e240. Reality Twitter? (and Politics)

Running a pop culture podcast isn’t easy. One of the biggest problems is that popular culture is a moving target. There’s just… always stuff happening! We can’t really get to it all. Every once in a while rather than pick a stable topic, we like to get together and just do a sort of free…

Call for Comments: Act your wage! Quiet quitting or just doing your job….

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels.com From Katya: I don’t know if we’re talking more about labor trends more since COVID or I’m just paying more attention to them these days but we have another labor trend catchphase upon us: “quiet quitting.” “Quiet quitting” doesn’t have a fixed definition. The scale seems to slide between…

e232. Paige v. Ariana: The Right to be Sexy on the Internet

A couple weeks ago, a story broke about a young woman named Paige Niemann turning 18 years old and starting an OnlyFans account. By all rights this shouldn’t be notable to our show at all. Sometimes models have OnlyFans accounts. However, Paige is notable because she has made a name for herself the last few…

e226. So… uh… what is a Dissertation? (and why would you do one?)

When we started our little psuedo-academic pop-culture analysis podcast with drinking and swearing, we had a few requirements. One of those was that the show would be smart and would celebrate academia but wouldn’t be overly hung up on it. We specifically didn’t want to be an academic show. And we didn’t want to be…

Call for Comments: Dissertations, what the hell are they?

From Katya: You know us as the pseudo-academic podcast with drinking and swearing. We also lied about that (very openly, in all fairness.) All of us have Ivory Tower experiences through teaching, conferences, independent scholarship, and the occasional long-winded degree. I left academic research a few years ago and the transition from being surrounding by…

e224. A Filler Episode on Filler Episodes

One of the most important things about academia is being in conversation with other academics. That is to say that the way knowledge happens is one scholar says something and then another scholar builds on it and so on and so on. About a week ago, our friends over at the Protagonist Podcast did an…

e222. So, The World’s On Fire… Everything is Fine…

It’s been a while since we spent the show just talking about the state of the world. Mostly because… well, the state of the world kinda sucks right now… and we sort of didn’t want to deal with it. But this is a show about culture and the culture in the world right now, particularly…

e219. Why We Still Love the Jurassic Park Franchise

Somehow, in 2022, there’s a Jurassic Park movie at the top of the box office. Some twenty-nine years after the first film and 32 years after the release of the first novel, this series is still going strong. There are cartoons, video games, Lego sets and other toys. Even though Jurassic World Dominion is theoretically…

e217. Online Shopping, Thrifting, and The Death of Mall Culture

When’s the last time you hung out at the mall? We don’t mean when is the last time you went to a mall, ran in, got something and left. When is the last time you really hung out there? Once upon a time, this used to be a thing. Families took all day shopping trips…

e203. Consumption, Capitalism, and the Culture of Luxury Fashion

Can you tell the difference between Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Gucci, and Versace? What about Michael Kors, Tom Ford, Alexander McQueen and Jimmy Choo? Do you even know who these people are? In all likelihood you read that list and knew that those are some of the biggest brands in luxury fashion. Or, if you…