Culture Study Podcast

Last week, Anne went on Slate's podcast about internet culture, ICYMI . The conversation felt very in line with what we talk about on Culture Study, so we're dropping this episode in your feed as a special weekend treat. Enjoy! The “tradwives” are retreating. Nara Smith went on Call Her Daddy to renounce any association with the term, and has been in the middle of a full-on rebrand as the promotes...

Coworkers using AI to respond to emails written using AI. Coworkers who put the entire email, in caps, in the subject line. Other coworkers who seemingly refuse to use their email at all. Coworkers who send you a Teams Chat, then an email, then a text, then call you on your personal phone . Organization-wide freakouts about moving from Slack to Teams. What made contemporary workplace communication...

GOD THIS EPISODE IS GOOD. I absolutely love talking about the publishing industry with Alyssa Morris: she has such a sharp eye for what makes people feel things (and what does and does not make people buy books). Every time we talk I swear we could go another two hours, but this time we try our best to limit ourselves to just over one. We talk about the feeling that "high-concept" books are everyw...

A psychological thriller about writing with three movie stars — sign me up! Let's do this! This is extremely my shit! But Verity has so much going wrong: bad writing, incoherent acting, a hesitancy to embrace the abject, a text that wishes it was Rebecca , a distractingly cool house, Dakota Johnson being Dakota Johnson.....it's quite bad. And yet, both Margaret and I agree: we had a pretty fu...

The third installment in our BACK TO SCHOOL Fashion Series is here! Corinne Fay is one of my favorite style writers — in part because she's writing for people that "Style" has largely ignored. She's out here finding the clothes that are actually inclusively sized, that work on all sorts of bodies, and that fit with your vision of self and gender. Her work delights me and expands my own style...

This episode is so chaotic! (Also very fun, very interesting, and obviously very smart.) All of our best laid plans for how it would go went straight out the window — that's what happens when you talk to two of the smartest, most introspective personalities in podcasting right now. We talk about NPR Voice (and how it's continuing to change), ticks of rural speech, what people actually mean when th...

This is not an episode about whether or not you should delete your social media accounts — we've had that conversation, and we'll keep having that conversation. Instead, this is an episode about all the weird habits we've developed around posting: posting on vacation, posting (or not posting) when sick or on leave, posting about your everyday life to your 200 followers like you're an influenc...

It feels like a real symptom of the modern age that an article of clothing can just start... following you around online. There it is, in your Instagram feed (again, and again, and again). But it's also there in between paragraphs while you're reading the New York Times , or suggesting you click while you're sifting through your Buy Nothing group on Facebook, or accosting you every tenth video on...

There are eight books in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, and people have bought fourteen million of them. First published online, then self-published on Amazon, with an audiobook version that people won't shut up about, Dungeon Crawler Carl has become the fantasy phenomenon of the year — and earned the moniker of "the book that all your [dude] friends who don't read are actually reading." I...

Over the last six years, our conversations on Culture Study have often circled back to a handful of recurring themes: contemporary work culture, burnout, optimization culture, intensive parenting, the often hollow pull of the algorithm, the tattered social safety net, and the desire to engage more with the world (and community) around us. We're fun, I promise! And today we're going to weave togeth...

IF YOU NEED HELP ADDING YOUR SUBSCRIBER-ONLY FEED TO YOUR PODCAST PLAYER, JUST CLICK HERE !   Conflict happens — and navigating that conflict is essential to a healthy community, a healthy relationship, and a healthy workplace. But so many of us are conflict-adverse (often for good reason). We need better strategies, better paradigms... better fighting advice. Priya Parker , author of the Cul...

I love kids. In a different timeline, I'd almost certainly have them. But when I was in my 30s, I looked around — and looked at my own bank account, and the realities of childcare, the weight of my student loans, and how hard people without close family support were working just to get by — and I thought: I can't make this work . And because I didn't even try to have a kid, I didn't have...

A man with a fairytale castle in upstate New York who keeps trying to make a self-produced reality show about "princesses" happen — and become a modern-day Hugh Hefner. A man who got famous on YouTube for lawn care who ends up filming himself as a baby — and has a SWAT team called to his house. These stories form the backbone of Jon Ronson 's journey into the world of "unraveling men." T...

In June, I sent out a Friday Thread prompt that readers had been asking for, in one shape or another, for years: How do we talk about non-romantic breakups? Why do they sting SO MUCH? Why is the vocabulary around a friend breakup so paltry? I know many people found tremendous solace just reading through other people's stories and knowing that 1) friend breakups are part of life and 2) yes, as a cu...

Let's do some HAIR STUDIES! How does blondeness recruit and convey power? When is curly hair a signifier of unruliness — and when does it say Cool Girl? Will we ever be free of the tyranny of the beachy wave? What's the New Karen Cut? Should we talk about Julia Roberts' hair in Pretty Woman for a solid 10 minutes? (Yes!) Sarah Mesle joins the pod to talk about her new book, Tangled: Seven Iconic M...

Welcome to the first of our three-part series on BACK TO SCHOOL FASHION , which is really just an excuse for us to talk about style and clothes. Today, the incredible Sophie Strauss — aka, the stylist for regular people — joins us to answer your questions about finding that one piece that will solve all your fashion problems, letting go of the fantasy capsule wardrobe, what you're actual...

More than a year ago, Melody put a placeholder in our shared podcast planning document: SOMETHING SMART ABOUT AI. We were sick, bored, or frustrated with the way so many podcasts were talking about it — usually because it involved dudes talking with other dudes and universalizing proclamations about whether artificial intelligence was going to usher in an age of utopia (doubtful) or kill us all (d...

Why is Planned Parenthood telling you that you should lift heavy during your menstrual cycle? Why will no one shut up about protein? How many different ways can a company try and convince you it's not a diet when it's TOTALLY A DIET??? How have companies taken advantage of the actual gaps in research on women's bodies to sell us crap? Journalist and elite distance runner Zoë Rom and registered die...

Two bonus episodes in two weeks, what is even happening! Well, The Odyssey happened — and after reading and writing about Matt Damon for this week's newsletter , I knew I wanted to talk and think more about the adaptation itself. Or, more specifically: the women of The Odyssey and Nolan's struggle to write women in his films. Oh, and their hair, of course — which is why Sarah Mesle , preeminent ha...

I have aspired to be like Lindsay Crouse — professionally and personally — since the first time I figured out who she was. Killing it as an editor and writer at the New York Times opinion section. Absolutely wrecking expectations about how fast women in their 30s can be (re: running). If you're a high-achiever millennial, she was living that that life we all dreamed of. Then a bunch of things in h...

Bonus eps are when we go deep on a cultural phenomenon, text, or celebrity that's overwhelming our feeds, charming our pants off, sparking general bewilderment, or, in this case, making us think long and hard about a text. When Vulture critic Kathryn VanArendonk texted Margaret to report that the new "woke" (don't worry, we discuss this designation at length) Little House on the Prairie was actual...

IF YOU NEED HELP ADDING YOUR SUBSCRIBER-ONLY FEED TO YOUR PODCAST PLAYER, JUST CLICK HERE ! Are you struggling to figure out the joys of your new home? Do you keep comparing it to a city you fell deeply in love with before? Maybe you're visiting a new city soon and just want tips on how best to appreciate its pleasures. Lilah Raptopoulos has spent so much time in her personal and professional life...

There are few things I like to do more than argue about the fine gradations of Who Is A Star Today And Why. I love the categorization element (what's the difference between a heartthrob and a sex symbol??) but I especially love thinking about what the actors we designate as heartthrobs tell us about our current understandings of masculinity. Is Pedro Pascal a heartthrob or a boyfriend? Is Leonardo...

Whatever your relationship is with your parents — incredibly close, estranged, somewhere in-between — there's just so much to handle when one of them dies. It doesn't matter if the death was sudden or a long time coming, our reticence to deal with (or even talk about) the postscripts of our lives leaves people scrambling, untangling, and slamming up against walls of legal bureaucracy. So we wanted...

We love our boomer moms. And our boomer moms are complicated . When Tracy Clark-Flory first told me about her memoir — in which she discovers the half-sister her mother had at age 19, and was forced to give up for adoption — I immediately thought about how so many of our boomer moms' choices were limited in ways we struggle to imagine. No matter how feminist their current politics may be, it doesn...