From Mav: The promise of our show was always that it was “a weekly pseudoacademic pop culture analysis round table with drinking and swearing.” It’s never really THAT much swearing and honestly… but the drinking has never been all that explicit. It’s more that I just kind of drink a beer during ever show to…
Category: Culture
e165. PCA-2021 Recap
It’s the PCA-2021 recap show! In many ways, Popular Culture Association(PCA) national conference is responsible for this show. One of the things we’ve always strived for is to have the kind of wide variety of cultural scholarship that is found there as well as the open and inclusive vibe and ideology that the organization and…
e154. Can We Cancel Cancel Culture Culture? (or can’t we?)
Every day another celebrity “is cancelled” for any number of problematic reasons. Typically, the celebrity responds by claiming they’ve done nothing wrong and blaming “cancel culture” gone wild. Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen not only politicians and actors supposedly cancelled as as well as children’s toys and books. Looking at the news,…
Call For Comments: Can We Cancel Cancel Culture Culture or Can’t We?
From Mav: So this is a weird one. We had this idea a few weeks ago that we would do a show on “cancel culture” after Gina Carano was publicly fired from The Mandalorian. But we didn’t get to it. For one thing, everyone else in the world was dumping think pieces left and right on her. For…
e146. TV in the time of COVID-19
It’s been weird doing a show based around pop culture for the last year. A lot of that weirdness, of course, is because pop culture largely stopped for a bit. Then, it came back staggered as people released what remaining content they had sort of haphazardly. Now we’re getting to a new phase… we’re seeing…
e141. Ghosts, Spirits, Scrooge and a Merry Marxist Christmas
Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is likely the most famous Christmas story ever written. First published 177 years ago, it has been produced as stage plays, adapted into dozens of films and spoofed and parodied countless times on television shows, in comics, and other media. Whether from Disney, The Muppets, Scrooged, the original or somewhere…
e138. Holiday Tradition and Ritual in the Time of COVID
It’s the holiday season. In the United States we just celebrated Thanksgiving, and in the coming weeks that will be followed by Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Years, Pancha Ganapati, Yule, Festivus, Saturnalia, Slackernalia and probably 1000 other winter holidays that get celebrated somewhere around the world. These holidays are often commemorated by coming together with…
Call for Comments: Photo Sharing isn’t for Photos?!?
July 7, 2021
From Katya: Instagram recently announced that the photo sharing app is no longer a place to share photos. The actual design implications aren’t clear nor is the actual goal. Instagram head Adam Mosseri says that the app’s goal is “to…entertain” with a focus on “Creators, Video, Shopping and Messaging.” Which reads as a pretty accurate…