Culture Study Podcast

A listener submitted a question earlier this week that was basically: Why are we talking about Taylor Swift again???? And I get it: if you’re not a fan, if her music is not for you, you too might be tired of the ongoing Taylor Swift Conversation. But I’m ultimately less interested in Taylor Swift herself and more interested in the shape of that conversation: what are we actually talking about when we talk about Taylor Swift? We’re talking about work and scarcity, we’re talking about aesthetics and whiteness, we’re talking about the performance of authenticity and narratives of romance… and we’re talking about all of those things today with Sarah Chapelle, the fashion journalist behind the enormously popular Instagram account Taylor Swift Style.

• Follow Sarah on Instagram, and pre-order Taylor Swift Style (out October 8)!

• Read the NYT review one listener referenced: “On ‘The Tortured Poets Department,’ Taylor Swift Could Use an Editor”

• And as a counterpoint, how about this Bloomberg op ed: “Taylor Swift Is Proof That How We Critique Music Is Broken”

• As a reminder, here’s Taylor’s Grammy look the night she announced TTPD

• Revel in the aesthetic of the “Fortnight” music video

• Here’s the YouTube short of snippets from Taylor’s life in the past few months

• And of course, revisit our third ever episode

• How we talk about the royals today (especially looking for some questions from people outside of the U.S. here!)

• The State Of The Food Blog in 2024

• Your strong opinions on things that, in the grand scheme, don’t matter much

• For our continuing series on romance novels: QUEER ROMANCE and ROMANCE BOOKSTORES

• The future of reality TV

• What’s the deal with JEANS right now (alternate title = Jeans: Help)

• The Contemporary Jennifer Lopez

• Ben Affleck (specifically within the framework of Ambition)

• The cultural force that is nostalgia (especially interested in how it functions in different generations)

• Anything you need advice on!

• You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here (and here’s the subscriber-only priority form)

• Join the ranks of paid subscribers and get bonus content, access to the discussion threads, ad-free episodes, and the knowledge that you're supporting an indie pod trying to make its way in the world.
• Got a question to submit, a prompt for Ask Anne Anything, or an idea for a future episode? Tell us here.
• Catch up on everything else happening in the Culture Study universe here.
• Transcripts will be available here within 24 hours of publishing.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Who can force a nationwide conversation about musical genre for a whole damn month? Beyoncé can. And I knew I wanted to be several weeks into that discussion — and several weeks into my own relationship with the album — before I dove in myself. I also knew I wanted to talk about it with someone else with a similarly deep and ambivalent relationship with country music: the good, the white, the cold-beer-nation-building, all of it. So I was absolutely thrilled when Elamin Abdelmahmoud agreed to come on the show and engage in what he calls one of his favorite hobbies: “talking about Beyoncé at length.” You’re gonna love the show and you’re gonna love Elamin and it’s gonna make you think a lot more about Cowboy Carter, even if it’s not (yet) your fav. I can’t wait for your thoughts (and to argue more about Jolene in the comments).

• Follow Elamin on Instagram and Twitter, and listen to his excellent show, Commotion (also read my interview with Elamin on Culture Study here from a few years ago here!)

• The episode of Into It with Sam Sanders and Tressie McMillan Cottom on country music and race

• A few of the country self-referential songs I mentioned: Tim and Faith, Damn Straight, She Had Me At Heads Carolina

• Watch Beyoncé and The Chicks perform at the 2016 CMAs (and also watch the crowd shots)

• Natalie Maines of The Chicks talked about the performance on The Howard Stern Show in 2020

• Elamin references Dr. Jada Watson’s studies on race in country music— check out “Redlining in Country Music: Representation in the Country Music Industry (2000-2020)” and the follow-up on representation in 2021 and 2022

• Read Doreen St. Félix’s piece in The New Yorker: “Beyoncé Won’t Burn Down the Barn with Cowboy Carter”

• Read Julianne Escobedo Shepherd’s review of the album for Pitchfork

• And just because it never gets old, revisit Miley Cyrus’s cover of “Jolene”

• How we talk about the royals today (especially looking for some questions from people outside of the U.S. here!)

• The State Of The Food Blog in 2024

• Your strong opinions on things that, in the grand scheme, don’t matter much

• For our continuing series on romance novels: QUEER ROMANCE and ROMANCE BOOKSTORES

• The future of reality TV

• What’s the deal with JEANS right now (alternate title = Jeans: Help)

• The Contemporary Jennifer Lopez

• Ben Affleck (specifically within the framework of Ambition)

• The cultural force that is nostalgia (especially interested in how it functions in different generations)

• Anything you need advice on!

• You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here (and here’s the subscriber-only priority form)

• Join the ranks of paid subscribers and get bonus content, access to the discussion threads, ad-free episodes, and the knowledge that you're supporting an indie pod trying to make its way in the world.
• Got a question to submit, a prompt for Ask Anne Anything, or an idea for a future episode? Tell us here.
• Catch up on everything else happening in the Culture Study universe here.
• Transcripts will be available here within 24 hours of publishing.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Moms For Liberty sucks. I’m not going to even try to soften that statement, because it’s true: they’re an ideologically regressive organization that is wielding the idea of “parental rights” to censor books, teachers, and instructional materials. They make it much, much harder for educators to do their jobs — and many of the people most involved don’t even have kids in public schools.

But to defeat them, you have to understand what they’re doing — and how they’re doing it. Which is why I wanted to have journalist Laura Pappano come on the show to talk about her extensive reporting on “school moms” and the place of Moms for Liberty within the “battle” for public schools. We talk about where the money comes from, how other parents are effectively organizing against them, the history of parent-led school activism, and most importantly, what uniform you wear to a conservative mom conference.

• Find Laura’s book, School Moms: Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education here

• Laura on the “Brief History of the Grand Old American Tradition of Banning Books”

• Her report from the Moms for Liberty gathering from last summer)

• Laura’s excellent piece on the effort to take back control of the school board from far-right extremists in West Bonner County, North Idaho

• A few of the pieces I mention re: my reporting on extremism in North Idaho: Here’s What Happens When Republicans Have No One To Fight and The Fight to Bear Arms

• Find Laura’s website — with links to her other reporting and work — here!

• The force and vector shifts and general dynamics of getting very mad at a celebrity

• What’s the deal with JEANS right now (alternate title = Jeans: Help)

• For our continuing series on romance novels: QUEER ROMANCE and ROMANCE BOOKSTORES

• The future of reality TV

• How we talk about the royals today (especially looking for some questions from people outside of the U.S. here!)

• The Contemporary Jennifer Lopez

• Online shopping culture, including but not limited to people’s reliance on reviews and/or compulsion to leave reviews

• The cultural force that is nostalgia (especially interested in how it functions in different generations)

• Anything you need advice on!

• You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here (and here’s the subscriber-only priority form)

• Join the ranks of paid subscribers and get bonus content, access to the discussion threads, ad-free episodes, and the knowledge that you're supporting an indie pod trying to make its way in the world.
• Got a question to submit, a prompt for Ask Anne Anything, or an idea for a future episode? Tell us here.
• Catch up on everything else happening in the Culture Study universe here.
• Transcripts will be available here within 24 hours of publishing.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Driving, attending meetings, hunching over laptops, zooming, commuting, absentmindedly scrolling Instagram — so much of contemporary life encourages if not outright demands that we sit. But study after study (and maybe just your own body) has told you: this much sitting is not great for us. But what are we supposed to do instead? Can we get rid of the junk wellness moralizing (10,000 steps a day!) and figure out small things that actually make our bodies feel better?

Turns out, yes! And Manoush Zomorodi is here to talk about all of it — including whether those walking pads are bullshit. And I promise: this show won't make you feel like a horrible person for sitting. But it might give you some ideas about how you can listen to your body more.

• NPR/Ted Radio Hour’s The Body Electric Challenge, which is very cool

• Manoush’s recap of the challenge:

• The Roxanne Gay Work Friend column on walking treadmills

• Manoush’s piece in the Los Angeles Times re: strategies to break up sitting

• Debunking the 10,000 Steps Myth

• THE NEW BEYONCÉ ALBUM — SPECIFICALLY WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF COUNTRY MUSIC (this ep’s with Elamin Abdelmahmoud and it’s going to be so good, but we absolutely need your questions to guide us)

• What’s the deal with JEANS right now (alternate title = Jeans: Help)

• For our continuing series on romance novels: QUEER ROMANCE

• The future of reality TV

• How we talk about the royals today (especially looking for some questions from people outside of the U.S. here!)

• The Contemporary Jennifer Lopez

• Online shopping culture, including but not limited to people’s reliance on reviews and/or compulsion to leave reviews

• The cultural force that is nostalgia (especially interested in how it functions in different generations)

• Anything you need advice on!

• You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here (and here’s the subscriber-only priority form)

• Join the ranks of paid subscribers and get bonus content, access to the discussion threads, ad-free episodes, and the knowledge that you're supporting an indie pod trying to make its way in the world.
• Got a question to submit, a prompt for Ask Anne Anything, or an idea for a future episode? Tell us here.
• Catch up on everything else happening in the Culture Study universe here.
• Transcripts will be available here within 24 hours of publishing.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

As any Pacific Northwest teen from the ‘90s and early 2000s who carted a Nalgene around campus can tell you: WATER BOTTLE CULTURE IS NOT NEW. As pretty much any Grandpa or Boomer Dad can tell you: NEITHER IS STANLEY. But the demand for Stanley Tumblers (and, just as important, the inflated, often misogynistic conversation around it?) That’s (sorta) new. Like everything we talk about on this show: it’s complicated.

For today’s episode, we invited Amanda Mull back to the show to unpack the so-called Stanley Tumbler “obsession,” the relatively novel fascination with hydration, and why every kid has to have a water bottle at school. You might not think there’s that much to talk about when it comes to water bottles, but this one’s a whole lot of fun and as always, Amanda is a font of consumer behavior knowledge. (And make sure to check out Amanda’s first appearance on the pod, exploring why do clothes suck now??)

• Amanda’s piece on Stanley Cups in The Atlantic (gift link)

• Amanda’s 2019 piece on millennials and fancy water bottles (gift link)

• The TMZ video of the argument in the Target line, which you hear at the start of this episode

• The model of Nalgene we had in my family for hiking (???)

• The great Decoder Ring episode on “the invention of hydration”

• Melody wants everyone to rewatch this clip from Parks and Rec, in which Pawnee citizens use water fountains

• Virginia Sole-Smith’s piece on diet culture and Stanley discourse is also worth the read (paywalled)

• Just one example of what a Stanley collection looks like

• An official Owala TikTok on how to clean the damn thing

• Find all of Amanda’s work here and here’s one of my favs on where your returns actually go

• Specific questions for a romance author (already scheduled, she’s awesome!) and romance booksellers (send us your recs!)

• The weird TikTok trends on your specific FYP

• What’s the deal with JEANS right now (alternate title = Jeans: Help)

• Sephora Teens and teen skincare/makeup culture

• How we talk about the royals today

• Beyond Ballerina Farm [and is there such a thing as too much tradwife discourse? How do we critique but also not celebritize?]

• WHAT CELEBRITY IMAGE SHOULD WE UNPACK NEXT?

• Online shopping culture, including but not limited to people’s reliance on reviews and/or compulsion to leave reviews

• The cultural force that is nostalgia (especially interested in how it functions in different generations)

• Anything you need advice on!

• You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here (and here’s the subscriber-only priority form)

• Join the ranks of paid subscribers and get bonus content, access to the discussion threads, ad-free episodes, and the knowledge that you're supporting an indie pod trying to make its way in the world.
• Got a question to submit, a prompt for Ask Anne Anything, or an idea for a future episode? Tell us here.
• Catch up on everything else happening in the Culture Study universe here.
• Transcripts will be available here within 24 hours of publishing.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I occasionally encounter someone who asks: Who would follow a celebrity on Instagram? Lady, I WOULD. I do! I follow celebrities who I actually like and celebrities who I find weird and complicated (Gwen Stefani, hi) and celebrities I wrote about or profiled at some point in the last ten years and now know all about their workout routines (hi, Brie Larson). But I didn’t follow Kevin Bacon — until a reel of him dancing, back-lit in his barn, to “Footloose” (in celebration of the end of the Actor’s Guild Strike) took over my field. Over the weeks to come, I let the posts of a man fundamentally at ease wash over me. Here was Kevin Bacon, playing me an LP from his collection. There was Kevin Bacon, slow-dancing with his wife of many decades (Kyra Sedgwick) in their modest farmhouse kitchen. There he was, with his shaggy graying hair and well-fit jeans, just effortlessly existing, seemingly free of the anxiety of public social media performance.

Of course, I’ve studied stars long enough to know there was something more complicated going on — in the performance of a particular kind of masculinity and progressive semi-agrarian whiteness and heterosexual romance and so much more. So I asked Sarah Mesle, one of my favorite culture analysts (also, crucially, a Gen-Xer like Bacon and a practitioner of “hair studies”) to come on the pod to unpack it all.

• KEVIN BACON’S INSTAGRAM, DUH

• I mention my favorite theorist of stardom, Richard Dyer — his canonical book is Stars, but I find Heavenly Bodies more accessible outside of academic context

• Sarah references Cruel Optimism by Lauren Berlant

• A movie poster for Quicksilver accidentally (?) stayed up in the NYC subway for 36 years

• Follow Sarah Mesle on Instagram, and stay tuned for her forthcoming book Tangled: American Racism and White Women's Hair

• The weird TikTok trends on your specific FYP

• What’s the deal with JEANS right now (alternate title = Jeans: Help)

• Sephora Teens and teen skincare/makeup culture

• How we talk about the royals today

• Beyond Ballerina Farm [and is there such a thing as too much tradwife discourse? How do we critique but also not celebritize?]

• WHAT CELEBRITY IMAGE SHOULD WE UNPACK NEXT?

• Online shopping culture, including but not limited to people’s reliance on reviews and/or compulsion to leave reviews

• The romance novel boom

• Anything you need advice on!

• You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here (and here’s the subscriber-only priority form)

• Join the ranks of paid subscribers and get bonus content, access to the discussion threads, ad-free episodes, and the knowledge that you're supporting an indie pod trying to make its way in the world.
• Got a question to submit, a prompt for Ask Anne Anything, or an idea for a future episode? Tell us here.
• Catch up on everything else happening in the Culture Study universe here.
• Transcripts will be available here within 24 hours of publishing.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

What does it mean to think of student loans as culture? First off, it means that we can think of them as something that’s changeable. Because as much as we’ve come to think of massive piles of debt as “just the way it is” for a broad swath of people (and more and more every year), there’s nothing inevitable about student loans. Our status quo doesn’t have to be saddling young adults (and/or their parents, and/or their grandparents) with albatrosses of debt, simply to obtain the credentials that (at least theoretically) put someone on track to financial security. But if significant student debt isn’t our status quo… what could be?

Dominique Baker is one of my favorite thinkers on higher ed in general and the topic of student loans in particular — and we’re answering all your student-loan-culture questions, from “why can’t endowments just pay for all of this” to “how do I convince my beloved partner that it’s okay for us to share their student loan obligations?”

• My Culture Study interview with Dominique Baker all about her most recent research re: the educational background of journalists writing about student loans

• Dominique Baker on Work Appropriate, giving advice on navigating the broken space of higher ed (one of our most beloved episodes, fwiw)

• I briefly mention the work I did writing about student loans at BuzzFeed News — here’s the big feature I did on the broken state of Public Service Loan Forgiveness, better known as PSLF

• My piece on what’s missing from most conversations about student loan forgiveness: any acknowledgment of wealth

• The podcast interview I’ve sent to anyone who doesn’t have student loans and wants to grasp the bigger picture (this also made me understand my own place in the system so much better): Tressie McMillan Cottom and Louis Seamster on The Ezra Klein Show. I’ll never shut up about this interview.

• Cottom’s seminal work on deeply exploitative for-profit colleges and the generation of student debt

• A direct link to Dominique’s work

• What’s the deal with JEANS right now (alternate title = Jeans: Help)

• Sephora Teens and teen skincare/makeup culture

• How we talk about the royals today

• Beyond Ballerina Farm [and is there such a thing as too much tradwife discourse? How do we critique but also not celebritize?]

• WHAT CELEBRITY IMAGE SHOULD WE UNPACK NEXT?

• Online shopping culture, including but not limited to people’s reliance on reviews and/or compulsion to leave reviews

• The romance novel boom

• Anything you need advice on!

• You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here (and here’s the subscriber-only priority form)

• Join the ranks of paid subscribers and get bonus content, access to the discussion threads, ad-free episodes, and the knowledge that you're supporting an indie pod trying to make its way in the world.
• Got a question to submit, a prompt for Ask Anne Anything, or an idea for a future episode? Tell us here.
• Catch up on everything else happening in the Culture Study universe here.
• Transcripts will be available here within 24 hours of publishing.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

If you’ve been in a bookstore lately, you’ve undoubtedly seen it: A Court of Thorns and Roses, better known as ACOTAR, ruling over the paperback bestsellers with all its sequel pals. These books are behemoths. They’re massive. They’ve sold millions upon millions of copies. They’re about faeries. And they’re very, very hot.

Culture writer (and lifelong fantasy reader) Kathryn VanArendonk joins me to talk all things ACOTAR, from “is the writing bad” and “is that actually an interesting question” to “is Feyre secretly a horrible painter” and “wtf is happening with book four.”

The podcast conversation is neatly divided, so you can listen to the first half without spoilers or without any previous knowledge of the books, and the second half (behind the paywall) is more of an ACOTAR book club, where we work through specific questions about plotting, characterization, and Feyre’s aforementioned painting skills.

And if you want even more ACOTAR content, head over to the Culture Study newsletter for everything I’ve been thinking about that didn’t make its way into this episode.

• [If you want a WHOLE BUNCH MORE from ACOTAR-tok, I’ll be posting on my Instagram stories starting Wednesday morning — and then will save as a highlight]

• Read Kathryn’s piece about Sarah J. Maas for Vulture, “The Mortal Queen of Faerie Smut”

Done with ACOTAR and need another fantasy fix?

• Anne recommends Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

• Kathryn recommends Freya Marske’s queer Victorian fantasy series that starts with A Marvellous Light [AHP NOTE: I'm half-way through this and love it]

• Melody recommends The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi and The Undertaking of Hart and Mercy

• Read Kathryn’s tremendous back catalog of writing and the interview I did with her on Culture Study about transitioning from academia to her job as a full-time critic

• What’s the deal with JEANS right now (alternate title = Jeans: Help)

• Sephora Teens and teen skincare/makeup culture

• How we talk about the royals today

• Beyond Ballerina Farm [and is there such a thing as too much tradwife discourse? How do we critique but also not celebritize?]

• WHAT CELEBRITY IMAGE SHOULD WE UNPACK NEXT?

• Online shopping culture, including but not limited to people’s reliance on reviews and/or compulsion to leave reviews

• The romance novel boom

• Anything you need advice on!

• You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here (and here’s the subscriber-only priority form)

• Join the ranks of paid subscribers and get bonus content, access to the discussion threads, ad-free episodes, and the knowledge that you're supporting an indie pod trying to make its way in the world.
• Got a question to submit, a prompt for Ask Anne Anything, or an idea for a future episode? Tell us here.
• Catch up on everything else happening in the Culture Study universe here.
• Transcripts will be available here within 24 hours of publishing.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Every so often, I do a Culture Study (newsletter) interview that inspires a LOT of follow-up questions — and the podcast is the perfect forum to address them, particularly when the interviewee is as smart and hilarious and curious as Heather Radke. For today’s episode, Heather and I tackle all your BUTTS questions, like: Why are butts so funny? Isn’t it weird the fossil record can’t tell us how big butts were? Wouldn’t it be awesome if someone told you about hemorrhoids in a very matter-of-fact way at, like, age 16?

• Find Heather’s incredible, hilarious, and deeply informative book, Butts: A Backstory, here

• So much more about Sarah Baartman and a bunch of the specific references re: historical butts in my interview with Heather on Culture Study

• My piece on getting a colonscopy (and why you should talk to people about yours!) (If you have any sort of family history — get one now! And if you don’t, the new guidance is still to get one starting at age 45.)

• NOT ME ON THE PREPARATION H INSTAGRAM PAGE!!!!

• WHAT CELEBRITY IMAGE SHOULD WE UNPACK NEXT?

• Online shopping culture, including but not limited to people’s reliance on reviews and/or compulsion to leave reviews

• Student loans— how we talk about them, think about them, take this wherever you want

• The romance novel boom

• Anything you need advice on!

• You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here (and here’s the subscriber-only priority form)

• Join the ranks of paid subscribers and get bonus content, access to the discussion threads, ad-free episodes, and the knowledge that you're supporting an indie pod trying to make its way in the world.
• Got a question to submit, a prompt for Ask Anne Anything, or an idea for a future episode? Tell us here.
• Catch up on everything else happening in the Culture Study universe here.
• Transcripts will be available here within 24 hours of publishing.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Bradley Cooper would very much like an Oscar. If you’ve been paying attention to Hollywood at any point over the last five years, you know this. It’s evident in the films he makes, the way he talks about them, the cheesesteak food truck he opened for a weekend to keep himself in the press cycle. There’s nothing wrong with wanting an Oscar — what actor doesn’t want one?! — but what happens when that desire becomes the overarching theme of your entire image? The dominant way the public understands you?

The great Sam Sanders joins the pod to talk about Cooper’s star image, Hollywood masculinity, and the Tracy Flick of it all.

[If you’re familiar with Culture Study/my work/Sam’s work, you’ll recognize this type of star image analysis — if not, a reminder that we’re talking about what Cooper means, not trying to be mean.]

• The Tracy Flick of it all

• If seven-year-old celebrity gossip is your thing, listen to the conversation Sam and I had about my book Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud

• Bradley Cooper serving cheesesteaks was a real thing

• Bradley Cooper asking Robert De Niro a question from within the audience in Inside the Actors Studio

• Bradley Cooper’s episode of Smartless, in which he tells his story of getting sober

• The scene from Alias that was sexiest thing 13-year-old Melody had ever seen

• Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s iconic profile, Bradley Cooper Is Not Really Into This Profile

• Allie Jones’s excellent piece on Bradley Cooper’s Oscar Women

• Sam Sanders talking soft news versus hard news on Las Culturistas

• Listen to Vibe Check!!!

• Online shopping culture, including but not limited to people’s reliance on reviews and/or compulsion to leave reviews

• Student loans— how we talk about them, think about them, take this wherever you want

• The romance novel boom

• Anything you need advice on!

• You can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here (and here’s the subscriber-only priority form)

• Join the ranks of paid subscribers and get bonus content, access to the discussion threads, ad-free episodes, and the knowledge that you're supporting an indie pod trying to make its way in the world.
• Got a question to submit, a prompt for Ask Anne Anything, or an idea for a future episode? Tell us here.
• Catch up on everything else happening in the Culture Study universe here.
• Transcripts will be available here within 24 hours of publishing.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.