Bloggingheads.tv: Culturally Determined: Recent Episodes
Bloggingheads.tv
Aryeh Cohen-Wade speaks with guests about culture in all its forms—pop, high, and low—and American society in general.
Culturally Determined is leaving BhTV, so here's how to keep following the show ... Tom Friedman's controversial column, "Biden-Cheney 2024?" ... Why Israel's anti-Netanyahu coalition could never happen in the US ... Aryeh's defense of Friedman's column ... A Hamilton song on Zoom, and other absurdities of centrist liberalism ... Chris: Any "grand coalition" would need to have Bernie and AOC in the lead ... Returning to the "is Trump a fascist" debate ... Has Trump moved on to other grifts? ...
The strange history of the Transformers action figures ... Diving into Transformers: The Movie (1986) ... Unicron, the giant planet-eating robot god voiced by Orson Welles ... Why the film is more than a glorified toy commercial ... Does the movie have any sort of politics? ...
How Doug came to run the leftwing book publisher Zer0 Books, and why he got kicked out ... Dave Chappelle, cancel culture, and the attention economy ... Doug narrates his ejection from Zer0 ... Doug's new company, Diet Soap Media ... How Bloggingheads was ahead of its time (yet failed to conquer the globe) ... How you can help shape the future of Culturally Determined ...
Max's new newsletter, Read Max ... The significance of Buzzfeed's underwhelming IPO ... Where are the cool kids online? ... Private equity squeezes a bit more blood from online media ... What is web3? And is it bullshit? ... Why Melania Trump is embracing NFTs but Elon Musk isn't ... Max's typology of '90s Dad Thrillers ...
David's podcast, Election Profit Makers ... Riding the waves of political prediction markets ... David: I don't think there's a limit to the depravity of the GOP ... Weighing the odds of American politics ever becoming normal again ... Can J.D. Vance out-crazy Josh Mandel in Ohio? ... Elon Musk, Time's Person of the Year and EPM's Bad Boy of the Week ... Esoteric rabbit holes into which the podcast digs deep ...
The many disappointments of The Many Saints of Newark ... Was any Sopranos prequel doomed from the start? ... How the opening scene undermines a key theme of the series ... Clumsy dialogue, broad acting, and flashes of the classic Sopranos wit ... Why Erin loves The Masked Singer ... An anti-narrative that rejects the meritocratic ethos of reality TV ...
Is it still possible for America to have a great leader? ... Why the pandemic sparked division instead of unity ... Why Obama was not a transformational president ... Will America just muddle through? ... Matt sees possibility on the anti-corporate right ... "Let's Go Brandon" and the return of conservative moralism ...
Mike's new book, The Memeing of Mark Fisher: How the Frankfurt School Foresaw Capitalist Realism and What To Do About It ... Subconscious narratives today and in interwar Germany ... Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse in the digital world ... Mike wants memes that will slow people down ... How "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" has been misread ... Mike's Kafkaesque book publishing experience ...
Seth's newsletter covering comedy from the left, Humorism ... Seth: Saturday Night Live is conservative ... Is being hired by SNL a Faustian bargain? ... Lawsuit alleges SNL ignored Horatio Sanz's sexual abuse of a minor ... The bizarre nature of SNL as a cultural institution ... How the pandemic has and hasn't changed comedy ... Is standup comedy an inherently conservative form? ...
Justin: It is morally imperative to not say true things on social media ... Why Justin loves Substack ... Pros and cons of writing without an editor ... AOC's real audience at the Met Gala ... Are social media editors purposefully riling up the mob? ... Sally Rooney and Israel, the Twitter Discourse perfect storm ... The "false representative class" of online pundits ...
Kat's new novel, No One Will Miss Her ... Writing YA vs. adult fiction ... A narrator speaking from beyond the grave ... The subtle art of crafting a twist ... Kat reviews Hillary Clinton's new thriller novel ... Who are all these political children's books actually for? ...
Dara's new book, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present ... Anne Frank, Jewish self-erasure, and the actual lessons of the Holocaust ... Unique features of Jewish literature and history ... The case for Jewish anger ... The myth of Jewish immigrants' names being changed at Ellis Island ... Debating Shylock ... The dark truth behind the comic relief of the "last Jew in Afghanistan" ... Dara: American society is fine with hating Hasidic Jews ... Dara's path to daily Talmud study ...
A new YouTube channel for Culturally Determined ... Meet the man who tweets as William Shakespeare ... The most secret and most grave truths of @Wwm_Shakespeare ... Spying a kind of hope in Shakespearean ambiguity ... Have you heard the joke about the old lady who reads Hamlet for the first time? ... Productions that hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature ... Shakespeare's shameless stealing ...
Gershom's new book, War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East ... How Gershom rediscovered forgotten heroes from Bletchley Park ... Fascist mythology and Italian colonialism ... The strategic importance of the North African front ... Debunking the myth of Rommel as a military genius and "good German" ... The strange story of the isolationist American military attaché in Egypt ... The real exploits of the man who inspired The English Patient ... The North African campaign as the prequel to the Arab/Israeli conflict ...
How #MeToo shaped Jacques's new book, The Philip Roth We Don't Know ... Jacques: Roth aimed to obliterate the critic ... Is it unethical to write a nasty fictionalization of an ex? ... Three levels of analysis of the misogynist charge ... Fiction and morality ... Roth's underexamined ideas about the existence of the self ... The fallout from the sexual assault allegations against Roth's biographer ...
Sophie's exploration of the use and misuse of "the Irish goodbye" ... The strange joy of watching a Picasso painting fall to the ground ... NFTs and the question of authentication ... What makes an object a valuable collectible? ... Sophie investigates the hidden melodies of subways ... The pathos of lost pet signs ...
Katie's recent essay, "Nickelodeon’s Generational Divide" ... Children's entertainment that didn't pander ... The early '90s as a midpoint in the shifting cultural battle of kids vs. parents ... The ultimate childhood dream: the Super Toy Run ... The people behind Nick's creative ferment ... Aryeh's brief childhood encounter with Nickelodeon stars ...
Joe's new essay on online disinformation ... Does advertising actually work? ... Joe: Maybe the real critique of Facebook is that it's a worthless product ... The ivermectin craze and the end of media gatekeeping ... How do you solve a problem like Bret Weinstein? ... The indigenous American berserk and the Internet's garbage ouroboros ...
Why John hated The White Lotus ... Is the show more of a farce than a satire? ... Debating whether the staff was thinly characterized on purpose ... John critiques the show's treatment of race and class ... Why the 1619 Project made so many people mad ... The controversial idea that Black Americans are the truest Americans ... Will we ever agree on what America means? ...
Joshua's new novel, The Netanyahus ... How Harold Bloom inspired a novel about Bibi Netanyahu's father ... Other influences: Philip Roth, classic sitcoms, and Yiddish anecdotes ... Jewish assimilationism vs. Jewish identitarianism ... The semi-forgotten history of Revisionist Zionism ... Those shameless Netanyahu boys! ... Why Aryeh thought the novel was targeted at his personal demographic ...
Laura's essay, "What the Hell Happened to the Claremont Institute?" ... Background on Harry Jaffa and the West Coast Straussians ... Why did many East Coast Straussians become NeverTrumpers? ... Michael Anton, the cosplaying conservative intellectual ... A recent "crazy rant" published by Claremont's house organ ... The tendentiousness of the 1776 Commission Report ... Trump's very strange idea for a "Garden of American Heroes" ...
Rebecca's essay on how Hannah Arendt was misread during the Trump years ... A capsule biography of Arendt ... The real meaning of Arendt's famous line about "the ideal subject of totalitarian rule" ... Rebecca: Trump's lies were mostly "boardroom bullshit" ... Are Trump's post-election machinations approaching "big lie" territory? ... The banality of evil vs. grotesquerie of Trump ... "Post-truth" in the run-up to the Iraq War ... The banality of Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld ... Rebecca cofounded The Drift as an antidote to the monolithic media narrative ...
Leigh's new poetry collection, What to Miss When ... How the collection emerged from lockdown ... Leigh's poem "Simulation Theory," which was inspired by a MeaningofLife.tv episode ... Leigh's essay, "Sympathy for the Girlboss" ... Women taking down other women in the name of feminism ... Michael Jordan vs. Lebron James as a marker of generational change ... Is a better version of the Internet possible? ...
Barrett embeds at a TikTok "collab house" ... Pleasant young people who are starstruck at themselves ... Why are so many college students anxious and depressed? ... Joan Didion and despair ... Barrett and his brother's unusual journey to a spiritualist enclave ... Barrett's new book of essays, Lost in Summerland ...
John's new book, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever ... The original profane words: damn and hell ... The four-letter big ones ... How donkeys and buttocks got the same name ... The nasty word we still euphemize ... How profanity can become pronouns ...
The origins of Doug's "New York Times Pitchbot" project ... The "In this Ohio diner..." trope ... The NYT's de facto national status and the hollowing out of local journalism ... The Opinion page's lack of ideological and geographic diversity ... Aryeh: The NYT's real tribe is the wealthy ... Cillizza and Greenwald, Doug's bêtes noires/muses ... With Biden in power, a return to concern trolling by the media ...
The absurd exercise of ranking presidential greatness ... Aryeh: We all agree on Lincoln and Washington, but then it's a fight ... Daniel: George W. Bush was much worse than Trump ... Did America react hysterically to the storming of the Capitol? ... Ghostbusters as a cultural expression of Reagan's America ... Nostalgia and cultural decadence ... Critical race theory, 1619, and national mythmaking ... Daniel's new podcast, "American Prestige" ...
Christian on gothic, sentimental, and ironic strains in recent US history ... Biden the pre-Boomer sentimentalist ... Trump as a postmodern gothic figure ... Why the gothic and the sentimental are two sides of the same coin ... Aryeh: It turns out that irony is never actually dead ... Who is the Great American Boomer novelist? ... Christian's review of Hunter Biden's memoir ...
Rabbi Ari introduces himself ... How do Millennial American Jews understand their Judaism? ... The unique Jewish community in Skokie, Illinois ... Identity, tribalism, and communal thickness ... The failures of Hebrew School education ... Rising anti-Semitism on both right and left in America ... Why Millennials must develop a mature relationship with Judaism and Zionism ... Rabbi Ari: "Judaism is ultimately not about you" ...
Nicholas's essay, "The Language of Privilege" ... Bottom-up vs. top-down language change (e.g. "cheugy") ... Nicholas: This is a mean way of talking ... The lefties who mock woke language ... Coca-Cola and the CIA got woke. Hooray? ... Trump's trolling and lack of virtue ... Why did the anti-Trumpers call themselves "the Resistance"? ...
Amazon launches "AmaZen" to keep its warehouse workers mindful ... Amazon's total war against unions ... Jeff Bezos blasts off ... Will the feds break up Amazon? ... NYC sues Chipotle, alleging 600,000 labor violations (some involving rats) ... Why many restaurant workers are not returning ... Alex argues for passing the PRO Act ...
Default Friend's new podcast, After the Orgy ... 2008 as a hinge point in sexual culture ... Is sex positivity over? ... DF: Young people want to get married and have kids sooner ... Ancient wisdom and cosplaying as a way of life ... Get ready for hot vaxx summer! ... Why today's teens are confessing less online ... Has moral conservatism returned to the right? ...
Ben's new book, Canceling Comedians While the World Burns ... Joe Rogan, Louis CK, and the online left's moralistic overreactions ... A material analysis of how Twitter distorts political movements ... Stalin nostalgia, guillotine gifs, and other performative radicalness ... Critiquing left rhetoric on criminal justice ... Aryeh: Cancel culture is neoliberal ... Ben: The left has made itself vulnerable to false accusations ... A socialist assessment of Biden's first 100 days ...
Accusations of sexual assault against Philip Roth's biographer, Blake Bailey ... Laura's early negative review of the biography ... How Bailey justified Roth's mistreatment of women ... Aryeh worries about an alleged rapist framing the historical record ... Laura argues against the "this changes everything" reaction ... Criticizing the actions of Norton, the book's publisher ... What Laura found in Roth's novels that she didn't expect ... What do we do with the fact that many great authors were awful people? ...
Mourning MEL Magazine ... Everything you ever wanted to know about Juggalos ... Do Juggalos vote? ... Why Magdalene identifies as a Juggalette ... Simps, incels, and pickup artists ... Trends in male horniness ... Should cat guys on dating apps pretend to not be cat guys? ... Male anxiety and the failures of media for men ...
Matt's podcast on the conservative movement, Know Your Enemy ... Matt's journey from movement conservative to democratic socialist ... Trump and the conservative intellectuals who tried to defend him ... Can there be a Trumpism without Trump? ... A cheer or two for the anti-Trump neoconservatives ... Are all the young conservative intellectuals just grifters? ... What Matt still retains from his conservative days ... Joe Biden, our first publicly Catholic president ...
Jacques's essay on race in Philip Roth's fiction ... Roth and Updike, compare and contrast ... Was Roth always totally in control of his powers? ... How Roth depicted the Newark riots ... Portnoy's Complaint and offensive humor ... Will we be reading Roth in 30 years? ... Roth's fictional (and actual) treatment of women ... Reading the reviews of the new authorized Roth biography ...
All about OnlyFans, which is like Substack but for porn ... Parallels between online journalism and online porn ... Cathy's experiences on OnlyFans ... When the NY Post "outed" an NYC medic as being on OnlyFans ... Is Twitter going to embrace the OnlyFans model? ... Why Cathy moved away from free-market fundamentalism ... Are people who work in porn more likely to have grown up conservative? ...
The new NYT documentary on Britney Spears ... The many ways the media mistreated Britney ... Revisiting the paparazzi, the head shaving, and the umbrella ... The conservatorship and the #FreeBritney movement ... Why we should have listened to the "leave Britney alone" guy ... Jason Alexander (the other one), K-Fed, and Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce ... Alana's book subscription project ...
Lauren's new novel, Fake Accounts ... Autofiction in the disinformation age ... Why the novel's narrator is unnamed ... Berlin, the city of expats hanging out ... The uses and abuses of a fragmentary narrative ... Twitter is made out of people ... When a book reviewer publishes her first novel ...
Phoebe's new position as a senior editor at The Signal ... "Cleansing your timeline" vs. "doomscrolling" ... The agony and the ecstasy of Twitter ... Twitter's insane risk-reward ratio ... How Twitter makes unpopular ideas seem popular ... With Trump banned, will Twitter return to being a niche site for weirdos? ... Aryeh's twisted fascination with MAGA and QAnon Twitter bios ... Would we all be better off if social media didn't exist? ...
Daniel's analysis of QAnon and the storming of the Capitol ... Is QAnon a religious cult? An alternative reality game run amok? ... Cultural vs. material explanations for Trump's rise ... Did the rioters get close to actually accomplishing anything? ... America's civic religion and why the left is unlikely to win ... Is Trump the worst president in American history? ... Aryeh praises and critiques Mickey Kaus ... The rise and fall of intellectual contrarianism ...
Justin's new company that arranges marriages for Millennials and Zoomers ... Do city men and country women want to be forced to wed? ... The ideal eligible NYC bachelor: tall and anti-Trump ... Justin: I quit academia because it was "satanic" ... Justin's podcast, Chat for God ...
Reflections on a bizarre week in America ... Protest, riot, insurrection, coup—or something stupider? ... The postmodern politics of symbols and cosplay ... Aryeh: Blaming this on "white supremacy" is both inaccurate and bad politics ... The link between anti-Semitism and Flat Earthers ... Impeachment? Resignation and pardon? A return to normalcy? ... Bill worries about historiography in the digital realm after Trump's Twitter banning ... What will Trump's post-presidency look like? ...
Tommy's recent essay, "What’s the Matter With Cultural Politics?" ... Police defunding and the case against "backlash" ... Can the austerity stalemate be broken? ... How the debate over trans rights is and is not like the debate over gay marriage ... Tommy: Racial and gender identity affiliation can lead to labor consciousness ... Tommy praises the Oakland activists who seized an empty house ...
Why Meghan is retiring from writing think pieces ... The devolution of the take, from op-eds to tweets ... The virtues of not knowing what to think ... Aryeh: The "Dr. Jill Biden" debate shows that the Trump era is ending ... The problems of too much speech ... Should we be optimistic about the future of the discourse? ...
The mysterious removal of Doug's YouTube video on "the Great Reset" ... Does YouTube have an anti–Alex Jones algorithm? ... Content moderation in an age of infinite content ... What videos should YouTube be taking down? ... Aryeh: The problem isn't people being silenced, it's too many people talking ... How YouTube helps spread conspiracy theories ... Should leftists reject Big Tech? ... Doug on the contemporary relevance of Christopher Lasch ...
Kelly's new book about her dog, The Particulars of Peter ... Everything you always wanted to know about Peter the dog ... Kelly: Dogs should be able to talk for 25 minutes a day ... The profound mysteries of the dog-human relationship ... "Doggo," "dog mom," and the cultural shift around pets ... Would you let your pet become a social media star? ... Dogs and the specter of death ...
Reviewing Obama's new memoir, A Promised Land ... Ryan excoriates Obama's response to the financial crisis ... Should Obama have gone much harder on the banks? ... Aryeh: Obama is an institutionalist to his core ... Was Obama just the wrong man for the job? ... Why the GOP gets away with radicalism but Democrats don't ... Is Biden's cabinet a team of nobodies? ... The mysterious nomination of Neera Tanden to OMB ... Aryeh: Maybe it's time to trust Biden's political instincts ...
How Joanna became a Jeopardy! champion ... The source of Alex Trebek's popularity ... Joanna on who should replace Trebek ... Why Aryeh was happy that he failed to get on Jeopardy! ... Trivia in the age of Google ... Is Vanderpump Rules the perfect reality show? ... A reality TV show starring people who grew up watching reality TV shows ... Aryeh's theory on the secret to the success of Great British Bake Off ...
The long history of white people claiming Native American ancestry ... White academics exposed as racial fakers ... Anatole Broyard and those who "passed" ... Katrina on Dances with Wolves, Avatar, and other "going native" narratives ... Aryeh's brief Biden brag ... Drug legalization today and drug panics of the past ... Race and the opioid crisis ...
John explains how he became a reluctant Trump voter ... How the threat of gun control pushed John towards Trump ... Is a vote against Biden a vote against woke ideology? ... Aryeh: Trump is bad for our brains and our souls ... Can Trumpism exist without Trump? ... Aryeh denies suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome ... Is the black vote in play? ... The party realignment that didn't happen ... Pessimism about a Biden presidency ...
Does Trump deserve to be re-elected? ... Examining "Trump Derangement Syndrome" ... Glenn's verdict on Trump's handling of Covid ... Aryeh: Biden is the candidate of returning us to normalcy ... What is college for? ... Aryeh's biggest college regret ... Issuing a challenge for Trump fans ...
Dan's essay, "How President Trump Ruined Political Comedy" ... Why so many Trump-era Daily Show–style shows have failed ... Trump the insult comic ... Dan: The way liberals and conservatives understand comedy has changed ... Stephen Colbert and Steven Crowder's different varieties of racial humor ... Trump's clownishness vs. Obama's dignity ... Remember when Trump gave a medal to a hero dog? Or was that just a joke? ... Cuties, QAnon, and the return of conservative moralizing ... What might comedy look like during a Biden presidency? ...
Bill's new book, The Death of the Artist ... Why the "long tail" thesis was wrong ... How did the early dream of the Internet die? ... Blockbuster consolidation in fine art ... Luck and privilege ... Is art school a pyramid scheme? ... What is to be done? Bill has some thoughts ... Will the pandemic finish off the arts? ... Wokism as a moral figleaf for careerist college students ...
Does Trump even want to be reelected? ... Debating Biden's and Trump's relative cognitive declines ... Aryeh: The material conditions will overpower campaign messaging ... Bob fears BLM is objectively helping Trump ... Aryeh's bold election prediction ... A unified theory of Bobism ... QAnon and a world without social media ...
Chris, a scholar of performance studies, defines performance art ... The two most important performance artists in America: Marina Abramović... ... ...and Donald Trump ... When Trump makes a show of "acting presidential" ... Pro wrestling, reality TV, and President Trump—which are real? ... Effective political performance by the Parkland students ... Trump's performance of victimhood ... Chris reviews the political conventions through the lens of performance ...
Laura's history with online dating ... How men and women use dating apps differently ... Laura and Aryeh's dating profile red flags ... Swiping strategies ... Modern dating as a "game of who can care less" ... First date dilemmas ... Dating during Covid ... Laura's advice for people new to app dating ...
Katrina on the historical origins of public statues ... Why 1880–1930 was the golden age of American statuary ... Why do we care so much about statues? ... If a statue is pulled down, where should it go? ... The strange saga of Rochester, NY's Frederick Douglass statue(s) ... Katrina on the false dichotomy between "tourists" and "travellers" ... The crucial role world travel plays on dating apps ... Which museums won't survive the pandemic? ...
Hamilton arrives on the small screen ... Interpreting the very last moment of the play ... Isaac connects Hamilton and Shakespeare's Henry IV Part 1 ... Prince Hal's unsympathetic ambition ... The two parts of Henry IV and the two acts of Hamilton ... A brilliant Muppets parody of Hamilton ... Hamilton in Trump's America ...
Leigh's new novel, Self Care ... Are social justice warriors sincere or cynical? ... On being a white author writing a black character in 2020 ... Why are all these white women apologizing on Instagram? ... The trials and tribulations of being a moderator ... Aryeh: Many of today's controversies come down to forum moderation ... Leigh: There's no restorative justice in cancel culture ... Would eliminating social media lead to a better world? ...
Bari Weiss's very public resignation from the New York Times ... Is the NYT a toxic workplace? ... Why Katie signed the Harper's open letter ... Aryeh: The vagueness of the letter fueled the backlash ... Do we have a cancel culture problem or a Twitter culture problem? ... Katie critiques the counterletter ... The recent failed attempt to cancel Aryeh ... Do online subcultures trend toward toxicity? ...
Looking for the truth between "Blue Lives Matter" and "ACAB" ... The rarely noted decline in police shootings ... What are the cops thinking? ... Peter: The police will never be fully demilitarized ... Aryeh: The underlying issue is widespread gun possession ... The Buffalo protester and cops who are bad at PR ... Peter: The actions of George Floyd's killer are baffling ... Peter argues that police abolition is "crazy" ... Peter lists his ideal police reforms ... The vast regional disparities in policing ...
Bill de Blasio's rise to power as NYC's great progressive hope ... The very strange story of de Blasio and the Park Slope YMCA gym ... The moment that changed everything between de Blasio and the cops ... De Blasio's bungled reaction to the virus ... Bernie's loss and the socialist left's debate over "electoralism" ... Why did the protests go national so quickly? ... Dave: De Blasio is scared of the cops ... Are the protests good or bad for Trump? ... What will NYC look like post-pandemic? ...
Chris's cancelled tour of "back row" places in America ... Chris on class and the pandemic: "Everything screws the poor" ... The geographic spread of the disease ... Chris draws parallels between Trump and Hugo Chavez ... Aryeh: Boring grandpa Joe will beat crazy grandpa Donald ... How Trump co-opted the GOP establishment ... The Republican senator who loves Chris's book ... Can a right populism succeed without xenophobia and racism? ...
Why did Bernie lose to Biden? ... When "common sense" is an ideology ... Daniel sees Bernie as the Barry Goldwater of democratic socialism ... Would a Biden administration do anything for people under 40? ... Aryeh charts his ideological path since 2008 ... Daniel: Republicans are better at politics because they understand what politics is ... The Spanish Flu in historical context ...
Assessing the initial economic response to the pandemic ... What the Federal Reserve's $1.5 trillion injection actually did ... Stimulus checks and other direct assistance ... How a rent strike could lead to a banking crisis ... Should we fear inflation? ... Is a pivot to austerity inevitable? ... The Defense Production Act and the prospect of a wartime economy ... After the threat passes, what will the recovery look like? ... What Karl is most worried about ...
Default Friend's critique of dating apps ... Bumble's false aura of female empowerment ... An infinite number of alternative romantic partners/Netflix shows ... App dating vs. IRL dating ... The phony promise of the "best" mate for you ... Girlbossism, gender differences, and sexual shame ...
Rachel's new book, Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today ... Rachel on writing very frankly about her personal life ... The origin and definition of "too much" ... Is the book a defense of too muchness? ... Should women be treated more like men? Men more like women? Neither? ... Embracing your emotions vs. detaching yourself from them ... Trump as the epitome of "too much" ... The constraints binding female politicians ...
Why it took eight years for Kirby to finish This Is Not a Conspiracy Theory ... Kirby: "Conspiracies are logistically impossible" ... Bernie fans get conspiratorial after the botched Iowa caucuses ... Donald Trump, the Conspiracist-in-Chief ... QAnon and conspiracism as lifestyle ... Will Epstein's death be the JFK assassination of our era? ... What should you do if a loved one is falling into conspiracy theories? ...
When Tim Allen proposed an ideology he called "masculinism" ... The 1950s sitcom as America's mythic Eden ... How Christian churches are grappling with Jordan Peterson ... Bill: There is always anxiety that churches are too feminized ... "Storming Area 51" and the idea that aliens will be our friends ... The strange fight over cultural appropriation and the word "y'all" ... What happened to entertainment that's fun for the whole family? ...
James's new book on Trump and television, Audience of One ... When TV was about the "least objectionable programming" ... The 1980s, when cable fractured TV and Trump started to rise ... Trump's postmodern transformation into a signifier of wealth ... How David Letterman and Trump used each other ... Aryeh recalls his days watching The Apprentice ... James: The Trump campaign was "like a plane that crashes every day" ... The master of TV becomes TV's slave ... What did Trump understand about TV that Hillary didn't? ...
Aryeh wonders: Does Twitter matter? ... Why people on Twitter like to get mad and stay mad ... The very white and male Oscar nominations ... Kat defends Stephen King's comments on diversity and quality ... Why do so many duds win Best Picture? ... Why journalists should spend less time on Twitter ...
So what's the deal with Tulsi Gabbard? ... Tulsi's critique of the Democratic party ... Who counts as a "crank"? ... The many reasons Tulsi drives people crazy ... Why is she not just barnstorming for Bernie? ... The theory that she's a secret Trump agent ... Does Tulsi support Indian PM Modi's Hindu nationalism? ... Tulsi's foreign policy beyond the Middle East ... A brief exchange on the wisdom of impeachment ...
Initial reactions to The Rise of Skywalker ... Aryeh: The movie's problems start in the first ten seconds ... The bizarre revelation of Rey's parentage ... Kylo Ren's sudden personality change ... Did the finale violate a central rule of the Star Wars universe? ... Why the Marvel movies mostly worked and the new trilogy mostly didn't ... Dan: Massive corporations plus social media blowback have ruined these films ... Speculating on the future of the saga ...
Explaining the wildly popular "ok boomer" meme ... Why Dan is both critical of and sympathetic toward "ok boomer" ... The Marxist critique of woke capitalism ... Twitter users offer bad life advice given by Boomers ... Do today's young people have a chip on their shoulders? ... Dan: We're still trying to develop a theoretical understanding of the Internet ... Why do college students seem to be more afraid of debate? ...
HBO's very strange Watchmen sequel ... Why is race the show's central theme? ... What is the show trying to say about cops? ... Martin Scorsese disses comic book movies, nerds go nuts ... Milton reviews Joker, the most chattered about movie of the year ... Why so many people prejudged the film ... Milton's graphic novel Kickstarter project about Orson Welles ... Milton's documentary about comic conventions, Tabling ...
Aryeh asks Micah to convince him to vote for Bernie Sanders ... Could Bernie lead a mass movement for progressive change? ... Micah: There's a hunger in America for transformative politics ... What does Bernie mean when he calls himself a socialist? ... Bernie is old, angry, and he yells—does that matter? ... The meaning of the AOC and Ilhan Omar endorsements ... Why do people still complain about BernieBros? ... How lefties view Warren ...
Mellie: Cancel culture is both real and fake ... Saturday Night Live's weird place in American culture ... Lenny Bruce was driven to his death but Louis CK is performing again ... Is cancellation just the market working itself out? ... Bret Stephens plays the Twitter martyr ... The Bagel Boss guy and other everyday malefactors who go viral ... Twitter libs try and fail to cancel Mellie ... Roy Cohn and the case for cancellation ...
Joanna's piece on Melissa McEwan and her controversial blog, Shakesville ... Actual activism vs. keyboard activism ... The ridiculous art of online war ... Was the site a cult of personality? ... Aryeh's history as a commenter and a moderator ... Shakesville's infamous "Left Tit Incident" ... The decline and fall of the Shakesville empire ... Joanna responds to her critics ...
David sings a hymn of praise to the Marvel Cinematic Universe ... Transformers, The Lion King, and Shakespeare ... The return of the Hollywood epic ... Aryeh: The shared universe is a key to the movies' success ... Have we reached the endpoint of spectacle? ... David: Avengers: Infinity War is about America coming to terms with losing ... Why you should watch (and read) Jessica Jones ... The possibility of virtue ...
Daniel: Jeffrey Epstein's death is a defining political moment ... People were cracking jokes about Epstein's death mere minutes later. Why? ... Reasons for and against believing in a conspiracy ... Will we ever know the truth? ... Aryeh vs. Daniel on the likelihood of foul play ...
The metatextual charms of Fleabag ... What does it mean when Fleabag speaks directly to the camera? ... In praise of the show's supporting cast ... What makes the "hot priest" so hot? ... Erin on New Jersey and The Sopranos ... New Jersey, the Postmodern State ... Tony Soprano and Chris Christie ... The baroque flair of New Jersey political crime ...
Jeffrey Epstein and the ruling class ... Epstein's rise through the meritocracy ... Is there something Jewish about the Epstein scandal? ... A power problem vs. a men problem ... Is it possible to have a better elite? ... Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as a Gen X rejection of Boomers ... A spoiler-filled discussion of the film's shocking ending ...
How Nathan used @steak_umm to revolutionize marketing on Twitter ... Weird Twitter vs. @steak_umm ... The complicated role that irony plays on Brand Twitter ... The bizarre trend of brands insulting potential customers ... Nathan wrestles with the ethics of advertising ... A brief history of Brand Twitter ... Nathan's massively viral tweet thread on Millennial mental health ... Twitter's crazy risk/reward ratio ... Nathan offers Bloggingheads some social media advice ...
Affirmative action and the college admissions scandal ... Jock and Man at Yale ... What money can't (and can) buy ... Considering class-based affirmative action ... Does it matter that Trump is an immoral person? ... Is racism at the center of the border crisis? ... Whatever happened to the domestic neoconservatives? ... Why Republicans stopped caring about cities ... The GOP after Trump ...
Robby's new book, Panic Attack: Young Radicals in the Age of Trump ... Aryeh's meta-critique of reporting about college students ... Why are so many college students acting so fragile? ... The good and the bad of intersectionality ... How did the ideology of intersectionality spread so quickly? ... Do colleges view students as customers who are always right? ... The rise and possible fall of no-platforming ... Sexual assault on campus, Title IX, and #MeToo ... Should we still be worried about the alt-right? ... Threats to free speech from both sides ...
Chris's new book, Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America ... Why politics and Trump are mostly absent from the book ... McDonald's, the community center for people on the margins ... Successful immigrant communities like the Somalis in Lewiston, Maine ... "This is my home" and forms of meaning you can't measure ... Why dignity is the book's central theme ... Chris's thoughts on universal basic income ... Why GOP Sen. Tom Cotton blurbed the book ...
The controversial finale of Game of Thrones ... Would Dany have been a good queen? ... Why many female fans felt so betrayed ... Was the story just a big red herring? ... Aryeh: The second part of the episode felt like fan fiction ... The fates of Jon, Arya, and Sansa ... Michael explains how the coffee cup blooper happened ... The end of a TV era ...
Reviewing Avengers: Endgame ... Spoilers! The movie's first wild twist ... Is time travel a cop out? ... The first big character death ... Milton: Comic book fans have matured ... Assessing the giant climactic fight scene ... The aftermath: selfishness and selflessness ... Appraising the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole ...
Justin's recent NYT op-ed, "The End of Satire" ... Neo-Nazi memes and satire from the bottom ... How Justin's views about free speech have changed ... The line between satire and fake news ... Our surreal reality, where Trump's "gorilla channel" seems plausible ... In the age of Trump, what's the use of satire? ... Justin's new book, Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason ...
Phoebe presents a short explainer on the Dreyfus Affair ... Why we still talk about Dreyfus today ... The Covington Affair, the Smollett Affair, and other contemporary Affairs ... How social media makes causes célèbres more likely ... Why Phoebe identifies strongly with George Costanza ... Does Seinfeld have a successor? ... Aryeh: There's no cancellation but self-cancellation ... Embracing martyrdom on left and right ...
Clues in the new Game of Thrones title sequence ... Reviewing the season premiere ... What's the point of Euron? ... Does Westeros have a "true" religion? ... Possible endings: Happy, sad, and time travel-y ... Gratuitous nudity returns ... Is this the last communal TV show? ...
College admissions fraud and children as products ... Adventures with Ivy League jocks ... Daniel: "Meritocracy is essentially bullshit" ... Was Black Panther neoliberal? ... Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman, and anti-imperialism ... Why Bernie has the advantage over Biden ... The consequences of America's senescent leadership class ... Do BernieBros actually exist? ...
Marshall's Oscar-nominated documentary short, A Night at the Garden ... The German American Bund and its leader, Fritz Kuhn ... A Nazi rally and a Trump rally ... The Jewish protester who ran on stage ... The return of "America First" ... Marshall's 2005 documentary on Cory Booker's mayoral run, Street Fight ... Marshall: Booker is not a phony ... Will the stain of New Jersey corruption stick to Booker? ...
Dan's recent essay, "Adolescent Politics" ... Dan: Social media has turned the world into a high school cafeteria ... Shouldn't stand-up comics be bad people? ... Trump, Exhibit A of the adolescent id ... The (largely pointless) college activism of the 1980s ... Why Aryeh kept his mouth shut about Jussie Smollett ... Reasons for optimism and pessimism ... How Joan Didion helped inspire Dan's essay ...
Juliet's new novel, Talent ... How Juliet created her creatively blocked main character ... Different ways that authors show their hands ... Against lifehacking ... The eternal tension between artists and scholars ... On having written a novel that will never be optioned by Hollywood ... The two type of academics in fiction ...
James's new book, Wit's End ... In defense of puns ... The science behind why jokes are pleasurable ... James: Wit can make you laugh, but it always makes you think ... The benign violation theory of humor ... Great wits of yesterday and today ... Wit as a weapon of the powerless ... Juggling as a physical form of wit ...
Riley's recent article in Jacobin, "Politics Is Not Harry Potter" ... Nostalgia and neoliberalism ... Is the ideology of the Potter books neoliberal or aristocratic? ... The fantasy of defeating the "final evil" ... Why does J.K. Rowling hate Jeremy Corbyn? ...
Brand consultant Bill on Gillette's controversial new ad on masculinity ... Bill explains what a brand consultant does ... Why Gillette took a big risk ... Was a conservative backlash part of Gillette's plan? ... Was the ad a success? ... Pepsi's disastrous political ad and Nike's successful political ad ...