Popular Culture Archives

The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos

A spellbinding exploration of alien life and the cosmos, examining how the possibility of life on other planets shapes our understanding of humanity

One of the most powerful questions humans ask about the cosmos is: Are we alone? While the science behind this inquiry is fascinating, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is a reflection of our values, our fears, and most importantly, our enduring sense of hope. […Learn More]

Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English

A lively linguistic exploration of the speech habits we love to hate—and why our “like”s and “literally”s actually make us better communicators

Paranoid about the “ums” and “uhs” that pepper your presentations? Concerned that people notice your vocal fry? Bewildered by “hella” or the meteoric rise of “so”? What if these features of our speech weren’t a sign of cultural and linguistic degeneration, but rather, some of the most dynamic and revolutionary tools at our disposal? […Learn More]

Don’t Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in LIfe

Big decisions are hard. We consult friends and family, make sense of confusing “expert” advice online, maybe we read a self-help book to guide us. In the end, we usually just do what feels right, pursuing high stakes self-improvement—such as who we marry, how to date, where to live, what makes us happy—based solely on what our gut instinct tells us. But what if our gut is wrong? Biased, unpredictable, and misinformed, our gut, it turns out, is not all that reliable. And data can prove this. […Learn More]

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are

Blending the informed analysis of The Signal and the Noise with the instructive iconoclasm of Think Like a Freak, a fascinating, illuminating, and witty look at what the vast amounts of information now instantly available to us reveals about ourselves and our world—provided we ask the right questions. […Learn More]

Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now

RISE is a love letter to and for Asian Americans–a vivid scrapbook of voices, emotions, and memories from an era in which our culture was forged and transformed, and a way to preserve both the headlines and the intimate conversations that have shaped our community into who we are today. […Learn More]

Butts: A Backstory

Whether we love them or hate them, think they’re sexy, think they’re strange, consider them too big, too small, or anywhere in between, humans have a complicated relationship with butts. It is a body part unique to humans, critical to our evolution and survival, and yet it has come to signify so much more: sex, desire, comedy, shame. A woman’s butt, in particular, is forever being assessed, criticized, and objectified, from anxious self-examinations trying on jeans in department store dressing rooms to enduring crass remarks while walking down a street or high school hallways. But why? In Butts: A Backstory, reporter, essayist, and RadioLab contributing editor Heather Radke is determined to find out. […Learn More]

Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons

Role-playing game historian Ben Riggs unveils the secret history of TSR― the company that unleashed imaginations with Dungeons & Dragons, was driven into ruin by disastrous management decisions, and then saved by their bitterest rival. […Learn More]

Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness

In Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth D. Samet reexamines the literature, art, and culture that emerged after World War II, bringing her expertise as a professor of English at West Point to bear on the complexity of the postwar period in national life. She exposes the confusion about American identity that was expressed during and immediately after the war, and the deep national ambivalence toward war, violence, and veterans—all of which were suppressed in subsequent decades by a dangerously sentimental attitude toward the United States’ “exceptional” history and destiny. […Learn More]

The Nineties: A Book

From the bestselling author of But What if We’re Wrong, a wise and funny reckoning with the decade that gave us slacker/grunge irony about the sin of trying too hard, during the greatest shift in human consciousness of any decade in American history. […Learn More]

The Koreas: The Birth of Two Nations Divided

What history, pop culture, and diaspora can teach us about North and South Korea today.

Korea is one of the last divided countries in the world. Twins born of the Cold War, one is vilified as an isolated, impoverished, time-warped state with an abysmal human rights record and a reclusive leader who perennially threatens global security with his clandestine nuclear weapons program. The other is lauded as a thriving democratic and capitalist state with the thirteenth largest economy in the world and a model for developing countries to emulate. […Learn More]