Things of Interest

Advertising, authenticity, and why we read/buy/engage in things. We welcome our new data-bloated overlords, or at least we say we do when online.

It's callback hour! This ep we're diving into our teenge years of reading and writing fanfiction, consuming fanart, and living it up in this strange and awesome subculture on the internet. We talk about the power of fanfiction, the voice it lends to its predominantly female and minority authors, and the strange ways it can play with canon, and sometimes, real life.

Does how we consume news make us more open-minded, or less? Is political extremism on the rise internationally? How do we tackle extremist views? Is it even worth tackling at all? This episode was a fascinating discussion on the intersection of media and politics, we hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

It's the Olympics! The wonderful event where athletes show off their incredible achievements and sports journalists show off their sexism. Does it make sense to gender-segregate sports in 2016? Just how bad is the wage gap in sports? Also: the Paralympics. They are badass and don't get nearly enough attention.

In our second part on Feels, we touch on hysteria, feelings around failure, the emotional toll academia takes on its students, asylums, witchcraft, and why blocking someone who's harassing you on the internet is a silly way to go.

The gendered nature of emotion, emotional labour, and how these assumptions could literally harm you at the doctor's.

Episode six: Where we talk about dating, relationships, and the internet, and Sophia’s life as a long-term single lady can finally be useful rather than a source of angst. Relationships can look many different ways, it’s increasingly legal to not be straight, and basically nobody says the word “spinster” anymore. How great is that?

You want to call out a bad joke, but you don't want to be *that person*. How do we talk about social topics without putting people on the defensive?

This week we geek out about space. We share our thoughts on human travel to mars, being a woman in science, and, of course, the power of storytelling and narrative both real and fictional, and how those narratives can create astronauts.

Do your friends berade you for using too many emoji, not making correct sentences, and using memes as replies too often? We look into the strange world of Tumblr linguistics, and how young girls are shaping the next era of language.