(Note: an earlier version of this episode failed to post correctly to our feed. Our apologies.) Every once in a while we like to step away from our usual serious… well… serious-ish, pseudo-academic intellectual pursuits and just do something a little fun. This is one of those weeks. Last week our friends at the Protagonist…
Year: 2025
e394. Spirits and Spectacles: The World of Haunted Houses
Happy Halloween! As we move towards the end of Spooky Season this year, we realized that there is an interesting cultural phenomenon that we’ve never even considered on the show before but that is something of a classic pop culture phenomena — The Haunted House. Hannah recently visiting a haunted house for the first time…
e391. Manga-101: Why is Manga?
It’s always weird and oddly exciting when we discover that we have a hole in the things we’ve covered one the show. And in fact, It’s actually quite surprising that we’ve been doing this show for 391 episodes and haven’t devoted an episode to manga before now. Sure it’s come up in discussions about comics…
e390. La Mort de le Mèmer? How memes make meaning
We’ve talked a lot on the show in the past about Roland Barthes’ influential literary essay “La mort de l’auteur” or “the Death of the Author” and what it means in practical terms for cultural studies and related fields. Recently however, friend of the show Andrew Darowski, texted Mav and casually asked if that concept…
e389. Boycotts and their Cultural Impact
So… America is in a weird place right now. Frankly, we could say that just about every week these days. But this last couple of weeks it’s been even more so than our (new) normal level of crazy. A couple of weeks ago, right-wing political commentator Charlie Kirk was murdered while performing his college campus…
e388. 2025 Summer Catch Up! Was that it?
Well, it’s been a summer… that’s certainly true. And if you live in America, you know there’s been a bunch of… let’s say “news” that happened this week. Obviously we have opinions on it. But honestly, you’re likely getting enough of that. So this week, Mav and Hannah decided to do a light show where…
e387. TV is Our Religion: The Theological Lens of Peak Television
There’s a lot of TV content out there. In fact, sometimes it feels like there’s maybe too much TV to watch. However, there’s a certain set of shows that it seems everyone agrees “these are the prestige shows”. The shows that the critics talk about. The shows that people say “that’s quality”. Of course, these…