New Books in Popular Culture

Over the span of a single decade, VHS technology changed the relationship between privacy and entertainment, pried open the closed societies behind the Iron Curtain, and then sank back into oblivion. Its meteoric rise and fall encapsulated the dynamics of the '80s and foreshadowed the seismic cultural shifts to come after the Cold War.In the West, its advent deepened the trends of the age: individualism, consumerism, the fragmentation of society, and the consolidation of corporate power in the entertainment industry and its victory over the regulatory powers of the state. In the East, it encouraged new forms of socialization and economic exchanges, while announcing the gradual crumbling of government control over the imagination of the people.By the mid-1990s, the VHS format was displaced by the DVD. The DVD would eventually give way to streaming. As explored in Videotape (Bloomsbury, 2025), by Dr. Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy in the Object Lessons series, the cultural legacy of the videotape continues to inform our relationship to technology, privacy, and to entertainment. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Michael Brown undertakes a thorough study of Eyeliner's Eyeliner's Buy Now (Bloomsbury 2025) a vaporwave homage to the kitsch electronic sounds of the 1980s and 1990s. Eyeliner's BUY NOW (2015) belongs to a new genre for our times: vaporwave. Emerging in the early 2010s on the internet, vaporwave originated with a cohort of millennial artists who reimagined the musical soundtracks of 1980s-1990s consumerism with an adroit mixture of irony and sincerity. One of these was Eyeliner, the alias of New Zealand computer musician Luke Rowell (a.k.a. Disasteradio). For his vaporwave masterpiece, Rowell harnessed computer software to craft a unique album, a catchy, funky, and witty tour through the utopias of advertising at "the end of history." BUY NOW epitomizes a new kind of album for the internet age: made DIY-style, all digital, free, licensed under Creative Commons, and released to a "virtual" community, an online scene without geographic center. Drawing on original interviews and the album's production archive, Eyeliner's BUY NOW (Bloomsbury 2025) uses BUY NOW's story to investigate what it means to create, distribute, and consume independent music in an era of global networks and digital technology. It places the album in both the real-world and online contexts of Rowell's life and career, from early websites to the Spotify era, from Lower Hutt to the world. Michael Brown on Bluesky. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America (Backbeat Books, 2021), Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, 2025), and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, 2025). He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. Bradley Morgan on Facebook and Bluesky. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

The first in a new LSU Press series exploring facets of Louisiana's iconic culture, Mardi Gras Beads (2022) delves into the history of this celebrated New Orleans artifact, explaining how Mardi Gras beads came to be in the first place and how they grew to have such an outsize presence in New Orleans celebrations. It explores their origins before World War One through their ascent to the premier parade catchable by the Depression era. Doug MacCash explores the manufacture of Mardi Gras beads in places as far-flung as the Sudetenland, India, and Japan, and traces the shift away from glass beads to the modern, disposable plastic versions. Mardi Gras Beads concludes in the era of coronavirus, when parades (and therefore bead throwing) were temporarily suspended because of health concerns, and considers the future of biodegradable Mardi Gras beads in a city ever more threatened by the specter of climate change. Doug MacCash covers New Orleans art and culture for NOLA.com, The Times- Picayune, and The New Orleans Advocate.  Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) holds a PhD in Musicology from Florida State University. Her current research focuses on parade musics in Mobile, Alabama's Carnival celebrations. Check out some of MacCash's other pertinent writings from NOLA.com here:  "Pretend Karens, marching traffic cones and French Quarter Fools: An amazing Monday before Mardi Gras" "Biodegradable Mardi Gras beads might be rarest throw of 2022 - or ever" "Mardi Gras flashback: Texas artist, 65, says she was first to bare breasts for beads at Carnival" Emily Ruth Allen (@emmyru91) holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Florida State University. Her current research is about parade musics in Mobile, Alabama's Carnival. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

"OK" as a word accepts proposals, describes the world as satisfactory (but not good), provides conversational momentum, or even agrees (or disagrees). OK as an object, however, tells a story of how technology writes itself into language, permanently altering communication. OK (Bloomsbury, 2023), by Dr. Michelle McSweeney and published by Bloomsbury in 2023, explores this story OK is a young word, less than 200 years old. It began as an acronym for “all correct” when the steam-powered printing press pushed newspapers into the mainstream. Today it is spoken and written by nearly everyone in the world. Drawing on linguistics, history, and new media studies, Michelle McSweeney traces OK from its birth in the Penny Presses through telephone lines, grammar books, and television signals into the digital age. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Steven Spielberg's extraordinary career redefined Hollywood, but his achievement goes far beyond shattered box office records. Rejecting the view of Spielberg as a Barnumesque purveyor of spectacle, Lester D. Friedman presents the filmmaker as a major artist who pairs an ongoing willingness to challenge himself with a widely recognized technical mastery. This new edition of Citizen Spielberg (University of Illinois Press, 2022) expands Friedman's original analysis to include films of the 2010s like Lincoln and Ready Player One. Breaking down the works by genre, Friedman looks at essential aspects of Spielberg's art, from his storytelling concerns and worldview to the uncanny connection with audiences that has powered his longtime influence as a cultural force. Friedman's examination reveals a sustained artistic vision--a vision that shows no sign of exhausting itself or audiences after Spielberg's nearly fifty years as a high-profile filmmaker. Incisive and discerning, Citizen Spielberg, Second Edition, offers a career-spanning appraisal of a moviemaking icon. Nathan Abrams is a professor of film at Bangor University in Wales [https://research.bangor.ac.uk/...(b8c6d91f-14c5-4862-8745-0f5d0e938a28).html]. His most recent work is on film director Stanley Kubrick [https://oxford.universitypress...]. To discuss and propose a book for interview you can reach him at n.abrams@bangor.ac.uk. Twitter: @ndabrams Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

“We know what we want, and one day, our prince will come,” says Toby, the bicycle-shorts-wearing, double ententre-making, unacknowledgely-gay neighbor in RTE's Upwardly Mobile. Though the first queer characters in Irish entertainment television were tropes and stereotypes, they represented an important shift in LGBTQ visibility in Irish media. The road to early representations in entertainment media was a hard road paved by gay rights activists, AIDS stigma, and production teams looking for sensationalism. In LGBTQ Visibility, Media, and Sexuality in Ireland, Páraic Kerrigan explores the dynamics of queer visibility and sexuality in Ireland through televised media between 1974 and 2008. Tune in for our chat about Gay Byrne and the Late Late Show, queer soap stars, the AIDS crisis and globalization of Ireland, and the LGBTQ rights tug-of-war that played out in turn-of-the-century television. Avrill Earls is the Executive Producer of Dig: A History Podcast (a narrative history podcast, rather than interview-based), and an Assistant Professor of History at Mercyhurst University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

It's The Pop Culture Professors, and we analyze the third episode of Vince Gilligan's new series Pluribus. We talk through this episode as a literalization of the problem of being an individual in late-stage capitalism or, if you prefer, the Amazonification of everything. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Business as Usual: How Sponsored Media Sold American Capitalism in the Twentieth Century, (U Chicago Press, 2024) reveals how American capitalism has been promoted in the most ephemeral of materials: public service announcements, pamphlets, educational films, and games—what Caroline Jack calls “sponsored economic education media.” These items, which were funded by corporations and trade groups who aimed to “sell America to Americans,”found their way into communities, classrooms, and workplaces, and onto the airwaves, where they promoted ideals of “free enterprise” under the cloaks of public service and civic education. They offered an idealized vision of US industrial development as a source of patriotic optimism, framed business management imperatives as economic principles, and conflated the privileges granted to corporations by the law with foundational political rights held by individuals. This rhetoric remains dominant—a harbinger of the power of disinformation that so besets us today. Jack reveals the funding, production, and distribution that together entrenched a particular vision of corporate responsibility—and, in the process, shut out other hierarchies of value and common care. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

How are influencers changing the arts? In Influencer Creep: How Optimization, Authenticity, and Self-Branding Transform Creative Culture (U California Press, 2025) Sophie Bishop, an Associate Professor in the University of Leeds' School of Media and Communication analyses the lives of artists and influencers to understand the working and living conditions shaping modern culture. The book draws a comparison between the two sets of workers, showing how artists are having to engage with influencer's techniques to be successful in the online economy, and how both groups struggle with the inequalities of the platform economy. Rich with fascinating case studies, alongside a range of theoretical insights that can be applied across many other aspects of the modern world, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in art, culture and contemporary social life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In the penultimate episode of season 2 of Soundscapes NYC, hosts Ryan Purcell and Kristie Soares sit down with acclaimed historian Alice Echols, author of Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture. Echols—who holds the Barbra Streisand Chair of Contemporary Gender Studies at the University of Southern California—unpacks how disco not only mirrored but actively shaped the social, racial, and sexual revolutions of 1970s New York City. Echols is the author of several books that have framed the way we understand the history of the 1960s and 1970s, and particularly the way music has shaped society at the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race. The conversation begins with Echols' newest research, drawn from her forthcoming book Black Power, White Heat: From Solidarity Politics to Radical Chic, which reexamines interracial activism and allyship during the Black Freedom Movement. From the Angela Davis trial to the alliances formed within SNCC and the Black Panther Party, Echols traces how solidarity both flourished and fractured across the era. Turning to disco, she considers disco's uneasy place in Black and queer cultural history. She notes how disco was created by and for Black audiences, while also being rejected by many in the Black music industry, like James Brown, for being “politically empty.” Through figures like Nile Rodgers, Grace Jones, and Sylvester, Echols argues that disco's lush orchestration and sensual performances reflected radical redefinitions of gender, sexuality, and Black masculinity. With musical excerpts woven throughout, Purcell and Soares guide listeners through the sonic textures of disco—its roots in funk and soul, its resistance to genre boundaries, and its capacity to move bodies and politics alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Black holes, demystified: follow along the quest to understand the history and influence of one of space science's most fascinating and confounding phenomenaLed by physicist James Trefil and astrophysicist Shobita Satyapal, Supermassive: Black Holes at the Beginning and End of the Universe (Smithsonian Books, 2025) traverses the incredible history of black holes and introduces contemporary developments and theories on still unanswered questions about the enigmatic objects. From the early work of Albert Einstein and Karl Schwarzschild to an insider look at black hole-galaxy connection research led by co-author Satyapa, the comprehensive book surveys an exciting and evolving branch of space science, with topics that include: Visibility of black holes Quasars, the brightest objects in the universe The black hole at the center of the Milky Way Popular theories on the origin of black holes Cosmic X rays Death of supermassives Black hole collisions Black holes in science fiction Invisible to the naked eye and telescopes, black holes have mystified and entranced astronomers, scientists, and humanity for more than a century. The first image of a supermassive black hole was only unveiled in 2019, and new black holes are continually discovered. Supermassive illuminates what we know about black holes so far and what we have yet to uncover. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

What is space? What is time? Where did the universe come from? The answers to mankind's most enduring questions may lie in science's greatest enigma: black holes.A black hole is a region of space where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. This can occur when a star approaches the end of its life. Unable to generate enough heat to maintain its outer layers, it shrinks catastrophically down to an infinitely dense point.When this phenomenon was first proposed in 1916, it defied scientific understanding so much that Albert Einstein dismissed it as too ridiculous to be true. But scientists have since proven otherwise. In 1971, Paul Murdin and Louise Webster discovered the first black hole: Cygnus X-1. Later, in the 1990s, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope found that not only do black holes exist, supermassive black holes lie at the heart of almost every galaxy, including our own. It would take another three decades to confirm this phenomenon. On 10 April 2019, a team of astronomers made history by producing the first image of a black hole.A Crack in Everything: How Black Holes Came in from the Cold and Took Cosmic Centre Stage (Apollo, 2025)is the story of how black holes came in from the cold and took cosmic centre stage. As a journalist, Marcus Chown interviews many of the scientists who made the key discoveries, and, as a former physicist, he translates the most esoteric of science into everyday language. The result is a uniquely engaging page-turner that tells one of the great untold stories in modern science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Gender by the Book: 21st-Century French Children's Literature (Routledge, 2025) investigates the gender representations that French children's literature transmits to readers today. Using an interdisciplinary, mixed methods approach, this book grounds its literary analysis in a sociohistorical examination of three key institutions – libraries, book clubs, and subscription magazines – that circulate reading material to children. It shows how French policies, cultural beliefs, and market forces influence the content of children's literature, including tensions between State support for unprofitable artistic endeavors and a belief in children's right to high-quality products on the one hand, and suspicion of activism as anathema to creativity and fear of losing boy readers on the other. In addition, the notion of universalism, which asserts that equality is best achieved when society is blind to differences, thwarts a diverse and equitable array of literary representations. Nevertheless, conditions are favorable for 21st-century French children's publishers to offer a robust body of richly entertaining egalitarian literature for children. Guest Julie Fette, author of Gender by the Book: 21st-Century French Children's Literature published in October 2024 by Routledge. Dr. Fette is Associate Professor of French Studies at Rice University where she is also Rice Faculty Scholar at the Center for the Middle East, Baker Institute and a Faculty Affiliate with the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is also the author of Exclusions: Practicing Prejudice in French Law and Medicine, 1920-1945 from Cornell University Press in 2012 and the co-author of the textbook Les Français from Hackett in 2021, as well as numerous articles and book chapters on subjects from gender and professional life in France to teaching French studies in the classroom and online.  Host Gina Stamm is Associate Professor of French at The University of Alabama. Their research is concentrated on the environmental humanities and speculative literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Surrealism to contemporary science fiction and feminist utopias, in Metropolitan France and the francophone Caribbean.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

It's The Pop Culture Professors, and we consider Bruce Springsteen's 1982 album Nebraska as personal and political document. With the release of the Nebraska 82 box set, and Deliver Me From Nowhere – about the making of the album – we take up the musical and social importance of Springsteen's lo-fi lament. One of us has been listening to Nebraska for their whole adult life, the other had never heard of it until a week ago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

It's The Pop Culture Professors, and we consider Bruce Springsteen's 1982 album Nebraska as personal and political document. With the release of the Nebraska 82 box set, and Deliver Me From Nowhere – about the making of the album – we take up the musical and social importance of Springsteen's lo-fi lament. One of us has been listening to Nebraska for their whole adult life, the other had never heard of it until a week ago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Dr. Rebecca van Laer and her partner purchase a home and move in with their senior cats, Toby and Gus. Their loved ones see this as a step toward an inevitable future-first comes the house, then a dog, then a child. But what if they are just cat people?Moving between memoir, philosophy, and pop culture, Cat (Bloomsbury, 2025) is a playful and tender meditation on cats and their people, part of the Object Lessons series. Van Laer considers cats' role in her personal narrative, where they are mascots of laziness and lawlessness, and in cultural narratives, where they appear as feminine, anarchic, and maladapted, especially in comparison to dogs.From the stereotype of the 'crazy cat lady' to the joy of cat memes to the grief of pet loss, van Laer demonstrates that the cat-person relationship is free of the discipline and dependence required by parenting (and dog-parenting), creating a less hierarchical intimacy that offers a different model for love. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Dr. Michael F. Maniates is a leading scholar in environmental politics and sustainability studies whose work has fundamentally reshaped how researchers and policymakers understand consumption, responsibility, and power in environmental change.  In this current book, The Living-Green Myth (Polity Press, 2025), he identifies recurring paradoxes in the sustainable-consumption agenda: the tendency to propose modest behavioral solutions for immense systemic problems, to depoliticize governance, and to avoid confronting growth. He believes the mantra of “buy green, live lean, save the planet” is a con of recent and unseemly origin. It fosters pernicious assumptions about social change, separates individuals from their real power in the world, and fuels damaging consumption. It thrives because it meets the short-term priorities of governments and business, not the long-term needs of the planet's human and non-human inhabitants. Environmentally concerned individuals can make a meaningful difference in the world, and living green is a start. But alone, it can do more harm than good. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Content moderation on social media has become one of the most daunting challenges of our time. Nowhere is the need for action more urgent than in the fight against terrorism and extremism. Yet despite mass content takedowns, account suspensions, and mounting pressure on technology companies to do more, hate thrives online. Safe Havens for Hate: The Challenge of Moderating Online Extremism (Princeton University Press, 2025) looks at how content moderation shapes the tactics of harmful content producers on a wide range of social media platforms.Drawing on a wealth of original data on more than a hundred militant and hate organizations around the world, Dr. Tamar Mitts shows how differing moderation standards across platforms create safe havens that allow these actors to organize, launch campaigns, and mobilize supporters. She reveals how the structure of the information environment shapes the cross-platform activity of extremist organizations and movements such as the Islamic State, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and QAnon, and highlights the need to consider the online ecosystem, not just individual platforms, when developing strategies to combat extremism.Taking readers to the frontlines of the digital battleground where dangerous organizations operate, Safe Havens for Hate sheds critical light on how governments and technology companies grapple with the tension between censorship and free speech when faced with violence, hate, and extremism. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

The Road (Akashic Books, 2025) is an illuminating selection of photographs spanning iconic punk rock guitarist Brian Baker's many years of global touring with Bad Religion, Dag Nasty, and other bands. The images are intelligent and arresting, reflecting time spent both inside and outside the bubble of backstages and tour buses. While touring is easily glamorized, all traveling musicians know that twenty-two hours of every day lack the lights, glitter, and other rock-and-roll trappings. For Baker, some of that time is spent photographing what interests him most in his surroundings. As revealed in The Road, his fascinations range from bizarre highway signage; to unsettling figurines, mannequins, and statuettes; to religious iconography that carries extra weight when one considers the ethos of a band called Bad Religion; to steaming cups of espresso and classic diner meals; to guitars, guitars, and more guitars; and so much more. The Road is designed in collaboration with award-winning photographer and curator Jennifer Sakai. Music lovers across the globe will revel in a Brian Baker's–eye view of the landscapes he inhabits, and gain insight into the sometimes disquieting and always beautiful imagery that seizes his attention and engages his obsessions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In the wake of Disco Demolition Night in 1979—a cultural bonfire that seemed to signal the end of disco—something unexpected began to rise from Chicago's underground. This episode traces the story of Frankie Knuckles, the Bronx-born DJ who became known as the “Godfather of House.” After the backlash against disco pushed the genre out of the mainstream, Knuckles found refuge in Chicago's Black, Latinx, and queer nightlife scenes, most famously at a club called the Warehouse. There, he pioneered a new sound: blending disco's heartbeat with gospel, soul, electronic drum machines, and experimental edits. What emerged was “house music,” named after the Warehouse itself, a genre that spoke directly to marginalized communities while later exploding into a global phenomenon. We'll explore how Knuckles's artistry and innovation not only kept dance floors alive after disco's so-called death but also transformed music history. By tracing the arc from the ruins of Disco Demolition to the rise of house, this episode reveals how moments of cultural rejection can spark radical creativity. Frankie Knuckles didn't just keep the party going—he built a new world of sound that would change the way the world dances. In this eighth episode of season two of Soundscapes NYC, hosts Ryan Purcell and Kristie Soares discuss the life and work of Frankie Knuckles with Micah Salkind, author of Do You Remember House?: Chicago's Queer of Color Undergrounds (Oxford University Press, 2018). Micah Salkind is the Director of Civic and Cultural Life at the Rhode Island Foundation. Prior, in his roles as Deputy Director and Special Projects Manager at the City of Providence Department of Art, Culture and Tourism, he managed large grants and strategic artist initiatives for the City, collaborating with non-profit cultural institutions as well as its emerging artists, designers, and creative entrepreneurs. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In this episode of International Horizons, Interim Director Eli Karetny speaks with film scholar Nathan Abrams about the enduring relevance of Stanley Kubrick and what his work can teach us about our current era. From the nuclear absurdities of Dr. Strangelove to the cosmic rebirth of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick's films expose the fragile line between technological mastery and moral collapse. Abrams unpacks Kubrick's fascination with war, authority, and obedience, his roots in the New York Jewish intellectual tradition, and his exploration of mystical and mythic themes—from Kabbalah to The Odyssey. Together, they reveal how Kubrick's cinematic universe reflects our own: a world where human creativity, paranoia, and power intertwine in both terrifying and illuminating ways. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Charles J. Stivale (Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Wayne State University) and Dan Smith (Professor of Philosophy, Purdue University) join me to discuss: Deleuze, Gilles. 2025. On Painting. Edited by David Lapoujade, translated by Charles J. Stivale. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Although Charles is the translator of this New Book, he has been working with Dan for years on The Deleuze Seminars (website here). Dan is also the translator of Deleuze's Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, which Deleuze published shortly after giving this seminar. I thank Charles for bringing him in to contribute to our discussion! From the inside flap: “ ” Nathan Smith is a PhD candidate in Music Theory at Yale University nathan.smith@yale.edu Available for the first time in English: the complete and annotated transcripts of Deleuze's 1981 seminars on paintingFrom 1970 until 1987, Gilles Deleuze held a weekly seminar at the Experimental University of Vincennes and, starting in 1980, at Saint-Denis. In the spring of 1981, he began a series of eight seminars on painting and its intersections with philosophy. The recorded sessions, newly transcribed and translated into English, are now available in their entirety for the first time. Extensively annotated by philosopher David Lapoujade, On Painting illuminates Deleuze's thinking on artistic creation, significantly extending the lines of thought in his book Francis Bacon.Through paintings and writing by Rembrandt, Delacroix, Turner, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Klee, Pollock, and Bacon, Deleuze explores the creative process, from chaos to the pictorial fact. The introduction and use of color feature prominently as Deleuze elaborates on artistic and philosophical concepts such as the diagram, modulation, code, and the digital and the analogical. Through this scrutiny, he raises a series of profound and stimulating questions for his students: How does a painter ward off grayness and attain color? What is a line without contour? Why paint at all?Written and thought in a rhizomatic manner that is thoroughly Deleuzian—strange, powerful, and novel—On Painting traverses both the conception of art history and the possibility of color as a philosophical concept. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Why is there no metric system in the United States? Why is it that a country known for its openness to the future, its scientific innovations, and its preference for practicality has not adopted the most practical, scientific, and innovative system of measurement? Yardstick Nation: The Metric System in America (Vanderbilt UP, 2025) by Dr. Hector Vera answers these questions by analyzing the political, economic, and international factors that determined the trajectory of the United States as a nation self-excluded from one of the most successful global technical languages. Using a historical-comparative approach and qualitative analysis of archival material, the book examines the trajectories of American scientists, engineers, politicians, and industrialists from 1787 to 1982, to detail what they wanted to attain and to explain what was actually possible to achieve given the political and economic conditions in which they lived. Yardstick Nation argues that in order to understand the unbreached distance between the United States and the metric system, we must consider the interaction between three structural elements: historical timing, state infrastructural power, and international economic integration. Dr. Vera's systematic look at when and why countries have adopted the metric system shows that its introduction is never casual. In the countries that voluntarily embraced the metric system, this was the result of either deep internal political transformations or momentous changes in the international economy. When the adoption of the metric system is politically driven, it comes as the result of a social revolution, independence war, national unification, or the draft of a new constitution. When it is propelled by economic factors, metrication is part of the efforts of economically stagnant countries to integrate into international markets. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Epic Disruptions: 11 Innovations That Shaped Our Modern World (Harvard Business Review Press, 2025) arrives at the perfect moment as artificial intelligence and other technologies promise to unleash another wave of major transformation. This book is a kaleidoscopic look at how eleven disruptive innovations—including the iPhone, transistor, disposable diapers, and Julia Child's The Art of French Cooking—reshaped industries and societies, propelling humanity toward new frontiers. It masterfully weaves together the fascinating stories behind history's most transformative disruptions—from ninth-century China to twenty-first-century Silicon Valley. Through the eleven pivotal innovations that it covers, including the printing press, mass-produced automobiles, the McDonald's revolutionary food system, and the iPhone, the author Dartmouth Business School Professor Scott D. Anthony reveals the hidden patterns behind world-changing breakthroughs from gunpowder to generative AI. These forces of disruption are repeatedly rewriting the rules of business, society, and human possibility. Through vivid storytelling and sharp analysis, Professor Anthony introduces the iconoclasts who dared to think differently—the Renaissance-era scientists, French-cooking enthusiasts, and corporate visionaries who saw opportunities others missed. This books shows how disruptions actually took place. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Nothing captivates the human imagination like the vast unknowns of space. Ancient petroglyphs present renderings of the heavens, proof that we have been gazing up at the stars with wonder for thousands of years. Since then, mankind has systematically expanded our cosmic possibilities. What were once flights of fancy and dreams of science fiction writers have become nearly routine – a continuous human presence orbiting the Earth, probes flying beyond our solar system, and men walking on the moon. NASA and the Russian space program make traveling to the stars look easy, but it has been far from that. Space travel is a sometimes heroic, sometimes humorous, and always dangerous journey fraught with perils around every corner that most of us have never heard of or have long since forgotten.Space Oddities: The Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe (Doubleday, 2024) brings these unknown, offbeat, and obscure stories of space to life. From the showmanship and bravado of the earliest known space fatality, German Max Valier, to the first ever indictment under the Espionage Act on an Army officer who leaked secrets concerning the development of early U.S. rockets; and the story of a single loose bolt that defeated the Soviet Union's attempt to beat America to the moon.Author Joe Cuhaj also sheds light on the human aspects of space travel that have remained industry secrets – until now: how the tradition of using a musical playlist to wake astronauts up began, fascinating tales about inventions like the Fischer Space Pen, Omega watches, and even Tang breakfast drink.In addition to fun and entertaining space trivia, Space Oddities also features stories of the profound impact that space travel has had on challenges right here at home, like the effort by civil rights leaders and activists in the 1960s to bring the money from the space program back home to those in need on Earth; NASA's FLATs (First Lady Astronaut Training) program and the 13 women who were selected to become astronauts in 1960, but were denied a chance at flying even after successfully completing the rigorous astronaut training program; and, the animals who many times sacrificed their lives to prove that man could fly in space.Filled with rare and little-known stories, Space Oddities will bring the final frontier to the homes of diehard space readers and armchair astronauts alike. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

What do you want out of life? To make a lot of money, work for justice, run marathons, sing in a choir, have children, travel the world? The things we care about in life—family, friendship, leisure activities, work, our moral ideals—often conflict, preventing us from doing what matters most to us. Even worse, we don't always know what we really want, or how to define success. Blending personal stories, philosophy, and psychology, this insightful and entertaining book offers invaluable advice about living well by understanding your values and resolving the conflicts that frustrate their fulfillment.Dr. Valerie Tiberius introduces you to a way of thinking about your goals that enables you to reflect on them effectively throughout your life. She illustrates her approach with vivid examples, many of which are drawn from her own life, ranging from the silly to the serious, from shopping to navigating prejudice. Throughout, the book emphasizes the importance of interconnectedness, reminding us of the profound influence other people have on our lives, our goals, and how we should pursue them. At the same time, the book offers strategies for coping with obstacles to realizing your goals, including gender bias and other kinds of discrimination. Whether you are changing jobs, rethinking your priorities, or reconsidering your whole life path, What Do You Want Out of Life?: A Philosophical Guide to Figuring Out What Matters (Princeton UP, 2024) is an essential guide to helping you understand what really matters to you and how you can thoughtfully pursue it. Our guest is: Valerie Tiberius, who is the Paul W. Frenzel Chair in Liberal Arts and professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota. Her books include Well-Being as Value Fulfillment: How We Can Help Each Other to Live Well and The Reflective Life: Living Wisely with Our Limits. She lives in Minneapolis. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a dissertation and grad student coach, and a developmental editor for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. She is the producer of the Academic Life podcast, and writes the show's newsletter at christinagessler.substack.com. Listeners may enjoy this playlist: How We Show Up The Good-Enough Life Tell Me What You Want Taking A Break from Overworking and Underliving How Can Mindfulness Help Meditation For Beginners Making A Meaningful Life Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can help to support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 280+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. Thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Propagandhi formed in 1986 in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, Canada and are now based in Winnipeg. Their outspoken influence and consistency in anti-fascist, animal-friendly, gay-positive, and pro-feminist ideas have inspired thousands of hardcore, thrash metal and punk rock music fans across four decades. Unscripted Moments: A Podcast About Propagandhi began in 2020 as a fan-made song-by-song podcast exploring each release by the band. The podcast also features bonus episodes about touring, recording and more with friends, fans and collaborators from throughout the bands musical career. Among the hundreds of episodes about the band's music are more than fifteen hours of candid interviews with past and present members of Propagandhi recorded between 2020 and 2025. The conversations vary widely in topic and discuss songwriting, touring stories, favourite cover songs and side projects, as well as personal hobbies and interests of the band members. These edited interviews with Chris Hannah, Jord Samolesky, John Samson Fellows, Todd Kowalski, David Guillas, and Sulynn Hago span the career of the band from their earliest demos through to the recording of their eighth album, At Peace, released in May 2025. Propagandhi has released music with G7 Welcoming Committee, Recess Records, Fat Wreck Chords, and Epitaph Records. The 200+ episodes of Unscripted Moments: A Podcast About Propagandhi have been downloaded more than half a million times and are available to stream everywhere podcasts are available. Greg Soden is the host of 'Unscripted Moments: A Podcast About Propagandhi' and a super-fan of the band, with whom he worked to put together this book of candid conversations over the last five years. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

What does contemporary China's diverse and exciting fiction tell us about its culture, and the relationship between art and politics? The Subplot: What China Is Reading and Why It Matters (Columbia Global Reports, 2022) by Megan Walsh takes us on a lively journey through a literary landscape like you've never seen before: a vast migrant-worker poetry movement, homoerotic romances by “rotten girls,” swaggering literary popstars, millionaire e-writers churning out the longest-ever novels, underground comics, the surreal works of Yu Hua, Yan Lianke, and Nobel-laureate Mo Yan, and what is widely hailed as a golden-age of sci-fi. Chinese online fiction is now the largest publishing platform in the world. Fueled by her passionate engagement with the arts and ideas of China's people, Walsh, a brilliant young critic, shows us why it's important to finally pay attention to Chinese fiction—an exuberant drama that illustrates the complex relationship between art and politics, one that is increasingly shaping the West as well. Turns out, writers write neither what their government nor foreign readers want or expect, as they work on a different wavelength to keep alive ideas and events that are censored by the propaganda machine. The Subplot vividly captures the way in which literature offers an alternative—perhaps truer—way to understanding the contradictions that make up China itself. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Since her death, Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) has become an endless source of fascination for a wide audience ranging from readers of The Bell Jar, her semiautobiographical novel, to her groundbreaking poetry as exemplified by Ariel. Beyond her writing, however, interest in Plath has also been fueled in part by the tragic nature of her death. As a result, a steady stream of biographies of Plath have appeared over the last fifty-five years that mainly focus on her death or contain projections of an array of points of view about the writer. Until now, little sustained attention has been paid to the influences on Plath's life and work. What movies did she watch? Which books did she read? How did media shape her worldview? In this meticulously researched biography The Making of Sylvia Plath (UP Mississippi, 2024), Carl Rollyson explores the intricate web of literature, cinema, spirituality, psychology, and popular culture that profoundly influenced Plath's life and writing. At the heart of this biography is a compelling exploration of William Sheldon's seminal work, Psychology and the Promethean Will, which Plath devoured in her quest for self-discovery and understanding. Through Plath's intense study of this work, readers gain unprecedented access to Plath's innermost thoughts, her therapeutic treatments, and the overarching worldview that fueled her creative genius.Through Sheldon as well as Plath's other influences, Rollyson offers a captivating survey of the symbiotic relationship between an artist and the world around her and offers readers new insights into the enigmatic mind of one of the most important writers of the twentieth century.   Jane Scimeca, Professor of History at Brookdale Community College Website here @janescimeca.bsky.social Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

The Jazz Masters: Setting the Record Straight (UP of Mississippi, 2021) is a celebration of jazz and the men and women who created and transformed it. In the twenty-one conversations contained in this engaging and highly accessible book, we hear from the musicians themselves, in their own words, direct and unfiltered. Peter Zimmerman's interviewing technique is straightforward. He turns on a recording device, poses questions, and allows his subjects to improvise, similar to the way the musicians do at concerts and in recording sessions. Topics range from their early days, their struggles and victories, to the impact the music has had on their own lives. The interviews have been carefully edited for sense and clarity, without changing any of the musicians' actual words. Peter Zimmerman tirelessly sought virtuosi whose lives span the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The reader is rewarded with an intimate look into the past century's extraordinary period of creative productivity. The oldest two interview subjects were born in 1920 and all are professional musicians who worked in jazz for at least five decades, with a few enjoying careers as long as seventy-five years. These voices reflect some seventeen hundred years of accumulated experience yielding a chronicle of incredible depth and scope. The focus on musicians who are now emeritus figures is deliberate. Some of them are now in their nineties; six have passed since 2012, when Zimmerman began researching The Jazz Masters. Five of them have already received the NEA's prestigious Jazz Masters award: Sonny Rollins, Clark Terry, Yusef Lateef, Jimmy Owens, and most recently, Dick Hyman. More undoubtedly will one day, and the balance are likewise of compelling interest. Artists such as David Amram, Charles Davis, Clifford Jordan, Valery Ponomarev, and Sandy Stewart, to name a few, open their hearts and memories and reveal who they are as people. This book is a labor of love celebrating the vibrant style of music that Dizzy Gillespie once described as “our native art form.” Zimmerman's deeply knowledgeable, unabashed passion for jazz brings out the best in the musicians. Filled with personal recollections and detailed accounts of their careers and everyday lives, this highly readable, lively work succeeds in capturing their stories for present and future generations. An important addition to the literature of music, The Jazz Masters goes a long way toward “setting the record straight.” Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi'i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

A formal approach to anime rethinks globalization and transnationality under neoliberalism Anime has become synonymous with Japanese culture, but its global reach raises a perplexing question--what happens when anime is produced outside of Japan? Who actually makes anime, and how can this help us rethink notions of cultural production?  In Anime's Identity: Performativity and Form Beyond Japan (U Minnesota Press, 2021), Stevie Suan examines how anime's recognizable media-form--no matter where it is produced--reflects the problematics of globalization. The result is an incisive look at not only anime but also the tensions of transnationality. Far from valorizing the individualistic "originality" so often touted in national creative industries, anime reveals an alternate type of creativity based in repetition and variation. In exploring this alternative creativity and its accompanying aesthetics, Suan examines anime from fresh angles, including considerations of how anime operates like a brand of media, the intricacies of anime production occurring across national borders, inquiries into the selfhood involved in anime's character acting, and analyses of various anime works that present differing modes of transnationality. Anime's Identity deftly merges theories from media studies and performance studies, introducing innovative formal concepts that connect anime to questions of dislocation on a global scale, creating a transformative new lens for analyzing popular media. Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Bradley Morgan's U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, 2025) celebrates fifty years of U2 with a career-spanning retrospective featuring more than 150 images that trace the band's journey from Dublin pubs to sold-out arena tours. Morgan delves into the history of U2, offering an intimate look at their formation and the evolution of their unique sound. From Boy and The Joshua Tree to Achtung Baby and beyond, the book captures how each album marked a creative turning point and cemented U2's place as musical pioneers. Through vivid photography and thoughtful storytelling, Morgan highlights the band's artistic growth and commitment to social activism. From Live Aid to Amnesty International, U2's impact on global causes is as significant as their musical legacy. Readers also gain a rare glimpse into the lives of Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen Jr., as individuals, collaborators, and lifelong friends behind one of the most influential bands in the world. A music journalist and media arts professional, Bradley Morgan is the director of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM's music film festival, manages partnerships for the station, and serves on the associate board of the Art Institute of Chicago's Gene Siskel Film Center. He also interviews authors of music and pop culture books for the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Iceland punches well above its weight in the world of music, producing global icons like Björk, Sigur Rós, Of Monsters and Men, and Laufey, while at the same time nurturing a vibrant local scene. Icelandic Pop: Then, Today, Tomorrow, Next Week (Reaktion, 2025) by Dr. Arnar Eggert Thoroddsen explores how Iceland's unique social habits, institutions and everyday practices contribute to its thriving music culture.  Tracing the development of Icelandic popular music since the rock 'n' roll era, it examines key influences shaping the scene, from Reykjavík's musicians to national institutions like radio and concert venues. With engaging explanations of sociological factors, the book sheds light on why Iceland has become a powerhouse in music. An illuminating journey through Iceland's music history, this is a celebration of the artistry and cultural forces behind its global impact. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

As a child in the foothills of the Himalayas, Priyanka Kumar was entranced by forest-like orchards of diverse and luscious fruit—especially apples. These biodiverse orchards seemed worlds away from the cardboard apples that lined supermarket shelves in the United States. Yet on a small patch of woods near her home in Santa Fe, Kumar discovered a wild apple tree—and the seeds of an odyssey were planted. Could the taste of a feral apple offer a doorway to the wild? In The Light Between Apple Trees: Rediscovering the Wild Through a Beloved American Fruit, Kumar takes us on a dazzling and transformative journey to rediscover apples, unearthing a rich and complex history while illuminating how we can reimagine our relationship with nature.Apples are popular, but in our everyday lives we rarely encounter more than a handful of varieties: of the sixteen thousand apple varieties once celebrated in America, scarcely a fifth remain accessible. Kumar reveals the richness of a hidden world, bringing readers to the vibrant forests and orchards where historic trees still survive. These mature and wild orchards offer more than just fruit: they are havens for creatures from hummingbirds to bears and a living connection to generations past. She brilliantly weaves together science and childhood memories with the apple's storied history, from its roots in Kazakhstan to Spanish orchards in the Southwest and Thomas Jefferson's beloved Monticello fruitery. Kumar shows how—if we follow untamed paths—the tang and texture of an apple can lead us back to the wild. Our guest is: Priyanka Kumar, who is the author of Conversations with Birds, and The Light Between Apple Trees. Her essays appear in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Orion, and Sierra magazine. She holds an MFA, and has taught at the University of California Santa Cruz and the University of Southern California. Her feature documentary, The Song of the Little Road, is in the permanent collection of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, and her awards include an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Award, a New Mexico/New Visions Governor's Award, an International Center for Jefferson Studies Fellowship, and an Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Fellowship. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a writing coach and freelance editor. She is the producer of the Academic Life podcast, and writes the show's newsletter. Playlist for listeners: Big Box USA In The Garden Behind the Moon Disabled Ecologies Endless Forms The Well-Gardened Mind Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 275+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Maggie Gram is a writer, cultural historian, and designer. She leads an experience-design team at Google. She has taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, and Harvard University, and she has written for N+1 and the New York Times. She lives in New York. The Invention of Design: A Twentieth-Century History (Basic Books, 2025) Recommended Books: Henry Dreyfuss, Designing for People Dolly Alderton, Ghosts Rob Franklin, Great Black Hope Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Women and Global Documentary: Practices and Perspectives in the 21st Century (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025), edited by Najmeh Moradiyan-Rizi and Shilyh J. Warren, answers the urgent need to re-evaluate not only the significance of women's documentary practices and their contributions to feminist world-building, but also the state of documentary studies as it engages with political, aesthetic, and industrial developments arising as a result of an increasing numbers of women's documentaries.  Bringing together a range of diverse practitioners and authors, the volume analyzes alternative and emergent networks of documentary production and collaboration within a global context. The chapters investigate filmmaking practices from regions such as East Africa, Latin America, South Asia, East Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. They also examine decolonial practices in the Global North based on Indigenous filmmaking and feminist documentary institutions such as Women Make Movies. In doing so, they assess the global, institutional, political, and artistic factors that have shaped women's documentary practices in the 21st century, and their implications for scholarly debates regarding women's authorship, political subjectivity, and documentary representation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

We're thrilled to announce that our episode “S2.E2. Lost Women of Disco” has been named a finalist in the Best Indie Podcast category at the 2025 Signal Awards! This powerful episode dives deep into the untold stories of the trailblazing women who shaped the culture we now call “disco”, but were overshadowed by history. We are re-releasing this episode, which originally aired on July 22, 2025, to highlight this recognition and to celebrate the forgotten legacy of these groundbreaking artists. Thank you to our listeners and the Signal Awards for this incredible honor. If you haven't tuned in yet, now's the perfect time to discover the voices that helped define a generation. *** *** Women have been central to the evolution of dance music culture since its earliest days, yet their contributions have often been overlooked. From Régine Zylberberg's pioneering work in creating the modern discotheque in 1950s Paris to Sharon White's trailblazing presence at New York's legendary venues in the 1970s, female DJs have shaped dance floors worldwide. Sharon White broke barriers as a Black queer radio DJ, finding her way into the booth at the Paradise Garage in 1975. She became the first female DJ to play at the revered Saint club and spun records at Studio 54. Her influence can be seen in later pioneers like London's Smokin' Jo, who emerged from the British acid house scene to become one of England's most celebrated DJs and the only woman to be awarded DJ of the Year in DJ Magazine's Top 100. In the second episode of Season Two of Soundscapes NYC, hosts Ryan Purcell and Kristie Soares welcome DJ, academic, and journalist Lulu Le Vay to explore the often-untold stories of women in dance music culture. Le Vay, who holds a PhD in Sociology from Goldsmiths and performs as DJ Lulu Levan, represents a new generation of "PhDJs" combining academic inquiry with dance floor experience. From writing for publications like The Face, i-D, and The Guardian to spinning at festivals like Lovebox and Bestival, she documents club culture from multiple perspectives. Currently working on a documentary about women DJs with director Sonja Phillips, Le Vay is also part of Love Underground, a new collaboration with producer Tommy D whose new single "The Journey Part 1" is out on Chillifunk records. Through her podcast Where Love Lives and her work preserving dance music history, Le Vay continues to celebrate the women who built the foundations of club culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

This is the story of a song. Yet, it is a song that binds nearly every strand of 20th-century American popular music. “Hey Joe” was written sometime in the early 1960s by a man named Billy Roberts, an obscure singer and guitarist from South Carolina who moved to New York City, drawn by the burgeoning folk music scene in Greenwich Village. It was a time when new, original material was scarce, leading other singers to quickly adapt songs of quality in the spirit of folk music's oral traditions. Thus began the long journey of “Hey Joe” from New York coffeehouses to the bars on L.A.'s Sunset Strip to the ears of a young guitarist named Jimi Hendrix who launched his career with his radical, electrified interpretation. Extensively researched, That Gun in Your Hand: The Strange Saga of ‘Hey Joe' and Popular Music's History of Violence (Anvil Press, 2025) also presents previously unpublished information about the life of Billy Roberts, a shadowy figure whose 2017 death went unreported by all news outlets. With a Foreword by Lenny Kaye. Jason Schneider has written for Exclaim!, The Globe & Mail, The Toronto Star, Paste, American Songwriter, Relix, Shindig and many other media outlets. He is the co-author of Have Not Been The Same: the CanRock Renaissance 1985-1995, and his other books include Whispering Pines: the Northern Roots of American Music, and the novel 3,000 Miles. He currently lives in Kitchener, Ontario. Jason Schneider on Bluesky. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America (Backbeat Books, 2021), Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, 2025), and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, 2025). He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. Bradley Morgan on Facebook and Bluesky. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

What is a good life? Traditionally, philosophers have seen it as an equation: The Good Life = Happiness + Meaning. But, if it's really that simple, why don't more of us achieve that truly "good" life?  In The Art of the Interesting: What We Miss in Our Pursuit of the Good Life and How to Cultivate It (Balance, 2024), Lorraine Besser, Professor of Philosophy at Middlebury College, offers insights drawn from both psychological research and philosophical analysis that provides new insights into a third aspect of happiness, psychological richness. According to Besser it is exposure to "the interesting" that leads to psychologically rich experiences. Put simply, "The Interesting" is an experience that captivates you, engages you, helps you let go of whatever is holding you back from fully engaging in the world around you. It's different for everyone, and everyone can obtain and strengthen the skills necessary to access it. In this interview, Besser relates key insights from her book, while discussing linkages to other areas of research including the notion of human capabilities developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, approaches to measuring societal well being such as Bhutan's Gross National Happiness Index, the influence of technology on our ability to achieve psychologically rich lives, and potential normative implications of her research for policy. Professor Besser is interviewed by Thomas McInerney (Loyola University Chicago School of Law; Stockholm Environment Institute). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Originating in Norse and Celtic mythologies, elves and fairies are a firmly established part of Western popular culture. Since the days of the Vikings and Arthurian legend, these sprites have undergone huge transformations. From J. R. R. Tolkien's warlike elves, based on medieval legend, to little flower fairies whose charms even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle succumbed to, they permeate European art and culture. In Elves and Fairies: A Short History of the Otherworld (Yale University Press, 2025), Dr. Matthias Egeler explores these mythical creatures of Iceland, Ireland, Scotland, and England, and their continental European cousins. Dr. Egeler goes on a journey through enchanted landscapes and literary worlds. He describes both their friendly and their dangerous, even deadly, sides. We encounter them in the legends of King Arthur's round table and in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, in the terrible era of the witch trials, in magic's peaceful conquest of Victorian bourgeois salons, in the child-friendly form of Peter Pan, and even as helpers in the contemporary fight against environmental destruction. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda's interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Popular music history collides with data analytics, charts, and numbers in this insightful and surprising look at the greatest hits and musicians, fads, forgotten artists, and much more. Data analyst and musician Chris Dalla Riva reframes everything you thought you knew about music. Did you know that hit songs in the late 1950s were regularly about gruesome death? That a US vice president wrote a number one hit? That while TikTok has spawned countless hits, it's made artists more anonymous than ever before? That pop songs have shaped race relations in the United States? That the key change died around 2003? And that's just the beginning. Coupling hard data with engaging anecdotes, Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves (Bloomsbury, 2025) is both a takedown and celebration of popular music and provides new ways to think about your favorite songs, genres, and artists from the last 6 decades using unexpected statistics and playful visualizations. This entertaining history is filled with the most popular musicians of all time from The Beatles and The Bee Gees to Michael Jackson, Mariah Carey, and beyond. Whether you danced the twist or the dougie at your senior prom, you're sure to never listen to music again in the same way. Chris Dalla Riva lives at the intersection of music and data. Playing in bands and recording music since his teenage years, Dalla Riva is currently a Senior Product Manager at Audiomack where he focuses on data analytics and personalization. Gregory McNiff is a Managing Director in the New York office of the Blueshirt Group, an IR firm focused on technology. Greg holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, an M. Litt. in Shakespeare Studies from the University of St. Andrews and a B.A. in Classical Languages from Columbia University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

John R. Davis's Keep Your Ear to the Ground (Georgetown University Press, 2025) is the first history of the fanzines that emerged from Washington, DC's highly influential punk community DIY culture has always been at the heart of DC's thriving punk community. As Washington, DC's punk scene emerged in the mid-1970s, so did the periodicals--"fanzines"--that celebrated it. Before the rise of the internet, fanzines were a potent way for fans to communicate and to revel in the joy of fandom. These zines were more than just publications; they were a distillation of punk's allure, connecting the city to the broader punk community. Fanzines remain a meaningful, tactile, creative medium for punk fans to connect with like-minded people outside the corporate-controlled world. In Keep Your Ear to the Ground, the archivist and musician John R. Davis unveils the development of punk fanzines and their role in supporting DC's hardcore and punk scene from the 1970s into the twenty-first century. He sheds new light on DC's scene and highlights some of its key personalities, including many who are often left out of punk history, with high-quality images of rare zines and insights from numerous interviews with zine creators and musicians. This book vividly weaves together the origin of zines and their importance in underground communities. For punk enthusiasts, zine creators, American studies scholars, and anyone who has ever felt like an outsider, Keep Your Ear to the Ground traces how the unique environment of Washington, DC, helped zines thrive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture