Interviews with Scholars of Popular Culture about their New Books
Veronica Litt's Ugh As If!: Clueless (ECW Press, 2025) uncovers the complex layers beneath the glossy surface of the 1995 classic film "Clueless." Litt investigates not just the Austen satire but the film's deeper ethical questions about femininity, innocence, bias, and inequity. A sweet and sly exploration of the Jane Austen–inspired teen movie and its evergreen imperative to be kind, do better, and find the activist within We are totally butt-crazy in love with "Clueless." Since the movie's premiere in 1995, pop culture has mined Amy Heckerling's high school comedy for inspiration, from Iggy Azalea and Charli XCX's “Fancy” music video to Cher's iconic yellow plaid suit appearing at every Halloween party. In Ugh As If!, Veronica Litt argues that this seemingly fluffy teen romp is the quintessential thinking woman's movie, one in which the audience is asked to seriously consider the beauty and power of naïveté. Cher Horowitz's gradual pivot from oblivious it girl to burgeoning activist is a powerful reminder that even the most unlikely people can change for the better and contribute to their communities. In this bright, shiny film, pursuing a more just society isn't just possible — it's enjoyable. This fun, feminine, feel-good movie is a counter-narrative to nihilism, a refusal to give into cynicism, hopelessness, and passivity. Almost without viewers noticing, "Clueless" teaches Cher, and us, how to become better. Like the film it examines, Ugh As If! nudges even the most jaded viewer into feeling hopeful about the future. About the Pop Classics Series Short books that pack a big punch, Pop Classics offer intelligent, fun, and accessible arguments about why a particular pop phenomenon matters. 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 year 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, a conflict that solidified SPAM's place in global food culture. Created by Hormel Foods in 1937 to utilize surplus pork shoulder during the Great Depression, SPAM became an essential resource during the Second World War, and helped shape perceptions of American culture. SPAM: A Global History (Reaktion, 2025) by Dr. Kelly Spring explores SPAM's complex history, from its inception to its resurgence during the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting its enduring legacy in places like Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, Okinawa and South Korea. It demonstrates how SPAM, a long-lasting and valuable protein, played a crucial role during wartime and continues to influence dietary practices worldwide. 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
In the eighth episode of Soundscapes NYC, host Ryan Purcell talks with music history professor Steve Waksman about the social and stylistic transformation of the New York rock scene during the mid-1970s. The introduction of new bands clashed with the old guard, culminating with a violent altercation between artists in CBGB in March 1976. In 2024, Waksman accepted the Leverhulme International Professorship in Music in the Department of Media, Humanities, and the Arts at the University of Huddersfield (UK) where for the next five years he will conduct a comprehensive study of how music and culture have developed since the invention of sound amplification. Waksman is the former Elsie Irwin Sweeney Professor of Music and American Studies at Smith College, and the author of numerous books on music history including Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience (Harvard University Press, 1999), This Ain't the Summer of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk (University of California Press, 2009), and Live Music in America: A History from Jenny Lind to Beyoncé (Oxford University Press, 2022). Contact Soundscapes NYC Here Support the show 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 NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Vancouver poet Natalie Lim about her debut poetry collection, Elegy for Opportunity (Wolsak & Wynn/Buckrider Books, 2025). In this collection, Natalie Lim asks: How do we go on living and loving in a time of overlapping crises? Anchored by elegies for NASA's Opportunity rover and a series of love poems, this collection explores the tension and beauty of a world marked by grief through meditations on Dungeons & Dragons, Taylor Swift's cultural impact, the all-engulfing anxiety of the climate crisis and more. Confessional, funny and bursting with joy, Elegy for Opportunity extends a lifeline from Earth that will leave you feeling comforted, challenged and a little less alone in the universe. About Natalie Lim: Natalie Lim is a Chinese-Canadian poet living on the unceded, traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Peoples (Vancouver, BC). She is the winner of the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize and Room magazine's 2020 Emerging Writer Award, with work published in Arc Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry 2020 and elsewhere. She is the author of a chapbook, arrhythmia (Rahila's Ghost Press, 2022). 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, New Books Network host Nina Bo Wagner talks to Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling about his recently published book The Ghost Lab: How Bigfoot Hunters, Mediums, and Alien Enthusiasts Are Wrecking Science (PublicAffairs, 2025). They talk about the process of writing the book, including delving deep into the local paranomal community in New Hampshire. The book contrasts profound institutional distrust effecting higher education policy and scientific literacy, with a desperate grapple for community through paranormal beliefs. It portrays the Kitt Research Initiative, established in 2010, with the mission to use scientific method to document the existence of spirits. Founder Andy Kitt was unafraid — perhaps eager — to offend other paranormal investigators by exposing the fraudulence of their less advanced techniques. Kitt's efforts attracted flocks of psychics, alien abductees, witches, mediums, ghost hunters, UFOlogists, cryptozoologists and warlocks from all over New England, and the world. Hongoltz-Hetling brings our attention to the exponential growth of new age beliefs in the United States, with the potential to be the largest religion in the nation by 2050 at current rates. He argues that it is time for institutions in both science and policy to sit up, take notice, and engage with paranormal beliefs instead of marginalizing, or worse, ostracizing them. Wagner and Hongoltz-Hetling touch on mental health, domestic violence, satanic panic and capturing paranormal orbs. The conversation is sure to provide fascinating insight into unconventional and riveting science journalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture
Bruce Springsteen was keenly aware and excited by the sounds of the CBGBs scene during the Seventies. With his own bands, the Boss performed in the same venues associated with punk rock and ultimately wrote songs for Patti Smith and the Ramones. Yet Springsteen's sound has remained distinct from punk rock as it emanated from New York. In the seventh episode of Soundscapes NYC, host Ryan Purcell talks with Bruce Springsteen biographer Jim Cullen and Melissa Ziobro the head curator of the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music at Monmouth University about Springsteen's complicated relationship with punk rock in 1970s New York. As an NJ native, the Boss was a so-called “Bridge-and-Tunnel-Boy” but that socio-cultural infrastructure worked both ways. By the end of the Seventies, Springsteen did not need to travel to New York to engage with the punk sound. Punk culture was traveling to Asbury Park, NJ. Jim Cullen is a historian of American popular culture and has taught at several colleges and universities, including Harvard, Brown, and Sarah Lawrence College. He was a longtime faculty member and History Department chair at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York before moving to the recently founded Greenwich Country Day School in 2020. Cullen is the author of multiple award-winning book books on music including Born in the USA: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition (Harper Collins, 1997). His latest book, Bridge and Tunnel Boys: Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and Metropolitan Sound of the American Century (Rutgers University, 2023), compares the musical careers of Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen. Melissa Ziobro is a Professor of Public History at Monmouth University where she is currently the Head Curator for the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music. Former editor of New Jersey Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Ziobro is deeply committed to documenting New Jersey history with the broader context of the American story. She curated a traveling exhibition called Music America: Iconic Objects from America's Music History which is now on display at the Grammy Museum in Mississippi and is expected to return to Monmouth University for the opening of the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music in Spring 2026. Contact Soundscapes NYC Here Support the show 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 the debut of These Are My Children in 1949, the daytime television soap opera has been foundational to the history of the medium as an economic, creative, technological, social, and cultural institution. In Her Stories, Elana Levine draws on archival research and her experience as a longtime soap fan to provide an in-depth history of the daytime television soap opera as a uniquely gendered cultural form and a central force in the economic and social influence of network television. Closely observing the production, promotion, reception, and narrative strategies of the soaps, Levine examines two intersecting developments: the role soap operas have played in shaping cultural understandings of gender and the rise and fall of broadcast network television as a culture industry. In so doing, she foregrounds how soap operas have revealed changing conceptions of gender and femininity as imagined by and reflected on the television screen. In a wide-ranging and enjoyable interview with Dr. Elana Levine, we covered a broad array of subjects pertaining to the history, culture, and craft of soap operas. After an initial conversation, I asked her a series of questions about her work and how it resonates with other genres such as the Real Housewives franchise, especially how original housewives (domestic workers as well as suburban housewives of numerous ethnicities and races) represented the viewership of soap opera consumption and support. We talked about the early origins of soap operas, especially with Proctor & Gamble in the early inception of the soap opera genre to now, with the innovative partnership and collaboration between Proctor and Gamble/CBS and the NAACP in debuting the new soap opera, Beyond the Gates. We discussed the ways in which the viewership of soaps, mostly working women and stay at home women shed light on significant aspects of American Women's and Gender history, women's civic participation (combing public and private space) as well as informs how women viewers, often housewives and domestics, found ways to weave their own life narratives together with those of cast actors, thus contributing to an interpretive lens on life matter,(blurring line between real and imagined), representing both an innovative and inclusive type of Citizenship seasoning process, whereby, via interaction with soap operas stars as both celebrities and everyday people, (as fellow Cinema scholar Anna McCarthy talks about in her work on ways in which 1950s television, functioned as a kind of citizen machine governing America, championed inclusive democratic practice that engaged citizens in repetitious call and response and back and forth conversation about everyday practices of everyday working people. Lastly, we talked about the parallels with primetime soap operas like Dallas, Dynasty, Knots Landing, Yellowstone, as well as what Dr. Levine calls a hybrid form of soap opera storytelling found in series like Grey's Anatomy, Scandal, and other primetime television series. We also spoke about the parallels between soap operas as meditations on aspects of good and evil, finding interesting synergy with genres such as wrestling as soap opera drama sport, the drama of superheroes and villains in the DC and Marvel Universe, as well as versions of science fiction. Dr. Elana Levine is Professor of Media, Cinema and Digital Studies in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She got her PhD, Communication Arts from University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research areas of interest include Television history, theory, and criticism; gender, sexuality, and media; media industry and production studies; media audience studies. 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 year 1925 was arguably the peak of literature's centrality. There were more magazines, more journals, more reviews, more book news, and more book gossip than ever before or since. Literature's rivals for cultural attention were on the rise-film was becoming a more significant part of people's media diet, radio was just taking off, television technologies were advancing--but literature was still king. Even mediocre books got dozens of reviews, and the reviews were (most often) thoughtful and intellectually engaged. The belief that literary writing was an essential and consequential business was nearly universal. Modernist ferment continued to excite discussion while the pulp revolution in genre fiction--detective stories, science fiction, Westerns, romance--was booming. These popular books, even if sometimes condescended to, were also given thoughtful review attention. This encyclopedia was written as we approached the 100th anniversary of the annus mirabilis. In what follows, we can see the seeds of virtually every aspect of our cultural life, from art, literature, theater, and music to physics, philosophy, social science, and political discourse. The fear of environmental degradation, the corruption in our politics, the competing claims of utopianism and dystopia, the bitterly divided views on science, mass media, art, nature, justice, generations, community, freedom, sexuality, race, immigration--all can be seen in their budding or full-blown gore and glory in 1925. We have come far and not very far at all. 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 sixth episode of Soundscapes NYC, host Ryan Purcell talks with John Holmstrom a comic illustrator and founder of Punk magazine. In the early 1970s, Holmstrom moved from suburban Connecticut to New York City to attend the School of Visual Arts where he studied under the celebrated comic illustrator Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman creator of MAD magazine. In 1975, Holmstrom conceived the idea for Punk Magazine by collaborating with Ged Dunn and Eddie “Legs” McNeil as an independent zine to cover the local rock scene. The trio initially considered the name Teenage News, a reference to an unreleased New York Dolls track, but settled on punk which they derived from the term “punk rock” which by 1975, had crept into music journalism as a descriptor of new sounds in the rock world. Punk magazine ran 15 issues from 1976 to 1979. During that time the publication brought international attention to the local rock scene and created an association between New York rock and punk. In addition to creating Punk magazine, John Holmstrom is perhaps best known for illustrating album covers for the Ramones, including Rocket to Russia (1977) and Road to Ruin (1978). In September 2024, Holmstrom relaunched Punk magazine to cover a new generation of punk bands in New York City. Contact Soundscapes NYC Here Gotham Center for NYC History - CUNY GCDisclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture
Barry Enderwick has been making, eating, and sharing historical sandwiches for years on social media @sandwichesofhistory and recently in live shows. In Sandwiches of History: The Cookbook: All the Best (and Most Surprising) Things People Have Put Between Slices of Bread (Harvard Common Press, 2024) he painstakingly recreates dozens of recipes, staying faithful to the original sandwiches while also providing guidance on how to make each more amenable to a contemporary palate. The recipes provide a window into the kinds of sandwiches that were common in prior eras and also highlight some of the ways that ingredients and techniques have changed. Ingredients like nasturtium leaves, watercress, and sardines may be surprising now but were common in the past. Other combinations speak to the new found prosperity and international interests of the post World War II years. Above all, Barry's good humor and respect for both the sandwiches and the sandwich eaters make this book a compelling exploration of changing tastes and circumstances. Although some of the combinations are surprising or even downright baffling, the book provides the context to make sense of the past. As just one example, the Toast Sandwich - yes, that's a piece of toast between two buttered pieces of untoasted bread -- was for people on restricted diets to provide some texture and taste to an otherwise bland eating experience. This peek into the humble sandwich becomes a highly personal culinary experience deeply rooted in curiosity about the past and the enjoyment of a good meal today. Author recommended reading: The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen by Jacques Pépin Hosted by Meghan Cochran 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 fifth episode of Soundscapes N.Y.C., host Ryan Purcell talks with British music critic Jon Savage about how LGBTQ resistance shaped American popular music from the 1950s to the 1980s. Savage discusses the curious and queer roots of the word punk stretching back to the time of Shakespeare when it was used to connote ambiguous and transgressive gender and sexuality. Those meanings carried through to the 1970s though their origins may have been obscured by popular culture. Jon Savage is the award-winning author of England's Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (1991) and Teenage: The Creation of Youth, 1875-1945 (2007) and his latest book, The Secret Public: How LGBTQ Resistance Shaped Popular Culture, 1955-1979 (2024). He is the writer of the award-winning film documentaries The Brian Epstein Story (1988) and Joy Division (2007), as well as the feature film Teenage (2013). His compilations include Meridian 1970 (Heavenly/EMI 2005) and Queer Noises: From the Closet to the Charts, 1961-1976 (Trikont 2006). Contact Soundscapes NYC Here Gotham Center for NYC History - CUNY GCDisclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the show 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 fourth episode of Soundscapes NYC, host Ryan Purcell and music historian Jesse Rifkin tour a constellation of seedy bars and venues in the 1970s that nurtured bands during the early days of punk rock. These spaces include well-known clubs like CBGBs and Max's Kansas City and lesser-known haunts like the Mercer Arts Center and Mother's that shed light on hidden meanings behind punk rock. These stories illuminate echoes of the trans liberation struggle, and how punk rock embodied the sounds of the city collapsing in a literal sense. Jesse Rifkin is the owner and operator of Walk on the Wild Side Tours NYC, a music history walking tour company in New York City, and consults as a pop music historian for the Association for Cultural Equity. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Conde Nast Traveller, and Vice among other venues. Before his work as a historian, he spent twelve years touring the country as a working musician, playing at CBGB, Lincoln Center, and venues of every size and shape in between. In 2023, Rifkin published his debut book, This Must be the Place: Music, Community and Vanished Spaces in New York City (Harper Collins, 2023). Contact Soundscapes NYC Here Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture
When singer Debbie Harry helped form Blondie in 1974 she developed a unique stage persona to front the band. Though she may have appeared to fans as a hyper-femme caricature, Harry recalls her role as androgynous or "transexual" in her 2019 memoir Face It. In the third episode of Soundscapes N.Y.C., host Ryan Purcell talks with Cornell University professor of music Judith Peraino, and University of Iowa cultural studies professor Kembrew McLeod about the stylistic and social forces that shaped gender-bending bands like Blondie and others in the early “punk” scene in 1970s New York. Judith Peraino is the author of multiple publications on rock music and constructions of gender. This includes We're Having Much More Fun: Punk Archives for the Present from CBGB to Gilman and Beyond (Cornell University Press, 2025) co-edited with Tom McEnaney, professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Berkley. McLeod is a cultural critic and documentary filmmaker. He is the author of Parallel Lines in Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 Series (2016) and the critically acclaimed history The Downtown Pop Underground: New York City and the Literary Punks, Renegade Artists, DIY Filmmakers, Mad Playwrights, and Rock 'N' Roll Glitter Queens Who Revolutionized Culture. (Abrams Press, 2018) Contact Soundscapes NYC Here Support the show 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 second episode of Soundscapes N.Y.C., host Ryan Purcell talks with Tony Zanetta. In the late 1960s, Zanetta worked in Off-Off-Broadway theater and ultimately landed a role playing the Andy Warhol character in Pork, an absurdist play based on Warhol's phone recordings. Zanetta followed the cast to London where he befriended David Bowie who subsequently appointed him president of his management company, Main Man, and Bowie's direct point of contact in America for the Ziggy Stardust tour (1972). With his involvement with Bowie, Zanetta was responsible for developing acts under the Main Man umbrella. This included a proto-punk band called Queen Elizabeth fronted by Jayne (formerly Wayne) County. With Bowie's financial backing, Zanetta produced a gender-bending spectacle of drag, sex, and rock 'n' roll: Wayne County at the Trucks! (1974). It may be the most spectacular rock show you have never heard of … till now. Contact Soundscapes NYC Here Support the show 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 premiere episode of Soundscapes N.Y.C., host Ryan Purcell talks with celebrated writer Lucy Sante about the landscape of gender logics within the New York rock scene. It was a nebulous soundscape of counterculture formed around gender explorations and social upheaval set to the soundtrack of an aggressive style of rock 'n' roll that critics would identify as punk rock by the end of the seventies. Lucy Sante is the author of Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, Folk Photography, The Other Paris, Maybe the People Would Be the Times, and Nineteen Reservoirs. Her awards include a Whiting Writers Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grammy Award (for album notes), an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and Guggenheim and Cullman Center fellowships. She recently retired after twenty-four years of teaching at Bard College. Contact Soundscapes NYC Here Support the show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture
Eric Blanc is an assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, researching new workplace organizing, strikes, digital labor activism, and working-class politics. He is the author of Red State Revolt: The Teachers' Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics (Verso 2019) and his writings have appeared in journals such as Politics & Society, New Labor Forum, and Labor Studies Journal as well as publications such as The Nation, The Guardian, and Jacobin. A longtime labor activist, Blanc is an organizer trainer in the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, which he helped co-found in March 2020. He directs The Worker to Worker Collaborative, a center to help unions and rank-and-file groups scale up their efforts by expanding their members' involvement and leadership. For more information about organizing your workplace and the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee you can click here: https://workerorganizing.org/ You can read more by Eric Blanc at https://www.laborpolitics.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
These days it's harder than ever to watch TV, scroll social media, or even just sit at home looking out of the window without contemplating the question at the heart of philosopher Todd May's Should We Go Extinct?: A Philosophical Dilemma for Our Unbearable Times (Crown, 2024). Facing climate destruction and the revived specter of nuclear annihilation even as humans continue to cause untold suffering to our fellow creatures on planet Earth, we are forced each day to contemplate whether the world would be better off in our absence. In this timely, fascinating examination, May, a renowned philosopher and advisor to the acclaimed TV show The Good Place, reasons both for and against the continuation of our species, trying to help us understand how and whether, the positive and negative tallies of the human ledger are comparable, and what conclusions we might draw about ourselves and our future from doing so. He discusses the value that only humans can bring to the world and to one another as well as the goods, like art and music, that would be lost were we no longer here. On the other side of the ledger, he walks us through the suffering we cause to nature and the non-human world, seeking to understand whether it's possible to justify such suffering against our merits and if not, what changes we could make to reduce the harm we cause. In this moment of rising pessimism about the future, and as many people wonder whether they should bring children into such a dark and difficult world, the questions May tackles in Should We Go Extinct? are hardly theoretical. As he explores the complexities involved with changes such as an end to factory farming, curbing scientific testing of animals, reducing the human population, and seeking to develop empathy with our fellow creatures, May sketches a powerful framework for establishing our responsibilities as a species and gives hope that we might one day find universal agreement that the answer to his title question should be No. Todd May is Instructor of Philosophy, and Nielsen Professor of the Humanities, at Warren Wilson College. He's taught and written on philosophy for over thirty years, mostly in the areas of ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of life. Kyle Johannsen is Sessional Faculty Member in the Department of Philosophy at Trent University. His most recent authored book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021). 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 latest episode of Unlocking Academia, Tarin Ahmed, the host, is joined by guest, Johanna Drucker, an American author, book artist, visual theorist, and cultural critic. In a discussion on Drucker's recent publication, Affluvia: The Toxic Off-Gassing of Affluent Culture (Bridge Books, 2025), they cover topics of invisible labour, globalisation, sustainability and more. Affluvia, a neologism for the “toxic off-gassing of affluent culture, explores the ecological costs of innocuous-seeming daily routines. Delving deeper into Drucker's own ten minute morning routine, the book examines the lifecycle of production and consumption, revealing the ways these familiar objects are connected to complex networks of industrial production, extraction industries, human rights and labor issues, pollution of air and water, and destruction of human and animal habitat. The illustrated study breaks the coffee making and pet feeding into component parts, with each chapter focussing on one part of Drucker's routine. "Making Coffee" describes the lifecycle of beans from planting to roasting, the production of the coffee bag in which the beans are packaged and sold, the manufacture of the coffee grinder etc, whilst "Feeding the Cats" traces the cat food, the can and label, spoon, and bowls. Even the water, electricity, and waste products come under examination. The book is a vivid, dramatic, account of the environmental and social impact of ordinary everyday activities and is guaranteed to leave any reader with a newfound sense of curiosity for how our everyday objects came to be, and the impact getting to us has on our world. 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 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 search of these goals. We appreciate the aesthetic achievement of the movie, which is perhaps Director Ryan Coogler and star Michael B. Jordan's best and most complete work. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture
Michelle Phillipov's Digital Food TV: The Cultural Place of Food in a Digital Era (Routledge, 2023) explores the new theoretical and political questions raised by food TV's digital transformation. Bringing together analyses of food media texts and platform infrastructures—from streaming and catch-up TV to YouTube and Facebook food videos—it shows how new textual conventions, algorithmic practices, and market logics have redrawn the boundaries of food TV and altered the cultural place of food, and food media, in a digital era. With case studies of new and rerun television and emerging online genres, Digital Food TV considers what food television means at the current moment—a time when on-screen digital content is rapidly proliferating and televisual platforms and technologies are undergoing significant change. This book will appeal to students and scholars of food studies, television studies, and digital media studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture
American Gangster (2007) is Ridley Scott's homage to The French Connection: it's got the right cars, clothes, and colors and is based on another true story of an obsessed cop trying to take down a drug kingpin. The feature (or the bug, depending on how you look at it) is Denzel Washington in the title role. Is an actor so charismatic that everyone talks as if they are on a first-name basis with him actually a liability in a movie that wants to tell a story of a large-scale heroin dealer who, in the movie's first scene, burns a man alive? Can an actor's star power ever backfire? John McCarty's Bullets Over Hollywood (Grand Central Publishing, 2005) traces the gangster film and explores the enduring appeal of the genre. Incredible bumper music by John Deley. Please subscribe to the show and consider leaving us a rating or review. You can find over three hundred episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the show on X and on Letterboxd–and email us any time at fifteenminutefilm@gmail.com with requests and recommendations. Also check out Dan Moran's substack, Pages and Frames, where he writes about books and movies, as well as the many film-related interviews on 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
Michael Broyles examines a wide variety of musical, technological, and social currents that helped to shape American music in Revolutions in American Music: Three Decades that Changed a Country and Its Sounds (Norton, 2024), but he accomplishes this by focusing on just thirty years. Broyles discusses three pivotal decades in US musical history: the 1840s, the 1920s, and the 1950s. He argues that these decades fundamentally remade the American cultural landscape in enduring ways. Although Revolutions in American Music describes the ruptures caused by new musical and technological innovations such as the development of jazz or rock 'n roll, Broyles also revisits deep cultural and social fissures that affected America and American music in all three time periods. Throughout the book, Broyles introduces important figures who have been overlooked and tells stories that illuminate the messy, complex, sometimes dark, but always fascinating history of music in the United States. 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 exhilarating journey into underground parties, pulsating with life and limitless possibility, acclaimed author Amin Ghaziani unveils the unexpected revolution revitalizing urban nightlife. Drawing on Ghaziani's immersive encounters at underground parties in London and more than one hundred riveting interviews with everyone from bar owners to party producers, revelers to rabble-rousers, Long Live Queer Nightlife: How the Closing of Gay Bars Sparked a Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2024) showcases a spectacular, if seldom-seen, vision of a queer world shimmering with self-empowerment, inventiveness, and joy. Amin Ghaziani is Professor of Sociology who has taught at Northwestern, Princeton, University of British Columbia, and UC Santa Barbara. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture
Ultima and World-Building in the Computer Role-Playing Game (Amherst College Press, 2024) is the first scholarly book to focus exclusively on the long-running Ultima series of computer role-playing games (RPG) and to assess its lasting impact on the RPG genre and video game industry. Through archival and popular media sources, examinations of fan communities, and the game itself, this book historicizes the games and their authors. By attending to the salient moments and sites of game creation throughout the series' storied past, authors Carly A. Kocurek and Matthew Thomas Payne detail the creative choices and structural forces that brought Ultima's celebrated brand of role-playing to fruition. This book first considers the contributions of series founder and lead designer, Richard Garriott, examining how his fame and notoriety as a pioneering computer game auteur shaped Ultima's reception and paved the way for the evolution of the series. Next, the authors retrace the steps that Garriott took in fusing analog, tabletop role-playing with his self-taught lessons in computer programming. Close textual analyses of Ultima I outline how its gameplay elements offered a foundational framework for subsequent innovations in design and storytelling. Moving beyond the game itself, the authors assess how marketing materials and physical collectibles amplified its immersive hold and how the series' legions of fans have preserved the series. Game designers, long-time gamers, and fans will enjoy digging into the games' production history and mechanics while media studies and game scholars will find Ultima and World-Building in the Computer Role-Playing Game a useful extension of inquiry into authorship, media history, and the role of fantasy in computer game design. Carly A. Kocurek is professor of digital humanities and media studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She is the author of Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade (Minnesota, 2015) and Brenda Laurel: Pioneering Games for Girls (Bloomsbury, 2017).Matthew Thomas Payne is associate professor of ?lm, television, and theatre at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Playing War: Military Video Games after 9/11 (NYU Press, 2016), and is a co-editor of How to Play Video Games (NYU Press, 2019) and Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games (Routledge, 2009). Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master's degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design and game studies at the University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal Titel kulturmagazin for the game section, hosts the German local radio show Replay Value and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies 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 2020 murder of George Floyd sparked mass protests that challenged many institutions, including large for-profit companies, to reflect on how to address racial inequality. Large corporations began making systematic public statements to show alignment with causes that impact people of color. These statements were also used to protect corporate reputations against claims that their businesses may perpetuate racial inequality. Disclosureland: How Corporate Words Constrain Racial Progress (Cambridge UP, 2025) argues that this process and others - including corporate rhetoric that leaves out past involvement in racial inequality, using disclosures about race as evidence of action, or pulling back on disclosures about race in response to conservative pushback - constrain true racial progress. Even when corporations make pledges to hire and promote people of color or fund racial equity causes through philanthropy, the book demonstrates how these pledges function to limit corporate responsibility. Critical and corrective, Disclosureland calls on the federal government and corporate stakeholders to regulate corporate race-conscious words. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture
Ten beautifully illustrated essays tell the stories of handcrafted objects and their makers, providing inspiration and insight into Black history and craftsmanship. Black artisans have long been central to American art and design, creating innovative and highly desired work against immense odds. Atlanta-based chairmaker and scholar Robell Awake explores the stories behind ten cornerstones of Black craft, from the celebrated wooden chairs of Richard Poynor, an enslaved craftsman who began a dynasty of Tennessee chairmakers, to the enslaved potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina, to Ann Lowe, the couture dressmaker who made Jacqueline Kennedy's wedding dress, A Short History of Black Craft in Ten Objects (Princeton Architectural Press, 2025) illuminates the work of generations of Black craftspeople, foregrounding their enduring contributions to American craft. 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 powerful and important exploration of how addiction functions on social, psychological and biological levels, integrated with the experience of being an addict, from an acclaimed philosopher and former addict.What is addiction? Theories about what kind of thing addiction is are sharply divided between those who see it purely as a brain disorder, and those who conceive of it in psychological and social terms. Owen Flanagan, an acclaimed philosopher of mind and ethics, offers a state-of-the-art assessment of addiction science and proposes a new ecumenical model for understanding and explaining substance addiction.Flanagan has first-hand knowledge of what it is like to be an addict. That experience, along with his wide-ranging knowledge of the philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, and the ethics and politics of addiction, informs this important and novel work. He pairs the sciences that study addiction with a sophisticated view of the consciousness-brain/body relation to make his core argument: that substance addictions comprise a heterogeneous set of "psychobiosocial" behavioral disorders. He explains that substance addictions do not have one set of causes, such as self-medication or social dislocation, and they do not have one neural profile, such as a dysfunction in dopamine system. Some addictions are fun and experimentation gone awry. Flanagan reveals addiction to be a heterogeneous set of disorders, which are picked out by multifarious cultural, social, psychological, and neural features.Flanagan explores the ways addicts sensibly insist on their own responsibility to undo addiction, as well as ways in which shame for addiction can be leveraged into healing. He insists on the collective shame we all bear for our indifference to many of the psychological and social causes of addiction and explores the implications of this new integrated paradigm for practices of harm reduction and treatment. Flanagan's powerful new book upends longstanding conventional thinking and points the way to new ways of understanding and treating addiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture
Everyone speaks with an accent, but what is an accent? Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice (UC Press, 2023) introduces accent as a powerfully coded yet underexplored mode of perception that includes looking, listening, acting, reading, and thinking. This volume convenes scholars of media, literature, education, law, language, and sound to theorize accent as an object of inquiry, an interdisciplinary method, and an embodied practice. Accent does more than just denote identity: from algorithmic bias and corporate pedagogy to migratory poetics and the politics of comparison, accent mediates global economies of discrimination and desire. Accents happen between bodies and media. They negotiate power and invite attunement. These essays invite the reader to think with an accent—to practice a dialogical and multimodal inquiry that can yield transformative modalities of knowledge, action, and care. Thinking with an Accent won the American Comparative Literature Association's 2024 Rene Wellek Prize for Best Edited Collection. Editors: Pooja Rangan, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, Akshya Saxena, and Pavitra Sundar Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture
Joshua K. Wright, The NBA's Global Empire: How the League Became an International Powerhouse (McFarland, 2025) During the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, the Dream Team, a collective of the National Basketball Association's top talent led by Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and Charles Barkley, shook up the world as they amazed spectators and opponents on their way to winning gold. Their success introduced the world to the NBA's charismatic superstars and their artistic brand of basketball. Over the next two decades, youth outside of America dreamed of becoming the next Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and LeBron James. The NBA took advantage of its popularity in China by forming lucrative television and streaming deals and opening training academies. By the 2022-23 NBA season, there were 109 international players from 39 countries, a Canadian franchise, and a league in Africa. Today's best players are Africans, Canadians and Europeans like Nikola Jokic and Victor Wembanyama. This book presents the history of the NBA's ascension to a billion-dollar global empire, analyzing the globalization of American sports since the end of the Cold War and the dawn of the millennium. How essential is globalization for the NBA to thrive in the 21st century? Do the benefits outweigh the geopolitical controversies associated with being a global brand? Is globalization responsible for a decline in American-born NBA players and declining domestic popularity? These questions and others are answered in this first treatment of the NBA's global reach. Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All. His next book, Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet, will be out in the fall of 2025. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture
No New Things: A Radically Simple 30-Day Guide to Saving Money, the Planet, and Your Sanity by Ashlee Piper, was published by Celadon Books in April 2025. In this honest and intentional book, Piper educates us on the history of our marketing and obsession with new things and guides us into a flexible and life changing 30-day-challenge. From award-winning sustainability expert Ashlee Piper, a witty, no-nonsense guide to regaining control over your time, consumerist impulses, and financial and mental wellnessFor nearly two years, Ashlee Piper challenged herself to buy nothing new. And in the process, she got out of debt, cut clutter, crushed her goals, and became healthier and happier than ever―all the things she'd always wanted to do but “never had time to” (because she was mindlessly scrolling, shopping, spending, and stressing). After a decade of fine-tuning, No New Things guides readers through the same revolutionarily simple challenge that has helped thousands of global participants find freedom and fulfillment in just thirty days.The book follows the rise of what Piper calls “conditioned consumerism” and how it sneakily hijacks our time, money, and mental bandwidth, as well as harms the planet. From there, readers follow customizable daily action items that bring about the ease and richness of a life less bogged down by spending and stuff, without compromising on style, convenience, or fun.Whether you're a bona fide shopaholic or someone who just wants to buy less and live more, No New Things is the antidote to modern overwhelm. - Meg Gambino is an artist and activist currently working as the Client and Community Relations Manager at a local nonprofit focused on ending hunger in North Penn. Her life mission is to creatively empower others by modeling reconciliation between communities of people and people on the margins. Find her on Instagram @megambino. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture
Get ready for the fight of your life in Go Straight: The Ultimate Guide to Side-Scrolling Beat-'Em-Ups (Bitmap Books, 2022). Written by award-winning author Dave Cook, and opening with a foreword by legendary Double Dragon creator, Yoshihisa Kishimoto, this odyssey through bare-knuckle nostalgia features over 200 games spanning 37 years. At over 450 pages, Go Straight takes a deep dive into familiar beat-'em-up legends like Double Dragon, Golden Axe, Final Fight and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, as well as delving into the more obscure brawlers you just have to try, like Denjin Makai, Shadow Force and Gaia Crusaders. As well as reviewing each game, Go Straight features hints, tips and guides to levels and enemies. The book is packed full of screenshots, sprites and level maps, all lovingly curated and presented to our usual high standards. Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master's degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design and game studies at the HNU University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm, Germany, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal Titel kulturmagazin for the game section, hosts the German local radio show Replay Value and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture
Alongside superheroes, supervillains, too, have become one of today's most popular and globally recognizable figures. However, it is not merely their popularity that marks their significance. Supervillains are also central to superhero storytelling to the extent that the superhero genre cannot survive without supervillains. Bringing together different approaches and critical perspectives across disciplines, in Supervillains: The Significance of Evil in Superhero Comics (Rutgers University Press, 2025) Dr. Nao Tomabechi troubles overly hero-centered works in comics studies to reconsider the modern American myths of the superheroes. Considering the likes of Lex Luthor, the Joker, Catwoman, Harley Quinn, Loki, Venom, and more, Supervillians explores themes such as gender and sexuality, disability, and many forms of Otherness in relation to the notion of evil as it appears in the superhero genre. The book investigates how supervillains uphold and, at times, trouble dominant ideals expressed by the heroism of our superheroes. 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
Laura Lee Flanagan's Hardcore Vegetarian (Feral House, 2025) is a celebration of food and love for everyone! Hardcore Vegetarian is a journey into vegetarianism led by someone who fell into it inadvertently and is happily still learning as she goes. As a passionate home cook, Flanagan became what she describes as a "lazy vegetarian" while figuring out how to cook for herself and her vegetarian husband, musician Harley Flanagan. It is a narrative guide for the vegetarian-curious, for home cooks who want to explore vegetarianism and introduce plant-based recipes into their households. It explores the meaning of food in our lives, how we interact with it, and how our relationship to it evolves as over time. Included are short personal accounts, as Flanagan engages readers as she gently and humorously shares her own learning curve, along with road-tested, beloved, and delicious recipes. Hardcore Vegetarian brings readers along for the successes and sometimes failures as Flanagan overhauls her kitchen and recipes from meaty to beety. She shares tips and insights from the people who taught her how to cook for the people she loves. Hardcore Vegetarian is organized into easily digestible sections that cover every meal and includes a guide to vegetarian pantry essentials. As she writes, "Food is a primordial expression of love," and there is nothing more Hardcore than love. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture
Bands like R.E.M., U2, Public Enemy, and Nirvana found success as darlings of college radio, but the extraordinary influence of these stations and their DJs on musical culture since the 1970s was anything but inevitable. As media deregulation and political conflict over obscenity and censorship transformed the business and politics of culture, students and community DJs turned to college radio to defy the mainstream—and they ended up disrupting popular music and commercial radio in the process. In this first history of US college radio, Katherine Rye Jewell reveals that these eclectic stations in major cities and college towns across the United States owed their collective cultural power to the politics of higher education as much as they did to upstart bohemian music scenes coast to coast. Dr. Jewell uncovers how battles to control college radio were about more than music—they were an influential, if unexpected, front in the nation's culture wars. These battles created unintended consequences and overlooked contributions to popular culture that students, DJs, and listeners never anticipated. More than an ode to beloved stations, this book will resonate with both music fans and observers of the politics of culture. Our guest is: Dr. Katherine Rye Jewell, who is a historian and a professor at Fitchburg State University. She writes about the intersection of business, politics, and culture, and is the author of Live From the Underground: A History of College Radio (University of North Carolina Press, 2023). Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a freelance book editor and dissertation coach. She is the producer and host of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: 100 Years of Radio in South Africa Interview with NPR host Celeste Headlee A Conversation with Marshall Poe about founding the NBN A conversation with tuba professor Richard A. White Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ 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
In Emergent Genders: Living Otherwise in Tokyo's Pink Economies (Duke UP, 2025), Michelle H. S. Ho traces the genders manifesting alongside Japanese popular culture in Akihabara, an area in Tokyo renowned for the fandom and consumption of anime, manga, and games. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in josō and dansō cafe-and-bars, establishments where male-to-female and female-to-male crossdressing is prevalent, Ho shows how their owners, employees, and customers creatively innovate what she calls emergent genders—new practices, categories, and ways of being stemming from the simultaneous fracturing, contestations, and (re)imaginations of older forms of gender and sexual variance in Japan. Such emergent genders initiate new markets for alternative categories of expression and subjectivity to thrive in a popular cultural hub like Akihabara instead of Tokyo's gay and lesbian neighborhood of Shinjuku Ni-chōme. By rethinking identitarian models of gender and sexuality, reconfiguring the significance of capitalism for trans studies and queer theory, and decentering theoretical frameworks incubated in a predominantly United States academic context, Ho offers new ways of examining how trans and gender nonconforming individuals may survive and flourish under capitalism. 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 twenty-first century alone, women filmmakers have succeeded at directing every size, genre, and style of motion picture. Their movies have won Oscars (Free Solo), made actors into household names (Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone), received induction into the Library of Congress's National Film Registry (Real Women Have Curves), and become worldwide box office phenomena (Captain Marvel, Deep Impact). Nevertheless in 2023, the year of Barbie, women directed only 12% of the top 250 movies in America. demonstrating how far moviemaking remains from gender parity. When women filmmakers succeed, they do so against these odds. Break the Frame (Oxford UP, 2025) is a collection of 24 career-spanning interviews with America's celebrated, reigning, and rising women filmmakers. Each conversation considers the director's complete filmography as a map of their evolving artistry and evidence of their unassailable contributions to a historically misogynist industry. Author Kevin Smokler listens as women filmmakers speak to the struggle and triumphs of developing and directing movies that are shaping how the film business sees women in the director's chair, and how their audiences see themselves and each other. This book is both an opportunity and invitation to devote one's time, admiration and enthusiasm to movies directed by women. 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 book to combine exquisite cartographical charts of the Moon with a thorough exploration of the Moon's role in popular culture, science, and myth. President John F. Kennedy's rousing “We will go to the Moon” speech in 1961 before the US Congress catalyzed the celebrated Apollo program, spurring the US Geological Survey's scientists to map the Moon. Over the next eleven years a team of twenty-two, including a dozen illustrator-cartographers, created forty-four charts that forever changed the path of space exploration.For the first time, each of those beautifully hand-drawn, colorful charts is presented together in one stunning book. In Lunar: A History of the Moon in Myths, Maps and Matter (U Chicago Press, 2024), National Air and Space Museum curator Matthew Shindell's expert commentary accompanies each chart, along with the key geological characteristics and interpretations that were set out in the original Geologic Atlas of the Moon. Interwoven throughout the book are contributions from scholars devoted to studying the multifaceted significance of the Moon to humankind around the world. Traveling from the Stone Age to the present day, they explore a wide range of topics: the prehistoric lunar calendar; the role of the Moon in creation myths of Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome; the role of the Moon in astrology; the importance of the Moon in establishing an Earth-centered solar system; the association of the Moon with madness and the menstrual cycle; how the Moon governs the tides; and the use of the Moon in surrealist art.Combining a thoughtful retelling of the Moon's cultural associations throughout history with the beautifully illustrated and scientifically accurate charting of its surface, Lunar is a stunning celebration of the Moon in all its guises. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture
Embodying Normalcy: Women's Work in Neoliberal Times (Lexington Books, 2024) calls attention to how women in the United States do a type of unpaid work to embody the latest trends for the purpose of achieving success in neoliberal culture. Using TLC reality shows, lifestyle and beauty influencers, Brazilian butt lift TikToks, and celebrities like Kim Kardashian as her archive, Lucia Soriano delivers four case studies that draw on gender studies, media studies, disability studies, and American studies to illustrate how the prerequisite for women to succeed in neoliberal culture calls for them to treat their bodies as projects that must be transformed every day. Author Lucia Soriano is assistant professor in women's, gender, and sexuality studies and ethnic studies at Albion College. The episode is hosted by Ailin Zhou, PhD student in Film & Digital Media at University of California - Santa Cruz. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture
Elton John is not only "still standing," he is a living superlative, the ultimate record-breaking, award-winning survivor of the great era of pop and rock music that he helped to shape during his six decades in the music industry. Yet few of his numerous biographies and song guides take him as a historical subject worthy of scholarly study.In contrast, On Elton John: An Opinionated Guide (Oxford University Press, 2025) approaches the artist seriously and analytically, while still couched in a highly accessible style. Author Matthew Restall offers a new way to explore Sir Elton's career and music within the contexts of other artists and of sweeping shifts in popular culture during his lifetime. Each of the ten chapters is anchored to an Elton song, rooted in its pop culture history, and advances a clear argument, pairing him with figures ranging from Bernie (Bernie Taupin, his lyricist) to Bennie (of the Jets), from "frenemy" David Bowie to artists like Rod Stewart, Aretha Franklin, and Dua Lipa, from Diana (the princess) to Jesus (yes, that one). Restall contends that Sir Elton's career offers us a novel way to see and understand the last half century of pop music and culture history--whether we call the era that of the album, of rock, of postmodernism, or of something else. The yellow brick road of Sir Elton's career has been long, winding, and bumpy, but, as Restall argues, his success has come not just despite but because of those challenges. The artist's transformations from Reg to Elton to Sir Elton to Uncle Elton, from ugly duckling to bedazzled swan, from the world's biggest rock star to creator of the world's largest AIDS fundraising organization, from tabloid punching bag to pop royalty, have all served as survival strategies that illuminate the era he has thereby navigated. Matthew Restall teaches at the Pennsylvania State University, where he is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History, Anthropology, and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Director of Latin American Studies. Caleb Zakarin is editor at 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
Covering her life and sixty-year career from Sonny & Cher to show-stopping solo performer, award-winning actress, fashion icon, and beyond, this is a glorious retrospective of one of the world's most enduring entertainers, Cher. Featuring a foreword by Cyndi Lauper! Commemorating six decades since her first #1 hit in 1965, I Got You Babe (Running Press, 2025) captures Cher's one-of-a-kind life. Written by award-winning writer and editor Annie Zaleski, this celebration of the fearless, down-to-earth "Goddess of Pop" explores key moments in her life and career in words and photos. Amid these moments are photo after photo of some of the most eye-popping outfits ever worn in life and on stage. As an avid clothes horse who wasn't afraid to wear a see-through dress to the Met Gala in 1974, Cher's many looks will be given their due in this engaging, career-spanning retrospective. Annie Zaleski is an award-winning writer and editor who's contributed to NPR Music, Salon, Rolling Stone, and The Guardian. She's also the author of multiple books, including an extensive look at Duran Duran's Rio for Bloomsbury's prestigious 33 1/3 series, and biographies of pop stars Lady Gaga and P!nk. She interviewed Cher ahead of her 2016 Las Vegas residency and praised the icon in a career-spanning 2021 Salon piece; additionally, she wrote about the intriguing backstory of Sonny & Cher's "I Got You Babe" in Running Press's forthcoming book We Found Love, Song by Song. Annie Zaleski on Bluesky. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America. He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming books are Frank Zappa's America (Louisiana State University Press, June 2025) and U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, October 2025). Bradley Morgan on 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
This timely and telling analysis identifies the formal and thematic innovations pioneered by millennial feminists between 2012 and 2020 that have shaped the trajectory of our favorite shows today. Author Vincent L. Stephens offers close readings of nine pivotal series, including Girls, Orange Is the New Black, Broad City, Jane the Virgin, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Fleabag, Insecure, Shrill, and I May Destroy You. Across these series, women-led creative teams translated techniques from indie films, inverted gendered television tropes, and engaged in innovative temporal storytelling. These series, often including showrunners who also act, write, and direct, are the product of a new ecology of television driven by the rise of streaming platforms and a demand for more inclusive narratives. Broads, Sisters, Exes: Feminist Millennial Television (Wayne State UP, 2025) optimistically contends with women as aesthetic innovators and maps their influence on entertainment industry reforms that are slowly but surely increasing accessibility for creatives from groups historically underrepresented across media. Through elegant prose deeply rooted in an intersectional feminist perspective, Stephens expands the aesthetic and narrative grammars of contemporary television. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture
Gospel singer and seven-time Grammy winner Andraé Crouch (1942-2015) hardly needs introduction. His compositions--"The Blood Will Never Lose Its Power," "Through It All," "My Tribute (To God be the Glory)," "Jesus is the Answer," "Soon and Very Soon," and others--remain staples in modern hymnals, and he is often spoken of in the same "genius" pantheon as Mahalia Jackson, Thomas Dorsey and the Rev. James Cleveland. As the definitive biography of Crouch published to date, Soon and Very Soon: The Transformative Music and Ministry of Andraé Crouch (Oxford University Press, 2025) celebrates the many ways that his legacy indelibly changed the course of gospel and popular music. 10 Songs chosen by the authors: The Blood (Will Never Lose Its Power) I've Got Confidence My Tribute (to God be the Glory) Satisfied Bless His Holy Name Take Me Back Soon and Very Soon Bless His Holy Name Jesus is the Answer Just Like He Said He Would Robert F. Darden is Emeritus Professor of Journalism at Baylor University and the founder of the Black Gospel Music Preservation Project. He is the author of more than two dozen books and former Gospel Music Editor for Billboard magazine. Stephen M. Newby holds the Lev H. Prichard III Endowed Chair in the Study of Black Worship as Professor of Music and serves as Ambassador for Black Gospel Music Preservation at Baylor University. Caleb Zakarin is editor at 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