The Culture Journalist

CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience, we recommend signing up for a paid subscription.Paid subscribers also get access to our CUJOPLEX Discord and The Weather Report, a monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains. On our latest installment, filmmaker and Zohran Video Guy Anthony DiMieri joins us to talk to tell us about the wild twists and turns of his career as an indie filmmaker turned key contributor to the Zohran & SubwayTakes cinematic universes, dark woke, and why everyone is obsessed with Geese. We’re removing the paywall for the next week so you can give it a listen.You’ll also get an invite to our second reading group meet-up: a discussion of Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s seminal 1995 year essay, “The Californian Ideology,” and Fred Turner’s recent article for The Baffler, “The Texan Ideology.” That’s going down on Sunday, January 11.In 2005, the music and culture critics Simon Reynolds and Mark Fisher (RIP) began using the term hauntology — a riff on “ontology” — to describe an emergent genre in UK music, built from archival recordings from post-war England, vinyl crackle, and haunted, elegiac atmospherics. (Think: Burial, The Caretaker, and the eerie catalog of the label Ghost Box.) They borrowed the term from Jacques Derrida, who used it to describe a present haunted by futures that had never arrived; Reynolds and Fisher heard that idea vibrating through a generation of musicians excavating Britain’s cultural memory.Fisher explored hauntology’s political dimension, rooting the movement in a longing for Britain’s pre-Thatcherite social democratic past and an affection for cultural touchstones like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Brutalist architecture, and films like The Wickerman. Reynolds, meanwhile, mapped its musical lineage—back to ’90s hauntology predecessors like Boards of Canada and Broadcast, and across the pond to J Dilla-era hip-hop and underground movements like freak folk, hypnagogic pop, and chillwave.A recent CUJO reading group on the topic inspired us to invite Simon—the author of books like Rip It Up and Start Again, Retromania, and Futuromania (listen to our ep about it!)—to help us mark the 20th anniversary of hauntology and explore what it has to teach us about mobilizing the culture of the past in a way that feels meaningful and even forward-lookingSimon joins us to dig into the cultural factors that gave rise to hauntology, the 21st-century fetish for obsolete media, and the differences between hauntology and simple nostalgia or “retro.” We also talk about the pasts that continue to haunt us—from rave culture to Marxism—and he gives us a sneak peek at his forthcoming book, Still in a Dream: Shoegaze, Slackers and the Reinvention of Rock, 1984–1994, arriving in 2026.Listen to our HAUNTOLOGY PLAYLIST on Apple Music and YouTubeRead more of Simon on hauntology in Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past and over at ReynoldsRetroKeep up with Simon and his writing on blissblogFollow Simon on XAdditional reading:Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, 1993.Mark Fisher, “October 6, 1979: Capitalism and Bipolar Disorder,” 2005.Simon Reynolds, “Haunted Audio, a/k/a Society of the Spectral: Ghost Box, Mordant Music, and Hauntology,” director’s cut of an article in the November 2006 issue of The Wire.Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures, chapter 2, 2014. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comHey pals. On this month’s Weather Report, we’re following up our last episode on America’s new image politics with someone who’s been there on the ground: Anthony DiMieri, one of the independent filmmakers behind Zohran Mamdani’s man-on-the-street, documentary-style visual campaign. In addition to iconic Zohran videos like “freeze the rent” and “halalfl…

CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience — including access to our CUJOPLEX Discord and reading group meetings — we recommend signing up for a paid subscription.Paid subscribers also get access to The Weather Report, a monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains. On our latest installment, we chat with Billboard editor Katie Bain, author of a new history of Coachella, about what the festival’s 2026 line-up tells us about where culture is headed, the rise of anti-sellout discourse, and the AI industry’s nostalgic, artisanal rebrand. Since our last episode, something historic happened: Zohran Kwame Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City, marking the American left’s most significant electoral victory since the Bernie movement took off in the 2010s. While his team will credit his win to bold, populist economic policies, there’s no denying another factor at play: Zohran’s extraordinary command of images. He grew up in a film-director household, rapped as Young Cardamom before pivoting to politics, and hired a crew of indie filmmakers to create a video campaign that unfolded like a documentary love letter to the NYC of halal carts, bodega cats, and ordinary working people. Zohran’s media fluency is also why people are calling him the Left’s answer to Trump. Which all raises some big questions: Is politics in the information economy becoming indistinguishable from theatrical world-building? And what does that mean for our offline lives?This week’s guest, writer and artist Gideon Jacobs, has thought about these questions for years. A former creative director at Magnum Photos, child actor, and native New Yorker, Gideon has explored our cultural relationship to images in outlets like The New Yorker, The New York Times, Artforum, and Los Angeles Review of Books, for whom he penned an excellent piece earlier this year called “Player One and Main Character,” which contends that political reality, post-Trump and post-Musk, is beginning to bend to the rules of fiction. We talk about the aesthetic politics of the Zohran campaign and what it tells us about what successful counter-programming to MAGA’s vision of America might look like. We also discuss what Gideon’s study of the role of images in ancient cultures and religions can tell us about navigating the image world of the present, how the rise of populism (on both the left and the right) is inextricable from our current technological moment, and whether Zohran’s victory marks the start of a political future more grounded in material conditions—or the next phase of the image arms race.Follow Gideon on InstagramRead Gideon:“Player One and Main Character” (Los Angeles Review of Books)“Trump l’Oeil” (Los Angeles Review of Books)“Thou shalt not make images—but what if AI does?” (Document Journal)“Aliens” (The Drift)Additional reading:“Selling Zohran” by Corey Atad (Defector) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

Just in time for Halloween, we’re hosting a virtual hauntology reading group (specifically, hauntology the music genre) at 4pm ET next Thursday, October 30. If you want to join in, sign up for a paid subscription, or toss a few bucks into our haunted tip jar, and we’ll send you the readings and a link to log into the conversation. We hope it’ll be the first of more group reading sessions to come.Paid subscribers also get access to our CUJOPLEX Discord, an online hangout zone where folks who like talking about the evolving state of independent music, culture, and media can talk about the news of the day; and the Weather Report, a monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains.We spend a lot of time here talking about the structural forces that turned pop culture into an endless churn of sequels, remakes, and nostalgia plays. But what if the blame for our current “creative recession” lies on more than just economics or platforms? What if our cultural values themselves have shifted in ways that make true innovation harder to sustain?That’s the focus of Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, the forthcoming book from Tokyo-based culture critic W. David Marx—and probably the first major exhaustive account of the last 25 years in music, film/TV, internet culture, and fashion. He doesn’t just look at the technological, political, and economic forces that that created a winner-take-all landscape where billionaires and centi-millionaires like Taylor Swift, Kanye West, Paris Hilton, MrBeast, Jay-Z and frankly Donald Trump took up all of the cultural oxygen in the room, making it harder and harder for the next generation of innovators to break through. He zeroes in on the cultural attitudes that have led us here—and that set us apart from our 20th-century forebears—including poptimism, the valorization of entrepreneurial heroism, cultural omnivorism, and more.In addition to Blank Space, David the author of the mega-influential books Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change and Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style. He joins us to talk about the mind-boggling task of summing up the past quarter-century of culture, and why most of the coolest, most innovative outputs ended up getting pushed to the margins. We also get into what originality means in a climate of constant churn, and why he believes that fighting for it is still important, even in a postmodern landscape where “everything has already been done.”Finally, David makes the case that building a healthier cultural ecosystem starts with changing our cultural attitudes. That means embracing and reinforcing social norms that have fallen to the wayside in the past quarter century, like normalizing giving credit to smaller artists, learning the canon so we can break it, and yes, making it lame to sell out again.Pre-order Blank Space, which is out November 18 via Penguin Random House. Subscribe to David’s newsletter, CULTURE: An Owner’s ManualFollow David on X This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience — including access to our CUJOPLEX Discord and the Weather Report, a new monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains — we recommend signing up for a paid subscription. Paid subscribers can now watch our video roundtable on Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another with film critic Joshua Rivera and Macho Pod cohost Drew Millard. They’ll also receive an invite to our upcoming “hauntology” reading group, which we’ll tell you more about soon. (Just so you know: We’ll also be inviting anybody kind enough to tip us a buck or two to support our work).It’s October, and we still don’t have the September jobs report because the government shut down. But the data we do have shows a clear trend: Job growth is slowing, unemployment is ticking up, and cities like New York are seeing the weakest labor market gains in decades. If you’ve noticed more “Open to Work” badges on LinkedIn, heard stories about people applying to thousands of positions, or felt the chill in your own job search, you’re not imagining it: The job market sucks right now, and things have been headed in this direction since before Trump took office. To wrap our head around how we got here (tariffs? offshoring? AI and automation?), we brought on the best person we could think of to explain it: Richard D. Wolff, a longtime faculty member at places like The New School and UMass Amherst, author of myriad books on economic methodology and class analysis, a founding director of Democracy at Work, and one of the most prominent Marxist economists in America. (Full disclosure: Rick’s work on class and labor were tremendously influential on Andrea’s work as a sociology student.)In part one of our two-part conversation, Rick explains why today’s shaky job market is just the latest phase in a decades-long trend that began in the 1970s—and, in his view, a symptom of an empire (and economic system) on the verge of collapse. We also get into the flawed logic behind Trump’s tariff and immigration policies, the real reasons offshored jobs aren’t “coming back,” and why China’s working class is seeing wage growth while American workers are stuck in place.Follow Rick’s work at Democracy at Work—and watch his Economic Update podcast. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comThank you ock sportello, DJ Falkor / Random Rules, Tyler Foster, Yana Sosnovskaya, Ingmar Carlson, and many others for tuning in to CUJO’s first-ever live video, featuring film critic Joshua Rivera and Macho Pod co-host drew millard. Shout out to Yuri for sparking the idea for this conversation. Full video available to paid subscribers.

Hey pals. A little housekeeping: We keep full-length episodes like this one free, because we want as many people as possible to be able to hear them. But every episode we put out takes at least 20 hours to produce, from researching and booking to script writing, recording, editing, and marketing — and if you love this pod, we could use your help in keeping this project economically sustainable so we can keep churning out episodes like this one for years and years to come.If a paid subscription ($5/month!) isn’t on the table for you right now, we’ve introduced a new tipping feature where you can throw us a couple bucks to let us know that you’re enjoying what we make. You can think of it as tipping a barista for your morning cup of coffee — only instead of a cup of coffee, you’re tipping us for an hour or more of stuff that you download into your brain. It’s been a rough couple of weeks for freedom of speech in America, from from Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension and reinstatement at ABC, to Trump’s executive order labeling Antifa a domestic terror group, to right-wing doxing databases targeting private citizens for Charlie Kirk wrongspeak. Here to help us make sense of the larger political and economic currents that have led us to this moment is Chicago-based journalist Adam Johnson, co-host of the long-running media criticism podcast Citations Needed, creator of The Column on Substack, and author of a piece for In These Times titled “The Trump admin is brazenly exploiting Charlie Kirk’s killing to silence dissent. Will Democrats take notice?”We break down the Kimmel saga — which coincided with a deportation order against Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil — and how the Trump administration is using Kirk’s assassination to push a broader agenda to erode liberal institutions, silence political opposition, and get corporations to fall in line. We also dig into the right’s overt embrace of so-called “cancel culture” tactics, backed by the full weight of the state — and how Democrats helped set the stage for this moment failing to defend the speech rights of their left flank. Finally, we examine how the media industry appears to be on the verge of a conservative “vibe shift,” from Bari Weiss’ rumored rise at CBS to the Ellison family’s powergrab over Paramount-Skydance and TikTok — and what standing up for free speech, and even doing one’s job as a journalist, could look like in the years to come.For access to our monthly cultural weather report, our CUJOPLEX Discord, and other bonus perks, become a paid subscriber.Read Adam’s piece “The Trump Admin Is Brazenly Exploiting Charlie Kirk’s Killing to Silence Dissent. Will Democrats Take Notice?” at In These Times.Subscribe to The Column and listen to Citations Needed. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience — including access to our CUJOPLEX Discord and our eternal parasocial friendship — we recommend signing up for a paid subscription.Paid subscribers also get access to The Weather Report, a new monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains. In the latest installment, cyberethnographer Ruby Justice Thelot joins us to wax philosophical about the Labubu craze, matcha and “performative male” discourse, and why politicians are lifting weights in public. It’s easy to get the impression these days that the traditional media industry is abandoning cultural criticism. Over the past few months, outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Chicago Tribune have been reassigning or letting go of veteran film, music, and theater critics, leaving some to debate what impact, if any, written criticism still has on the culture at large. Bucking this trend (and pretty much all mainstream media logic) is The Metrograph, a new biannual print magazine about cinema from the eponymous repertory theater in New York City’s Chinatown. It’s long, proudly niche, intentionally disconnected from the news cycle, and available only in print—with the goal of offering deep film fans an experience they won’t be able to find online, while inviting a new generation of people into the culture. The recently released second issue includes a 42-page dive into Paul Morrissey’s archives, author Gary Indiana’s favorite films (RIP), a history of the Japanese pink film, a “cinemap” of Belgrade, and a comic about Jerry Lewis’s infamous lost film The Day the Clown Cried. The cover, which we’ve cropped for this episode’s artwork, features a painting by artist Louise Giovanelli inspired by Christina Ricci’s character in Buffalo ’66.Senior editor Annabel Brady-Brown (formerly of Australia’s Fireflies Press) and editor-at-large Nick Pinkerton (film critic, screenwriter of The Sweet East, creator of the Substack Employee Picks, and a former coworker of Emilie’s at Kim’s Video) join us to discuss the past, present, and future of independent film criticism—and what it means to make a magazine for cinephiles in 2025. We also discuss why younger people in NYC seem to be gravitating back to the movies these days, and how the hyper-IRL, videostore-centric independent film culture of 20 years ago is a good template for what that might look like in the 2020s. Finally, we shout out some of the directors, movies, and micro publications that are making right now such an exciting time for cinema in NYC — and the repertory theaters and video stores we love around the world that are keeping the old Kim’s Video spirit alive.Issue 2 of The Metrograph is out now. Buy it here, or at an independent book or magazine store near you.Read more by our guests:”Less rock, more talk: On Paul Morrissey, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ezra Pound, ‘political’ art, and 1988’s ‘Spike of Bensonhurst’” by Nick Pinkerton (Employee Picks) “Sunshine, lollipops and rainbows: On the subversive pleasures of Agnès Varda‘s Le Bonheur” by Annabel Brady-Brown (The Metrograph) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience — including access to our CUJOPLEX Discord and our eternal parasocial friendship — we recommend signing up for a paid subscription.Paid subscribers also get access to The Weather Report, a new monthly episode series where we take stock of where the cultural winds are blowing and tell you what’s rained into our brains. In the first installment, we wax philosophical about Ari Aster’s Eddington, the future of search, and the alleged returned of Butt Rock. These days, it feels like the web is becoming… less of a web. Websites aren’t getting visitors anymore, employees are worried that they’re going to be replaced by AI agents, and the search tools we used to rely on to pull up the information we need are deliberately enshittifying themselves. It’s like the internet as we know it — fundamentally, a thing that connects people with other people — is being swallowed up by AI and smooshed down into the cramped, impersonal space of a chatbot interface, whether we like it or not.Or, as New York Magazine tech journalist John Herrman recently put it, “The World Wide Web … has been going through something akin to ecological collapse.” John has been keeping close tabs on these developments in his excellent column “Screen Time,” where he recently reported on the emerging field of generative-engine optimization, or GEO. Think: SEO, but for the AI-consolidated internet.We invited John on the show for a wide-ranging conversation about the strange new chapter of the internet that is materializing before our eyes—and what our experience of the web might look like a world where conversational AI becomes our main portal to the digital realm. We discuss the shift from SEO to GEO, why we’re all reading Reddit a lot more now, and what we stand to lose (and, in some cases, gain) in a world where we summon our information from chatbots.Finally, we get into what New York Times writer Mike Isaac is calling the dawn of Silicon Valley’s “Hard Tech” era: a vibe shift away from the consumer-focused, employee-friendly, optimistic culture of the 2010s to the more cutthroat, bossist, AI and data center-obsessed tech culture of the present.Follow John on BlueskyRead “Screen Time” at New York Magazine’s Intelligencer More by John: “What’s the deal with GPT-5?”“SEO is dead. Say hello to GEO.”“The AI boom is expanding Google’s dominance” “Why you are reading Reddit a lot more these days”“At work, in school, and online, it’s now AI versus AI” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

What do mullets, SpongeBob stick-and-pokes, and foil-wrapped sandwiches have in common? According to this week’s guest, London writer Clive Martin, they’re all hallmarks of a new type of food-obsessed, young urban professional that Clive calls the “defining person-type of 2025.” You know the type: people who queue up around the block for hours for a taste of the latest Instagram-viral, cartoonishly gigantic Italian sandwiches, in a neighborhood where the old school Italian sandwich shops are being displaced. Clive calls these people “The Normans,” after a North London cafe-restaurant they frequented for its loving homages to greasy-spoon staples like chippy teas and chicken fingers. But it’s a subculture that transcends international borders, at least in the English speaking world: a distinctly bro-y strain of contemporary foodie culture fueled by viral images of oozing cheeseburgers, indie rock music, Anthony Bourdain hagiography, and upscale, farm-to-table recreations of working class and immigrant food traditions. The plan their weekends around new eateries, walk around wearing restaurant merch, and secretly wish they could they could quit their fintech job and start over as Carmy from The Bear. Clive is a former colleague of ours from VICE, and one of our favorite observers of contemporary culture—especially when it comes to cities and gentrification. We brought him on to discuss his article for VICE, titled “Meet the Normans,” and how food supplanted music, film, and art as the dominant mode of cultural consumption among young people. We also get into the subculture’s nature as a kind of masculine reaction to other strains of millennial yuppie food culture, how both the food internet and the bro internet are reshaping our cities, and how the rising cost of living is pushing the gentrification cycle into exurban areas like Upstate New York, Margate, and Joshua Tree. Finally, we share some of our favorite, decidedly not-Norman restaurants in London, Philly, and LA that are still hanging on.Follow Clive on X @clive_mart1nRead more by Clive:“Urban sprawlers: How city folk ruined the countryside” (The Face)“Ketamine, crime, and chaos: Life in a London party slum” (VICE)Other relevant reads:“Welcome to Neo New York, where everything feels old school but isn’t” by Emilie Friedlander (VICE)“We are all foodies now” by Steven Phillips-Horst (Spike Art) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

Join us in Philly on Tuesday, 29 for a special book talk with this week’s guest, Jeff Weiss, co-presented by CUJO and Lot 49 Books. The event kicks off at 7 pm, at Fishtown’s Neon Clown Dream Lounge — and will feature Jeff in conversation with Emilie, Drew Millard, and Sadie Dupuis, followed by a book signing, a Britney-themed DJ set by Domino Dancing, and, rumor has it, Britney-themed drinks. Admission is free, but you can pre-order Jeff’s book here to support him and one of the city’s best independent bookstores.As a younger generation obsesses over Canon PowerShots, low-rise jeans, flip phones, Von Dutch, and other relics of the Y2K era, it’s easy to forget that the 00s were actually a pretty terrible era for pop culture. And while some of that has to do with aesthetics (looking at you, Boho Amnesia Belt), it was especially true when it comes to media. Think: award-winning news anchors contemplating pop stars’ virginities and making them cry on primetime TV; reality shows about celebrities in rehab funded by commercials for dubious diet pills; supermarket check-out aisles lined with magazines asking whether your favorite actor was “hot” or “not.”Few people got to know that world quite like music writer, friend-of-the-pod, and Passion of the Weiss founder Jeff Weiss, and he just published a book about it. It’s called Waiting For Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly, and it’s a semi-fictional account of Jeff’s years working as a young tabloid reporter in the early 2000s, roving the streets of LA with a paparazzi buddy in pursuit of the rich and famous — and the concurrent arc that saw Britney Spears go from America’s Sweetheart to Vegas party girl to conservatee.You could call it a work of fiction, written as a memoir; a work of non-fiction in the spirit of Joseph Mitchell and the Beat poets; or, as Jeff has described it, “a one-person referendum on the impossibility of knowing the exact truth about anything — especially anything refracted and distorted through the lens of electronic media.” Either way, it’s as much about Britney as it is about the glossy, Ed Hardy-adorned last days of pre-internet media and pop culture at the turn of the millennium — and how that time set the stage for the ruthless, gossip-obsessed cultural climate of the present. Jeff joins us to talk about his days as a gossip reporter, and why he chose this experimental format rather than a straightforward biography. We also get into how these experiences informed his understanding of the morality (and amorality) of journalism, how the tabloid era paved the way for our current moment in political media, and why a new generation of young people seems so nostalgic for the fashion and music of the early 2000s.CUJO is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. For access to paywalled episodes and an invite to our Discord, become a paid subscriber.Buy Waiting for Britney Spears, and follow the book’s Instagram account. There’s also an official playlist. Follow Jeff on X and check out his new podcast, The Truth Hurts. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

With a catalog full of art house favorites like The Witch, Spring Breakers, Moonlight, and Uncut Gems, it’s hard to deny that A24 occupies a unique position in the zeitgeist. In a Hollywood landscape that can feel like it’s becoming more risk-averse by the year — see our recent episode with Andrew Dewaard on his book Derivative Media — the artist-forward distributor and studio has become synonymous with a dream that, to many American cultural producers, feels increasingly remote: the conviction that one can doggedly put quality art out into the marketplace and see it actually succeed.But is A24 singlehandedly saving American cinema, or is that just a carefully crafted illusion, more a testament to the importance of smart brand positioning than to the actual quality of the films in its catalog? We brought on the Las Vegas-based writer and critic Nicholas Russell, author of an excellent essay for Dirt called “​​The Popular Alternative: the State of A24,” to discuss how the company evolved from an upstart indie film distributor to a studio and lifestyle brand in the mold of Disney — albeit one for adults who pride themselves in being savvy cultural consumers.We talk about how the company successfully commodified the idea of being “a cinephile,” the similarities between the A24 cap and the New York tote, and what Nicholas describes as the longstanding “tension between A24 the studio and A24 the startup” — one recently complicated by a $100 million cash injection from Josh Kushner’s Thrive Capital, a major investor in OpenAI. We also try to break down the ineffable A24 “feel” (including the aesthetic elements and political themes the company tends to foreground, and shy away from) and consider the rise of Neon — the distributor behind movies like Parasite, Anora, and How to Blow Up a Pipeline — as the “other popular alternative.”Follow Nicholas on X and SubstackRead more by Nicholas hereRecommended reading about A24 and the Hollywood system from Nicholas:"The Life and Death of Hollywood" by Daniel Bessner (Harpers)"A24's Risky Hollywood Moment" by Felix Gillette (Bloomberg)Hollywood: The Oral History by Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson (Harper Collins) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit theculturejournalist.substack.comThis is a free preview of a subscriber-only episode. If you sign up for a paid subscription between now and July 4, we’ll give you 50% off.For as long as any of us can remember, the NBA has been the cultural North Star of the United States. But according to Ock Sportello, author of a viral Substack article called “Toward a Unified Theory of Uncool,” the league has become a microcosm of the ways that economic risk aversion and image production in the age of social media are rendering the culture at large… increasingly swagless. To celebrate the final weekend of the NBA season, Emilie and boyfriend-of-the-pod/co-host of the excellent new show Macho Pod Drew Millard brought on Ock to discuss how “aura” replaced “coolness,” the erasure of regional identity in the age of globalization, and what the basketball superstars of 2025 have in common with the West Village Girls.

From tariffs on foreign goods to scaling back on US military and humanitarian aid abroad, it’s clear that Trump is intent on moving the country in a more protectionist direction. But what does that look like for pop culture? Think: Kendrick’s “Not Like Us” as an anthem for our time, versus Drake collaborating with lesser-known grime and Afro-house producers during the Obama years.Critic Jaime Brooks — who you may also know for her work in musical projects like Elite Gymnastics and Default Genders — recently wrote an epic essay exploring the geopolitics of music and entertainment in 2025. The piece is called “Notes on the Canzukian Schism,” and it’s an eye-opening look at the ways the European social welfare system, US military policy, and libertarian free market evangelism have shaped our experiences as both consumers and producers of pop culture over the past century.Jaime joins us to discuss how her Canadian upbringing — much like Marshall McLuhan’s and Drake’s — gave her a distinct perspective on media and culture in the Anglosphere. She takes us through the history of radio in the UK and US, and how it set the stage for both the genesis of Western pop music and the perennial question of whether art should be funded by markets or the state. We also talk about how the “poptimism vs. rockism” debate overlooks the material realities of the music industry, how being online and being literate have become two entirely separate things, and why community radio may be the last viable path forward for culture.Want to continue the conversation? For access to our member-only Discord (and the full edition of this episode), sign up for a paid subscription.Subscribe to Jaime’s Substack, The Seat of LossRead more by Jaime“American Sajaegi” (The New Inquiry)“The Summer of Love and the Holy Fair” (The New Inquiry) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

In his new book, What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis, writer Malcom Harris examines what is probably our most pressing existential paradox: Both individually and as a society, we’re all so caught up in the struggle to survive under capitalism that we’ve become incapable of taking decisive action to reduce our reliance on carbon and ensure our collective survival. Fortunately, as Malcom sees it, our fate isn’t sealed just yet. And What’s Left lays out, clearly and accessibly, what he sees as the three remaining options for saving the world.Malcolm joins us to talk about those strategies — which he calls marketcraft, public power, and communism — and why solving the climate crisis requires people from across the left pursuing all three of them in tandem. We also get into why more mainstream political philosophies — like the notion of “Abundance,” popularized by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and championed by centrist Democrats like Cory Booker — won’t help, largely because of a failure to engage with class politics.Finally, we zoom out to contemplate what political opposition even looks like in our increasingly inhospitable environment for free speech. Will the left will remain fragmented between Boomers shouting “Hands off NATO” at public protests while college students get arrested for peacefully protesting the atrocities in Gaza? Or is a broader coalition possible?Want to continue the conversation? For access to our member-only Discord (and all our bonus episodes), sign up for a paid subscription.Order What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary CrisisFollow Malcolm on XRead more by Malcolm:“What’s the matter with Abundance?” (The Baffler) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

During the pandemic, it seemed like the internet, and specifically TikTok, was coughing up one fringe aesthetic after the next: Cottagecore! Trad Cath Coquette! Old Money! Coastal Grandmother! And of course, our personal fave, Dark Academia. We even did a whole episode on it, as part of a larger examinatin of post-pandemic aesthetics. Fast forward to today, and the churn of social media-born aesthetics seems to have slowed somewhat, leaving behind a landscape that feels more fragmented and difficult to parse. So we’ve brought back our guest for that episode — style writer, trend forecaster, and bonafide Cool Girl Biz Sherbert — to give us a lay of the sartorial land. Along with continuing to co-host the influential fashion and culture podcast Nymphet Alumni, and writing for places like The Face and AnOther Magazine, Biz recently launched a new publication called American Style on Substack (subscribe!), which she says is about “what people are really wearing and why.”If you’re a CUJO subscriber, you already got a little taste via our Coachella collab with American Style a couple weeks ago. Either way, you’re in for a treat: Biz joins us to talk about American Style’s origin story and what’s she’s learned from documenting what young people are wearing out in the real world, at places ranging from a Deftones concert in Atlanta, to Disney World in Orlando, to a rave in North London. We also get into the state of countercultural and subcultural fashion in 2025; why men and boys seem, for the first time in a long time, to be leading the style conversation; the role that festivals like Coachella play in the wider image-making ecosystem; and the strange staying power of the festival cowgirl.Subscribe to American Style and follow Biz on Instagram (fka @marcfisherquotes). Listen to Nymphet Alumni on your pod platform of choice. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

Franchises, reboots, crossovers, live-action remakes, interpolations… Why does the entertainment industry keep churning out content that is derivative of something that came before, like Nicki Minaj rapping over “Barbie Girl” at the end of the Barbie movie on an endless loop? According to Andrew deWaard, a professor of media and popular culture at UC San Diego, it’s because of Wall Street. In his brain-expanding new book, Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture, Andrew pulls back the curtain on how popular culture has become derivative in a deeper, more insidious way: it’s private equity buying up entire song catalogs, activist hedge funds staging hostile takeovers of entertainment conglomerates, and the cultural industries getting consumed wholesale by the financial sector — actual derivatives trading included. That wave of financialization is having an increasingly palpable effect on what we see and hear when we open up apps like Spotify and Netflix — not just in terms of the kinds of works that get funded, but increasingly, in the character of the works themselves, leading Andrew to posit that “the stock exchange has been embedded within the media text.”Andrew joins us to talk about how finance-world strategies impact both the companies that fund the culture we consume and the labor of those who produce it — and how they result in an entertainment landscape that is increasingly inhospitable to taking big risks. And we get into how the logic of the derivative has become embedded in media products themselves, from Jay Z turning lyrical wordplay into a champagne empire, to The White Lotus casting K-pop star LISA.Order a copy of Derivative Media — or download an open-access PDF for free.Read more by Andrew:The Cinema of Steven Soderbergh: Indie Sex, Corporate Lies, and Digital Videotape (Columbia University Press)“Independent Canadian Music in the Streaming Age: The Sound from above (Critical Political Economy) and below (Ethnography of Musicians)” (Popular Music and Society) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

Since Trump took office in January, you may have picked up on a certain, shall we say, visual vibe. Think: AI slop memes, gilded neoclassical decor, men clad in dark suits and red ties, women decked out in high heels and flowing hair—not to mention an ambiguous blend of plastic surgery and contoured make-up that the Hollywood Reporter recently dubbed “Mar-A-Lago Face.”If you’ve noticed some of these recurring themes, you’re not alone. The arts journalist and critic Carolina Miranda has been keeping tabs on the intersection of visual culture, society, and politics for years, and she recently came up with a name for the look and feel of the current administration: Trump Trad. Her recent column for the Washington Post, “Welcome to the Era of Trump Trad,” is worth a read—and it’s the first in a monthly series providing an ongoing aesthetic analysis of the Trump era, which is among her new endeavors since taking a buyout from her longtime role at the LA Times last year. (She also writes the Arts Insider newsletter for KCRW, which Andrea edits.)Carolina joins us to explain the three core pillars of Trump Trad: a yearning for the past (architecturally and otherwise), traditional gender roles, and—fascinatingly—professional wrestling. We also get into how to reconcile all the trad-ness with this administration’s simultaneous embrace of Silicon Valley and AI, whether or not Biden or Kamala aesthetics exist, and how Trump’s obsession with taking control of the programming at the Kennedy Center and issuing executive orders about architecture fits in with his politics of resentment against so-called “cultural elites.”Want to continue the conversation? For access to our member-only Discord (and all our bonus episodes), sign up for a paid subscription.Sign up for Carolina’s KCRW newsletterRead more from Carolina:“How Silicon Valley boys came to rule politics” (WaPo)“Influencer Jenny69 calls herself a ‘buchona.’ How a narco-inspired style came to rule social media” (LA Times) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

Today we explore how many of the habits and customs we associate with American bourgeois life — religiously reading the Sunday Times, buying organic produce, building your entire identify around excelling at a career you love, etc. — stem from one generation in particular. Friends, we’re talking about the yuppies, that notoriously status-obsessed, hyper-educated cohort of young urban professionals who came to cultural prominence in the ’80s and ’90s, setting off a series of transformations in our cities, media, and consumer culture that we’re still witnessing to this day.It’s easy to see the Boomer worldview as a reflection of the fact that they had it much easier than us Millennials, economically speaking. But a new book called Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation, by Philadelphia journalist and author Tom McGrath, subtly challenges that idea, reframing the yuppie obsession with money, achievement, and unimpeachable good taste as a response to the rough economic headwinds of the 1970s and ’80s. Along the way, it explores how yuppiedom was equally a reaction to suburban post-war monoculture — and perhaps most perplexingly, a kind of impossible attempt to reconcile a newfound love of capitalism with the egalitarian values of the hippie era.Tom joins us to discuss the yuppie origin story and the historical factors that rerouted a generation from protesting the Vietnam War to working on Wall Street. We get into who — and what — the yuppies were rebelling against, and how their emphasis on not just consumption, but consuming the right things, laid the blueprint for everything from urban gentrification, to contemporary food culture, to the news and television we consume.We also talk about whether or not the yuppie still exists — perhaps in the form of Millennials? — and, of course, where Trump, then and now, fits into all of this.Purchase Triumph of the Yuppies.Follow Tom on Substack. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe

The Culture Journalist is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience — including bonus episodes and our eternal parasocial friendship — we recommend signing up for a paid subscription.Paid subscribers also get access to CUJOPLEX, a private Discord server and online hangout zone where independent culture fans who like talking about things like creative economies, media theory, current events, and the future of entertainment and journalism can congregate, share links, and talk about the news of the day.Climate disasters like the Los Angeles wildfires in January and Hurricane Helene last fall aren’t just laying bare the realities of global warming; they’re exposing the hidden dynamics of another kind of ecosystem: Media and information.From journalists compiling mutual aid spreadsheets to country music radio shows that became community message boards when the internet went out, these calamities are shining a spotlight on the evolving role of journalism and how we access information. They’re also raising new questions about what that information should be, whose responsibility it is to vet and disseminate it, and what the media of the future might look like — you know, as climate disaster becomes a more regular feature of life.There’s a lot to unpack here. So we’ve tagged in two media experts who, like Andrea, are based in LA and have had to confront climate disasters firsthand. Matt Pearce is a former Los Angeles Times reporter (and co-founder of its first union) with experience covering everything from hurricanes to internet culture; these days, he writes a Substack newsletter on the state of local news and media policy and is a senior policy advisor for the nonpartisan think tank Rebuild Local News.Longtime listeners might remember Emma Kemp from one of our earliest episodes on ghost kitchens. She’s a researcher and writer and assistant professor at the Otis College of Art and Design who specializes in environmental media studies, and co-founder of the non-profit land conservation coalition No Canyon Hills.Matt and Emma join us to talk about their experiences on the ground as both media consumers and producers during the wildfires; the sources of information that became essential, and the sources of information that just sort of fell away; the limitations (and opportunities) of AI in a crisis; and how climate disasters will transform what both traditional and non-traditional media look like.Follow Matt on Substack and X. Check out his pieces on Watch Duty and on AI use during the wildfires.Check out more from Emma on her website and at No Canyon Hills. She also sells chickens, eggs, and coop supplies over at Party Fowl. The cover of “California Dreaming” by Jarvis Cocker featured in this episode was purchased from the LA fire benefit compilation Los Angeles Rising. Check it out, along with a collection of other compilations released to fundraise for wildfire relief, here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe