New Books in Popular Culture

“You are correct: something is seriously wrong.” So begins Attensity: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement (Crown, 2026) written by members of the friends of attention collective. That something is that our attention, and it is being captured and commodified by corporate entities that see our attention as a precious resource, perhaps as fundamental as water, that can be mined and extr...

Stephen C. Foster (1826–1864) was a prolific song composer. A few of his minstrel tunes have become so enmeshed in American musical culture that they are often thought to be folk songs. Although he died in poverty and most of his music was quickly forgotten, by the early twentieth century he was hailed as the “Father of American Music” and had become a symbol of US democracy. In Formulating Foster...

Finding Mr. Perfect: K-Drama, Pop Culture, Romance, and Race (Rutgers UP, 2025) by Dr. Min Joo Lee explores the romantic relationships between Korean men and women who were inspired by romantic Korean televisual depictions of Korean masculinity to travel to Korea as tourists. Dr. Lee argues that disparate racialized erotic desires of Korean pop culture fans, foreign tourists to Korea, Korean men,...

In her new book, Finding Jackie: A Life Reinvented (Diversion Books, 2023), scholar and writer Oline Eaton examines the story of an era's biggest "star of life," Jaqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, as she coped with trauma and built a new existence in an unstable world during the time between JFK's murder in 1963 and the death of her second husband, Aristotle Onassis, in 1975. Jackie Kennedy was un...

Even before we get to introduce ourselves by name, our hair has already started to tell stories about who we are, where we are from and where we are at. Our hair is tangled up in the interplay of race, gender, class, nationality, sexuality, power and beauty. It is an avid storyteller and a consummate performer - whether we like it or not. If our hair could talk, what stories would it tell about us...

It’s The Pop Culture Professors, and we analyze the first three episodes of The Night Manager, season two. We consider the season as a continuation of Le Carré’s narrative, and consider how far the themes of this new iteration of the series match those of Le Carré’s wider body of work. We look into the ideologies (and views on ideology) that underpin the series, and consider the extent to which th...

P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Puerto Rican Resistance (Duke UP, 2026) explores the work of Puerto Rican musical superstar Bad Bunny (Benito A. Martinez Ocasio), focusing on his cultural and political significance. Global superstar Bad Bunny, like many other Puerto Ricans, has lived a life marked by public crises—blackouts, hurricanes, political corruption and oppression, among...

When Walt Disney decided to build Disneyland in Anaheim, CA in the 1950s, the move presented a puzzle for Anaheim’s government: How would the city balance the interests of private investors against those of the citizenry when the two came into conflict? Disneyland Politics: How a Medium-Size City and Corporate Giant Coexist (Temple UP, 2025) by Dr. Peter F. Burns, Dr. Matthew O. Thomas, and Max R....

Does Plato matter? An ancient philosopher whose work has inspired and informed countless thinkers and poets across the centuries, his ideas are no longer taught as widely as they once were. But, as Angie Hobbs argues in this clear-sighted book Why Plato Matters Now (Bloomsbury, 2025), that is a mistake. If we want to understand the world we live in – from democracy, autocracy and fake news to cel...

Rick Fröberg was an accomplished artist and musician born in Southern California who spent most of his early creative years in San Diego before moving to New York, and then back to San Diego toward the end of his life. While juggling both of his creative outlets, he established a meaningful, urgent, vital, and powerful platform. Plenty for All: The Art of Rick Fröberg (Akashic Books, 2026) represe...

In a burst of creativity unmatched in Hollywood history, Preston Sturges directed a string of all-time classic comedies from 1939 through 1948--The Great McGinty, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek among them--all from screenplays he alone had written.  Stuart Klawans' Crooked, But Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges (Columbia UP, 2023)...

A companion to the #1 music podcast on Spotify, this book takes listeners through the greatest hits that define a weirdly undefinable decade. The 1990s were a chaotic and gritty and utterly magical time for music, a confounding barrage of genres and lifestyles and superstars, from grunge to hip-hop, from sumptuous R&B to rambunctious ska-punk, from Axl to Kurt to Missy to Santana to Tupac to Britn...

An ever-expanding and panicked Wonder Woman lurches through a city skyline begging Steve to stop her. A twisted queen of sorority row crashes her convertible trying to escape her queer shame. A suave butch emcee introduces the sequined and feathered stars of the era’s most celebrated drag revue. For an unsettled and retrenching postwar America, these startling figures betrayed the failure of promi...

In the October 12, 2023 issue of The Hollywood Reporter, Scott Feinberg offered an annotated list of the 100 greatest film books of all time. Drawing on a jury of 322 people who make, study, and are otherwise connected to the movies, Feinberg assembled an annotated list that reads like the ultimate film study syllabus. In this interview, Dan Moran asks him about the voting process, top winners, so...

It’s The Pop Culture Professors, and we continue our analysis of Pluribus, with our thoughts on episode 8, “Charm Offensive” and episode 9, “La Chico o El Mundo.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In 1966 Stanley Kubrick told a friend that he wanted to make “the world’s scariest movie.” A decade later Stephen King’s The Shining landed on the director’s desk, and a visual masterpiece was born. J. W. Rinzler and Lee Unkrich's book Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (Taschen, 2023) is the definitive compendium of the film that transformed the horror genre features hundreds of never-before-seen phot...

From whiskey in the American Revolution to Spam in WWII, food reveals a great deal about the society in which it exists. Selecting 15 foods that represent key moments in the history of the United States, this book takes readers from before European colonization to the present, narrating major turning points along the way, with food as a guide. US History in 15 Foods (Bloomsbury, 2023) takes everyd...

In his new book B-Sides: A Flipsided History of Pop (Headpress, 2023), Andy Cowan explores a century of music b-sides. Pop music would be a different beast without the B-Side. Music history is riven with songs deemed throwaway that revolted against their lowly status and refused to be denied. Be it rock'n'roll's national anthem ('Rock Around The Clock'), disco's enduring game-changer ('I Feel Love...

Breakfast Cereal: A Global History (Reaktion, 2023) by Dr. Kathryn Dolan presents the long, distinguished and surprising history of breakfast cereal. Simple, healthy and comforting, breakfast cereals are a perennially popular way to start the day around the world. They have a long, distinguished and surprising history – around 10,000 years ago, with the advent of agriculture, people began breaking...

In Sesame Street: A Transnational History (Oxford UP, 2023), author Helle Strandgaard Jensen tells the story of how the American television show became a global brand. Jensen argues that because the show's domestic production was not financially viable from the beginning, Sesame Street became a commodity that its producers assertively marketed all over the world. Sesame Street: A Transnational His...

For hard-core baseball folks, for anyone who cares for the future of the game, veteran baseball writer Jane Leavy compels attention with her provocative book, Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong With Baseball And How To Fix It (Grand Central, 2025). Our conversation focuses on her proposed solutions to the core problem of a sport in the destructive grip of a data-driven analytics mindset. Fo...

Hello, this is Eric LeMay, a host on the New Books Network. Today, I speak with Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, author of the new artist’s biography Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist (Simon & Schuster, 2025). The book was recently named one of NPR’s Books We Loved for 2025. Pollack-Pelzner is a cultural historian, theater critic, and teacher at Portland State University, whose writing has app...

Long before the fashion industry formally addressed questions of sustainability and advocated for “slow fashion,” a husband-and-wife design duo were working to create handcrafted leather-goods and functional women’s sportswear that could be worn for decades. Active from the 1940s to the late 1960s, the Phelps quickly won acclaim, attracting a broad clientele and becoming known for quality, utility...

Clean energy won’t save us from the effects of climate change. Amid corporate Net Zero campaigns, the politics of the Green New Deal, and the calls to abandon fossil fuels for renewable technology — or vice versa — lies a troubling truth: No clean technological solutions can solve the problem of human-induced climate change. To find a credible path to a sustainable future, we must set aside hopes...

It’s The Pop Culture Professors, and we continue our analysis of Pluribus, with our thoughts on episode 6, “HDP” an episode 7, “The Gap.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture