(Pop) Cultural Marxism

In episode 19 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Isi and Ajay are joined by fellow BISR faculty Joseph Earl Thomas to discuss Ghost of Yotei , Sucker Punch Productions' much-anticipated sequel to Ghost of Tsushima . To kick off the episode, Isi and Ajay chat about recent cultural news and highlights, from the Japanese government calling on OpenAI to refrain from using anime and manga as training data, to...

In episode 18 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Isi and Ajay spend some time with a handful of big news items at the intersection of politics and media—from the Skydance-Paramount merger (and other instances of media market concentration) and its implications for American newsmedia (and its potential new gatekeepers); to Charlie Kirk's assassination, its aftermath, its mediations with mass cultural objec...

In episode 17 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Ajay and Isi once again find themselves in the regrettable position of praising the Walt Disney Company. After chatting about recent cultural highlights ( Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 , a 40th anniversary screening of Kurosawa's Ran , and a Criterion retrospective on Johnnie To), they consider the popular and critical success of Andor 's second season, and a...

In episode 16 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Isi and Ajay discuss the return of Tony Gilroy's  Andor.  Before departing for a galaxy far, far away, they stop by the world of gaming to chat about Hazelight Studio's latest co-op title, Split Fiction, and the impact of Trump's tariffs on the rollout of Nintendo's Switch 2. Turning to the first three episodes of  Andor 's second season, Isi and Ajay discu...

In episode 15 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Ajay, Isi, and Joseph explore vampires in media, across genre and time! Welcoming back Joseph after a few episodes away, the episode kicks off with a games roundtable on Monster Hunter: Wilds (Capcom, 2025) and Pentiment (Obsidian, 2022), among other things. Then the group quickly dives into all things vampire. From Capital to Castelvania , the conversation...

Isi and Ajay kick off episode 14 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism by paying tribute to the late, great American auteur David Lynch. They discuss the pleasures of Lynch's oneiric style, his keen eye for American mass culture (and the horrors it conceals), and recent re-watches of Twin Peaks and Dune . The two then reprise episode 13's review of 2024 pop culture. Along the way, they discuss year-end film r...

In episode 13 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Ajay and Isi ruminate on a largely dismal year in pop culture. Kicking off with a discussion of unexpected developments in the world of health insurance, the conversation turns to a number of broad trends that characterized culture this year: AI, long production cycles, platforms—rather than cultural works—as objects of cathexis, IP art, and the use of IP a...

In episode 12 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Ajay and Isi tackle Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis (2024). Kicking off with a review of a few recent pop-cultural engagements—including an assemblage of classic vampire films (Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), among them), Mubi's restoration of The Fall (2006), Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree , and a pair of streaming series about professional w...

In episode 11 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Ajay and Isi examine Alex Garland's  Civil War  (2024). Kicking off with a handful of pop culture news items—including the Met Gala, the death of Steve Albini, A24's  Stop Making Sense  tribute album, and Apple's alarming iPad Pro commercial—the conversation turns to Garland's provocative and uneven drama about a group of photojournalists traveling through...

What does culture look like in a "sustainable" world? In episode of 10 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Ajay, Isi, and guest Rebecca Ariel Porte examine the problems with "green" technology and consumption—which, it turns out, do little, nothing, or less than nothing to sustain the environment—and talk about the kinds of cultural forms, from literature to architecture to games, that are not only sustain...

In the final episode for 2023, Isi, Ajay, and Joseph address the vexing nature of End-of-Year lists—and then go through the vexing process of assembling our own! Isi leads us through our year in cinema; Ajay, the year in games; and Joseph, the year in television, culminating in three top picks (and some honorable mentions) for the year in each category. Discussions range from the surprising succes...

After a brief hiatus, Ajay and Isi are back with another episode of (Pop) Cultural Marxism! In episode 7, they sojourn amidst the splendid ruins of Hyrule in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom , the much celebrated 2023 game from Nintendo's EPD development group, directed and produced by Hidemaro Fujibayashi and Eiji Aonuma. Before delving into the series' past and present iterations, the t...

In episode six of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Isi and Ajay consider the cultural imperative du jour, "Let People Enjoy Things" —and offer an alternative: not letting people enjoy things.  What underlies the collective impulse to not  criticize? What is the purpose of criticism? And how does the injunction to not criticize misunderstand the relationship between the self and representation? Are critics...

In episode 5 of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Isi and Ajay dive deep into the spectacle of James Cameron's latest blockbuster Avatar: The Way of Water , touching on questions of cinematic language, the ironic celebration of nature through its destructions, papyrus fonts, visual and narrative incoherence, Final Fantasy (and being unfair to it), Ridley Scott, Moby Dick , Heidegger's question concerning te...

In episode four of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Ajay, Isi, and Joseph review the year 2022 in pop culture via the prism of five topics and trends: "open world" (and cinematic universe) fatigue (for example,  Assassin's Creed: Vahalla ,  Sonic Frontiers ); the plague of remakes and cultural nostalgia ( Top Gun Maverick ,  Wednesday ,  Interview with the Vampire ); cultural paranoia (true crime TV and pa...

In episode three of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Ajay and Isi welcome fellow faculty and  videogame connoisseur  Joseph Earl Thomas to talk about  Elden Ring , the acclaimed 2022 RPG videogame, directed and created by Hidetaka Miyazaki and Japan's FromSoftware studio (alongside some "worldbuilding" by  Game of Thrones  writer George R.R. Martin.) After a few preliminaries (a revisit to  Andor  and disc...

In the second episode of (Pop) Cultural Marxism, Isi and Ajay continue their explorations of the "fantastic form" of pop-cultural commodities. This time around, they take up the latest addition to the Star Wars universe, Tony Gilroy's television series  Andor.  Their talk touches on topics large and small, from animatronic garbage droids, ordinary social life in the Star Wars universe, and the pet...

Introducing Episode 1 of the new Podcast for Social Research subseries (Pop) Cultural Marxism, in which Ajay and Isi (and special guests!) will be exploring the "fantastic form" of pop-cultural commodities—from film and television to toys and games to objects of every conceivable consumer variety. In the premier episode, they turn their attention to the genre of fantasy, and in particular to the r...