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Mia is joined by writer and activist Vicky Osterweil to talk about Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery and the grim, shockingly violent history of media monopolies.
@vickyacab.bsky.social
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Annette Laing, a "proper historian" with a Ph.D. in the field, wants to dispel the myth that history education occurs only in the classroom. She is the chief proprietor of "Non-Boring History,"a Substack devoted to bringing the past to bear on the present in a way accessible to history buffs of all ages. If you are a public historian, you do not want to miss this episode.
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K-Pop Fandom: Performing Deokhu from the 1990s to Today (U Michigan Press, 2026) insists that K-pop fan practices and activities constitute a central productive force, shaping not only K-pop’s explosive global popularity, but also K-pop’s cultural impacts, politics, and horizons of possibility. Over the past three decades, the K-pop fandom and its activities have expanded, intensified, and diversified along myriad dimensions, assuming novel social, technological, and economic forms, some of which are unique to K-pop, and some of which reflect broader cultural and industrial logics of globalized mass entertainment culture. Areum Jeong argues that K-pop fans, in performing deokhu—a Korean term connoting an “avid fan”—perform a materialization of affective labor that also seeks to produce good relationships between asymmetrically positioned actors in the K-pop ecosystem.
Through an autoethnography of becoming a K-pop deokhu, Jeong connects their experiences to generations of K-pop fans, showing simultaneously how fandom practices have shifted over time and the intricacies of fan labor participation. This personal connection paved the way for participant-observation and co-performer witnessing methodologies in the study, which crucially allowed for collaborating with fans whose communal pursuits have been stigmatized by dominant discourses that denigrate their activities as solely addictive, uncritical, and wasteful. Jeong’s genre-spanning corpus of fan activities and analyzing its contexts and contents represents an important contribution to the making of a fan archive that is also an archive of affective labor.
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It’s a weird time for culture. There is more of it than ever before, it’s more accessible than ever before, but so little of it feels original. New movies are based on old stories, new songs are recycling old hooks, and fashion trends are cycling so fast that everything’s in.
Has our culture grown stagnant? The author and culture critic W. David Marx thinks so.
His new book, Blank Space, argues that there is a “blank space” in the 21st century where cultural innovation should be. In this episode, David explains to Willa how culture change worked in the 20th century, what changed after the turn of the millennium, and what we might do about it.
This episode was produced by Max Freedman. Decoder Ring is also produced by Willa Paskin, Katie Shepherd, and Evan Chung, our supervising producer. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director.
If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, email us at [email protected] or leave a message on our hotline at (347) 460-7281.
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SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK is back on the show to talk about his new book Quantum History: A New Materialist Philosophy.
We’re talking Quantum Variations, Superposition, Wave Collapse, Catastrophe, & So On.
Thank you to everyone for supporting our project and keeping us going. The series on Quantum History will continue with some more interviews and episodes with some great guests who have been working on all of these things and we’re looking forward to it!
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See you in Paris,
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In this episode, we discuss the work of historian Hayden White. His provocative claim is that the practice is inescapably the practice of narrative forms to give sense and significance to events of the past. It is this form that often supplements, or even outright makes, historical arguments. Is history a tragedy, a comedy, a satire, or a romance? Why did Marx describe history as tragedy and then farce? What could entitle him to that? The historian always prefigures their history with these choices. We get into whether history has a meaning on its own, what it contributes to politics, and whether there are literary styles more commensurate to Marxist history than others.
leftofphilosophy.com
References:
Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).
Hayden White, The Content of Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).
Music:
“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN
A conversation with David Wiens about his recent book, "From the Best to the Rest: Idealistic Thinking in a Non-Ideal World" (Oxford UP).
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