The Cluster F Theory Podcast

We are taking a break. Here are the episodes we mention in this chat as well as the list of podcast recommendations we talked about. Rosie Nixon - Burnout https://theclusterftheory.substack.com/p/45-burnout-rosie-nixon Merve Emre - Public/Publics https://theclusterftheory.substack.com/p/39-publicpublics-merve-emre Jonas Staal - Propaganda https://theclusterftheory.substack.com/p/47-propaganda-jona...

Jeff Rosenthal is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and community builder. He is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of CIV, a back-and-build investment firm focused on critical industries. Prior to founding CIV, Jeff co-founded Summit, a leading business and thought leadership community. Jeff also co-owns Powder Mountain, the largest ski resort in North America. He sits on the board of the Ocean C...

Jason Mittell is Professor of Film & Media Culture at Middlebury College and is the author of some of the most read and cited books in TV studies. Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (Routledge, 2004) Television and American Culture (Oxford University Press, 2010) Complex Television: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (NYU Press, 2015) Narrative Th...

Trine Syvertsen is professor of media studies at the University of Oslo, working in the fields of media history, media policy, television and digital media. She co-edited The Digital Backlash and The Paradoxes of Disconnection and authored the influential Digital Detox, The Politics of Disconnecting . Faculty page: https://www.hf.uio.no/imk/english/people/aca/trinesy/ Google Scholar: https://schol...

Victoria Smith is a feminist writer with a particular interest in motherhood and intersections of misogyny and ageism. She has written for Unherd, the Critic, the New Statesman and the Independent. She is the author of two books- Hags, on the demonisation of middle-aged women- which was shortlisted for the Nero Prize in 2023 - and her new book Unkind, on how ‘kindness culture’ entrenches sexism. (...

Jonas Staal is a visual artist whose work deals with the relation between art, democracy and propaganda. Much of his work is collaborative, performative and critically utopian. He is the founder of the artistic and political organization New World Summit . Together with Florian Malzacher he co-directs the training camp Training for the Future and with human rights lawyer Jan Fermon he initiated th...

Andrew MacDonald is a film producer who has made some of the most well-known British films including Trainspotting , 28 Days Later (and the sequels), The Last King of Scotland , Ex Machina , Civil War and 2025’s Warfare . He was also executive producer on the TV series Devs and Shogun … DNA Films: http://www.dnafilms.com/ Andrew Macdonald on IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0531602/ DNA Films on...

Rosie Nixon is a bestselling author of three novels, and one non-fiction book, 'Be Kind'. Her new novel 'Bad Influence' will be published in summer 2025. As the Editor in Chief and Editor of HELLO! magazine, she was awarded Editor of the Year by the British Society of Magazine Editors and was involved in exclusive stories about the Royal Family and A-List celebrities, attending parties and events...

David Markus is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. His interdisciplinary writing focuses on representations of dwelling and domesticity in late-capitalist contexts; social practices in contemporary art; the conflict between intimacy and artistic ambition in twentieth-century literature, art, and film; and the question of Jewish belonging in the...

Julie Reshe is a Ukrainian-born philosopher and the author of a negative psychoanalytic approach. With over 300 patients, she has extensive experience as a negative practitioner. ​ She earned her PhD studying psychoanalysis at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts under the supervision of Alenka Zupančič. She studied existential therapy at the University of Oxford and h...

Tomiwa Owolade is a Nigerian-born British journalist, author and critic. He writes about social and cultural issues for many publications, including The Times and The Sunday Times, The Observer, The Telegraph, New Statesman and London Evening Standard. He has also frequently appeared on BBC Radio 4 and Times Radio. His interests cover many topics, including identity politics, freedom of speech, re...

Nicole Stott is an author, artist, engineer and veteran NASA Astronaut with two spaceflights and 104 days in space as a crewmember on both the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle. In her book “Back to Earth: What Life In Space Taught Me About Our Home Planet – And Our Mission To Protect It”, Nicole presents essential lessons in problem-solving, survival, and crisis response that all...

Bertha Chin is a Senior Lecturer in Communications And New Media at the National University of Singapore. Her research in fan, media & cultural studies covers fan and celebrity cultures, with a focus on Hollywood film and television. She's published on topics covering transcultural fandom, anti-fandom and fan-producer relationships. She's co-edited two books: 'Eating Fandom' and 'Crowdfunding the...

Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. Merve is the author of a host of books including Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017) The Personality Brokers  (Doubleday: New York, 2018), which was sele...

Dame Arlene Phillips is a world-renowned, award-winning choreographer and theatre director. From creating the revolutionary dance group Hot Gossip in the 1970’s to working with stars from film, TV and theatre, Arlene is a household name. Her work includes choreographing Hollywood films such as ‘Annie’, ‘Legend’ and ‘Monty Python's The Meaning of Life’, West End and Broadway musicals such as ‘Starl...

Hello! We're going to take a break for a little while. In this episode, we discuss what the past 7 months have been like for us and what kinds of topics we'd like to cover in our next season. If you have only recently found us, we'd love it if you'd go back to the beginning and listen to earlier episodes. Also, feel free to share the podcast and subscribe to our Substack in order to be emailed wit...

Caroline Crampton is a writer and a podcaster. She is the creator and host of the award-winning detective fiction podcast Shedunnit. She curates articles as editor-in-chief of The Browser, and she writes reviews and essays for publications like Time, Literary Hub and the Guardian. She writes non-fiction books about the world and how we live in it. Here most recent book A Body Made of Glass was ser...

Pete Etchells is a professor of psychology and science communication at Bath Spa University. He researches the behavioural and wellbeing effects of playing video games, as well as metascientific issues regarding best practice in digital technology effects research. He’s written articles for various publications including New Scientist, the Guardian, the Observer, the New York Times, WIRED and the...

Architect and theorist Jimenez Lai was born in Taiwan, grew up in Canada, and lives in Los Angeles. He holds the Robert Gwathmey chair at Cooper Union, and is the director of architecture agency Bureau Spectacular. Before establishing Bureau Spectacular, Lai lived in a desert shelter at Taliesin and resided in a shipping container at Atelier Van Lieshout on the piers of Rotterdam. Lai's first book...

Baroness Beeban Kidron OBE sits as a crossbench peer in the UK’s House of Lords. She is an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford, a Commissioner on the UN Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development, an expert advisor for the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence, and Founder and Chair of 5Rights Foundation. Before taking up...

Kathy Lette is the author of 17 novels, THE woman about town in London and one of the pioneering voices of contemporary feminism. She is well known for her one-liners, wise cracks and witticism and is as close to being the 21st century's Dorothy Parker as anyone else I know. She wrote her first book, Puberty Blues, when she was 17. The book addresses the sexism in teenage culture in 1970s Australi...

Nick Rhodes is a composer, producer and founding member and keyboardist in Duran Duran. Apart from his work with Duran Duran, he's had several side projects with Arcadia, The Devils and TV Mania and has collaborated with various artists, including Blondie, Mark Ronson and the Dandy Warhols. He's a keen photographer and art collector. Nick's wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Rhodes...

The artist and thinker Brenda L Croft is from the Gurindji/Malngin/Mudburra peoples from the Victorian River region of the Northern Territory of Australia, and Anglo-Australian/German/Irish/Chinese heritage. She has been a key participant in the Australian First Nations and broader contemporary arts and cultural sectors as a multi-disciplinary creative practitioner—artist, arts administrator, cons...

Note: This interview was recorded before the most recent General Election in the UK. Professor Tamsin Edwards is a climate scientist specialising in quantifying the uncertainties of climate model predictions, particularly for the ice sheet and glacier contributions to sea level rise. She was a Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report published in...

Peter Saville is an English art director and graphic designer. He was one of the founders of Factory Records in 1978 and designed many record sleeves for their bands including Joy Division's 'Unknown Pleasures' and New Order's 'Power Corruption and Lies'. Outside of Factory he did work for artists such as Roxy Music, Wham!, OMD, Ultravox, Peter Gabriel, Suede and Pulp. He's worked with various fas...