Cursed Objects

Air isn't an object, right? Wrong. This week, climate comms expert and historian Dr Alice Bell makes Dan and Kasia think hard about ephemerality via a jam jar of polluted air, captured 'fresh' from the Euston Road in north London. In doing so they explore the history of the climate crisis – where it came from, who covered it up, and when people started noticing we were ruining the only planet we h...

Is there actually any moral value to hard work? From the Dignity of Labour to CEO Mindset, Girlbossing and Instagram Hustle propaganda, our entire culture is full of messages that working hard and 'loving what you do' will make you a good person. Aspiring idlers Kasia and Dan are here to tell you why that's wrong. Prompted in part by the Wellcome Collection's new 'Hard Graft'  exhibition, we discu...

The early 2000s were a fever dream: why was pop culture so mean? Specifically, why was it acceptable to write off entire cities - and the people within them - as crap? This is the question posed by our special guest Isaac Rangaswami, journalist, writer and brains behind Instagram sensation Caffs not Cafes . Isaac’s object is the wildly popular 2003 book Crap Towns, something about half of Britain...

They are marketed as democratised holiday rentals, where you get an ‘authentic’ experience by literally living in someone's home - so why are Airbnb’s full of crap, generic art? The answer is obvious (predatory venture capitalism), but the effect is cursed in uniquely jarring ways.   Welcome back from your summer holidays - to a new season of Cursed Objects! This week Kasia and Dan explore the geo...

If smart, humane, pro-migration Ed Miliband really hated Labour’s infamous ‘Controls On Immigration’ coffee mug – both of his parents were Jews who escaped the Nazis and found refuge in Britain – then why did he let it happen on his watch? Why is there so much cowardice, ignorance and fiction at the heart of our immigration conversation? Why does Labour have such a toxic relationship with migrants...

How do you start collecting objects for a cursed museum? Kasia and Dan spend all of their money in the gift shop of the Museum of Neoliberalism (well, it wouldn’t be a Museum of Neoliberalism if you left with more money than you entered with). They find a world curated by Darren Cullen - artist, activist and collector of some of the most mundanely dystopian objects imaginable. They discover corpor...

Troubling war merch, Van Gogh bucket hats, Soviet space dogs and the scourge of ‘world’ history - Kasia and Dan stage their first-ever live show to celebrate 100,000 downloads ! They tell a sell-out crowd about some of their favourite cursed objects from museum shops, plus some of their favorites from the podcast. And we heard from YOU - via audience questions! Including: Why are museum shops all...

A record etched onto an x-ray of a (probably, now) dead Soviet citizen’s head. That is the uniquely cursed object Stephen Coates came across in a Russian flea market in 2014. Weird, eerie, and almost polyphonic in quality, these DIY records captivated him and sparked a mission to find the bootleggers who had risked up to *five years* in a gulag for their love of music. How did they turn x-rays int...

Oh god, not another one! When BREAKING NEWS bursts through the wall, we spring, gently and apologetically, into action, with a (cough) emergency p for the snappy g. That’s right guys, we’ve got a bootleg Keir Starmer mug and we’re not afraid to do a podcast about it.   Real change. Change you can believe in. Change for you, change for me, change for the entire human race. This week we are talking...

What if there was an object so cursed that it was never even made? This week we are joined by culture studies don Prof Anamik Saha to discuss anti-racism, racism and corporate diversity in pop culture - via Agatha Christie, Yellowface, American Fiction and One Day - woke agendas and cultural elites, colourblind casting, sensitivity readers and cultural consultants. What does diversity and anti-rac...

Were you into Cursed Objects before it was cool? Like Grandpa Simpson remembering the war, this week Dan and Kasia are holding a seance for those perennial whipping boys and girls, the hipsters – and recalling the green remembered hills of artisan beards, cereal cafes and small-batch trucker hats. Kicking off with a revisit to seminal, frequently painful 2005 sitcom Nathan Barley, we ask whether i...

The police just follow the law, right!? Our guest Melayna Lamb thinks we need to flip this thinking around - and see the police as a law unto themselves. Using the example of the very cursed ‘thin blue line’ police badge, Melayna challenges the police’s foundational idea that they are the ‘thin blue line between order and chaos’. What happens if - as we have seen on multiple occasions - it is the...

How do you like your eggs in the morning? Hopefully not wet?? It’s Easter, so in the spirit of bringing you some seasonal #content, Kasia and Dan explore what came to be known as ‘wet egg discourse’ via a Morrisons food-to-go container of six hard-boiled eggs. Is it ever appropriate to eat an egg on a train? Why are eggs eaten around the beginning of spring? Why are there so many phrases and idiom...

Forget everything you thought you knew about the housing crisis! This week we have a very special guest, housing lawyer Nick Bano, with a hugely enlightening and at times shocking lesson in just how we got into this mess. Drawing on his searing new book Against Landlords, Nick argues that the YIMBY / NIMBY argument is distracting us from the real problem - landlordism (even if we build more bloody...

Kasia and Dan are earning their lunch. And it’s a big, steaming bowl of cuteness! They go to the Somerset House ‘Cute’ exhibition to unravel how this seemingly benign cultural phenomenon has come to infect our brains with adorable kittens and kawaii. Often seen as infantile and saccharine - can cuteness be emancipatory or is it an escape from the grim reality of the world? What does it mean for ac...

This week, Dan and Kasia are getting into a submersible and heading into the dark blue depths, poking around the extremely cursed domain of Britain's unnatural party of government, THE CONSERVATIVE AND UNIONIST PARTY. The Tories. The true Blues. That lot.  Specifically, we're talking Tory merch. Just what the hell is going on in the Tories' online shop, who is all this crap for, and what does it t...

We're baaaack! And we're feeling FIT, while also reassuring you that it's what's inside that counts. Kasia and Dan return with a new series, where today we're talking about the beauty industry, vanity and gender, and - following a Cursed Objects outing to the Wellcome Collection's new exhibition The Cult of Beauty - early modern German wife-prettying windmill technology.  From the masterful make-u...

It's a classic Haunted Dickensian Cursed Objects Office Christmas Party! If you think Halloween is the spookiest time of year - you’re dead wrong. We’re gathering round the metaphorical office photocopier to delve into the pagan origins of festive ghost stories. What can a mysterious RNLI lifeboat poster in Kasia’s hallway tell us about the ‘happy ghosts’ found in the haunted house that is Cursed...

Service! This week, we are hovering around ‘the pass’, checking our plating is okay, and asking how a simple labour-saving device, a coffee shop palette knife, caused Kasia so much angst and strife – “like a dagger to my heart”? Maybe it’s because of the uniquely painful and exhausting nature of working in food and drink service. Kasia and Dan discuss the legendary pamphlet Abolish Restaurants, th...

Mice, lice, moths…and prehistoric-looking ‘weta’ grasshoppers. We are in the grips of a pest control moral panic. Could the humble hedgehog be the solution to the bedbug APOCALYPSE that newspapers keep telling us is wracking London? From Ancient Greek prayers for worms to eat someone else's crops, to lousy experiences of the Spanish Civil War, and ‘squander bugs’ that undermine the wartime economy...

Recorded on a hungover rainy Sunday, it's a history-on-TV episode, and it's an episode about HISTORY IN THE FIELD. Literally in the field, or rather in a field: metal detecting, archeology, and a little bit of mudlarking on the side. Don't we all want to find some buried treasure? This week, Dan and Kasia talk about the sweet and gently profound Mackenzie Crook sitcom Detectorists, and what a powe...

It's our 50th episode! Sort of. There's an asterisk. But it's sort of our 50th episode! To mark the occasion, Dan and Kasia are tackling their own logo, the Cursed Objects avatar and icon: the beans clock. They take on the politics of time, and discuss the use of the clock to discipline people into docile worker-drones. They learn the helpful unit of time measurement "pissing-while" and why some p...

What happens when a revolution dies? Jack Shenker witnessed firsthand the phenomenal Egyptian strike waves of the late 2000s that led to the toppling of the Mubarak regime, reporting from Tahrir Square and the towns and factories beyond - in 2016 publishing The Egyptians . This episode, our very special guest brings in a mug from the April 6th Youth Movement, once among the leaders of the revoluti...

Welcome to a new series of Cursed Objects! For the first episode back, very special guest historian Charlotte Lydia Riley brings in a souvenir mug commemorating the British Empire Exhibition of 1924 – where the very normal exhibits included a working coalmine, a model of the Prince of Wales sculpted out of butter, and… actual human beings brought back from the colonies to the metropole. Charlotte...

For the next Patreon-only Cursed Summer Session, Dan and Kasia get stuck into a decades-old British institution, with a TV review of Antiques Roadshow - comparing the huge gulf between the show in 1990 and 2023. Is it the most suffocating, reactionary show on TV? Twee middle-class commodity fetishism? Or is there more to it than that - couldn't this also be a democratic goldmine, a forum for grass...