, mutant tomatoes, London’s Shard skyscraper). The authors also disprove faked examples (no, The Simpsons didn’t predict Donald Trump’s death, the 2019 fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral, or the Capitol riots) and offer a lesson on detecting doctored screenshots. The book is full of fun tidbits, like the Simpsons writers’ passion for math—in one scene from the episode “The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace,” Homer scrawls a complex mathematical formula on a blackboard, which predicts the mass of the Higgs boson particle 14 years before it was discovered. Poulteney and Hicks also discuss theories as to how the series has made so many predictions, including creator Matt Groening’s supposed involvement in the Freemasons, and consider the possible locations of the Simpsons’ hometown of Springfield.