This all started with my desire to do a Paul Mescal episode. A listener suggested we ask Caroline O’Donoghue — author of The Rachel Incident , host of Sentimental Garbage , noted Irish person — to be co-host. We reached out, and (gasp!) she responded that she didn’t actually know that much about Paul… but would be more than happy to do an episode about the “Irishification of pop culture.” Since my interest in Irish men (and movies, books, music, television, poetry ) by no means starts with Paul ...
Mar 12, 2025•1 hr 12 min•Transcript available on Metacast If you’re a historical romance person, all I need to say is: Sarah MacLean is here, and she is answering all the questions . If you’re not a historical romance person, I’ll spell it out a little more: Sarah MacLean is one of the most popular writers of historical romance today — and she’s also the cohost of the incredibly popular podcast Fated Mates . She’s a very good pod conversationalist, which is one of many reasons we wanted to have her on the show (that and I knew it would make Melody fain...
Mar 05, 2025•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast Last month, I published an interview in the newsletter with Dana Miranda about “budget culture” — and it became one of the most popular (and discussed) interviews I’ve done since I first launched the newsletter. At the time, I asked for questions for Dana about specific myths of budget culture for us to unpack. We got dozens of those — plus a bunch of compelling follow-up questions, like “what’s the difference between knowing how much money goes in and out of your account and ‘budget culture’” a...
Feb 26, 2025•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast I love old movies — but I didn’t always! In fact, I needed many years of directed classwork to fall in love with them. But if you’re not in the mood to pause your life and take on significant graduate debt, THERE ARE STILL OPTIONS, and Margaret H. Willison and I are here to offer them. In this episode, we offer specific suggestions to listeners based on short lists of their (recent) film favs, talk about “aesthetic friction” and how to overcome it, strongly invite you to put your phone in the ot...
Feb 19, 2025•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast What makes something ~Dad~? Is it pleated Dockers? A worn baseball cap? Asking (again) if you’ve checked your oil? Incompetency in the domestic sphere paired with competency outside of it? I’ve long loved thinking through both the serious and the ridiculous of Dad Culture, and for today’s episode, we have an actual scholar of it ( Phil Maciak , currently hard at work on a Dad Culture book) to unpack the history and theory of Dadness, including: do you have to be a dad to be part of Dad Culture (...
Feb 12, 2025•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast I know a lot about historic Hollywood feuds. I could do an entire episode just on the magazine covers featuring Elizabeth Taylor, Eddie Fisher, and Debbie Reynolds circa 1959. But to do any episode on Celebrity Feuds right — particularly one that airs just days before Kendrick Lamar performs at the Super Bowl — I knew I needed a different sort of celebrity feud expert. When Joel Anderson , host of three blockbuster seasons of Slow Burn (including a canonical one on Biggie + Tupac), agreed to com...
Feb 05, 2025•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast We’re at the point where we know a b******t attempt to commodify our burnout when we see it. No one’s buying the self-care spiel the bath bomb companies are selling us. But the rhetoric of self-care has crept into the workplace, family dynamics, and TikTok therapy speak, usually divorced from any critique of the systems that make self-care feel necessary in the first place. Pooja Lakshmin MD , author of Real Self-Care , joins the pod to answer your very smart questions about contemporary self-ca...
Jan 29, 2025•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast I grew up skiing at a mid-size mountain in the middle of Idaho. I wasn’t ever an athletic kid, but skiing — it made me feel fast and really good at something. I loved it: the routine, the long slog to the mountain, the Cup of Soup for lunch, the crappy hotels, the freedom. But the ski culture that I grew up with is largely gone, at least in the U.S. — and I’ve spent the last few years coming to terms with how industrial shifts, climate change, conglomeration, the explosion of the unregulated sho...
Jan 22, 2025•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast Let me start with this: this is a dream interview. If, like me, you spent a lot of time in the 2000s and 2010s reading about celebrity online, Go Fug Yourself was an essential part of your online diet. Heather and Jessica were simply unrivaled when it came to celebrity fashion in general and red carpet fashion in particular. I idolized them the same way I idolized Lainey Gossip — both of whom I read alongside all of my graduate texts in star studies. The problem with those star studies is that t...
Jan 15, 2025•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast Thrifting has a smell, but it also has a feel . For me, the feel is of thick, almost indestructible rayon weaves; of dense, mothbally wool; of slick, ancient crinoline; of stiff and generously cut denim. It was the feel of handstitching on a dress made from a pattern, or a cracked logo on a company picnic shirt from 1975. It was not the feel of shopping at Forever 21, even though the prices were approximately the same. Like so many of you, at various points in my life I’ve relied on thrift store...
Jan 08, 2025•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast No matter where you spend your time, online or off, you’ve encountered some form of therapy speak. Maybe it comes from a friend who loves processing their therapy with others; maybe it suffuses your TikTok FYP; maybe your friends or family members have been using it to try and describe how they’re trying to foster and maintain healthy relationships; or maybe you’ve just been keeping up on the latest celebrity gossip. It’s everywhere — and as you’ll find in this episode, tracing its proliferation...
Jan 01, 2025•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast As an Registered Auntie, I get to watch kids’ toy trends from the backseat. I’ve bought annoying things (sorry, parent friends) and learned how to play new things (Beyblades, I rule) and passed down precious things (all of my My Little Ponies from the ‘80s). We could talk forever about the merits of various toys, past and present, but your listener questions this week underline that there’s also a tremendous amount of anxiety and class signaling absorbed by kids’ toys. So this episode, featuring...
Dec 18, 2024•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Sometimes we do episodes where I know a fair amount about the subject and end up on a three minute digression about picture palaces. And sometimes I’ve only started to learn about a topic — or read within a genre — and am absolutely thrilled to spend an hour listening to someone else’s expertise. That’s what we’re doing today with queer romance writer Adib Khorram : tackling your questions on everything from how to feel about queer romance written by straight people, why so many romance plots ar...
Dec 11, 2024•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast What is Quince and why is it everywhere? Who is running Albion Fit? Who buys clothes at Altar’d State? Why is Madewell so sad? This is an explainer episode, but it’s also a brands-feelings processing episode, because any time millennials try and talk about how J.Crew or Madewell has changed, they’re also talking about how their own feelings about fashion have changed. And no one understands the rhythms of brands quite like Caroline Moss, the host and curator of the Gee Thanks Just Bought It exte...
Dec 04, 2024•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast Sometimes I forget just how many classes I took on the history of cinema — or that I used to teach a class on it! — but then I have a conversation like the one you’re about to listen to and remember: oh right, I am a huge film history dork. This episode, featuring the brilliant Hannah McGregor , travels all over the past, present, and future of the blockbuster, from the theory of the “whammy,” to Hannah’s book on Jurassic Park, from Barbie to Twisters , from why we started going to the movies to...
Nov 27, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast I could talk about Nicole Kidman for hours . Very few Hollywood actors have had careers this varied, this delightful, this weird — oh, and she’s also been married to Tom Cruise. She manages to be both chronically underestimated and overrated, and she’s recently found herself in a slew of roles where she embodies a slew of different rich white ladies, each miserable in their own specific ways. For this episode, I’m joined by the great Sam Sanders to talk about our own Kidman Syllabi and answer yo...
Nov 20, 2024•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast Almost all of the public conversations about sex testing and sports — or, more to the point, who should be allowed to participate in women’s sports — are pretty bad. In many if not most cases, they’re outright transphobic; even in the “best” cases, they’re still pretty ham-fisted. But Rose Eveleth is having a very different sort of public conversation about sex testing in their new podcast, Tested — one that looks to the way these tests affect the athletes subject to them, and how the concept of...
Nov 13, 2024•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast “Most people who complain about BookTok have never seen a BookTok.” Alyssa Morris drops that insight about two-thirds of the way through the episode, and it’s such a good point that I almost want to make it the title of the episode. Most people have an idea of what BookTok is (people talking about books on TikTok) but no real understanding of the immensity of BookTok. It’s talking about what you’ve read, sure, but it’s also about recommendations, and performance, and the aesthetics of reading cu...
Oct 30, 2024•1 hr 17 min•Transcript available on Metacast A podcast episode on the state of podcasting? Classic Culture Study Pod. At this point in my career, I’ve been interviewed on hundreds of podcasts, been adjacent to the production of dozens, been the host of three pods, and even watched a fourth pod go through two years of production only to get axed. The podcasting world is so dynamic, so weird, and so complicated… and industry analyst and critic Nicholas Quah is the best person to talk about its shifts, its future, and the best stuff coming ou...
Oct 23, 2024•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast You might look at the question in the title of this episode and think: duh, it’s because we’re weird about death . But cancer is so common, with so many different variations, with so many ways it can touch your life, in ways immediate and lasting… that of course we’ve figured out ways to be weird about it. Of course there are bizarre metaphors, of course we don’t have space for the messy, extended work of recovery; of course there are bizarre tropes and plot lines intended to make cancer more un...
Oct 16, 2024•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast You know that feeling when you and a friend get weird and detailed and hilarious about something you deeply (and maybe irrationally) hate, or find ridiculous, or can’t stomach in your vicinity? It’s one of my favorite versions of friendship intimacy — talking s**t about something you shouldn’t dislike nearly as much as you do, because that thing is relatively trivial, but that doesn’t mean that the thing itself doesn’t make you want to bang your head against the wall. And that’s what this week’s...
Oct 09, 2024•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast What’s the difference between a conspiracy theory and gossip? When does joking around about Kate Middleton’s abduction turn into something much darker? Are women actually more susceptible to contemporary conspiracy theories — or are we just finally paying attention to it? Cristen Conger, host of the new podcast Conspiracy, She Wrote joins me to talk about Taylor Swift’s evil twin, Beyoncé’s illuminati connections, Katie Holmes getting impregnated by Scientology aliens, sex trafficking panics, an...
Oct 02, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast You can almost hear the producers trying to sell this show to Hulu: It’s hot Mormon moms… who are also swingers . Turns out only one of them was “swinging,” and the swinging was (in her words) “soft.” But it was enough to get Hulu — and now, millions of other viewers — on board with Secret Lives of Mormon Wives , which tracks the interlocking stories of eight Mormon influencers in Utah. Like so much of contemporary reality television, this show is glossy, melodramatic, unhinged, and addictive. I...
Sep 25, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast We’ve had listeners asking us to do an episode on sapphic pop for months now, and were trying to figure out who we wanted to co-host. Then Melody sent me a text: I FOUND THE PERFECT PERSON. That person is Trish Bendix , who just published a sprawling look at the past and present (and popularity) of sapphic pop, from Big Momma Thornton to Chappell Roan. I absolutely loved this conversation, where we did our very best to answer your questions about everything from the ‘80s sound in contemporary sa...
Sep 18, 2024•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is a dream come true of an episode: we got the owners of The Ripped Bodice to talk to us about all the ins and outs of running a romance-only bookstore. We talk about everything from the genesis of their annual State of Racial Diversity in Romance Publishing Report to their fav recommendations for tweens and teens …..and how they deal with “vintage” romances in the store. I found everything about our discussion fascinating — plus, if you’re a paid subscriber, you get very good advice on how...
Sep 11, 2024•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast This episode is the Culture Study Podcast’s version of a Just Trust Me. It’s difficult to describe exactly WHY it’s so good, just that after we finished recording (with Lilah Raptopoulos, host of the podcast Life and Art ) Melody and I both immediately texted each other with: SO GOOD !!! The episode is ostensibly about figuring out how to cook in the world of infinite recipes, but it’s also about how we pass down recipes (or gatekeep them), recipes as a form of memory making (and retrieval), rec...
Sep 04, 2024•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast We’re more than twenty years into the current reality boom — and things are getting complicated . What are the unspoken and spoken ethics of signing up to become a reality star? What resources (about harassment and protection, about brand deals) should be made available to anyone who signs a reality contract? Are reality stars scabs during strikes — and should they unionize? WHAT MAKES THESE MELODRAMAS SO COMPELLING? WTF IS SCANDOVAL??? Hollywood correspondent Natalie Jarvey joins me to talk thr...
Aug 28, 2024•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast Jennifer Romolini is one of my favorite thinkers about ambition, and workism, and the stories we tell ourselves about what we must endure in order to find a modicum of security and pride — and she also happens to be a true scholar of all things Ben Affleck. Months ago, I asked her to come on the podcast to talk about the intersection of Affleck and ambition, but we held the episode for a bit to give it some distance from the (also excellent!!) J.Lo episode. But we’d had it scheduled for today fo...
Aug 21, 2024•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast TikTok is filled with wonders. It’s SO weird. It can make you feel like the algorithm is telling you something you don’t even realize about yourself….or it serve you a whole bunch of cyst draining videos. In order to answer your questions about WTF is happening in your feed, I knew I needed a weird internet aficionado who also understands the way our tech platforms actually work. I needed Katie Notopoulos. Join us as we talk about the parallel dimension that is TikTok Live, the difference betwee...
Aug 14, 2024•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Trad Wife Discourse is everywhere. It’s been everywhere for a while, in part because it offers a twisted fantasy of ease to women who are attempting to negotiate life, and family, and career in a society whose policy is actively hostile to women working outside the home. But I’ve seen a spike in interest in the ramp-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election, where a Trump victory — paired with the explicit goals of Project 2025, J.D. Vance, and Christian Nationalism in general — will make trad w...
Aug 07, 2024•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
