e333. Twisters, Titanics, & Terror: Deconstructing Disaster Narratives

If one of the the primary functions of books and movies is to help us escape from the adversity of day to day life, then why do we have so many of them that are basically about what if our modern problems became not only inescapable, but became the absolute worst case scenario of themselves…

e327. Decoding Literary Criticism: From BookTok to Shakespeare

Recently an 18year old college student who calls herself alisha not alihsha posted a vlog where she argues in favor of what she calls “being a hater” in her video essay “Booktok, brainrot, and why it’s okay to be a hater” Somehow she went viral and became the topic of conversation for a bit on…

Call For Comments: BookTok thinks I have a PhD in being a hater?

From Katya: I was recently watching a Twitch stream with Cozy K when my favorite thing happened: people discussing literary criticism in the wild. This NEVER happens. Cozy K and her chat, affectionately called the Poopies, were discussing “Booktok, brainrot, and why it’s okay to be a hater” by alisha not alihsha on YouTube. She…

e318. A.I. in Academia: Balancing Technology and Traditional Learning

(Note from Mav. This is an episode about A.I. and Academic writing… so I decided to just let Descript’s A.I. take a stab at writing the show notes all by itself. Parentheticals are by me. So here’s how it did!) This episode of VoxPopcast explores the multifaceted impact of artificial intelligence, especially ChatGPT, on academia…

e314. Fashion, Furniture, and Furballs — Six Years of VoxPopcast

On this week’s show, all five co-hosts are online to celebrate six years of producing a weekly pseudo academic roundtable of pop culture analysis with drinking and swearing. It isn’t too often that we can get the entire gang together these days, so this week we thought we’d do so with no strict agenda other…

e300. The 2024 Box Office Draft

Somehow we’ve been making this show for 300 episodes! We can’t believe it either! And what better way to celebrate that than doing one of our very favorite regular episodes? It’s time for our annual Box Office Draft! But first we have to deal with the results of last year’s box office game. So, on…

e296. The Great Christmas Tree Debate

Do you have a Christmas Tree? If you do then chances are, even without thinking about it, you have taken a side in the great Christmas tree debate. You have implicitly taken a stance. You have chosen a side in an age old war that determines exactly what kind of person you are… whether you…

e287. We Made This! Why We Love DIY!

Do you like to knit? Paint? Build stuff? Sew? Bake? Garden? Work on your own car? Maybe you don’t do any of those things, but chances are you have some kind of craft type thing that you enjoy which frankly, you could probably pay someone to do, but really you just enjoy doing it yourself.…

e251. Eating the Rich! (on film)

A curious set of movies have been racking up nominations on the film circuit this awards season. Glass Onion, the Menu, and Triangle of Sadness. Each of these films has a peculiar thing in common… they’re basically about eating the rich… ok if not eating them than at least killing rich people… largely just because…

e250. We Always Figured We Would Do a Show on Quiet Quitting (Eventually)

Do you remember “quiet quitting”? We can’t really blame you if you don’t. But the news media was all in an uproar about it… wow… like five months ago! They were talking about it like it was the fall of civilization. It was the worst thing in the world. It was… well, it apparently amounted…