The year 2020 is over. You’re probably as relieved as we are. Of course the problems with 2020 are largely still with us, but at least getting here feels like SOMETHING has happened. Last year on VoxPopcast, we decided that rather than doing a “best of the year” episode with the greatest movies or books…
Category: Literature
e141. Ghosts, Spirits, Scrooge and a Merry Marxist Christmas
Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is likely the most famous Christmas story ever written. First published 177 years ago, it has been produced as stage plays, adapted into dozens of films and spoofed and parodied countless times on television shows, in comics, and other media. Whether from Disney, The Muppets, Scrooged, the original or somewhere…
Call for Comments: Dying Laughing! Connections of Comedy & Horror
From Hannah: We all desperately need a laugh right now. Which is why you should fire up your spookiest Halloween-themed movies (and television shows and stories and novels). I’m deadly serious! There are horror movies that are laughably bad (M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening might be the best example of this). But camp classics like…
e131. Cuties: Eroticizing the Innocent and Infantilizing Sexuality
It’s rare that a tiny little foreign market indie film gets any mainstream media attention at all. It’s even rarer that it actually trends on social media, creating calls for the public to boycott the world’s largest streaming service and results in court investigations of that company. And yet, Netflix’s new film Cuties managed to…
Call For Comments: Is This The Darkest Timeline?
From Mav: It’s 2020, and the world is on fire. We all know how bad things have been. Some of the things are obvious, longterm, and we’ve done shows on them before. Some of them are new: There’s a deadly pandemic that has killed over 213,000 people in the United States (and over a million…
e129. Corsets: Enhancement, Imprisonment, Empowerment, & Empresses
The corset might be one of the most fascinating garments in the history of fashion. On one hand, it’s simply underwear. It is a garment that provides a specific function. On the other hand popular culture has made it a symbol forever associated with everything from the Victorian Age to 80s pop music to burlesque…
e128. 9 Popular Culture Pet Peeves We Hate and Why
Pop Culture is a double edges sword. The more we love a certain type of media, the more of it we absorb. But the more we absorb, the more we notice some of the tropes that are frequently repeated. And the more we notice those tropes, the more likely we are to eventually get annoyed…