Cultural Mixtapes

Jun 15 2024 21 ep. 39 mins

Cultural Mixtapes Podcast artwork

An attempt at probing the minds of writers, musicians, artists and pretty much anyone else making intriguing contributions to the cultural zeitgeist.

Society & Culture

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Crystallizing and Unraveling The Now with Novelist Paul Lynch

Jun 15 2024 44 mins

Sometimes I find myself in the throes of writing agony. I don’t like the term writers’ block because it implies a certain impermanence. But what is vernacularly referred to as writers’ block, is part and parcel of the creative act itself. Anyone who’s tried to do something creative for an extended period of time can vouch for this. No one can exactly figure where creative i

The Convergence of Food, Memory and Language, with writer Rachel Khong

Apr 11 2024 36 mins

I came across a novel that used food as tool for reflection into the life and mind of a few characters. Rachel Khong’s first novel Goodbye Vitamin, is about a woman who moves back home to care for her father, who has started to develop Alzheimer’s. And Khong meditates on this family by refocusing on their daily activities. From cooking to eating, to morning conversations, we se

The Future of the Humanities with Professor and Critic Merve Emre

Dec 30 2023 47 mins

In August, West Virginia University announced that it would be dissolving its Department of World Languages, Literature and Linguistics. And a couple months after that, my school Middlebury College, chose to eliminate a faculty position in its creative writing department. As someone studying English Literature, and who cares deeply about the future of humanities education, I was cu

Finding Grace in Politics with Former White House Speechwriter Cody Keenan

Oct 24 2023 46 mins

I read Barack Obama’s memoir A Promised Land when it first came out in November of 2020. That time was filled with rampant polarization, multiple quaratines, alternative realities, an insurrection, and politics that was so messy it was near impossible to find any hope and see America as this Promised Land that Obama wrote about. Thinking about the American Project is quite diffi

AI, Dystopia, and Creativity in the Future, with Novelist Vauhini Vara

Sep 26 2023 32 mins

Last November, I had Alexander Chee on the show. And in preparation for his interview, I read The Best American Essays 2022. I came across an essay titled “Ghosts.” This essay stood out from the rest of the anthology because it seemed to have 9 iterations. When I read further, I was baffled at the idea that a writer had used Artificial Intelligence to produce prose. Even more i

Decoding Suburban Vibes, with Writer Jason Diamond

Sep 19 2023 52 mins

About 6 months into my first year of college, I found myself soliloquizing to some friends about the beauties of suburban life. It struck me immediately that I was longing for a world that I found profoundly boring for 18 years, and had swore to never replicate. I was going to live my big life in cities. Yet the pleasures of driving around open roads amidst constant pockets of civi

Redefining Genre and the Music Business with Jazz Pianist Ethan Iverson

Sep 10 2023 44 mins

As part of this mini series on the past and future of the music industry, I wanted to speak to another person who’s been a force in the industry for years. I came across an article in The Nation that was called The End of the Music Business. This piece presented the history of a century in recorded music that began with pre-war 78-rpm gramophone records, and ended with the onset

A Life in Music, with Pianist Jerome Lowenthal

Sep 03 2023 46 mins

In 2019, I went to New York City for 24 hours. I told my high school teachers I was sick, postponed two tests, and asked for an extension on a project; all because Jerome Lowenthal had agreed to give me a piano lesson at the Juilliard School. On a cold New York Winter Night, I went to his studio and he heard me play Bach and Beethoven. We went on for an hour as he corrected my inte

The Future of Literary Criticism, with Book Critic Christian Lorentzen

Aug 27 2023 35 mins

If you keep up with academic chatter in English literature, there’s a debate going around about the versatility of English degrees, and of the fairly insular nature of literary criticism that comes out of academia. A piece in the New Yorker earlier this year, titled The End of the English Major, prompted me to do some thinking about the world of literature itself and the people i

The Open Veins of Palo Alto with Malcolm Harris

Jul 28 2023 42 mins

Imagine writing a history of the world from the perspective of a small California town that spans less than 30 sq. miles. That’s exactly what Malcolm Harris did. His new book Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and The World was published earlier this year by Little Brown and Company. This is a sweeping historical account of the founding of the suburb of Palo Alto; t