Culture Study Podcast

I know a lot about historic Hollywood feuds. I could do an entire episode just on the magazine covers featuring Elizabeth Taylor, Eddie Fisher, and Debbie Reynolds circa 1959. But to do any episode on Celebrity Feuds right — particularly one that airs just days before Kendrick Lamar performs at the Super Bowl — I knew I needed a different sort of celebrity feud expert. When Joel Anderson , host of...

We’re at the point where we know a bullshit attempt to commodify our burnout when we see it. No one’s buying the self-care spiel the bath bomb companies are selling us. But the rhetoric of self-care has crept into the workplace, family dynamics, and TikTok therapy speak, usually divorced from any critique of the systems that make self-care feel necessary in the first place. Pooja Lakshmin MD , aut...

I grew up skiing at a mid-size mountain in the middle of Idaho. I wasn’t ever an athletic kid, but skiing — it made me feel fast and really good at something. I loved it: the routine, the long slog to the mountain, the Cup of Soup for lunch, the crappy hotels, the freedom. But the ski culture that I grew up with is largely gone, at least in the U.S. — and I’ve spent the last few years coming to te...

Let me start with this: this is a dream interview. If, like me, you spent a lot of time in the 2000s and 2010s reading about celebrity online, Go Fug Yourself was an essential part of your online diet. Heather and Jessica were simply unrivaled when it came to celebrity fashion in general and red carpet fashion in particular. I idolized them the same way I idolized Lainey Gossip — both of whom I re...

Thrifting has a smell, but it also has a feel . For me, the feel is of thick, almost indestructible rayon weaves; of dense, mothbally wool; of slick, ancient crinoline; of stiff and generously cut denim. It was the feel of handstitching on a dress made from a pattern, or a cracked logo on a company picnic shirt from 1975. It was not the feel of shopping at Forever 21, even though the prices were a...

No matter where you spend your time, online or off, you’ve encountered some form of therapy speak. Maybe it comes from a friend who loves processing their therapy with others; maybe it suffuses your TikTok FYP; maybe your friends or family members have been using it to try and describe how they’re trying to foster and maintain healthy relationships; or maybe you’ve just been keeping up on the late...

As an Registered Auntie, I get to watch kids’ toy trends from the backseat. I’ve bought annoying things (sorry, parent friends) and learned how to play new things (Beyblades, I rule) and passed down precious things (all of my My Little Ponies from the ‘80s). We could talk forever about the merits of various toys, past and present, but your listener questions this week underline that there’s also a...

Sometimes we do episodes where I know a fair amount about the subject and end up on a three minute digression about picture palaces. And sometimes I’ve only started to learn about a topic — or read within a genre — and am absolutely thrilled to spend an hour listening to someone else’s expertise. That’s what we’re doing today with queer romance writer Adib Khorram : tackling your questions on ever...

What is Quince and why is it everywhere? Who is running Albion Fit? Who buys clothes at Altar’d State? Why is Madewell so sad? This is an explainer episode, but it’s also a brands-feelings processing episode, because any time millennials try and talk about how J.Crew or Madewell has changed, they’re also talking about how their own feelings about fashion have changed. And no one understands the rh...

Sometimes I forget just how many classes I took on the history of cinema — or that I used to teach a class on it! — but then I have a conversation like the one you’re about to listen to and remember: oh right, I am a huge film history dork. This episode, featuring the brilliant Hannah McGregor , travels all over the past, present, and future of the blockbuster, from the theory of the “whammy,” to...

I could talk about Nicole Kidman for hours . Very few Hollywood actors have had careers this varied, this delightful, this weird — oh, and she’s also been married to Tom Cruise. She manages to be both chronically underestimated and overrated, and she’s recently found herself in a slew of roles where she embodies a slew of different rich white ladies, each miserable in their own specific ways. For...

Almost all of the public conversations about sex testing and sports — or, more to the point, who should be allowed to participate in women’s sports — are pretty bad. In many if not most cases, they’re outright transphobic; even in the “best” cases, they’re still pretty ham-fisted. But Rose Eveleth is having a very different sort of public conversation about sex testing in their new podcast, Tested...

“Most people who complain about BookTok have never seen a BookTok.” Alyssa Morris drops that insight about two-thirds of the way through the episode, and it’s such a good point that I almost want to make it the title of the episode. Most people have an idea of what BookTok is (people talking about books on TikTok) but no real understanding of the immensity of BookTok. It’s talking about what you’v...

A podcast episode on the state of podcasting? Classic Culture Study Pod. At this point in my career, I’ve been interviewed on hundreds of podcasts, been adjacent to the production of dozens, been the host of three pods, and even watched a fourth pod go through two years of production only to get axed. The podcasting world is so dynamic, so weird, and so complicated… and industry analyst and critic...

You might look at the question in the title of this episode and think: duh, it’s because we’re weird about death . But cancer is so common, with so many different variations, with so many ways it can touch your life, in ways immediate and lasting… that of course we’ve figured out ways to be weird about it. Of course there are bizarre metaphors, of course we don’t have space for the messy, extended...

You know that feeling when you and a friend get weird and detailed and hilarious about something you deeply (and maybe irrationally) hate, or find ridiculous, or can’t stomach in your vicinity? It’s one of my favorite versions of friendship intimacy — talking shit about something you shouldn’t dislike nearly as much as you do, because that thing is relatively trivial, but that doesn’t mean that th...

What’s the difference between a conspiracy theory and gossip? When does joking around about Kate Middleton’s abduction turn into something much darker? Are women actually more susceptible to contemporary conspiracy theories — or are we just finally paying attention to it? Cristen Conger, host of the new podcast Conspiracy, She Wrote joins me to talk about Taylor Swift’s evil twin, Beyoncé’s illumi...

You can almost hear the producers trying to sell this show to Hulu: It’s hot Mormon moms… who are also swingers . Turns out only one of them was “swinging,” and the swinging was (in her words) “soft.” But it was enough to get Hulu — and now, millions of other viewers — on board with Secret Lives of Mormon Wives , which tracks the interlocking stories of eight Mormon influencers in Utah. Like so mu...

We’ve had listeners asking us to do an episode on sapphic pop for months now, and were trying to figure out who we wanted to co-host. Then Melody sent me a text: I FOUND THE PERFECT PERSON. That person is Trish Bendix , who just published a sprawling look at the past and present (and popularity) of sapphic pop, from Big Momma Thornton to Chappell Roan. I absolutely loved this conversation, where w...

This is a dream come true of an episode: we got the owners of The Ripped Bodice to talk to us about all the ins and outs of running a romance-only bookstore. We talk about everything from the genesis of their annual State of Racial Diversity in Romance Publishing Report to their fav recommendations for tweens and teens …..and how they deal with “vintage” romances in the store. I found everything a...

This episode is the Culture Study Podcast’s version of a Just Trust Me. It’s difficult to describe exactly WHY it’s so good, just that after we finished recording (with Lilah Raptopoulos, host of the podcast Life and Art ) Melody and I both immediately texted each other with: SO GOOD !!! The episode is ostensibly about figuring out how to cook in the world of infinite recipes, but it’s also about...

We’re more than twenty years into the current reality boom — and things are getting complicated . What are the unspoken and spoken ethics of signing up to become a reality star? What resources (about harassment and protection, about brand deals) should be made available to anyone who signs a reality contract? Are reality stars scabs during strikes — and should they unionize? WHAT MAKES THESE MELOD...

Jennifer Romolini is one of my favorite thinkers about ambition, and workism, and the stories we tell ourselves about what we must endure in order to find a modicum of security and pride — and she also happens to be a true scholar of all things Ben Affleck. Months ago, I asked her to come on the podcast to talk about the intersection of Affleck and ambition, but we held the episode for a bit to gi...

TikTok is filled with wonders. It’s SO weird. It can make you feel like the algorithm is telling you something you don’t even realize about yourself….or it serve you a whole bunch of cyst draining videos. In order to answer your questions about WTF is happening in your feed, I knew I needed a weird internet aficionado who also understands the way our tech platforms actually work. I needed Katie No...

Trad Wife Discourse is everywhere. It’s been everywhere for a while, in part because it offers a twisted fantasy of ease to women who are attempting to negotiate life, and family, and career in a society whose policy is actively hostile to women working outside the home. But I’ve seen a spike in interest in the ramp-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election, where a Trump victory — paired with the...