Call For Comments: Is This The Darkest Timeline?

From Mav: It’s 2020, and the world is on fire. We all know how bad things have been. Some of the things are obvious, longterm, and we’ve done shows on them before. Some of them are new: There’s a deadly pandemic that has killed over 213,000 people in the United States (and over a million…

e125. It’s the End of the World as we show it…

It’s 2020 and the world is ending… or maybe it’s not… or maybe it ended months ago and we just can’t tell anymore. Honestly at this point it’s pretty much just impossible to tell. With what seems like one disaster after another shaking the planet, we decided to take a look at apocalypse and disaster…

Call for Comments: It’s the end of the world … no, I don’t feel fine

From Hannah: As we’ve said in just about every blog post and podcast since March, 2020 is a waking nightmare. If Twitter is any indication, a large majority of the U.S. population has gone from joking about it being the end of the world to wishing for that event to occur. Good Omens, this is…

e119. Copaganda II: Going Rogue

A few weeks ago, we released an episode about “copaganda.” On that show we started out talking about the TV show Paw Patrol and internet calls to have it and other cop shows cancelled in the wake of the #DefundThePolice movement and heightened scrutiny on law enforcement in the United States (Note from Mav: And…

e118. #activism

We live in very interesting times. The world around us is changing every day… and with the internet if feels like it’s changing ever rapidly. With everything from #COVID-19 to #BlackLivesMatter to #MeToo to #DefundThePolice to #Resist to #LoveIsLove, the social media sites have given every one of us the ability to advocate for what…

Call for Comments: Copaganda II: Going Rogue!

From Hannah: Our initial episode exploring copaganda (media that reinforces police-positive narratives) covered a lot of ground, but we majorly focused on media geared toward children and families — such as Paw Patrol, Zootopia, and Artemis Fowl — and shows whose underlying premise argue that the police should serve their communities (Brooklyn Nine-Nine is perhaps…

Call for Comments: Performing the Minimum and Virtual Protesting

From Katya: This episode is more than a bit overdue but it’s especially pervading online culture right now: online activism. The internet has unquestionably opened up historic new options for sharing information, fund raising, and promoting causes and events. But for smart phones and the internet, most of us would not know the names of…

e114. Your Black Friend is Tired

A few years ago, in an interview with Stephen Colbert, Will Smith said that he believed that racism isn’t getting worse — it’s getting filmed. While it may be hard to quantifiably judge the first part of that statement, the second part is certainly true. In the last couple of weeks, the public availability of…

e112. Social Media and Free Speech

If you’re unlucky enough to live on the planet Earth, you probably know that it’s not doing terribly well lately. We’ve had a global pandemic sweeping through every corner of the globe that has largely shut business and commerce to a halt, tanking the economy. And if you live in America, and the people dying…

Call For Comments: Avatars and the Virtual You

From Mav: In the last few days an interesting meme of sorts has popped up on Facebook: people posting their “Facebook Avatars,” stylized cartoonish self-made images generated with Facebook’s mobile app. They’re cute enough, but rather innocuous and I didn’t think much of it. I did play around with it for 5 min and made…