The Culture We Deserve

Alternative title for this episode: Don't let the Prez sundown on me. Why is the inability to retire or withdraw, damn the consequences, a recurring problem in American politics? From Biden to RBG to Mitch McConnell, the powerful all want to die in the saddle. Is it the baby boomers, or is it what that generation represents: infinite growth, unquestioned power, top of the world baby. Jessa and Nic...

Is American culture hostile to children? With certain hotels, resorts, restaurants, and other public spaces forbidding the presence of kids, and the government ending its extremely popular pandemic-era family aid program, and the endless social media complaints about screaming children and bad parenting, yeah okay maybe. But is this a new development, or are we inventing a golden age where childre...

Amazon controls everything, literature is culturally irrelevant outside of the Tiktok subgenres of Dark Academia Dark Romance Dark Fantasy, the industry is still going through corporate consolidation, etc etc. Jessa and Nico get into the terrible state of publishing, and what happens to an industry wholly dependent on the university system when the university system goes into crisis.  This week's...

What's an Arts District without any art? Mostly condo buildings named after composers, restaurants with a $200 seafood tower, and Madam Butterfly as muzak. And what's a literary community without any literature? It's spending tens of thousands of dollars on an MFA so you can teach creativity workshops online. Jessa and Nico assess the wreckage left by Philadelphia's shocking University of the Arts...

If the masculinity influencers like Tate and Huberman are our society's surrogate daddies, who are the women giving mother? Are the makeup YouTube tutorials, home cooking TikToks, and parasocial substitutes a baby bottle replacement for the nurturance and care women feel like they lack? What is the divide between the metaphorical mother and the literal human woman? Can you self-care your way throu...

It's not a great time to be a fan. The hooligan, the violent and illogical fanatic who will commit crimes to defend their faves, is no longer found only in sports. The hooligan can be found worshipping pop stars, politicians, Netflix shows, and comic book characters. There they are, issuing death threats to those who dare to criticize a singer-songwriter. They are in your mentions, swarming you fo...

Jessa and Nico return from their week off to discover nothing has really changed. We're still talking about campus protests (instead of what they are protesting), technology is still celebrating the destruction of things that are handmade and skillful and good, people are still trying to declare who art is "for" and who is allowed to have opinions about it, and American fascists are still nostalgi...

Americans are being warned by their government that before they leave the country they need to check their luggage for any "stray ammo" or weaponry that they might have stashed in there. Is the world getting sick of America's nonsense? Europe is ending its golden visa program, Turks & Caicos has Americans under arrest for trying to bring guns etc on vacation, and Venice is now charging entry fees...

Civil War is a hit! Both blue states and red states agree that watching a movie that lets you fantasize about the half of the country you don't agree with being buried in a shallow mass grave is a great time. Could it happen here? Probably. Jessa and Nico get into why so many people want it to. And what a film, devoid of any insight into political polarization or who is paying for those Western Fo...

The Dept of Health and Human Services ruled that hospitals could no longer do pelvic exams on unconscious women without their consent, in the year of 2024. Nico and Jessa get into the horror of having a human body right now, with telehealth companies selling drugs to cure baldness that have been linked to psychosis to abortion laws that change every day to the rise of entrepreneurial and hedge-fun...

DEI is the new Critical Race Theory is the new Affirmative Action -- a way to distract you from the way finance is ruining everything. Jessa and Nico get into the online conspiracies that soon your doctors, pilots, and dentists will just be some guy they pull from the streets. Also: Is Berlin over? If Trump becomes President again, are we ready for four more years of hideous anti-Trump "art"? This...

America's oldest art school, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, is closing its degreed programs after a perilous drop in enrollment. It is just one of the many arts and humanities programs that are being slashed, retooled, and shut down across America. Nico, who both attended and taught at art school, and Jessa discuss the state of arts education, the tight grip the MFA has on the imaginations...

Every week there's a new docuseries where the victims of horrific violence or exploitation have to get in front of the camera and tell us the bad things that happened to them. And within a few days, we've forgotten again. Nico and Jessa look at the overproduction of nonfiction content, from the multiple "investigations" into Twin Flames to the multiplicity of deep dives on Nickelodeon damaged chil...

Are the tradwives coming to take your husbands? Page Six printed an essay by a woman whose partner got addicted to depictions of effortless domesticity and wondered why his house was not as blissful. Divorce rates are high, marriage rates are low, what is the meaning of wife in this moment? Jessa and Nico talk tradwive propaganda, why the feminists are divorcing, and whether we should abolish the...

The viewership of the Oscars is less than half of what it was a decade ago, and yet the award ceremony dominates celebrity media more than ever. The films themselves are almost secondary to what the awards represent, which is... racial equality? social harmony? proof that our democracy is working? Unclear. People take sides in the awards so much that Emma Stone was threatened with cancellation imm...

Hey, hey you. No no no, act cool. Listen, I have discovered some pretty potent information about the dealings of our government in (Iran/Nicaragua/Chile/Brooklyn). People have died knowing this stuff, you know what I'm saying? So this is for your eyes only, well, yours and the rest of the Netflix audience. Netflix has been releasing very successful conspiracy-related docuseries the last few years....

The Oscars love the Holocaust. Jessa and Nico look back at the short history of the Oscar bait Holocaust film, from Sophie's Choice to Schindler's List to Zone of Interest, and why we set so many films in this apocalyptic moment. And what is the lasting effect of a culture overstuffed with these good vs evil tales and allows our historical education to be done by entertainment properties? http://t...

Families of the victims of mass shootings are participating in The Shotline, where AI recreates their loved ones' voices to plea for political action. How useful is sentimentality as a political tool? Jessa and Nico look through how various advocacy and political groups have used appeals to sentimentality to sway opinion in the name of gun control, support for Israel, amnesty for FARC in Colombia,...

Has TikTok ruined music? With its users flooding concert venues to meow at the artists, with the "oh no" song playing in the background of videos of puppies falling down and actual atrocities, with a standoff between two global corporate forces in its battle with Universal Music Group? Or will Spotify have that honor, by algorithming us all into mediocre bliss, as we toss our pennies at our genius...

With the release of "Griselda," a Narcos-adjacent Netflix show that reboots Scarface as a woman as if this were the Ghostbusters, Jessa and Nico look at the specific place Colombia and the international drug wars has in the American imagination.  http://theculturewedeserve.substack.com

America has an arrested development problem. But while men are castigated regularly for not meeting the markers of basic adulthood, the feminine, the girly, the infantile in women's culture is cause for celebration. Women want to be girls forever. Hosts Nico and Jessa discuss the auteur of childishness Greta Gerwig, our eternal teen Taylor Swift, the taboo of aging, and the dark side of staying in...

Media continues its decline with layoffs and closures. The only winners appear to be the tech intermediaries like Meta, Amazon, and Google. (X continues to lose at everything.) Hosts Jessa Crispin and Nico Rodriguez discuss the new models of journalism, the fantasies of meaningful work in the modern age, and why everyone profits except the people who do the work. http://theculturewedeserve.substac...

As we head into our end of the year break, here is a sample of our bonus episode, a discussion of what the last four years of Marvel Cinematic Universe vs Scorsese discourse has really been about -- the pivot from an auteur-focused cinema to corporate movie culture. Hosts Jessa Crispin and Nicolas Rodriguez cover this transition, argue over whether Scorsese cares about women, and why A24 has its o...

Jessa Crispin speaks with two working artists, Philadelphia Orchestra bassoonist Daniel Matsukawa and mezzo-soprano singer Amber Fasquelle, about the sometimes precarious life in music. But there's a missing element: what is the role of the audience member in this ecosystem? Are we all just consumers or do we have other choices?

We tend to think of the art world as being more progressive than the rest of society -- mostly because we confuse libertine with progressive -- but actually it's extremely conservative, especially when it comes to gender. In classical music, the men are geniuses, and the women are support systems or vessels or ornaments. Which is, in part, why Gustav's wife Alma, who certainly was no support syste...