If you listen to our show, chances are you’re on the Internet. If you’re on the Internet, then chances are in the last couple weeks you’ve seen a proliferation of people posting A.I. generated selfies in crazy art styles. Then, you’ve perhaps also seen the explosion of controversy over people arguing about whether or not…
Category: Culture
e243. What’s in a Name? (or Several)
Sometimes we come up with an episode idea that we just completely mean to be filler. We have no real agenda and not as much research as normal, but we need to fill a week before a much more complicated show and so we just decide “lets have a discussion topic and see how it…
e242. A Specifically Very Positive Thanksgiving Ep
If you’ve been watching the news lately you might have noticed that things have been… kind of gloomy. Trump is running for president again. Twitter is imploding. The pandemic is still here. BUT… it’s Thanksgiving! At least it is here in America. Thanksgiving’s origins tell of friendship and togetherness between natives and colonizers. OK, it’s…
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…
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…
CFC: Bechdel Tests, Fire Island, and the lack of nuance in pop culture criticism
From Mav: So I hate the Bechdel Test. I think it’s stupid. See what I’m doing here is saying something kind of outrageous to start an article and then going into a more nuanced discussion where I try to make a larger point but that will be ignored by a lot of people who just…
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…
Call for Comments: “Get in loser, we’re going shopping”
From Monica: This week on VoxPop, we’re feeling nostalgic for the ultimate palace of capitalism— the mall. Because even if you don’t like shopping, the sheer quantity of things geographically centered meant that you probably bought clothes, or read comics, or listened to CDs, or saw a movie, or had a haircut, or took a…