New Books in Popular Culture

Matthew Facciani, author and researcher at the University of Notre Dame, dives into the world of misinformation in his latest work. He uncovers the cognitive and social dynamics that make us susceptible to false beliefs, sharing real-life stories, including those from the COVID-19 pandemic. Facciani challenges traditional approaches to media literacy, highlighting the influence of identity and social ties. He also provides actionable strategies for meaningful dialogue and rebuilding trust amidst today’s polarized landscape, emphasizing communication’s critical role.

Alisha Mughal's It Can’t Rain All the Time: The Crow (ECW Press, 2025) weaves memoir with film criticism in an effort to pin down The Crow’s cultural resonance. A passionate analysis of the ill-fated 1994 film starring the late Brandon Lee and its long-lasting influence on action movies, cinematic grief, and emotional masculinity Released in 1994, The Crow first drew in audiences thanks to the well-publicized tragedy that loomed over the film: lead actor Brandon Lee had died on set due to a mishandled prop gun. But it soon became clear that The Crow was more than just an accumulation of its tragic parts. The celebrated critic Roger Ebert wrote that Lee’s performance was “more of a screen achievement than any of the films of his father, Bruce Lee.” In It Can’t Rain All the Time, Mughal argues that The Crow has transcended Brandon Lee’s death by exposing the most challenging human emotions in all their dark, dramatic, and visceral glory, so much so that it has spawned three sequels, a remake, and an intense fandom. Eric, our back-from-the-dead, grieving protagonist, shows us that there is no solution to depression or loss, there is only our own internal, messy work. By the end of the movie, we realize that Eric has presented us with a vast range of emotions and that masculinity doesn’t need to be hard and impenetrable. Through her memories of seeking solace in the film during her own grieving period, Mughal brilliantly shows that, for all its gothic sadness, The Crow is, surprisingly and touchingly, a movie about redemption and hope.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Philip Carr-Gomm joins Jana Byars to talk about A Brief History of Nakedness (Reaktion, 2010) on the occasion of its newest paperback edition. From the naked sages of India to modern-day witches and Christian nudists, from Lady Godiva to Lady Gaga, Carr-Comm writes a survey of the touching, sometimes tragic, and often bizarre story of our relationships with our naked bodies. As one common story goes, Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, had no idea that there was any shame in their lack of clothes; they were perfectly confident in their birthday suits among the animals of the Garden of Eden. All was well until that day when they ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and went scrambling for fig leaves to cover their bodies. Since then, lucrative businesses have arisen to provide many stylish ways to cover our nakedness, for the naked human body now evokes powerful and often contradictory ideas--it thrills and revolts us, signifies innocence and sexual experience, and often marks the difference between nature and society. In A Brief History of Nakedness psychologist Philip Carr-Gomm traces our inescapable preoccupation with nudity. Rather than studying the history of the nude in art or detailing how the naked body has been denigrated in the media, A Brief History of Nakedness reveals how religious teachers, politicians, protesters, and cultural icons have used nudity to enlighten or empower themselves as well as entertain us. Among his many examples, Carr-Gomm discusses how advertisers and the media employ images of bare skin--or even simply the word "naked"--to garner our attention, how mystics have used nudity to get closer to God, and how political protesters have discovered that baring all is one of the most effective ways to gain publicity for their cause. Carr-Gomm investigates how this use of something as natural as nakedness actually gets under our skin and evokes complicated and complex emotional responses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Matthew Sparks and Oliva Sizemore join Jana Byars for a fun, chilling, and thoughtful discussion about about Haint Country: Dark Tales from the Hills and Hollers (University Press of Kentucky, 2024). The hills of the Appalachia region hold secrets—dark, deep, varied, and mysterious. These secrets are often told in the form of eerie, thrilling, and creepy folk tales that reveal strange sightings, curious oddities, and commonly serve as cautionary tales for eager and curious ears. These spine-tingling stories have been told and retold by family members, neighbors, and "hillfolk" for generations. Haint Country: Dark Folktales from the Hills and Hollers is a collection of weird, otherworldly, and supernatural phenomenon in Eastern Kentucky—tales that have been recorded and documented for the first time. Collected and adapted by Matthew Sparks and Olivia Sizemore, the anthology explores stories of ghosts or "haints," strange creatures or "boogers," haunted locations or "stained earth," uncanny happenings or "high strangeness," and humorous Appalachian ghost stories. Contemporary yarns of black panthers, demons, and sightings of ghostly coal miners are narrated in the first person, reflecting the style and dialect of the collected oral history. Though comprised of a mixture of claimed accounts and fabricated lore, the locations and people woven throughout are very real. Complemented with evocative watercolor illustrations by Olivia Sizemore (who was inspired by the work of Stephen Gammell) and a compendium that provides additional context, Haint Country is a thrilling and bone-chilling excursion to the spooky corner of Appalachia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

If you mention Appalachia to many people, they may immediately respond with the "Deliverance" dueling banjos theme. Unfortunately, this is an example of how the region is stereotyped and misunderstood, particularly in films. In her book, Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film(University of Georgia Press, 2018), Meredith McCarroll, Director of Writing and Rhetoric at Bowdoin College, describes Appalachian people as being shown as different from both white and nonwhite groups, often considered as belonging to the worst of each group. Her book discusses specific film examples that help to illustrate the negative connotation heaped upon Appalachia, and also presents where filmmakers treat them more fairly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Behind the braided wigs, buckskins, and excess bronzer that typified the mid-century "filmic Indian" lies a far richer, deeper history of Indigenous labor, survival, and agency. This history takes center stage in historian Liza Black's new book, Picturing Indians: Native Americans in Film, 1941-1960 (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), which looks at Indigenous peoples' experiences in the American film industry that so often relied upon and reproduced racialized stereotypes of "authentic Indians" to produce profit. Black shows how non-Native film producers, in producing monolithic and historically static Native caricatures for profit, reinforced settler colonial narratives on screen while simultaneously denying Indigenous actors, extras, and staff of their modernity.Thorough in detail and innovative in analysis, Black incorporates film studies, Native and Indigenous studies, and history, shedding new light on the mid-century film industry and Native peoples' roles in it. Black chronicles the contours of American settler colonialism and its cultural and economic manifestations both on- and off-screen, giving the "authentic Indian" so familiar to non-Native audiences a much-needed dose of historical context. The result is an engaging story of Indigenous talent, labor, and livelihood that transcends critical moments in Native and U.S. histories alike.Listeners can now purchase Picturing Indians using code 6AF20 for a 40% discount on the University of Nebraska Press' site.Annabel LaBrecque is a PhD student in the Department of History at UC Berkeley. You can find her on Twitter @labrcq. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Amid the ongoing reckoning over America’s history of anti-Black racism, scores of monuments to slaveowners and Confederate soldiers still proudly dot the country’s landscape, while schools and street signs continue to bear the names of segregationists. With poignant, lyrical prose, cultural commentator Irvin Weathersby confronts the inescapable specter of white supremacy in our open spaces and contemplates what it means to bear witness to sites of lasting racial trauma.Professor Weathersby takes us from the streets of his childhood in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward to the Whitney Plantation; from the graffitied pedestals of Confederate statues lining Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, to the location of a racist terror attack in Charlottesville; from the site of the Wounded Knee massacre in South Dakota to a Kara Walker art installation at a former sugar factory in Brooklyn, New York. Along the way, he challenges the creation myths embedded in America’s landmarks and meets artists, curators, and city planners doing the same. Urgent and unflinchingly intimate, In Open Contempt (Viking, 2025) offers a hopeful reimagining of the spaces we share in order to honor our nation’s true history, encouraging us to make room for love as a way to heal and treat each other more humanely. Find Professor Weathersby at his website, where you can order In Open Contempt, check out his other writings, and attend upcoming events. Host Sullivan Summer can be found at her website, on Instagram, and on Substack, where she and Professor Weathersby continue their conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Few politicians produced the musical reaction that Ronald Reagan did. His California-branded conservatism inspired countless young people to pick up guitars and thrash out their political angst. Punk bands across the United States took aim at the man, his presidency, and the idea of America he was selling to voters nationwide. Small yet vibrant scenes across the country emerged to challenge the communal norms and social values projected on them by the popular media and consumer culture. Punk enthusiast Robert Fitzgerald argues that these songs' lyrics aren't just catchy and fun to scream along with; they also reveal the thoughts and feelings of artists reacting to their political environment in real, forthright, and uncensored time.In Hardcore Punk in the Age of Reagan (UNC Press, 2025), Fitzgerald shows how these lyrics illustrated what young adults felt and how they reacted to one of the most influential and divisive leaders of the era. Punk lyrics are seemingly simple, the author argues, but they sketch out a complex, musically inspired countermovement that is as canonical in the American songbook as the folk and rock protest music that came before. Robert Fitzgerald is a laboratory school administrator and a lifelong punk fan. Robert Fitzgerald on UNC Press’s website. Bradley Morgan is a media arts professional in Chicago and author of U2's The Joshua Tree: Planting Roots in Mythic America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) and Frank Zappa's America (LSU Press, 2025). He manages partnerships on behalf of CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM and is the director of its music film festival. His forthcoming book is U2: Until the End of the World (Gemini Books, October 2025). Bradley Morgan on Facebook and Bluesky. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Are zoos an anachronism in the 21st century when we can watch animals in their natural habitat, close-up from our couches without worrying about cruelty? Should they go the way of other bygone era ‘spectacles’ and ‘attractions’ that we now regard as barbaric? There are vocal campaigners and activists who believe so. Heather Browning and Walter Veit disagree, but they acknowledge there is a case to be answered. In What Are Zoos For? (Bristol University Press, 2024) they test the common justifications for zoos (entertainment, education, research, conservation) against the evidence and suggest what the best zoos of the future should look like to ensure that they are primarily for animals and not just for people. Heather Browning is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Southampton. Her primary research interests are animal welfare, ethics, and consciousness. Previously, she worked for many years as a zookeeper and zoo animal welfare officer, interested in the practical application of animal welfare measurement. Walter Veit is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Reading and an external member of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He’s also the author of A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness (Routledge, 2023). Most of his ongoing research is on the consciousness and welfare of animals and AIs. Kyle Johannsen is Sessional Faculty Member in the Department of Philosophy at Trent University. His most recent authored book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

Dom Ford joins Jana Byars to talk about Mytholudics: Game and Myth (DeGruyter Brill, 2025). Games create worlds made of many different elements, but also of rules, systems and structures for how we act in them. So how can we make sense of them? Mytholudics: Games and Myth lays out an approach to understanding games using theories from myth and folklore. Myth is taken here not as an object but as a process, a way of expressing meaning. It works to naturalise arbitrary constellations of signs, to connect things in meaning. Behind the phrase ‘just the way it is’ is a process of mythologization that has cemented it.  Mytholudics lays out how this understanding of myth works for the analysis of games. In two sections each analysing five digital games, it then shows how this approach works in practice: one through the lens of heroism and one through monstrosity. These ask questions such as what heroic mythology is constructed in Call of Duty? What do the monsters in The Witcher tell us about the game’s model of the world? How does Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice weave a conflict between Norse and Pictish mythology into one between competing models of seeing mental illness? This method helps to see games and their worlds in the whole. Stories, gameplay, systems, rules, spatial configurations and art styles can all be considered together as contributing to the meaning of the game. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture