The Culture Journalist

Just a little over a year ago, everyone was talking about the Great Resignation — a trend of workers across multiple different sectors resigning from their jobs. But amid rising interest rates, inflation, stagnating wages, and layoffs in… uh… certain industries we may or may not be intimately familiar with , we seem to have entered an entirely new chapter in the history of work.  It’s not just tha...

This week’s episode goes out to the journalists in your life. (Or you, if you happen to be a journalist). According to one estimate , nearly 130,000 workers in tech and media have lost their job over the 12 months — and while we’ve talked about the annual ritual of media layoffs before, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that we’re finally reaching the end of the era of digital media as we know it. Is...

Do you ever just look around and get the feeling that everything is just… worse?  This week, we’re joined by Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman , a Los Angeles-based filmmaker, and Lauren Boyle, co-founder of the long-running NYC art collective DIS , to discuss how the story of the 21st century became one where consumer experiences are always getting crappier, jobs are becoming increasingly precarious, and wor...

Have you ever wondered why the Silicon Valley oligarchs seem so obsessed with preparing for the end of the world? In our first episode of 2023, we join media theorist Douglas Rushkoff on an epic journey through the universe of million-dollar bunkers, libertarian island micronations, and hypothetical Mars colonies to explore why they want to get away from us so badly when the apocalypse hits — and...

AI image-generation tools like DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion are creating something of a moral panic in the worlds of art, media, and design. And for good reason: Graphic designers and other commercial artists are worried that AI will spur companies to replace human labor with machines while exacerbating the scourge of intellectual property theft that they’ve already been dealing with...

In the spring of 2021, we recorded an interview with artist, technologist, and Interdependence host Mat Dryhurst about a then-little-known technology called NFTs, short for non-fungible tokens. (You may have heard of them.) Seemingly out of nowhere, musicians like Grimes and Kings of Leon were netting millions of dollars by uploading their work to something called the blockchain — and we wanted to...

If you were alive in the late ’90s, chances are there was an entire chapter of your life that was soundtracked by Eve 6’s “Inside Out” — you know, that insanely catchy, angst-filled “heart in a blender” song that, starting in 1998, was ubiquitous on the radio and during Saturday trips to the mall. Nearly 25 years later, the Southern California alt-rock giants are back in the zeitgeist, though for...

Hey pals. We’re going to kick things off today with a quote from the great Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Gramsci was describing the political situation in Italy and Europe a year into the Great Depression. But his words also sum up the...

What do billionaire Peter Thiel, Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance, and edge-lordy, art-kid podcasts like Red Scare and Wet Brain have in common? According to journalist James Pogue , the author of an expansive, 9,000-word article that ran in Vanity Fair last month, they’re all part of a loose-knit constellation of fringe public intellectuals, conservative politicians, and independent media person...

Flower crowns. Culturally appropriative costumes. Dead-eyed influencers snapping selfies in front of branded activations. If you have never been to Coachella, you probably think of it as a sum of the memes that have circulated about it online — or, at the very least, as an avatar for American youth culture at its most extravagant and, well, capitalist.  Today, we’re going to advance the somewhat c...

When you're an artist navigating the 21st century creator economy, it can be hard to feel like you have a support system to fall back on. Which is why Yancey Strickler , a former music journalist and the co-founder of Kickstarter and The Creative Independent , had something of a eureka moment recently while revisiting Michael Azerrad’s groundbreaking chronicle of the 1980s punk and indie scenes, O...

Especially in the internet age, it’s hard to say who an artist’s story belongs to. Musicians can communicate with audiences directly, fan armies rise up to defend their faves against narratives they don’t agree with, and even if we haven’t met the artist in person, we all have tales of the ways their music has touched our lives. But when veteran music journalist Paul Cantor set out to write a biog...

Is it possible to imagine a future where the platforms that circumscribe every aspect of our online lives *aren’t* owned by the same handful of for-profit behemoths — companies that have come under fire time and time again for prioritizing shareholder interests and exponential growth over the economic and psychological well being of their users? Could we ever live in a world where these tools, fro...

Welcome to season three of The Culture Journalist, a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. We’re excited to kick things off today with an episode that feels pretty damn perfect for these darkest days of winter. Think: neo-Gothic architecture, darkened libraries full of dusty old books, putting on your smartest blue blazer and rushing across a misty university quad at dawn. Friends, we’re...

We know we said that we were taking a pause from publishing as we cook up Season 3 of The Culture Journalist, but we couldn’t resist jumping back in for a quick one-off about a topic we just can’t shake: Neil Young (et al.) vs. Spotify.  The TL;DR is that Young, on the heels of an open letter by a cadre of scientists, medical professionals, and academics, threatened to pull his catalog from the st...

Back in September, Sotheby’s announced it was auctioning off one of 13 surviving original copies of the U.S. constitution. Given the rarity and historic significance of the document, it wasn’t surprising that it would make some headlines. But the news was quickly overshadowed by the revelation that 17,000 people on the internet were teaming up to bid on it. They did this through forming something...

Get ready to hide under a napkin with a fried song bird while shouting “f**k off” in a thick Scottish accent, because this week we’re talking about HBO’s Succession . The third season of the acclaimed media family drama kicked off last month, and from the acting, to the writing, to the plot-twist momentum, it’s shaping up to be the series’ best yet.  Part of Succession ’s pitch-perfect rendering o...

It’s 2021, which means that us millennials are in for a parade of 20-year anniversaries of things that informed our understanding of culture and the world. Y2K. September 11th. The Strokes’ Is this It? . There’s even a festival happening called Just Like Heaven , which basically packs the entire history of 2000s indie music into a single day. Part of that strange nostalgia train includes a film we...

On this week's episode of The Culture Journalist, we talk about collab houses: The McMansion-sized influencer incubators where young social media celebrities shack up to shoot TikTok videos, churn out brand deliverables, and generally lead glamorous lives for the sake of turning those experiences into content.  Just when we thought we couldn’t read another take on the phenomenon, a contributing ed...

Has music journalism lost its way? Earlier this week, the debate bubbled up on music Twitter after a user named @cllnsmith posted a viral joke about Pitchfork that (understandably) made a lot of people in the music journo community pretty mad. The timing, for our own opportunistic purposes, was perfect, because we happened to be putting the finishing touches on an episode with veteran music journa...

This week, we'll be digging into a phenomenon that has been on our mind a lot lately: The rise of the so-called "creator" economy, and the possibilities and perils of a model of cultural patronage grounded in a very specific type of relationship between producers and fans.  Friends, we're talking about parasocial interaction, the phenomenon whereby a cultural producer fosters a kind of illusory, (...

While scrolling on Doordash one night last year, co-host Emilie Friedlander made a strange discovery: She stumbled upon a listing for a restaurant called F*cking Good Pizza. Only, as far as she could tell, it didn't seem to actually exist. Her recent long read for VICE, “ The Mysterious Case of the F*cking Good Pizza ,” chronicles her months-long investigation of a ring of mysterious restaurants w...

What does the unfolding NFT craze mean for the future of music—and particularly, for independent artists? To help us make sense of this strange new chapter in the cultural economy, we enlisted Mat Dryhurst , a Berlin-based artist, technologist, and teacher who you’ve probably seen commenting on such brain-bending matters on Twitter—and who co-hosts the fantastic Interdependence podcast with Holly...

Hey everyone. We’re excited to kick off our second season today with a conversation on a subject that is near and dear to hearts: counterculture. It's a term that has been used to describe pretty much every major, music-adjacent youth movement of the 20th century, from the Beats and the hippies, to 70s hip-hop and punk, to the darkened warehouses in Detroit where techno was born. For some of us, c...

Hello there. Welcome to the last installment of our first season. From musicians adjusting to an industry that has moved entirely online , to journalists fighting for increased workplace protection s and newsroom diversity , to independent venue operators banding together to petition Congress for federal relief —it’s hard to avoid the fact that creative workers have spent this year asking American...