CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience — including access to our CUJOPLEX Discord and reading group meetings — we recommend signing up for a paid subscription.

Paid subscribers also get access to The Weather Report, a monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains. On our latest installment, we chat with Billboard editor Katie Bain, author of a new history of Coachella, about what the festival’s 2026 line-up tells us about where culture is headed, the rise of anti-sellout discourse, and the AI industry’s nostalgic, artisanal rebrand.

Since our last episode, something historic happened: Zohran Kwame Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City, marking the American left’s most significant electoral victory since the Bernie movement took off in the 2010s. While his team will credit his win to bold, populist economic policies, there’s no denying another factor at play: Zohran’s extraordinary command of images. He grew up in a film-director household, rapped as Young Cardamom before pivoting to politics, and hired a crew of indie filmmakers to create a video campaign that unfolded like a documentary love letter to the NYC of halal carts, bodega cats, and ordinary working people.

Zohran’s media fluency is also why people are calling him the Left’s answer to Trump. Which all raises some big questions: Is politics in the information economy becoming indistinguishable from theatrical world-building? And what does that mean for our offline lives?

This week’s guest, writer and artist Gideon Jacobs, has thought about these questions for years. A former creative director at Magnum Photos, child actor, and native New Yorker, Gideon has explored our cultural relationship to images in outlets like The New Yorker, The New York Times, Artforum, and Los Angeles Review of Books, for whom he penned an excellent piece earlier this year called “Player One and Main Character,” which contends that political reality, post-Trump and post-Musk, is beginning to bend to the rules of fiction.

We talk about the aesthetic politics of the Zohran campaign and what it tells us about what successful counter-programming to MAGA’s vision of America might look like. We also discuss what Gideon’s study of the role of images in ancient cultures and religions can tell us about navigating the image world of the present, how the rise of populism (on both the left and the right) is inextricable from our current technological moment, and whether Zohran’s victory marks the start of a political future more grounded in material conditions—or the next phase of the image arms race.

Follow Gideon on Instagram

Read Gideon:

“Player One and Main Character” (Los Angeles Review of Books)

“Trump l’Oeil” (Los Angeles Review of Books)

“Thou shalt not make images—but what if AI does?” (Document Journal)

“Aliens” (The Drift)

Additional reading:

“Selling Zohran” by Corey Atad (Defector)

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com

For our October weather report, we’re joined by Billboard Senior Music Correspondent and CUJO’s unofficial festival analyst Katie Bain. As of this month, Katie literally wrote the book on Coachella: It’s called Desert Dreams: The Music, Style, and Allure of Coachella, and it’s an exhaustively researched cultural history of the world’s most influential m…

Just in time for Halloween, we’re hosting a virtual hauntology reading group (specifically, hauntology the music genre) at 4pm ET next Thursday, October 30. If you want to join in, sign up for a paid subscription, or toss a few bucks into our haunted tip jar, and we’ll send you the readings and a link to log into the conversation. We hope it’ll be the first of more group reading sessions to come.Paid subscribers also get access to our CUJOPLEX Discord, an online hangout zone where folks who like talking about the evolving state of independent music, culture, and media can talk about the news of the day; and the Weather Report, a monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains.

We spend a lot of time here talking about the structural forces that turned pop culture into an endless churn of sequels, remakes, and nostalgia plays. But what if the blame for our current “creative recession” lies on more than just economics or platforms? What if our cultural values themselves have shifted in ways that make true innovation harder to sustain?That’s the focus of Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, the forthcoming book from Tokyo-based culture critic W. David Marx—and probably the first major exhaustive account of the last 25 years in music, film/TV, internet culture, and fashion. He doesn’t just look at the technological, political, and economic forces that that created a winner-take-all landscape where billionaires and centi-millionaires like Taylor Swift, Kanye West, Paris Hilton, MrBeast, Jay-Z and frankly Donald Trump took up all of the cultural oxygen in the room, making it harder and harder for the next generation of innovators to break through. He zeroes in on the cultural attitudes that have led us here—and that set us apart from our 20th-century forebears—including poptimism, the valorization of entrepreneurial heroism, cultural omnivorism, and more.

In addition to Blank Space, David the author of the mega-influential books Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change and Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style. He joins us to talk about the mind-boggling task of summing up the past quarter-century of culture, and why most of the coolest, most innovative outputs ended up getting pushed to the margins. We also get into what originality means in a climate of constant churn, and why he believes that fighting for it is still important, even in a postmodern landscape where “everything has already been done.”

Finally, David makes the case that building a healthier cultural ecosystem starts with changing our cultural attitudes. That means embracing and reinforcing social norms that have fallen to the wayside in the past quarter century, like normalizing giving credit to smaller artists, learning the canon so we can break it, and yes, making it lame to sell out again.

Pre-order Blank Space, which is out November 18 via Penguin Random House.

Subscribe to David’s newsletter, CULTURE: An Owner’s Manual

Follow David on X

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience — including access to our CUJOPLEX Discord and the Weather Report, a new monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains — we recommend signing up for a paid subscription.

Paid subscribers can now watch our video roundtable on Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another with film critic Joshua Rivera and Macho Pod cohost Drew Millard. They’ll also receive an invite to our upcoming “hauntology” reading group, which we’ll tell you more about soon. (Just so you know: We’ll also be inviting anybody kind enough to tip us a buck or two to support our work).

It’s October, and we still don’t have the September jobs report because the government shut down. But the data we do have shows a clear trend: Job growth is slowing, unemployment is ticking up, and cities like New York are seeing the weakest labor market gains in decades. If you’ve noticed more “Open to Work” badges on LinkedIn, heard stories about people applying to thousands of positions, or felt the chill in your own job search, you’re not imagining it: The job market sucks right now, and things have been headed in this direction since before Trump took office.

To wrap our head around how we got here (tariffs? offshoring? AI and automation?), we brought on the best person we could think of to explain it: Richard D. Wolff, a longtime faculty member at places like The New School and UMass Amherst, author of myriad books on economic methodology and class analysis, a founding director of Democracy at Work, and one of the most prominent Marxist economists in America. (Full disclosure: Rick’s work on class and labor were tremendously influential on Andrea’s work as a sociology student.)

In part one of our two-part conversation, Rick explains why today’s shaky job market is just the latest phase in a decades-long trend that began in the 1970s—and, in his view, a symptom of an empire (and economic system) on the verge of collapse. We also get into the flawed logic behind Trump’s tariff and immigration policies, the real reasons offshored jobs aren’t “coming back,” and why China’s working class is seeing wage growth while American workers are stuck in place.

Follow Rick’s work at Democracy at Work—and watch his Economic Update podcast.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com

Thank you ock sportello, DJ Falkor / Random Rules, Tyler Foster, Yana Sosnovskaya, Ingmar Carlson, and many others for tuning in to CUJO’s first-ever live video, featuring film critic Joshua Rivera and Macho Pod co-host drew millard. Shout out to Yuri for sparking the idea for this conversation. Full video available to paid subscribers.

Hey pals. A little housekeeping: We keep full-length episodes like this one free, because we want as many people as possible to be able to hear them. But every episode we put out takes at least 20 hours to produce, from researching and booking to script writing, recording, editing, and marketing — and if you love this pod, we could use your help in keeping this project economically sustainable so we can keep churning out episodes like this one for years and years to come.

If a paid subscription ($5/month!) isn’t on the table for you right now, we’ve introduced a new tipping feature where you can throw us a couple bucks to let us know that you’re enjoying what we make. You can think of it as tipping a barista for your morning cup of coffee — only instead of a cup of coffee, you’re tipping us for an hour or more of stuff that you download into your brain.

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for freedom of speech in America, from from Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension and reinstatement at ABC, to Trump’s executive order labeling Antifa a domestic terror group, to right-wing doxing databases targeting private citizens for Charlie Kirk wrongspeak.

Here to help us make sense of the larger political and economic currents that have led us to this moment is Chicago-based journalist Adam Johnson, co-host of the long-running media criticism podcast Citations Needed, creator of The Column on Substack, and author of a piece for In These Times titled “The Trump admin is brazenly exploiting Charlie Kirk’s killing to silence dissent. Will Democrats take notice?”

We break down the Kimmel saga — which coincided with a deportation order against Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil — and how the Trump administration is using Kirk’s assassination to push a broader agenda to erode liberal institutions, silence political opposition, and get corporations to fall in line. We also dig into the right’s overt embrace of so-called “cancel culture” tactics, backed by the full weight of the state — and how Democrats helped set the stage for this moment failing to defend the speech rights of their left flank.

Finally, we examine how the media industry appears to be on the verge of a conservative “vibe shift,” from Bari Weiss’ rumored rise at CBS to the Ellison family’s powergrab over Paramount-Skydance and TikTok — and what standing up for free speech, and even doing one’s job as a journalist, could look like in the years to come.

For access to our monthly cultural weather report, our CUJOPLEX Discord, and other bonus perks, become a paid subscriber.

Read Adam’s piece “The Trump Admin Is Brazenly Exploiting Charlie Kirk’s Killing to Silence Dissent. Will Democrats Take Notice?” at In These Times.

Subscribe to The Column and listen to Citations Needed.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com

Did Oasis suddenly become everybody’s favorite band, or are we witnessing a strange new era of the millennial nostalgia industrial complex? In our September weather report, we bring on Severin Matusek—Berlin-based cultural strategist, founder of the studio co-matter, and co-author of a new Metalabel release titled “New World Order: The Return of Hard Po…

CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience — including access to our CUJOPLEX Discord and our eternal parasocial friendship — we recommend signing up for a paid subscription.

Paid subscribers also get access to The Weather Report, a new monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains. In the latest installment, cyberethnographer Ruby Justice Thelot joins us to wax philosophical about the Labubu craze, matcha and “performative male” discourse, and why politicians are lifting weights in public.

It’s easy to get the impression these days that the traditional media industry is abandoning cultural criticism. Over the past few months, outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Chicago Tribune have been reassigning or letting go of veteran film, music, and theater critics, leaving some to debate what impact, if any, written criticism still has on the culture at large.

Bucking this trend (and pretty much all mainstream media logic) is The Metrograph, a new biannual print magazine about cinema from the eponymous repertory theater in New York City’s Chinatown. It’s long, proudly niche, intentionally disconnected from the news cycle, and available only in print—with the goal of offering deep film fans an experience they won’t be able to find online, while inviting a new generation of people into the culture. The recently released second issue includes a 42-page dive into Paul Morrissey’s archives, author Gary Indiana’s favorite films (RIP), a history of the Japanese pink film, a “cinemap” of Belgrade, and a comic about Jerry Lewis’s infamous lost film The Day the Clown Cried. The cover, which we’ve cropped for this episode’s artwork, features a painting by artist Louise Giovanelli inspired by Christina Ricci’s character in Buffalo ’66.

Senior editor Annabel Brady-Brown (formerly of Australia’s Fireflies Press) and editor-at-large Nick Pinkerton (film critic, screenwriter of The Sweet East, creator of the Substack Employee Picks, and a former coworker of Emilie’s at Kim’s Video) join us to discuss the past, present, and future of independent film criticism—and what it means to make a magazine for cinephiles in 2025.

We also discuss why younger people in NYC seem to be gravitating back to the movies these days, and how the hyper-IRL, videostore-centric independent film culture of 20 years ago is a good template for what that might look like in the 2020s. Finally, we shout out some of the directors, movies, and micro publications that are making right now such an exciting time for cinema in NYC — and the repertory theaters and video stores we love around the world that are keeping the old Kim’s Video spirit alive.

Issue 2 of The Metrograph is out now. Buy it here, or at an independent book or magazine store near you.Read more by our guests:”Less rock, more talk: On Paul Morrissey, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ezra Pound, ‘political’ art, and 1988’s ‘Spike of Bensonhurst’” by Nick Pinkerton (Employee Picks)

“Sunshine, lollipops and rainbows: On the subversive pleasures of Agnès Varda‘s Le Bonheur” by Annabel Brady-Brown (The Metrograph)

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

Hey folks. It’s time for our second cultural weather report. Cyberethnographer, self-proclaimed dandy, and friend-of-the-pod Ruby Justice Thelot joins us to parse where the cultural winds are blowing this month, including the sudden ubiquity of the Labubu, and whether we should read the exploding popularity of these snaggle-toothed creatures as a form of IRL brainrot, an economic indicator, or proof of China’s rising status as a global culture producer. We also discuss why politicians are lifting weights in public, how romantasy became the new literary mainstream, memories of Y2K tech optimism (as experienced by Andrea while seeing the Backstreet Boys at The Sphere), and why more and more people seem to be using privacy screens on their phones.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience — including access to our CUJOPLEX Discord and our eternal parasocial friendship — we recommend signing up for a paid subscription.

Paid subscribers also get access to The Weather Report, a new monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains. In the first installment, we wax philosophical about Ari Aster’s Eddington, the future of search, and the alleged returned of Butt Rock.

These days, it feels like the web is becoming… less of a web. Websites aren’t getting visitors anymore, employees are worried that they’re going to be replaced by AI agents, and the search tools we used to rely on to pull up the information we need are deliberately enshittifying themselves. It’s like the internet as we know it — fundamentally, a thing that connects people with other people — is being swallowed up by AI and smooshed down into the cramped, impersonal space of a chatbot interface, whether we like it or not.

Or, as New York Magazine tech journalist John Herrman recently put it, “The World Wide Web … has been going through something akin to ecological collapse.” John has been keeping close tabs on these developments in his excellent column “Screen Time,” where he recently reported on the emerging field of generative-engine optimization, or GEO. Think: SEO, but for the AI-consolidated internet.

We invited John on the show for a wide-ranging conversation about the strange new chapter of the internet that is materializing before our eyes—and what our experience of the web might look like a world where conversational AI becomes our main portal to the digital realm. We discuss the shift from SEO to GEO, why we’re all reading Reddit a lot more now, and what we stand to lose (and, in some cases, gain) in a world where we summon our information from chatbots.

Finally, we get into what New York Times writer Mike Isaac is calling the dawn of Silicon Valley’s “Hard Tech” era: a vibe shift away from the consumer-focused, employee-friendly, optimistic culture of the 2010s to the more cutthroat, bossist, AI and data center-obsessed tech culture of the present.

Follow John on Bluesky

Read “Screen Time” at New York Magazine’s Intelligencer

More by John:

“What’s the deal with GPT-5?”

“SEO is dead. Say hello to GEO.”

“The AI boom is expanding Google’s dominance”

“Why you are reading Reddit a lot more these days”

“At work, in school, and online, it’s now AI versus AI”

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe