Timestamps:

00:00 – Intro: What is People Stuff?

02:00 – What Fresh Hell: Baseball cards, blind packs, and CT scanners

08:00 – Question 1: Politics, podcasts, and the red-pill relationship

20:00 – Question 2: Anti-vaxx cousins and the anthropology of purity and danger

34:00 – Fixing Shit: How to fix college admissions (spoiler: lotteries)

44:00 – Question 3: Food, family, and why your boyfriend refuses tamales

56:00 – Outro: Fake sponsors & final thoughts

In this episode, Dan and Michael discuss:

Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson

Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman

Purity and Danger by Mary Douglas

“Techniques of the Body” by Marcel Mauss

Outline of a Theory of Practice by Pierre Bourdieu

Human Nature and Conduct by John Dewey

And, the “Parkerization” of Wine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Parker_(wine_critic)#Impact_on_the_supply:_the_%22Parkerization%22_of_wine

That’s it for this week’s People Stuff — the show where two anthropologists try (and sometimes fail) to make sense of people.

If you’ve got a question, a dilemma, or just something deeply weird about humanity you’d like us to unpack, send it our way at people-stuff.com

Credits

Produced by Gabe Bullard
Music by The Endless Bummer
Art by Siobhan Henegan
Marketing by Bryan Haut
Legal support by The Law Office of Matthew Shayefar, the one true business uncle.

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So go to people-stuff.com