New Books In Popular Culture

In Producing Precarity (NYU Press, 2025) Curtis Marez examines the television industry’s practice of “offshoring” production to impoverished sites within the US. Marez, focuses on state efforts to attract film and TV producers to poor places with tax incentives, discounted public lands, and subsidized infrastructures. He argues that these efforts result in the redistribution of wealth from poor people of color, Indigenous people, and other taxpayers to Los Angeles-based media makers, while also diverting money that could be used for education and health care to the wealthy. The popular series produced in these places, such as Breaking Bad, The Watchmen, Lovecraft County, The Walking Dead, and Vida, are praised by critics and awards organizations and highlighted by streaming services for challenging genre, casting, and narrative conventions. However, many of these shows rely on racialized and gendered low-wage labor for production, and diversity, equity, and inclusion representations can sometimes perpetuate r

In Appropriated Tales: Race and the Disney Fairy-Tale Mode (Wayne State UP, 2025), scholar Michelle Anya Anjirbag examines Disney's method of fairy-tale storytelling to determine how the corporation has shaped public understanding of what fairy tales are and who belongs within them. Covering a span of years "from mermaid to mermaid"—from the 1989 animated The Little Mermaid to the 2023 live-action remake starring Halle Bailey—she deconstructs and interrogates Disney's corporate commodification of multiculturalism and diversity, centering its impact on misrepresented people and cultures over the stated intentions of the producers. Further, Anjirbag demonstrates that Disney shapes childhood experiences and imagination in a way that strategically promotes American cultural imperialism. Through close film analysis, applied critical theory, and social analysis of the Disney corporation, Anjirbag unearths a new framework for studies of Disney fairy tales and how they shape popular culture. For a limited time, Way

For as long as cats have coexisted with humans, they have been feared, revered and respected. They appear as dynamic hunters in Palaeolithic carvings and cave paintings; were venerated as gods in ancient Egypt; and still have the power to fascinate and frighten us, as the popularity of Joe Exotic, the self-styled Tiger King, shows. How did we go from hunting, and being hunted by, cats to keeping them as pets in our homes? In Cat Tales: A History (Thames & Hudson, 2025), Dr. Jerry Moore presents a wide-ranging and captivating history, charting cats’ journey from the African plains of the Pleistocene through the first human settlements in the Near East and on to ships setting sail for the Americas. What emerges is a complex picture of mutual domestication: cats chose to live with us as much as we chose to live with them, and as our growing cities bring the world’s wild cats into closer contact with humans, we must learn new ways to live together. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book 

Ready to move beyond routine dental checkups and unlock your body’s full potential? In The Dental Fitness Advantage: How a Healthy Mouth Enhances Total Body Health and Elevates Performance (Playbook Scholars, 2025), Dr. Camesia O. Matthews, a general and sports dentist, introduces the concept of dental fitness, a breakthrough approach that links oral health to whole-body wellness, athletic performance, and even confidence. With clear science and relatable analogies, Dr. Matthews uncovers surprising connections between the mouth and the body: from how oral bacteria influence heart disease and Alzheimer’s to why your “bite” affects sleep quality and body balance, and how wearing a custom-fitted sports mouthguard could even boost athletic performance. The book is built on five practical pillars: Prevention, Posture, Protection, Presentation, and Psychology. It also includes a unique assessment tool, the Dental Fitness Score, which helps you track your progress. Each pillar offers simple, actionable steps to

When the sun sets, things start to get interesting among wild animals. Wherever we live, whether in the city or suburbs or country, darkness conjures a hidden world of wildlife that most of us rarely glimpse. Foxes, wolves, and bears prowl while skunks, opossums, and porcupines lurk; fireflies send flashing signals to potential mates; raccoons rummage for food; owls and bats fly overhead. Wildlife biologist Sophia Kimmig is our guide to the startling behaviors of these and many more nocturnal creatures. Introducing us to night’s wild inhabitants, she reveals what life for them is like in this parallel world—how it looks, feels, and smells—and the ingenious ways some creatures thrive after sunset. Living Night: On the Secret Wonders of Wildlife After Dark (Experiment, 2025) helps us appreciate how essential darkness is: not just a time but a diverse habitat all to itself—one that we still know too little about, and that we must urgently protect for the benefit of the world’s flora and fauna that depend on th

Delve into Jewish history through 100 unique objects from the YIVO Archives and Library with 100 Objects from the Collections of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (2025). This gorgeously-illustrated coffee table book contains images and essays which represent modern Jewish history and culture through YIVO's one hundred years of collecting. The volume highlights a variety of manuscripts, photographs, ritual objects, and other ephemera. ּBook can be purchased here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Timothy Gitzen's Unscripting the Present (SUNY Press, 2025) interrogates contemporary sex panics in the United States, looking especially at popular culture texts to conceptualize queer youth survival strategies. Sex panics saturate contemporary discourse and politics in the United States. While such panics have a long history, they are now infused with rhetoric, logics, and methods of security that turn queer sexuality into an existential crisis. Queer youth bear the brunt of this crisis, with their presumed innocence always in danger of being lost. Unscripting the Present interweaves analysis of laws and lawsuits, news media, sociological studies, and popular culture both to understand contemporary sex panics and to highlight how queer youth find ways to survive in the here and now. Developing a novel technique of "unscripting," Gitzen focuses our attention on those impromptu moments when things go awry in representations of queer youth-moments that disrupt securitization's social "scripts." Foregoing well-

Before Hacks and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, there was the comedienne who started it all. First Lady of Laughs: The Forgotten Story of Jean Carroll (NYU Press, 2024) tells the story of Jean Carroll, the first Jewish woman to become a star in the field we now call stand-up comedy. Though rarely mentioned among the pantheon of early stand-up comics such as Henny Youngman and Lenny Bruce, Jean Carroll rivaled or even outshone the male counterparts of her heyday, playing more major theaters than any other comedian of her period. In addition to releasing a hit comedy album, Girl in a Hot Steam Bath, and briefly starring in her own sitcom on ABC, she also made twenty-nine appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show.Carroll made enduring changes to the genre of stand-up comedy, carving space for women and modeling a new form of Jewish femininity with her glamorous, acculturated, but still recognizably Jewish persona. She innovated a newly conversational, intimate style of stand-up, which is now recognized in comics like Joa

It’s The Pop Culture Professors, and we analyze the fourth and fifth episodes of Vince Gilligan’s new series Pluribus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Bradley Borougerdi joins Jana Byars to talk about Cannabis: A Global History (Reaktion, 2025). An international cultural history of the multifunctional plant. Cannabis explores the historical, pharmacological, and cultural significance of the controversial plant. Beginning with cannabis's origins as a food source in Southeast Asia, Borougerdi describes the global evolution of cannabis over the centuries, with a particular focus on its spread across the Atlantic and its modern renaissance in cuisine. The book also investigates the stimulant's mood-altering forms of consumption, from smoking to edibles and drinks. A richly illustrated guide, this book draws together a diverse account of international cannabis cultures in a single, captivating narrative. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

In Joke Farming: How to Write Comedy and Other Nonsense, Elliott Kalan (U Chicago Press, 2025) explains that it’s easier to write jokes when you have a dependable method for doing so. All jokes, he argues, are built from the same elements: structure, premise, voice, tone, wording, and audience—and these elements can be applied to any comedic genre, from stand-up to sitcoms to satire. Kalan analyzes examples from his own career—including jokes that he wrote (and rewrote and rewrote and rewrote . . . ) as head writer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart—as well as material from a diverse array of comedians, writers, and filmmakers, highlighting the phrasing, rhythm, and precise details that make their work so dang funny.Drawing on his experiences in professional writers’ rooms as well as episodes from everyday life, Kalan’s guide to jokes will appeal to aspiring writers, their mentors, comedy fans, and anyone who has to speak at a wedding. Joke Farming points the way toward a writing process that lessens stress

A thrilling tour of Earth that shows the search for extraterrestrial life starts in our own backyard.Is there life off Earth? Bound by the limitations of spaceflight, a growing number of astrobiologists investigate the question by studying life on our planet. Astronomer and author Jon Willis shows us how it’s done, allowing readers to envision extraterrestrial landscapes by exploring their closest Earth analogs in The Pale Blue Data Point: An Earth-Based Perspective on the Search for Alien Life (U Chicago Press, 2025). With Willis, we dive into the Pacific Ocean from the submersible-equipped E/V Nautilus to ponder the uncharted seas of Saturn’s and Jupiter’s moons; search the Australian desert for some of Earth’s oldest fossils and consider the prospects for a Martian fossil hunt; visit mountaintop observatories in Chile to search for the telltale twinkle of extrasolar planets; and eavesdrop on dolphins in the Bahamas to imagine alien minds.With investigations ranging from meteorite hunting to exoplanet dete

Stefania Marghitu's Teen TV (Routledge, 2021)explores the history of television's relationship to teens as a desired, but elusive audience, and the ways in which television has embraced youth subcultures, tracing the shifts in American and global televisual and youth cultures. Organized chronologically, Teen TV starts with Baby Boomers and moves to Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z as a way to contextualize and discuss cultural and historical contexts of teen television and television audiences. The book examines a wide range of historical and contemporary programming: from the broadcast bottleneck, multi-channel era that included youth targeted spaces like MTV, the WB, and the CW, to the rise of streaming platforms and global crossovers. It covers the thematic concerns and narrative structure of the coming-of-age story, and the prevalent genres of teen TV, and milestones faced by teen characters. The book also includes interviews with creators and showrunners of hit network television teen series, including Degr

Sabrina Mittermeier's edited volume Fan Phenomena: Disney (Intellect Books, 2023) analyzes the fandom of Disney brands across a variety of media including film, television, novels, stage productions, and theme parks. It showcases fan engagement such as cosplay, fan art, and on social media, as well as the company’s reaction to it. Further, the volume deals with crucial issues—race and racism, the role of queerness, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the advent of the streaming service Disney+—within the Disney fandom and in Disney texts. The authors come from a variety of disciplines including cultural and media studies, marketing and communications, cultural history, theater and performance studies, and more. In addition to interviews with fan practitioners, the essays feature both leading experts in fan and Disney studies alongside emerging voices in these fields. A vital new addition to the growing subdiscipline of fan studies, it will be popular with scholars of cultural studies, cultural history, a

Josh Levine's Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Good: Larry David and the Making of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, Fully Revised and Updated (ECW Press, 2025) is fully revised and includes a full insightful episode guide to the entire "Curb Your Enthusiasm." For Larry David, success was no sure thing. A frustrated New York comic who was known to walk off the stage in disgust, David was barely making a living. At least until his friend Jerry Seinfeld asked him to create a new kind of television sitcom for NBC. The result — Seinfeld — started slowly but became a gigantic hit. But most people didn’t know that the real genius behind the show was Larry David. Rich beyond his wildest dreams, David still had something to prove — and some television boundaries to push. And so he created Curb Your Enthusiasm, the improvised comedy that cast aside political correctness and made for hilarious, cringeworthy TV, a show that dared to relive the disastrous Seinfeld finale and turn it into a triumph. This second, fully updated edit

A vibrant, meticulously researched celebration of the women and non-binary skateboarders who defied a hostile industry and redefined skateboarding around the world With enthusiasm and empathy, Girl Gangs, Zines, and Powerslides: A History of Badass Women Skateboarders (ECW Press, 2025) celebrates the relentless participation of women in skateboarding from the 1960s onward who defied a hostile industry to carve out their own space through underground networks. Skater librarian Natalie Porter presents interviews and meticulous research, including the DIY zines created by female and non-binary skaters as a means of communication, to expose this unacknowledged story while offering a personal narrative about the importance of community-building and validation, with or without your own video game. Girl Gangs, Zines, and Powerslides disrupts the image of skateboarding as an exclusive male domain, offering historical context for the seemingly rapid progress of female skaters today seen competing on the Olympic stage.

Today I talked to Meg Bernhard about her new book Wine (Bloomsbury, 2023). Agricultural product and cultural commodity, drink of ritual and drink of addiction, purveyor of pleasure, pain, and memory - wine has never been contained in a single glass. Drawing from science, religion, literature, and memoir, Wine meditates on the power structures bound up with making and drinking this ancient, intoxicating beverage. While wine drunk millennia ago was the humble beverage of the people, today the drink is inextricable with power, sophistication, and often wealth. Bottles sell for half a million dollars. Point systems tell us which wines are considered the best. Wine professionals give us the language to describe what we taste. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choice

Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognisably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers--from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden to Zadie Smith. Few literary characters have led such colourful lives or matched her influence or capacity for reinvention in poetry, drama, fiction, and film. In The Wife of Bath: A Biography (Princeton UP, 2023), Marion Turner tells the fascinating story of where Chaucer's favourite character came from, how she related to real medieval women, and where her many travels have taken her since the fourteenth century, from Falstaff and Molly Bloom to #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. A sexually active and funny working woman, the Wife of Bath, also known as Alison, talks explicitly about sexual pleasure. She is also a victim of domestic abuse who tells a story of rape and redemption. Formed from misogynist sources, she plays with stereotypes. Turner sets Alison's fictional st

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with Treena Orchard about her memoir, Sticky, Sexy, Sad: Swipe Culture and the Darker Side of Dating Apps (Aevo, U Toronto Press, 2024).  Jane Goodall meets Carrie Bradshaw in Sticky, Sexy, Sad – an insightful, empowering memoir by an anthropologist who lays her own life bare as she explores the cultural matrix of digital courtship. Lifelong luddite Treena Orchard was a newly sober woman coming off a much-needed break from relationships, reluctantly taking the digital plunge by downloading a dating app. Instead of the fun, easy experiences advertised on swiping platforms, she discovered endless upkeep, ghosting, fleeting moments of sexual connection, and a steady flow of misogyny. In Sticky, Sexy, Sad, Orchard uses her skills as both an anthropologist who studies sexuality and a sex-positive feminist to explore what it feels like to want love while also resisting the addictive pull of platforms designed to make us swipe-dependent. She asks important questions

At the center of 1970s New York's most iconic clubs—from the celebrity-studded Studio 54 to the premiere lesbian discotheque Sahara—stood a queer Black woman on the turntables: Sharon White. With a sound she describes as "edgy, deep, aggressive, tech, synthy, percussive and lush," White became the first woman resident DJ at the Saint and the only woman to ever play Paradise Garage, breaking barriers in spaces where women were told they didn't belong. Her five-decade career didn't just challenge disco's male-dominated DJ culture; it redefined it, paving the way for future generations of women behind the decks. In this season finale, we explore how one visionary artist carved out space in disco's inner sanctum and what her trailblazing journey reveals about women—especially queer Black women—who shaped the sound and culture of an era from behind the booth. In the Season 2 Finale, hosts Ryan Purcell and Kristie Soares talk with legendary DJ Sharon White. Born in West Babylon, New York, White studied music at th