How did a generation of teenagers who were raised on novels about revolution grow up to become Trad Wives and crypto shillers and BetterHelp paid partners? Was the 2010s YA dystopia craze all just a fad, or did it actually make a dent in the zillenial mindset?

This year, we’re seeing some new teen dystopias crop up like The Testaments, The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping and Klara and the Sun. But this isn’t our first rodeo! When we were in high school, the teenage zeitgeist was uniquely shaped by The Hunger Games and approximately four thousand other YA dystopias (Divergent, Maze Runner, Matched, Uglies, The 100, The Giver, etc. etc. etc.) In this episode, we talk about the cultural factors that could have led to this explosion.

According to a researcher called Melissa Ames, one major factor was authorship. The adults who wrote our YA dystopia novels grew up in the Thatcher/Reagan era reading 1984 in high school, spent their whole youth braced for nuclear war, and then just... lived pretty nice lives. They projected their unresolved fears about authoritarianism onto their work. And because these authors still held 20th century fears, they wrote distinctly 20th century dystopias.

Ewan Morrison wrote a piece for The Guardian pointing out that a lot of these dystopias share the common theme of a well-meaning government that tried to make things good and equal and went too far. The dystopia is constructed by some corrupt social planners who decided to eliminate inequality through mandatory plastic surgery or sorting people into Harry Potter houses based on a personality test.

Uglies focused on how s**t it would be if the government forces everyone to be the same, but were we ever really at risk of this in the 2010s? YA dystopias warned of the dangers of governments having too much control, during a time of welfare cuts and the slow privatisation of the NHS. In these stories, inequality is always imposed by the hyper-controlling state, not by capitalists who benefited from the government having less control.

We also discuss the limitations of teen dystopias. It’s easy to get swept up in grand narratives about exceptional teens saving the world, but they often make change feel fantastical. Sure, yeah, fine we’d all overthrow a dictator but would we stop shopping at Zara…?

Many 2010s YA teen dystopias were bad at real world politics but great at representing the extremity of the teenage experience — the triumphs and defeats, the epic highs and lows of high school football. The guy who wrote Uglies has this quote where he says, “Life as a teenager can feel like living in an authoritarian state.” Presumably he hit a kick flip afterwards, but that doesn’t stop him from having a point.

Your whole life as a teenager is controlled by external forces. You take an exam that determines your future forever. You’re put into social groups you wouldn’t necessarily choose. You’re surveilled constantly (stop reading my diary, Mum). Because you’re experiencing everything (heartbreak, love, the pressure of a huge decision) for the first time, it all feels huge. It feels like the end of the world.

To hear our thoughts on 2010s YA dystopias (including Matched, The Hunger Games, and Uglies), as well as a deep dive into their inception and legacy, please enjoy this week’s episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or wherever you like to listen!

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More episodes:

Further Reading:

* Ames, Melissa R., “Engaging “Apolitical” Adolescents: Analyzing the Popularity and Educational Potential of Dystopian Literature Post-9/11” (2013). Faculty Research & Creative Activity. 11. https://thekeep.eiu.edu/eng_fac/11

* The Rise and Importance of Dystopian Literature for Young Adults, Ooligan Press https://www.ooliganpress.com/ya-dystopian-fiction/

* YA dystopias teach children to submit to the free market, not fight authority, The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/01/ya-dystopias-children-free-market-hunger-games-the-giver-divergent

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Do cities trap us in a man-made version of the internet doomscroll? We didn’t have time for a deep-dive this week, so we chatted about cities, bikinis as a trend slop predictor, and mimetic desire.

You can also listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts! Subscribe below to get these in your inbox whenever a new one is out. Below is a loose write-up with none of the jokes.

Today’s mini chat (let’s call these ‘Further Scrolling’) was inspired by this note:

In major cities, you can’t escape the algorithm simply by logging off. TikTok can follow you into the real world through the clothes people wear, the cafes menu you order from and the phrases written on billboards. You can map the timeline of trends just by walking down the street. First, you might pass a buzzy matcha shop, then a family-run bar that started serving a brownish diabetic matcha to keep up with said shop, then a new matcha bar with lo-fi vinyl, then, finally, a chain that did something diabolical to the matcha like adding liquorice jam or whatever. You can see the whole arc of the trend (innovation, democratisation, gentrification, corporate ruination) just by walking to the dentist. In cities, internet trends are physically perceptible and all around you.

We also talk about mimetic desire — the idea that your desires aren't organic to you, but they're installed by repetition. If you see all the cool city people wearing that hideous brown Zara skirt with blue dots all over, you might start wanting it too, but how many of them only wanted the skirt in the first place because they saw it 500 times on TikTok? We end up living in this 3D algorithm that just forces our tastes. (We did warn you this wouldn’t be a very profound episode lol)

Sithara delivers her bikini theory in this episode: The bikini is the purest canary in the trend slop coal mine. It’s cheap, constitutes a full outfit, and it doesn’t take up too much space in your wardrobe, so you can theoretically just get a new one each year to participate in whatever trend it is next time. This summer you might see people in brown-and-pastel bikinis, and your “ugh, that's disgusting" could slowly turn into an "actually, you know what, it's kind of cute."

Obviously, the countryside doesn’t protect you from the internet. If anything, some people use the internet more out of boredom and isolation. But cities externalise the internet and then surround you with its trends until the algorithm warps reality. When you live in a city, you're walking around being constantly reminded of all the things that you learn from your phone. Added to that, the chances are you’re in close proximity with people who are discoursed up. It’s slop soup in here.

Is this a problem? Probably not, but if you want to hear more about everything above, please enjoy this kind of stupid episode! Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

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Who gets to live la dolce vita? Have Mediterraneans cracked the code to living well? Should we all be nonna-maxxing…?

You can also listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts! Subscribe below to get these in your inbox whenever a new one is out. Below is a loose write-up with none of the jokes.

In this week’s episode, we talk about the social media obsession with old Mediterranean people, particularly the trend “nonna-maxxing.” Combining an Italian nonna with the language of incels is already wild, but a lot of this content treats “my MEDITERRANEAN grandma” the way content creators with lots of flags in their bio treat their KOREAN boyfriends. While the whole thing sounds uniquely TikTokesque, there’s a 200-year history of Northern Europeans looking south and seeing a corrective to their own lives.

It starts with the Grand Tour in the 17th-19th centuries. Wealthy young English men travelled through Europe (notably Italy) to “complete their education” by looking at ruins and naked statues, and feeling connected to antiquity. But although these men had plenty of respect for the Ancients, they didn’t extend that respect to living locals. In 1805, a travel writer described Sardinians as “little better than savages” who “always go armed and are all thieves and robbers.” (Hot…?)

Today, rich northern Europeans and Americans are still gawking at Mediterraneans, but with a slightly different gaze. The Mediterranean still represents bygone civilisations and an older way of doing things, but there’s much more of a lifestyle focus than an artistic/cultural one. According to stressed out American influencers, Mediterranean elders have cracked the code to living well.

This idea of Mediterranean elders as lifestyle influencers dates back to the 1960s, when two American scientists coined the term “Mediterranean diet”, but it really dug its heels in during the popularisation of ‘blue zones’. Blue zones are a (contested) theory that 5 locations in the world (2 in the Mediterranean basin) hold the key to long life due to diet, community and olive oil or whatever. It’s either that or poor record keeping and pension fraud. Either way, Mediterranean grandparents are evidence of this secret health hack — if they lived this long, they’re clearly doing something right.

Some young Mediterranean people (wild generalisation, sorry) are also guilty of romanticising their own grandparents’ lifestyles, albeit usually with more nuance. Jaume talks about how there’s a common sentiment that things have modernised faster than people have been able to keep up with, and grandparents represent a nostalgia for old times. The difference is, when these people say they want to live like their grandparents, they know those grandparents lived through times of sexism and repression, or even dictatorship.

So we have American nonna-ism and European nonna-ism. The American nonna-ism is characterised by sort of the disconnect with the physical conditions that made nonnas the way they are. It’s not like they woke up in Franco’s Spain and thought, “Time to biohack.” They’re a product of their society and of their time. The idea of the American nonna-ism is one that’s very disconnected from context.

(Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts)

We also dive into how nonna-ism parallels medievalism in that it’s wielded by both the Right and the Left in very different ways. Conservatives love the nonna because she’s anti-technology, Catholic, rooted in the land, and, obviously, a woman in the kitchen.

In a lot of “mediterranean aesthetic” shoots, women in headscarves are doing the laundry or the ironing, shopping for groceries at the market, or cooking and serving dinner. For a ‘holiday’ aesthetic, there’s so much domestic labour in America’s view of the Mediterranean dream. Chores are something we all do, but it hasn’t escaped us that it’s never a man pinning up the laundry in these Pinterest boards.

Also, let’s keep in mind that this view of ‘The Mediterranean™’ often completely misses the bit of it that touches North Africa. In fact, she’s distinctly European. A lot of nonna-maxxing-flavoured posts talk about how the Mediterranean grandma’s longevity has nothing to do with matcha, yoga, meditation or any other foreign tradition. The wholesome nonna is often contrasted with the matcha-drinking hipster, an emblem of modern globalisation. Could this be the Wario to Chinamaxxing?

Meanwhile, anti-capitalist leftists can love the nonna for her anti-work, community-forward lifestyle, and her rejection of beauty standards, flaunting her saggy tits on the beach. There’s surely some truth in both portrayals of the nonna, but is she really the right medium for either message? Both sides are pointing at the same old woman on the beach and seeing completely different lifestyle doctrines, while the nonna herself is probably thinking about dominoes or something.

What’s really underneath all of it, we think, is rootlessness. A lot of people who are drawn to nonna content are those most disconnected from place (remote workers who could be anywhere, city-dwellers who don’t know their neighbours, etc.) But to learn more about our thoughts on the romanticisation of Mediterranean grandparents, as well as to hear Jaume’s thoughts on his MEDITERRANEAN grandparents, please enjoy this week’s episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or wherever you like to listen!

Subscribe for more deep dives

Further reading:

* Gordon, B. M. (2003). The Mediterranean as a Tourist Destination from Classical Antiquity to Club Med. Mediterranean Studies, 12, 203–226. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41166959

* Do people in ‘Blue zones’ actually live longer? New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/24/well/live/blue-zones-longevity-aging.html

* ¿Qué es el “Nonnamaxxing”? El estilo de vida de la abuela italiana podría ser el secreto de la longevidad Glamour https://www.glamour.es/articulos/que-es-el-nonnamaxxing-el-estilo-de-vida-de-la-abuela-italiana-podria-ser-el-secreto-de-la-longevidad

We also reference this post by Angelica Frey :

And this one by Anastasia Miari:

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Somehow, this episode has the most left field content warning out of all them, because the doodle/poodle community loves talking about Hitler.

You can also listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts! Subscribe below to get these in your inbox whenever a new one is out…

The guy who invented Doodle dogs talks about them with more regret than Oppenheimer showed for the atom bomb: “I opened a Pandora’s box and released a Frankenstein’s monster.”

We discuss the rivalry between the the Doodle and Poodle breeding communities. The Doodle community likes to call the Poodle breeders blood purists, to which Jaume says:

It’s quite strange seeing people that have intentionally bred to animals to obtain a result calling the other side eugenicists.

In Animal Aesthetics, Interactionism and Animal Aesthetics: A Theory of Reflected Social Power, Bonnie Berry suggests that people project some of the characteristics of your pet onto you…

J: Some of their characteristics reflect on their human owner. So for example, if you were to see someone holding a snake, you think, wow, they’re so brave. S: I would personally think they’re evil. Or a sorcerer.

Just as an experiment, please comment what you would assume about the owners of the following dog…

Because the typical life stages (house, kids) are either unaffordable or undesirable to a lot of Gen Zs/Millennials, a lot of us have built our family structures up around our dogs — our fur babies, if you will. But a lot of heterosexual couples who co-parent a dog end up reproducing the stereotypical gender dynamics of parenthood, with the woman as the primary caregiver and the man as the playmate. (Imagine being the deadbeat dad to a dog.)

Also, just for fun, please name this dog:

Further reading:

* Doodlemania by Allie Conti (Bloomberg, 2025)

* How Doodles Became the Dog du Jour by John Seabrook (New Yorker, 2026)

* Greenebaum, Jessica. (2004). It’s a Dog’s Life: Elevating Status from Pet to “Fur Baby” at Yappy Hour. Society and Animals. 12. 117-135. 10.1163/1568530041446544. (You can access it here easily)

* Burnett, E., Brand, C.L., O’Neill, D.G. et al. How much is that doodle in the window? Exploring motivations and behaviours of UK owners acquiring designer crossbreed dogs (2019-2020). Canine Med Genet 9, 8 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40575-022-00120-x

* Why the rise of ‘fur baby’ culture is fuelling overtreatment and major animal welfare issues (book announcement on Taylor & Francis)

* Berry, B. (2008). Interactionism and Animal Aesthetics: A Theory of Reflected Social Power. Society & Animals, 16(1), 75-89. https://doi.org/10.1163/156853008X269908

Also, just in case this episode has somehow given you a thirst for designer dogs, we’d like to leave you with some pet rescue resources instead:

* Why adoption is the best option

* Find a dog to adopt in the UK https://www.rspca.org.uk/findapet & USA https://www.aspca.org/adopt-pet/adoptable-dogs-your-local-shelter & Australia

https://www.petrescue.com.au/

* & NZ/Aotearoa https://www.spca.nz/adopt & Spain https://www.facebook.com/groups/perrosenadopcionespana/

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit furtherreadingpod.substack.com

Do you feel like a Princess Diaries-style transformation would change your life? Jaume and Sithara read too deeply into 2000s makeover shows, drawing a direct line between them and the warped beauty culture we have today.

You can also listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts! Subscribe below to get these in your inbox whenever a new one is out…

In this episode, we talk about how makeover shows are probably more influential to our current toxic beauty climate than we give them credit for:

You can directly connect the way that beauty and femininity were talked about on 2000s makeover shows to the way that it’s talked about on TikTok right now, and modern discourses around beauty. Things like “you’re not ugly you’re just poor”, and, “I need to get better looking not because I’m vain, but because it’s going to help me in my job” and “pretty privilege.”

Sithara talks a lot of shit about BBC show Snog, Marry, Avoid, which she’s seen every single episode of. (It’s crazy that for 5 years, our taxes were spent animating a decuntification robot.)

I’ve defined something called the hag to slag spectrum. It refers to the perspective of the external eye in which you are either a counter-cultural hag that does not care about what men think of you, or you’re a slag, and you care too much about how you look and you’re tricking men with all your makeup.

The makeover’s goal is to “correct” both ends of the spectrum — the hags and the slags — and to make them “normal.” Sad!

Here are a few of the Snog, Marry, Avoid makeovers:

We also discuss the Swan:

The way it’s framed in these makeover shows is that by improving your appearance, you are going to reveal a truer, better self that’s being trapped inside your hideous, ugly, fat self. If surgery uncovers your real self, then refusing to have surgery is dishonest and like betraying yourself.

Here are some transformations from that show:

We use this quote from Sophie Gilbert’s 2025 Girl on Girl as a framework for this episode:

The mode of the decade was self- improvement. The aesthetic was tanned, toned, homogenized beauty, a plasticized kind of perfection, made all the more desirable because it could be purchased. Anybody’s body — anybody — could be refashioned as a status symbol, an emblem of conspicuous shop-till-you-drop consumption. More than ever before, people’s exteriors were understood to reflect their inner identities, both of which seemed malleable and endlessly unprovable. Cosmetic surgeries were widely touted and understood to be fixes for the imperfect self, with the reality shows in particular hammering home the message that becoming skinny, hot, and sexy would totally change a person’s life

Get updated when there’s a new episode!

The post is titled in reference to the fantastic There’s a Beautiful Girl Under All of This: Performing Hegemonic Femininity in Reality Television. Critical Studies in Media Communication (2010) by Alice Marwick.

Further reading:

* Marwick, Alice. (2010). There’s a Beautiful Girl Under All of This: Performing Hegemonic Femininity in Reality Television. Critical Studies in Media Communication. 27. 251-266. 10.1080/15295030903583515.

* Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert (2025)

* Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life by Micki McGee (2005)

* Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity by Brenda R. Weber (2009)

* Time for an entirely new face or body? The chequered history of the TV makeover show by Daisy Jones for the Guardian

* A Ranking Of Makeover TV Shows, From The Destructive To The Uplifting

Makeover TV by Julia Brucculieri for Huffpost lol (link)

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Can nostalgia say more about the future than the past? Why don’t tech billionaires live in a house like the one from Totally Spies? In this episode, Sithara and Jaume read too deeply into the return of future-facing 2000s microtrends and their unfulfilled promises.

You can also listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts! Subscribe below to get these in your inbox whenever a new one is out. Below is a loose summary with none of the jokes.

In this episode, Sithara talks about the origins of nostalgia, which should interest you if you’re the 1 listener we have from Switzerland:

Nostalgia was coined in 1678. It was used to describe the pain that a sick person feels because they’re away from their native land — homesickness basically, but really making you sick. Nostalgia was sort of seen as this sickness of the mind. Right. Also it was sometimes referred to as the Swiss disease. :-)

We define some types of nostalgia…

There’s reflective nostalgia, which is when you try and rebuild fragments of your memory that you actually remember. And then restorative nostalgia treats the past as a better place and ideal that we need to get back to.

…and then we apply them to some of the recent 2000s microtrends that are all over TikTok, like the 2000s Yoga Mom aesthetic.

Jaume has a theory about why we’re so hungry for hyper-niche nostalgic visions of the future:

We’re struggling a lot to imagine a future these days, so I think from both ends of the political spectrum, everyone’s looking back, right? It sort of feels like we have a wall in front of us and the only way is back.

But we’ve just burned through all the “looking back”s possible, and none of them has granted us a solution. So now we’re cherry picking.

We also discuss how niche microaesthetics could function as ways to digest our issues with the present…

You can see the 2000s Yoga Mom as a criticism to the clean girl and frutiger aero as a response to the monopolistic internet. It’s a way of looking at the past to question the present.

More episodes…

Frutiger Aero

2000s Yoga Mom

2000s Tuscan Mom

Utopian Scholastic

90s Cool

Curly Girl

And here’s what we read…

* B.J. Hartmann and K.H. Brunk, Nostalgia marketing and (re-)enchantment, International Journal of Research in Marketing, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijresmar.2019.05.002

* None, D. T. J., None, D. V. K. M. & None, M. D. K. (2025). Digital Nostalgia Marketing: How Past-Centric Ads Affect Gen Z Consumption. Advances in Consumer Research, 2(4), 4279-4291.

* Brown, M. G., Carah, N., Tan, X. Y. (Jane), Angus, D., & Burgess, J. (2024). Finding the future in digitally mediated ruin: #nostalgiacores and the algorithmic culture of digital platforms. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 30(5), 1710-1731.

* The Hours Have Lost Their Clock: The Politics of Nostalgia by Grafton Tanner

* Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert

* Not a book/article, but the Rowan Ellis video “The Politics of Ugliness”

* Our obsession with nostalgia is driving a trend revival spiral by Lauren Cochrane

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Have you ever met a man with a mid thermometer? Sithara and Jaume read too deeply into the boy cook, an archetype of guy who really loves Le Creuset. Articles mentioned:

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