Culturally Determined

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 ... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 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 mythmakin...

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 ... Hosted on Acast. Se...

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...

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"? ... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 ... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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? ... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/p...

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 vulne...

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 i...

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 ... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 c...

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 ... Hosted on Aca...

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? ... H...

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 ... Hosted on Acast...

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 ... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 b...

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...

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 ... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 digit...

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 ... H...

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? ... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 t...

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 ... Hosted on Aca...

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 Neer...