From Mav: We’ve talked before about the ways in which people complaining that media is “too woke now” are often just not aware that the media they’ve always loved always has been. A few years back I remember when there was an uproar amongst comic fans when Nick Spencer, then writer of Captain America comics…
Category: Call For Comments
CFC: How Do You Holiday Shop?
From Mav: As we reach the Christmas (Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, etc) season and devolve into our annual socially mandated display of affection through conspicuous consumption, we started having this little conversation amongst the cohosts about gift giving. Not for each other… just in general. How do you shop? Are you trying to be as capitalist as…
Call for Comments: Wicked and the Wonderful (?) World of OZ
From Hannah: In our next show, we’re tackling populism, propaganda, and resistance — through Wicked (the film, the musical, the book series) and its source material the Oz series by L. Frank Baum. The world of Oz has always been political (especially in terms of American politics) since The Wonderful Wizard of Oz first appeared…
Call For Comments: Why do people like conventions?
From Mav: So while I was watching the Democratic National Convention coverage last week — yes, I watch all of the DNC… I also watch all of the RNC… I do it so you don’t have to — Anyway, while I was watching I started thinking about the concept of conventions. Political conventions had a…
Call for Comments: Disaster Narratives
From Hannah: Perhaps it’s because of Twisters (it’s really good, actually), but I want to talk about disaster narratives. We’ve kind of done this before, when we talked about end of the world stories. But I don’t think they’re necessarily the same — we know in disaster films like Twister and Twisters and Geostorm and…
Call For Comments: On Bouncing Off the Fourth Wall
From Mav: A couple weeks back, my friend Mikey Wood made a Facebook post about writing a superhero story and that in said story he had characters use the colloquial phrase “dynamic duo” NOT to refer to Batman and Robin. He then questioned whether that reference made sense in that world. Because would the phrase…
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…
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…
Call For Comments: AI and Academics or GPT and Grading
From Mav: So, this has come up from a couple people. Long-listeners know that we’ve done several shows on AI before. We’ve talked about its use art and its use in comedy and we’ve touched on its use in things like Hollywood script writing. As the Spring college semester is finishing up, I’ve seen any…
Call For Comments: What Happened to the Teen Sex Farce?
April 2, 2025
From Mav: So a few weeks ago, after Michelle Trachtenberg suddenly died, I started thinking about whether or not we wanted to do an episode of our “is this a bad movie?” series to talking about Eurotrip. Partly because I thought it would be interesting to talk about the changing sensibilities within American youth culture,…