A couple weeks ago the RNC presidential primary debates opened with a segment where each candidate got to explain why they best epitomized the conservative values for the real american laid out by Oliver Anthony’s country folk song “Rich Men North of Richmond”. They sounded like idiots, and even more so when Anthony himself released…
Tag: politics
e261. PCA2023 After Dark!
After two years being held virtually, and a cancelled conference in 2020, the Popular Culture Association returned to in person conferences for PCA2023. There were some good notes (Mav won a major award for his doctoral dissertation) and some bad notes (Mav ended up catching COVID during the trip) but along the way there was…
e240. Reality Twitter? (and Politics)
Running a pop culture podcast isn’t easy. One of the biggest problems is that popular culture is a moving target. There’s just… always stuff happening! We can’t really get to it all. Every once in a while rather than pick a stable topic, we like to get together and just do a sort of free…
e237. So, We Need to Talk About Kanye…
Three weeks ago, Kanye West decided to premiere a line of White Lives Matter t-shirts at Paris Fashion Week… and somehow with that at the starting point pretty much every day since he has somehow managed to become MORE racist and problematic. And so, in the last few weeks, Kanye has continued a persistent stream…
e225. Can We Talk About Climate Change?
If you line in the United States and follow political news you might have noticed something crazy last week. The Democrats kind of… did something! In fact, they did something potentially huge. On Thursday, July 28th, essentially out of nowhere, senators Joe Manchin and Chuck Schumer announced that they had come to terms on what…
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…
e202. To Kill a Mockingbird… and a Maus — Censorship & Book Banning
Every once in a while the world of weekly pop culture and the world of literary academia collide so totally that the world notices even outside of our show. Last week was one of those weeks. A school board in Tennessee voted to remove Maus, the critically acclaimed, Pulitzer Prize winning Holocaust memoir graphic novel,…
e181. Entertainment and Other Unions — IATSE Solidarity
Over the past year, our viewing consumption habits have changed a lot. We spent months indoors streaming everything — including new release films — largely through new media platforms like Netflix and Disney Plus. These new production models have drastically changed box office results, profit models, and production budgets that reverberate across the industry —…
e158. Superhero Thought Experiments
Have you ever had one of those pointless internet arguments about the philosophical righteousness of Batman, Superman, Rorschach or Luke Skywalker? Or maybe you’ve spent hours arguing about how time travel works based on old Fantastic Four comic books. And I’m sure many of you have tried to defend the value of some superhero movie…