Pop Literacy

Pop Literacy

Your biweekly pop culture book club.

Episodes

January 11, 2023 60 mins

Francesca T. Royster’s Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions is a vital read that helps us to understand how country music got whitewashed, stripping it of its distinctly African American origins in slavery and its aftermath, and shows us how embracing that history will only enrich the form. Royster weaves Black, queer, and feminist scholarship into her analysis, but even more compellingly, she brings her own experiences a...

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TV journalist Michael Ausiello wrote a 2017 memoir called Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies that detailed his 13-year relationship with his husband Kit Cowan, who, in a devastating turn, was diagnosed with terminal cancer and, as the title tells us, died. Not to sound jaded, but there are a lot of memoirs about cancer and death. This book, however, is special because it’s so specific and true and willing to ...

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Consider this a Pop Literacy year-end gift: the recommendation of a deeply engrossing read for the average book fan, an extra fantastic read for writers of all mediums and genres, and a round-up of some of the finest dramas to ever unfold on the small screen. All those things come courtesy of Life’s Work: A Memoir, the personal and professional autobiography – and unofficial writing how-to – from Emmy and Peabody Award-winning Dead...

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The Big Bang Theory ran for 12 seasons, 279 episodes, on CBS, and continues to be a pop culture presence with its frequent re-airings on cable, permanent home on HBO Max, and its spin-off life with the CBS hit Young Sheldon. With its spot in television history firmly secured, the series was due for a comprehensive chronicle of its success, and journalist and author Jessica Radloff’s New York Times bestseller The Big Bang Theory: Th...

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November 2, 2022 59 mins

Carell Augustus’s brilliant and beautiful photography book Black Hollywood reimagines, and restages, iconic Hollywood moments from the likes of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Singin’ in the Rain, and Mission Impossible with Black entertainers at their center. The work allows Black people to see themselves as part of the fabric of Hollywood history and also inherently questions American entertainment’s shameful...

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James Gavin’s stunning biography of pop star George Michael—simply entitled George Michael: A Life—dives deep into an enigmatic, charismatic figure who dominated pop music in the 1980s and ‘90s, but never seemed to find peace and happiness.

James’s thorough and riveting account of Michael’s life traces how his battles with his own sexuality, his larger-than-life image, tablo...

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The episode originally aired July 23, 2019.

Jennifer Lopez turns 50 this month and is at the top of her game: dancing her way through an international tour, engaged to baseball superstar Alex Rodriguez, and managing to be one of the few massive pop stars with lots of loyal fans and relatively few haters. But it wasn’t always thus. Her career hit a precarious point in 2002—wh...

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This episode originally aired March 4, 2019.

It was the decade of “The Macarena,” the O.J. Simpson trial, the teen pop boom, VHS tapes, and Nintendo. It was also before 9/11 and Columbine, a time when the nation hung on every lurid detail of the president’s sex life and the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan feud. Though 2000s nostalgia is on the way—as we discussed previously—it’s hard to let go of our nostalgia for what looks like our ...

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This episode originally aired April 8, 2019

Boy bands as we know them have been around since New Edition got together in 1978—and now, they’re bigger than ever, thanks to online fandom. New Kids on the Block, Backstreet Boys, O-Town, 98 Degrees, and Boyz II Men are among the groups who have recently been on tour or recorded new music. And the boy band legacy is evident in two recent developments: An excellent new YouTube Originals ...

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This episode originally aired February 19, 2019.

AOL Instant Messenger, the first iPods, Paris Hilton, emo, Mean Girls, The O.C., low-rise jeans… Now that it’s 2019, it’s time to prepare for a wave of 2000s nostalgia. Pop Literacy host Jennifer Keishin Armstrong is joined by guest co-host Andrea Bartz, author of the forthcoming 2009 nostalgia novel The Lost Night, to discuss what we miss most about the 2000s, from MySpace to the ve...

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June 7, 2022 60 mins
This episode originally aired April 16, 2019.

After years of massive popularity around the world, Korean boy band BTS is breaking through to the top of mainstream American culture. They just dropped a new album (Map of the Soul: Persona), which includes the single “Boy with Luv,” featuring Halsey; and they played Saturday Night Live, a first for a Korean act. They also recently surpassed 5 billion streams on Spotif...

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Thomas Edison and the French Lumiere brothers have widely been credited with inventing motion pictures, but there’s another strong contender for the distinction: Louis LePrince, a driven inventor who dedicated every moment of his life and most of his money to making moving pictures not only possible but accessible enough to be widely available—and, in the process, to change the world. But he’s never bee...

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Asking yourself how you ended up paying for half a dozen streaming entertainment subscriptions every month? There’s a book for that: Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix, entertainment journalists Dade Hayes and Dawn Chmielewski’s insider history on how Netflix started the game with those little red envelopes of DVDs, and just a few short years had us all Netflixing and chilling – and b...

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In Truly, Madly, author Stephen Galloway explores the tumultuous relationship between two giants of Hollywood’s Golden Age, movie stars Vivian Leigh and Laurence Olivier, which he calls “the romance of the century.” The dual biography explores the lives of both of these huge personalities, which collided in 1934 when a Leigh’s friend brought her to see Theatre Royal, featuring Olivier—that night, Leigh ...

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Many of the pop culture devoted among us sadly missed the chance to experience the New York City populated by pop artist and pop culture genius Andy Warhol, filled with brilliant work (solo and collaborations), and exploring the city surrounded by the world’s most famous and infamous and everyone in between. A read of Warhol’s classic posthumously-published book The Andy Warhol Diaries has been an oft-revisited taste of the Warholi...

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The writer-producer Jenji Kohan has given us some of the best depictions of women on television. Nancy Botwin of Weeds followed a Breaking Bad-like path from suburban widow to druglord. The diverse cast of Orange Is the New Black revolutionized TV with not one, but dozens, of empathetic, flawed, fascinating characters. And GLOW, which followed a scrappy women’s wrestling operation, gave us a women’s spo...

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February 15, 2022 79 mins

So, yeah, whatever did happen to Richard Gere’s career? The Golden Globe-winning actor was once everywhere on the big screen, but has been largely MIA for the last few years. Could it have something to do with his ongoing vocal support of Tibetan independence, a stance that has gotten him banned from China?

Given China’s importance in Hollywood’s big picture, Wall Street Journal journalist Erich Schwartzel writes in his fascinating...

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Novelist Jami Attenberg’s new memoir I Came All This Way to Meet You takes readers behind the scenes of her creative life, from scraping by in Brooklyn before it became a cultural phenomenon and going on book tour in a station wagon to becoming a bestselling author and finding peace in New Orleans.

In this episode, we talk to Jami about the rise of Brooklyn, the freedom of t...

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January 4, 2022 64 mins

When Betty White died on New Year’s Eve, it was a shocker—even though she was 99 years, 11 months, and two weeks old. It seemed impossible to conceive of living in this world without White, who brought us so much joy via a television career that has spanned the entire length of the medium’s history.

We talk about the heartrending outpouring of celebrity grief that accompanie...

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The new novel Dava Shastri’s Last Day by Kirthana Ramisetti tells the story of an aging music mogul who plans her own assisted death after a devastating cancer diagnosis—but decides to let news of her passing leak a little early so she can read what she assumes will be her glowing obituaries. Instead, she witnesses the public revelation of some of her darkest secrets. In this episode, we talk to Kirthan...

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