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 — 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

Clive Martin, a London-based writer and cultural observer, explores the rise of a new foodie subculture he dubs 'The Normans.' He dissects how this group, characterized by an obsession with Instagrammable, oversized sandwiches, reflects cultural shifts amidst gentrification. Clive reveals how food has supplanted art and music, becoming a status symbol and a means of identity for urban youth. He also delves into the intertwining of masculinity and culinary trends, revealing the emergence of tattooed chefs as a new archetype in today's food landscape.

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

Nicholas Russell, a Las Vegas-based writer and critic, discusses the evolution of A24 from an indie film distributor to a powerful lifestyle brand. He dives into how A24 commodified cinephilia and transformed indie cinema's identity. The conversation explores the tension between A24's artistic roots and its mainstream aspirations due to private equity. They also analyze A24's unique marketing strategies and its cultural impact, questioning the authenticity of its brand in an ever-evolving cinematic landscape.

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.

Jaime Brooks, a critic and musician known for her projects Elite Gymnastics and Default Genders, digs into the intersection of geopolitics and pop culture. She explores how U.S. protectionist policies influence musical expressions, using Kendrick Lamar and Drake as prime examples. Jaime reflects on her Canadian upbringing and the historical impact of UK and US radio on Western pop music. She critiques the material realities of the music industry, examines the fallout from declining U.S. cultural funding, and emphasizes the importance of community radio in today's media landscape.

Malcolm Harris, a writer and progressive thinker known for his book 'What's Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis', dives into urgent strategies to tackle the climate crisis. He outlines three leftist approaches: marketcraft, public power, and communism, advocating for their simultaneous use. Harris critiques mainstream ideas like 'Abundance' for neglecting class politics, and questions the future of political opposition amid escalating environmental challenges. The conversation emphasizes unity within diverse movements for effective action.

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