Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share How do you like it so far?
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
How do you like it so far?
How do you like it so far? episodes
- Reimagining the ecology of cultural criticism
This week we continue with the second installment of our conversation about critics of color. Colin and Henry talk to Carolina Miranda, a writer and art critic at the LA Times, and Elizabeth Mendez Berry, Director of Voice, Creativity and Culture at the Nathan Cummings Foundation. Both critics came from a background of studying social movements and politics, but realized they could make a living as critics of art and music. We discuss that as a critic of color, you understand not to pigeonhole an artist, an ethnicity or race can influence a piece of art, yet so can a film watched in childhood. Yet in a moment where artists have direct access to their audience online, does everyone want criticism, and if so, how do we create a more inclusive infrastructure and economy to incentivize a diversity of voices?
52 min - The growing hunger: why do we need more critics of color?
Today is our first of three episodes [exploring why we all need] critics of color. Colin talks to Jeff Yang, an American writer, journalist, and business/media consultant who has written for The Wall Street Journal and CNN, and, Mauricio Mota, a producer of East Los High, an award-winning [Hulu] drama series that has earned five Emmy nominations for its realistic portrayal of Latinx high school students. We talk about the gatekeeping responsibility and power of the few critics of color when they are critiquing media coming from their own communities: They can break or make a show or movie. We [also] discuss their importance for unpacking the cultural context and nuance of movies such as Crazy Rich Asians and Coco [within their fan community and for those encountering these more inclusive representations for the first time]. We also discuss how globalization should, and can, [work in unexpected ways]: Coco did very well in China, for example. But, how do we move forward? “Everyone can be a critic” says Mota, but for a long time “we were not allowed to have taste in this town”.
55 min - War of the Worlds, hoaxes and conspiracies with Nick Cull
To continue our thread on rumours and conspiracy theories, this week Colin discussed the 80th anniversary of the The War of the Worlds broadcast on CBS radio with media historian Nick Cull. Orson Welles' infamous radio drama showed the power of news media to convince populations about a fake event, but it also highlighted the rumours surrounding the broadcast: not everyone thought it was aliens invading, but Nazis, the Japanese etc. Cull explains how rumours reflect the underliying social and political tensions of the moment, and tying to the current moment, describes how rumours have always worked the same way: to explain, engage, undermine and entertain.
53 min - Episode 23: Naja Nielsen and youth political participation
Why are younger people more likely to protest, and less likely to vote? This week, Henry talks with Naja Nielsen from Orb Media. They discuss how youth feels about their relationship with traditional politics, their tendency to focus on issues and not parties, and how they can often feel unwanted in current political systems. Nielsen also walks us through the shift - or need - to look at issues in a global perspective, and how news media can and should reflect it.
52 min - Episode 22: Wu Ming and Benjamen Walker on conspiracy theories
This week we talked about conspiracy theories with Wu Ming, the collective, whose books inspired one the main conspiracy theorists on the internet, and Benjamen Walker, whose podcast often focuses on conspiracy theories. We cover: The art of blurring fact and fiction, and non-fiction, discrediting gatekeepers, can we ever really debunk, the role of satire, the hunger for complexity, pizzagate, the “deep state,” QAnon, and of course, president Trump.
1 hr 9 min - Episode 21: Rohan Joshi from All India Bakchod on civic entertainment
This week we explore the role of comedy in civic participation within the Indian context. Rohan Joshi is part of the sketch comedy group All India Backhod, which tackles political and social issues on their YouTube channel. A notable example was their viral video “It’s your fault” that dealt with the issue of rape, focusing on the irony of victim-blaming. Joshi recently spoke at the "The Past, Present and Future of Civic Entertainment in India" a day-long event in Mumbai. We bring you some of his insights (courtesy of Godrej India Culture Lab) that day, on what Indian audiences could learn from Captain America on “when to stop being a good citizen, and become a good person.”
37 min - Episode 20: Anushka Shah and Civic Entertainment in India
In this episode, we get the chance to talk to Anushka Shah, who works as a researcher at the Center for Civic Media, MIT Media Lab. More recently, she has started a project called Civic Entertainment that explores the intersection of civic engagement with television, radio, and digital entertainment and film. This project researches the media effects of fiction on thought and behavior change, and explores how methods of social change available to citizens can be best represented in entertainment media. It also investigates the representation of protest and activism in current popular culture. She also runs a production studio in Mumbai called Civic Studios that creates civic entertainment content for Indian audiences. Shah tells us about the inspiration she, and other Indians, have gotten from popular media, and how she brought civic participation with entertainment together.
38 min - Episode 19: Star Trek and actual space with Margaret Weitekamp
Henry is currently a visiting scholar at the Library of Congress in Washington DC, where he had the chance to speak about space with Margaret Weitekamp, curator of Space History department or the Smithsonian Air and Space museum. She curates the museum's social and cultural dimensions of spaceflight collection, which has more than 4,000 artifacts that include space memorabilia and space science fiction objects. We talked about the relationship of imaginaries of science fiction with those of space planning, and the benefits of displaying them side by side in the museum. We also discuss the link between the fandom of Star Trek and the dreams of space travel, we contextualize it within larger socio-cultural contexts, and also discuss the history of women in the space program.
49 min - Episode 18: Diane Winston on religion and the entertainment media
This week Henry Jenkins talks to Diane Winston, professor of Communication and Journalism at USC, about religion and reality television. Are young people getting how to live their lives from reality TV? Contrary of reality TV as being a guilty pleasure, Winston's latest book talks about reality TV as the "the lived religion of late capitalism". Reality television tells stories that people feel identified with, or see as cautionary tales. We talk about Survivor's latest season, (survival of the fittest, and its very "hyper individualism that is so embedded in capitalism").
44 min - Episode 17: Science fiction as a way of understanding and re-imagining the world
Our podcast returns after its summer hiatus with an episode focused on science fiction as a way of understanding and re-imagining the world. We reassembled a panel of science fiction scholars fresh from the World Science Fiction Convention (in San Jose) and eager to dig deeper into the history of the genre, its social and political impact, and in particular, the forms of thought which were enabled and sustained by the emergence of speculative fiction. Our guests are: Michael Saler, author of As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality; Sherryl Vint, author of Science Fiction: A Guide for the Perplexed; and Minsoo Kang, author of Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination.
1 hr 5 min
About How do you like it so far?
From the publisher's feed
Academics Henry Jenkins and Colin Maclay use their combined knowledge to dig deeper and ask more ambitious questions than most pop culture podcasts out there – not doing recaps or just remaining on…
the level of entertainment coverage. For them, popular culture offers resources for asking questions about who we are and where we are going, questions that can be political, legal, technological, economic, or social, but often cut across all of the above.