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PODCAST

New Books in Popular Culture

Interviews with Scholars of Popular Culture about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

society & culture

All Episodes

42:35

Ashlee Piper, "No New Things: A Radically Simple...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/06/01

No New Things: A Radically Simple 30-Day Guide to Saving Money, the Planet, and Your Sanity by Ashlee Piper, was published by Celadon Books in April 2025. In this honest and intentional book, Piper educates us on the history of our marketing and obsession with new things and guides us into a flexible and life changing 30-day-challenge.From award-winning sustainability expert Ashlee Piper, a witty, no-nonsense guide to regaining control over your time, consumerist impulses, and financial and mental

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19:26

Dave Cook, "Go Straight: The Ultimate Guide to...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/05/31

Get ready for the fight of your life in Go Straight: The Ultimate Guide to Side-Scrolling Beat-'Em-Ups (Bitmap Books, 2022). Written by award-winning author Dave Cook, and opening with a foreword by legendary Double Dragon creator, Yoshihisa Kishimoto, this odyssey through bare-knuckle nostalgia features over 200 games spanning 37 years. At over 450 pages, Go Straight takes a deep dive into familiar beat-'em-up legends like Double Dragon, Golden Axe, Final Fight and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, as

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43:40

Nao Tomabechi, "Supervillains: The Significance of...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/05/30

Alongside superheroes, supervillains, too, have become one of today’s most popular and globally recognizable figures. However, it is not merely their popularity that marks their significance. Supervillains are also central to superhero storytelling to the extent that the superhero genre cannot survive without supervillains. Bringing together different approaches and critical perspectives across disciplines, in Supervillains: The Significance of Evil in Superhero Comics (Rutgers University Press,

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40:41

Laura Lee Flanagan, "Hardcore Vegetarian: Welcome to...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/05/30

Laura Lee Flanagan's Hardcore Vegetarian (Feral House, 2025) is a celebration of food and love for everyone! Hardcore Vegetarian is a journey into vegetarianism led by someone who fell into it inadvertently and is happily still learning as she goes. As a passionate home cook, Flanagan became what she describes as a "lazy vegetarian" while figuring out how to cook for herself and her vegetarian husband, musician Harley Flanagan. It is a narrative guide for the vegetarian-curious, for home cooks who

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56:35

Live from the Underground: A History of College Radio

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/05/29

Bands like R.E.M., U2, Public Enemy, and Nirvana found success as darlings of college radio, but the extraordinary influence of these stations and their DJs on musical culture since the 1970s was anything but inevitable. As media deregulation and political conflict over obscenity and censorship transformed the business and politics of culture, students and community DJs turned to college radio to defy the mainstream—and they ended up disrupting popular music and commercial radio in the process. In

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41:28

Michelle H. S. Ho, "Emergent Genders: Living...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/05/23

In Emergent Genders: Living Otherwise in Tokyo's Pink Economies (Duke UP, 2025), Michelle H. S. Ho traces the genders manifesting alongside Japanese popular culture in Akihabara, an area in Tokyo renowned for the fandom and consumption of anime, manga, and games. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in josō and dansō cafe-and-bars, establishments where male-to-female and female-to-male crossdressing is prevalent, Ho shows how their owners, employees, and customers creatively innovate what she calls

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51:39

Kevin Smokler, "Break the Frame: Conversations with...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/05/22

In the twenty-first century alone, women filmmakers have succeeded at directing every size, genre, and style of motion picture. Their movies have won Oscars (Free Solo), made actors into household names (Jennifer Lawrence in Winter's Bone), received induction into the Library of Congress's National Film Registry (Real Women Have Curves), and become worldwide box office phenomena (Captain Marvel, Deep Impact). Nevertheless in 2023, the year of Barbie, women directed only 12% of the top 250 movies in

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75:09

Matthew Shindell, "Lunar: A History of the Moon in...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/05/22

The first book to combine exquisite cartographical charts of the Moon with a thorough exploration of the Moon’s role in popular culture, science, and myth.President John F. Kennedy’s rousing “We will go to the Moon” speech in 1961 before the US Congress catalyzed the celebrated Apollo program, spurring the US Geological Survey’s scientists to map the Moon. Over the next eleven years a team of twenty-two, including a dozen illustrator-cartographers, created forty-four charts that forever changed

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55:21

Lucia Soriano, "Embodying Normalcy: Women's Work in...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/05/17

Embodying Normalcy: Women’s Work in Neoliberal Times (Lexington Books, 2024) calls attention to how women in the United States do a type of unpaid work to embody the latest trends for the purpose of achieving success in neoliberal culture. Using TLC reality shows, lifestyle and beauty influencers, Brazilian butt lift TikToks, and celebrities like Kim Kardashian as her archive, Lucia Soriano delivers four case studies that draw on gender studies, media studies, disability studies, and American

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80:03

Matthew Restall, "On Elton John: An Opinionated...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/05/16

Elton John is not only "still standing," he is a living superlative, the ultimate record-breaking, award-winning survivor of the great era of pop and rock music that he helped to shape during his six decades in the music industry. Yet few of his numerous biographies and song guides take him as a historical subject worthy of scholarly study.In contrast, On Elton John: An Opinionated Guide (Oxford University Press, 2025) approaches the artist seriously and analytically, while still couched in a highly

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54:31

Annie Zaleski, "I Got You Babe: A Celebration of...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/05/15

Covering her life and sixty-year career from Sonny & Cher to show-stopping solo performer, award-winning actress, fashion icon, and beyond, this is a glorious retrospective of one of the world's most enduring entertainers, Cher. Featuring a foreword by Cyndi Lauper!Commemorating six decades since her first #1 hit in 1965, I Got You Babe (Running Press, 2025) captures Cher's one-of-a-kind life. Written by award-winning writer and editor Annie Zaleski, this celebration of the fearless, down-to-earth

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69:41

Vincent L Stephens, "Broads, Sisters, Exes: Feminist...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/05/14

This timely and telling analysis identifies the formal and thematic innovations pioneered by millennial feminists between 2012 and 2020 that have shaped the trajectory of our favorite shows today. Author Vincent L. Stephens offers close readings of nine pivotal series, including Girls, Orange Is the New Black, Broad City, Jane the Virgin, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Fleabag, Insecure, Shrill, and I May Destroy You. Across these series, women-led creative teams translated techniques from indie films,

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51:56

Robert F. Darden and Stephen M. Newby, "Soon and Very...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/05/13

Gospel singer and seven-time Grammy winner Andraé Crouch (1942-2015) hardly needs introduction. His compositions--"The Blood Will Never Lose Its Power," "Through It All," "My Tribute (To God be the Glory)," "Jesus is the Answer," "Soon and Very Soon," and others--remain staples in modern hymnals, and he is often spoken of in the same "genius" pantheon as Mahalia Jackson, Thomas Dorsey and the Rev. James Cleveland. As the definitive biography of Crouch published to date, Soon and Very Soon: The

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70:58

The Politics of Andor (Season 2 Episodes 7-9): Truth...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/05/12

It’s the UConn Popcast, and we continue our analysis of Andor season 2 with episodes 7-9. We break down the politics of these episodes, focusing on the question of when in a rebellion must you break cover and insist - publicly - on the truth. We see a second major theme of this arc as discipline. The rebellion is moving from a para-military to a military posture, and requires increasing discipline from its members as it does so. Further, Cassian fights a battle in this arc between his belief that

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39:31

Brian M. Ingrassia, "Speed Capital: Indianapolis Auto...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/05/11

The 1909 opening of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway marked a foundational moment in the history of automotive racing. Events at the famed track and others like it also helped launch America's love affair with cars and an embrace of road systems that transformed cities and shrank perceptions of space.Brian Ingrassia tells the story of the legendary oval's early decades. This story revolves around Speedway cofounder and visionary businessman Carl Graham Fisher, whose leadership in the building of

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33:08

Tracy Fullerton and Matthew Farber, "The Well-Read...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/05/10

How players evoke personal and subjective meanings through a new theory of player response. In The Well-Read Game: On Playing Thoughtfully (MIT Press, 2025), Tracy Fullerton and Matthew Farber explore the experiences we have when we play games: not the outcomes of play or the aesthetics of formal game structures but the ephemeral and emotional experiences of being in play. These are the private stories we tell ourselves as we play, the questions we ask, and our reactions to the game’s intent

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69:10

Harry Castleman and Walter J. Podrazik, "Watching TV:...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/05/09

In their fourth edition of Watching TV: American Television Season by Season (Syracuse University Press, 2025), Harry Castleman and Walter Podrazik present a season-by-season narrative that encompasses the eras of American television from the beginning in broadcast, through cable, and now streaming. They deftly navigate the dizzying array of contemporary choices so that no matter where you start on the media timeline, Watching TV provides the context and background to this multi-billion-dollar

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39:03

Eunji Kim, "The American Mirage: How Reality TV...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/05/06

In an age of growing wealth disparities, politicians on both sides of the aisle are sounding the alarm about the fading American Dream. Yet despite all evidence to the contrary, many still view the United States as the land of opportunity. The American Mirage: How Reality TV Upholds the Myth of Meritocracy (Princeton University Press, 2025) addresses this puzzle by exposing the stark reality of today’s media landscape, revealing how popular entertainment media shapes politics and public opinion in

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41:06

Katie Milestone and Simon A. Morrison, "Transatlantic...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/05/04

Transatlantic Drift: The Ebb and Flow of Dance Music (Reaktion, 2025) by Dr. Katie Milestone & Dr. Simon A. Morrison explores the emergence and evolution of nightclubs and electronic dance music from the 1950s onwards. It traces the rhythmic journey of dance music, following the pulse as it bounced between Europe, North America and the Caribbean. Music, dance styles and nightclub spaces are not created in isolation; they are shaped by collective influences and shared experiences. This book uncovers

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55:24

The Politics of Andor (Season 2 Episodes 4-6): Too...

New Books in Popular Culture ·

2025/05/03

It’s the UConn Popcast, and we continue our analysis of Andor season 2 with episodes 4-6. We break down the politics of these episodes, focusing on the mirrored political challenges faced by figures from the Empire and the Rebellion. We see a big theme of these episodes as “too much information,” as both sides struggle to distinguish friend from foe, signal from noise, the authentic from the inauthentic. We discuss classic political problems portrayed in the episodes such as collective action

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1,328 results

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