The Pop Culture Professors

It’s the UConn Popcast, and we analyze the movie Sinners, starring Michael B. Jordan, just released on streaming. We address the political themes of the movie, focusing on its generic identity as a Southern Gothic, the historical context in which the movie takes place, its engagement with ideas of utopia, community, freedom, and the siren songs that often lead communities down false roads in searc...

It’s the UConn Popcast, and we continue our analysis of Andor season 2 with the conclusion to the series. We break down, analyze, and explain the political themes in these finale episodes, focusing on freedom, order and their interconnectedness in both the rebellion and the Empire. We explore the extent to which farce is an operative mode of storytelling in this arc. And we consider Cassian's stat...

It’s the UConn Popcast, and we continue our analysis of Andor season 2 with episodes 7-9. We break down the politics of these episodes, focusing on the question of when in a rebellion must you break cover and insist - publicly - on the truth. We see a second major theme of this arc as discipline. The rebellion is moving from a para-military to a military posture, and requires increasing discipline...

It’s the UConn Popcast, and we continue our analysis of Andor season 2 with episodes 4-6. We break down the politics of these episodes, focusing on the mirrored political challenges faced by figures from the Empire and the Rebellion. We see a big theme of these episodes as “too much information,” as both sides struggle to distinguish friend from foe, signal from noise, the authentic from the inaut...

It’s the UConn Popcast, and today we react to Andor Season 2, episodes 1-3. We break down the politics of these episodes, focusing on the motives and aims of the rebellion and the Empire. Both sides have major coordination problems in these episodes, although the causes are very different. We explain and analyze the recurrent problems of authoritarian control and rebellion against it, and the way...

It’s the UConn Popcast, and what impact will AI have on being human in the next decade? Elon University’s Center for Imagining the Digital Future just released a big report on this question, based on a survey of nearly 300 global tech experts. These insiders predict major changes in the very near future to the way we think about work, life, and ourselves. We talked with Lee Rainie, the director of...

It’s the UConn Popcast, and on the 100th anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel, we explore what The Great Gatsby means in America today. In this deep-dive we ask: What did Gatsby mean in 1925, and how have those meanings changed in 2025? What mythologies of America does Gatsby circulate, and challenge? How does Gatsby read to a Brit who never read it in high school, and to an American...

It’s the UConn Popcast, and we spoke with Duke Law Professor James Boyle about his new book The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood (MIT Press, 2024). We spoke with Boyle about how our legal and moral understandings of personhood are being challenged by advances in AI. We discussed the role of the law, popular culture, tests of sentience, and our capacity for empathy in shaping this urgent debat...

It’s the UConn Popcast, and can you fall in love with ChatGPT? Can, and should, you have sex with a robot? We asked Professor Kate Devlin, a leading researcher on intimate relations between humans and artificial intelligences, to help us navigate the new landscape of sex and love with robots. Kate is a Professor of AI & Society in the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London. She’s...

It’s the UConn Popcast, and we've been experiencing a revolution in the past few years, as artificial intelligence becomes an increasingly common part of everyday life. Powerful AI tools are now integrated into our work, our schools, our creative industries, and our experiences of dating and companionship. This is a disorientating experience, one that changes not only our views of technology, but...

It’s the UConn Popcast, and “The Beast” is a 2023 sci fi / romance movie by French director Bertrand Bonello, in which artificial intelligence has determined that human emotions are a danger, and must be surgically controlled. In this deep dive, we ask whether this is really a film about AI, a transhistorical love story, a narrative of societal decline, or something else entirely. The Beast stars...

It’s the UConn Popcast, and when did we really start dreaming about the promise, and the danger, of artificial intelligence? When ChatGPT was released in 2022? When IBMs Deep Blue defeated Chess world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997? When Stanley Kubrick introduced us to HAL 9000 in 1968? Or perhaps you think it was much earlier. Maybe we have had the dream of AI since the development of the first...

It’s the UConn Popcast, and A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Steven Spielberg’s 2001 movie, is a strange and profound text on human-AI relations. Centering on David, an artificial child who is embraced and then abandoned by his adoptive human mother, the movie has the structure of a fairy tale and the sensibility of a horror film. We found the text to have significant things to say about the ethics o...

It’s the UConn Popcast, and Ex Machina, Alex Garland’s 2014 sci fi movie, is a provocative examination of what an updated Turing test for a super-capable AI might look like, if the designer of the test was a megalomaniacal tech-mogul / genius. The movie, starring Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson, and Alicia Vikander, is a rich and often confounding text, which seems to posit a horrifying possibility:...

This episode is based upon three readings: Alan Turing’s Computing Machinery and Intelligence aka The Turing Test paper. Turing starts his paper by asking “can machines think?” before deciding that’s a meaningless question. Instead, he invents something he calls “the imitation game” - a text conversation where the player has to guess whether they are chatting with another person or with an AI. Cha...

It’s the UConn Popcast, and in this episode of our series on artificial intelligence, we discuss Joanna Bryson’s essay “Robots Should be Slaves.” We dive headlong into this provocative argument about the rights of robots. As scholars of cultural and social understanding, we are fascinated by the arguments Bryson - a computer scientist - makes about who should, and should not, be rights-bearing mem...

It’s the UConn Popcast, and in the second of our series on Thinking Machines we consider Karel Čapek’s “Rossum’s Universal Robots” (1920). Čapek’s play invented the word “robot” and pioneered the genre of the AI uprising. The play - a clear influence on works such as 2001, Blade Runner, The Terminator, and Battlestar Galactica – is a deep rumination on the boundary between the natural and artifici...

It’s the UConn Popcast, and this is the first episode in our new series about artificial intelligence and popular culture. In this first episode, we revisit Alan Turing's seminal1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, in which he asks "Can machines think?" In the paper, Turing proposes what became known as "The Turing test," a game of deception which, if a machine were to pass it, could b...

P. Djèlí Clark is the author of acclaimed and award-winning speculative fiction, including the much-loved Dead Djinn universe books, Ring Shout, and his most recent, The Dead Cat Tail Assassins. We speak with him about why he writes, how he sees speculative fiction as a genre, whether we can expect to see more Dead Djinn books, the origins of his acclaimed novella Ring Shout, his new book The Dead...

Dr. Dexter Gabriel is an associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut. He’s published and taught widely on the histories of slavery, resistance, and freedom, including teaching a superb class on slavery in popular culture, particularly film. He’s the author of the 2023 book Jubilee’s Experiment: The British West Indies and American Abolitionism (Cambridge UP, 2023). But in addit...

It’s the UConn Popcast, and today we offer a political science / popular culture studies view of Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. We situate Swift’s endorsement within the wider moment of popular culture, and consider her long journey from a self-imposed moratorium on political speech to her current position as the most sought-after endorsement in...

Fede Alvarez’s "Alien: Romulus" hit cinemas on August 16th. It’s set between the events of Alien and Aliens, two science fiction classics. We review the movie and ask whether it continues the thematic work done in its lauded predecessors, touching on capitalism, AI, body horror, subversion of sexual and reproductive systems, colonialism, class, and genre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit me...

It’s the UConn Popcast, and Purple Rain, Prince’s semi-autobiographical, semi-concert film, hit cinemas 40 years ago this week. The movie followed the album of the same name by a few short weeks. While the album is considered a defining musical achievement, the movie met a mixed reception at the time, and later critics have been both troubled by its misogyny and perplexed by its surreal qualities...

It’s the UConn Popcast, and recently UConn’s Center for the Study of Popular Music hosted a panel discussion on Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Music. The panel featured Dr. Mitchell Green, Professor of Philosophy, University of Connecticut; Dustin Ballard, a musician and creator of the social media channel “There I Ruined It”; and Dr. Aaron Dial, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Hu...

It’s the UConn Popcast, and “Hit Man” is writer and director Richard Linklater’s latest film, available on Netflix after a brief theatrical run. We analyze the movie through Linklater’s classic themes: identity and its malleability, American sub-cultures, and American mythologies. “Hit Man” is a less challenging watch than much of Linklater’s canon, but it works best, we argue, when seen as part o...