Culture Study Podcast

In today's BIG MARGARET ANNOUNCEMENT, we mentioned that we'll be doing (consistent) monthly bonus episodes from here on out — and here's the first one! It's part of an ongoing series that we're either calling 1) Late to the Party or 2) Cool Takes, in which we arrive a few weeks late to whatever cultural text is dominating the discourse (because that's when most of us have actually found the time to watch/listen/read/whatever). This...

Weddings are such a rich text. Maybe the richest text? At least how they're performed today, at the intersection of conspicuous consumption and cultural capital. What do your wedding favors say about you? Wha...

When we wax poetic about the wonders of 2007 and 2008... what are we actually yearning for? Serendipity? Hope? The as-yet uncompromised belief that the arc of history bends toward justice? Or maybe just... a world w...

Did you see the stat from last week that the U.S. could've fully funded universal daycare for two million children... using the money spent on the War on Iran (only leading up to the ceasefire)? Do you look a...

When we recorded this episode two weeks ago, we knew that the Supreme Court was planning on releasing a judgment in Chiles v. Salazar — to decide whether Colorado’s law banning conversion therapy (which is similar to laws in 22 other states) likely violated the First Amendment. We thought the decision might come in June. But it fell last week like a hammer, and has the potential to undo years of advocacy to ban treatments that have...

The future of the chain restaurant is... chicken? I learned so much from this conversation with food systems (and chain restaurant) expert Austin Frerick — from how Sysco maintains its restaurant supremacy (and what Sysco "tastes" like) to which chain restaurants have significantly changed in quality (Wendy's) and are on the verge of extinction (also Wendy's). Did you know what makes a chain restaurant resistant to suckage? The ans...

Did you get into gaming as an adult? Did you come back to gaming as an adult? Or, like me, did you savage people on Bubble Bobble in the early '90s... and are trying to figure out how to reproduce that feeling as an adult? Or maybe you're gaming-curious... but can't shake the feeling that gaming is a waste of time (and/or associate it with POS ex-boyfriends).

Keza MacDonald, gaming critic for The Guardian and author of a stunning n...

It's the second coming of Hilary Duff... but real ones know she never went anywhere. This week we're so lucky to have Allie Jones — author of the superb Gossip Time newsletter and Hilary Duff superfan — on the show to answer all your questions about how Duff managed to avoid her peers' timeline, her professionalism, her relatable lack of stage presence, and the crafting of her millennial mom image. (Melody fans will also appreciate...

Free Yourself from the Tyranny of the Automobile!! That's the subtitle of the new book Life After Cars, written by the hosts of the popular podcast "War On Cars." And listen, I am 100% on board: this quasi-hippy spent most of her 20s trekking around college towns on a crappy commuter bike. But like a lot of you, I also live in a place where the infrastructure has refused to catch up to my desire to have fewer cars on the road.

So h...

When I first came up for the idea for the Culture Study Romance Book Club back in January, I knew I wanted every edition to have two books: one contemporary, and one historical. Part of this desire was selfish (I personally gravitate towards historicals) but I also wanted to explore the contrast between what you can do with a romance set in the past (with its particular confines) and one set in the present (with seemingly none, but...

Baby names are in inexhaustible cultural text. They're a way to talk about class, race, and gender, of course — but also the way we perform familial respect and coherence. In this episode, sociologist Hannah Emery — who wrote her dissertation on baby names — joins us to talk about the history of baby names, how naming conventions and aspirations have changed over the last century, and the broad and specific requests parents bring t...

Unstructured conversation! Teenage Feelings! Flesh walls! Abjection! Jacob Elordi's Jacob Elordi-ness! Arguments about the purpose of adaptation! THE GREAT AND VERY SMART MARGARET WILLISON! This bonus episode's got it all. So listen on as three English Majors with various levels of affection for the source text talk about horny aspic, the melodramatic imagination, Romeo + Juliet, pseudo race-blind casting, the 2005 Pride & Prejudic...

I've written a bunch of mildly serious stuff about having BIG NO-KIDS ENERGY. I've talked with so many others — and published interviews with them! — about how they've negotiated conversations with others about not having kids, leaned in to the expansiveness of their no-kids lives, and figured out their own life priorities when they're not what society tells you they should be. But all of these conversations have been pretty, well,...

Why is weird spelled like that? Why is yacht pronounced like that? Why is a firefighter a person who fights fires... but a pickpocket is neither a pick nor a pocket? We're so lucky to have linguist Colin Gorrie on the pod to talk about the "disaster" of English spelling and the history you can unearth in pretty much every English word. This one's such a nerdy delight — if you found yourself enraptured by our episode on accents, you...

What happens when the "move fast and break things" start-up philosophy comes for infertility treatments? Exactly what you'd expect: cut corners, bad service, aesthetically pleasing offices that can't seem to stop churning staff, upsells backed by dubious science, and more. This week, journalist Jackie Davalos joins the pod to talk about her reporting on IVF start-up Kindbody, breaking down why so many of these women's health start-...

How does an audiobook narrator know how to pronounce everything? Do they have editors? How many books can they do a year? What differentiates the live voice from AI — and how do they get paid (vs. how should they get paid)? And why are so many beloved books read by Julia Whelan? WELP, FRIENDS, GOOD NEWS, WE GOT JULIA WHELAN TO COME ANSWER ALL THESE QUESTIONS. This is a conversation about mechanics and production flows and vocal hea...

If you don't make your living creating content online, you probably think of yourself as the furthest thing from an influencer — a designation that has developed the same slightly dirty connotation as being a celebrity, especially a celebrity like Paris Hilton, back in the 1990s. But influencers have cultivated and refined a mode of existing online that has filtered down into the way so many of us navigate online spaces: in the way...

"Family-friendly society" sounds SO BORING but listen: it's what we all want. It's what singles and elders want, it's what parents and partnered people without kids want, it's what KIDS WANT. A society that takes all of us — and our needs and capacities — seriously?? That considers all of us, in whatever scenario we find ourselves, AS A FAMILY? When we announced that we were doing this episode, we got a ton of questions asking us t...

This episode is the result of years of listener requests: how did dating get SO bad, and how can we possibly make it better? Melody and I have been out of the dating game for a hot minute, but we knew that the combination of your excellent questions + an excellent co-host [Jonquilyn Hill, host of Vox's Explain It All who is, importantly, currently dating] + sociological discussion of how dating has historically functioned (and why ...