e323. The Complex Legacy of Barbie: Gender, Fashion & Identity

So how about that Barbie? No, not THAT Barbie… we did a show on the movie last year. No, what we want to talk about is enduring legacy of the concept of Barbie. Starting with the doll and going through to the movie, Barbie is just… always there. Or at least she has been for…

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…

e322. 4 Killer Out-of-the-Box X-men Movie Pitches for the MCU

It’s somehow been five years since Disney’s acquisition of Fox and the impending promise therein of having the X-men added into the MCU. While we have … let’s just say feelings… about the idea of a single global megacorportation essentially owning the movie landscape in the US, that is perhaps a show for another day.…

Call For Comments: Hey… So How About That Barbie?

From Mav: So I had been thinking of doing an episode like this ever since last year when the Barbie movie came out. BUT I didn’t want to do it right around Barbie because I don’t so much want to talk about the movie specifically as I do the concept of Barbie in general. Barbie…

e321. The All-Time Best All-Time Best Albums List of All Time

A couple weeks ago, Apple Music released their list of the 100 Best Albums of all time. This isn’t really new. People do it all the time. In fact, Rolling Stone publishes a top 500 Albums of all time list fairly regularly. More than anything, these lists serve to create arguments amongst the readers about…

Call For Comments: The Greatest of the Greatest of Music

From Mav: So last week, Apple Music released their list of the Best 100 albums of all time. As these things do it sparked a fair bit of media attention from music reporter types either praising it or complaining about it, and then… basically everyone moved on and forgot about it. To be fair, these…

e320. Adrenaline and Affection: Exploring the Action Romance Genre

What do you do if you’re in couple that was designed on an 80s sitcom so you have extremely traditional gender roles of a feminine partner who loves lovey dovey chick flicks and a masculine partner violent ‘splosiony dude movies. You go to an action romance of course! So it turns out that we don’t…

e319. X-men ’97 Revisited: Superheroes, Sacrifices, & Saturday Mornings

There’s an argument that the current wave of superhero dominated content that pervades popular media doesn’t begin with the MCU but with X-men the Animated Series, a cartoon that ran from 1992-1997 and is a formative touchstone for many millennial viewers who have come of age today. This argument may be somewhat backed up by…

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…

e317: From Field to Frame: Life Lessons from Sports Movies

Sometimes when the world is on fire, you just want to watch a dumb feel good sports movie. Right now the world is on fire, so we thought maybe we’d talk about dumb feel good sports movies. BUT, are they really as dumb as we make them out to be? On this week’s episode Mav…