Culture Study Podcast

Nov 20 2024 50 ep. 51 mins 582

Culture Study Podcast artwork

A podcast about the culture that surrounds you — with Anne Helen Petersen and a bunch of very smart co-hosts

culturestudypod.substack.com

Society & Culture Arts

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Nicole Kidman's Resting Rich Face

Nov 20 2024 54 mins

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 ow

Women's Sports and Gender Panic

Nov 13 2024 51 mins

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 testin

Is BookTok Actually About Reading?

Oct 30 2024 77 mins

“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

Is the Golden Age of Podcasts Over?

Oct 23 2024 51 mins

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 industr

Why Are We So Weird About Cancer?

Oct 16 2024 43 mins

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 spac

Strong Opinions About Trivial Sh*t

Oct 09 2024 51 mins

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 t

The Feminine Draw of Contemporary Conspiracy

Oct 02 2024 67 mins

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 evi

Will MomTok Even Survive This?!?!

Sep 25 2024 62 mins

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 i

Sapphic Pop, So Hot Right Now

Sep 18 2024 47 mins

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 conv

What It's Really Like to Run a Romance Bookstore

Sep 11 2024 54 mins

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