The Culture We Deserve

The Christians finally have a film they can rally around. It's Romanian. You know, the country Erika Kirk can't return to because of accusations of human trafficking. Anyway, Christians and conservatives love Fjord, the latest film by Cristian Mungiu. It tells the story of a Romanian Christian family living in Norway until the secular progressives running their children's school start to suspect the parents of abusing the kids. Is it accurate or is it persecution? You can guess which ones the Christians are going with.

Then You Can See Everything is being filtered through the gender wars...

The images of the riots in Milan were shocking. Shop windows smashed, luxury items looted, fires set to vehicles and buildings. But of course they were AI generated, made well enough to fool even local residents that their city center was in disarray. 

In the wake of the protests in Paris and the election in Serbia, there's a lot of discourse about whether, a) Europe is the future of leftist politics; b) protests like those in Paris lead to reform or fascist takeover; or c) Europe is over, fallen to a Russia-friendly rightwing or migrant crisis, depending w...

From the pits of "suicidal empathy" and testosterone tests for military men, we are now getting livestreamed executions. We have a generation or two who were raised on pornography and gore, in the unregulated days of the internet, and maybe there are consequences for that? 

Jessa and Nico pick through the parades of unfeeling masculinities, from El Tigre in Colombia making videos with stacks of dead bodies to the return of public executions.

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Critics are absolutely gleeful that Tom Cruise's new movie Digger seems to be crashing at the box office. And in an era where we demand healthy, moral, ethical actors, do we really have a place for complicated, dark, tortured Tom Cruise? Jessa and Nico discuss how his reputation got so bad in the first place (cult member, negligent father, etc), and why we'll never see another star like him. 

Shownotes and references:

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From Stranger Danger to Pedo Hunting on YouTube, we have long projected our fears onto the outsider, rather than the people within our family who are much more likely to do us harm. (Maybe not the best week to make this argument as the Philadelphia serial killer's house is still being investigated, but oh well.) Jessa and Nico discuss Primetime and our moral panic around child safety, and our eagerness to replace justice with entertainment.

Shownotes and references:

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In this episode, Nico and Jessa discuss one of the weirder ideas championed during feminism's Second Wave, including by Gloria Steinem: the idea that pre-history's civilizations were matriarchal with a goddess culture at their center. The idea didn't originate with the feminist movement, they were based on a confused interpretation of 19th century archeological finds. But they sure did run with it, nearly 75 years after the idea had been discredited. Today you still see people repeating these ideas in spirituality circles, the more woooo end of feminism, and also the neo-Nazis.

Jessa and Nico discuss the wish...

It takes a certain kind of deranged mind to look at the Lindsay Clancy case and think, "Well, we're never going to get a female president now!" but that is what a lot of the rightwing ladies have been doing. Everything is a Gender War now.

Jessa and Nico consider how we think about men and women who kill their children, by looking at two films: Alice Diop's Saint Omer, based on the real life case of a Senegalese-French woman who drowned her baby daughter; and, The Shining, everyone's favorite Family Annihilator film. 

Shownotes and r...

Amanda Knox has written a memoir. And another memoir. And made a documentary. And another documentary. And a fictionalized adaptation of her life story. And she has a podcast. And now she's written a one-woman-show for Fringe. All while the family of the young woman who was murdered begs her to stop.

The true crime industry gives a lot of young women the opportunity to endlessly create content about the one bad thing that happened to them. Or, near them? Because some of these women, like the BTK Killer's daughter, or now the granddaughter of Charles Manson...

Everyone is looking for love, and no one can find it. That's the message from the inside look at matchmaking services, where both men and women are locked in an endless cycle of first dates and "there has to be something better." The rich men want women with degrees and robust fertility but no hobbies or interests of their own, and women want men who are six feet tall and at least half a million a year. Finally we find gender parity somewhere: both men and women are entirely delusional about what kind of partner will make them happy.<...

Katie Porter, fresh off a loss in the California governor's race, has announced she is going to be a book influencer now. Come join her book group, it recommends all the same books that the others do, too! As President Obama releases a new podcast about books, Dua Lipa interviews Booker Prize winners, and the daughter of President Bush tells you which slop books to read, we have to ask, why is everyone a book influencer now?

Nico and Jessa chart the evolution from the Parisian salon to BookTok and every horrific stop along the way, to...

The youths don't like sex in movies anymore. The director of the new romantic comedy One Night Only decided to cut a considerable amount of nudity and suggestive moments out of the film in order to cater to a squeamish audience. 

As eager as people are to declare horny movies back, due to the release of four erotically themed movies back to back (The Invite, ONO, Camp Miasma, and I Want Your Sex), Jessa and Nico consider whether this is a trend or a blip. Also: are any of these movies good or are they just older p...

About five years ago, there was a conversation between journalists who had done years of work under precarious conditions and the YouTubers who used that work to create monetized content that made them a ton of money. If someone spends ten years of their life covering a story, and then some 22-year-old reads a simplified version of that work to the camera while doing their make-up and makes 10x as much money for it, is this a fair distribution of resources?

Now the conversation is about YouTubers being pushed out and losing income because of AI. Science...

Elon Musk is going to save Western Civilization from migration, Sharia law, and Christopher Nolan films. He bravely offered up Grok as the tool to generate a woke-free version of The Odyssey, after spending months of his life complaining about casting choices and insults to traditional Greek culture. 

Jessa and Nico rehash how The Iliad and The Odyssey became culture war flashpoints, how Elon became such a RETVRN guy, and why weirdos look to the past to shore up their identities so they don't have to deal with what disappointments they all are.

Shownotes and r...

So that 250th anniversary thing was kind of a letdown, huh? A poorly attended (and even more dismally entertained) fair in DC, a fiasco of a July 4th celebration in Philadelphia, the only thing in the movie theaters being a new Minions movie... 

In this moment of disappointment, Jessa and Nico take the New York Times's lead in figuring out which films define America. Their list included things like Disclosure Day, Killer of Sheep, and There Will Be Blood, but J&N have a few additions.

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Jessa and Nico survey the World Cup discourse. Why and how do we love things that we know are corrupt? Why can't the United States stop itself from cheating every time it plays on an international level? Did the CIA send in Evangelical missionaries to convert everyone away from Catholicism to undermine the power of Brazilian football? And has globalized soccer created a monoculture, where all homegrown variety and innovation has been lost? 

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With the release of the final Jackass film comes nostalgia and reverie. Because our media class is the way it is, it includes a lot of think pieces about masculinity. Can't a man just hit another man in the balls without it being theorized? Can scatological entertainment resist inquiry?

Jessa and Nico also discuss Jackass's failsons: the YouTube pranksters, the violent and exploitative streaming show Fishtank, and fascism-curious podcasters. How did skateboarding subculture curdle into its current form?

Also: Rick Rubin is CIA, right?

Shownotes and references:

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Everything is an emergency! There's genocide(s), environmental collapse, capitalism, patriarchy -- and it all has to be taken care of now! Revolution! 

It's the attention economy, baby -- and everyone wants your attention on the emergency because it is making them a lot of money. Jessa and Nico look at the off-putting and unpersuasive language of the Emergency and wonder if there's a way of talking about these issues in a more reasonable way. If everything is trauma, and trauma makes us helpless and overreactive, then how is anything going to change? 

Also discussed: Ez...

We all agree that identity politics need to die, yes? They've been infiltrated and exploited by the wealthy and the elites, they led to years of scamming, and they have created a standstill where nothing can be done because nothing can be totally equal. But a return to the bad old system where various identity groups have their needs belittled and ignored would also be a mistake. Could the answer be a politics of dignity? As the Catholic church pivots toward human dignity as the center of their priorities, can we as political actors learn something from this? And...

Lately social media has been inundated with the loneliness influencer, the people (mostly women) who glamorize and romanticize a cozy little life alone: frozen pizzas, a glass of wine, and a sweet treat eaten in front of a TV, snug in yoga pants or luxury sweats, in your perfectly gray urban apartment. Is this helpful for those still stuck in our loneliness crisis, teaching them to turn solitude into meaningful me-time? Or is this going to drive everyone insane and lead to the dying out of humanity as a species? Why not both? Jessa and Nico look at the...

The Pope's encyclical on the subject of AI inspired a flurry of headlines and quick takes, but then people got distracted. But did the Pope really say Death to All Clankers or was there something else going on there? Jessa and Nico look at this very interesting document, which continues the pivot away from individual sin and toward structural evil and asks if there might be something beautiful and dignified about the un-optimized, un-perfected, un-productive human life? What if there is a way to engage with the idea of the value of a life without focusing on metrics and...

With new books like "How to Be a Dissident," "Read This When Things Fall Apart," "How to Save Democracy," "Beyond Molotovs" and others flooding the shops, it's obvious that the anti-racist grift has morphed into an anti-authoritarian grift. Will the Yale professors really be able to save us? And what exactly do these books propose? Jessa and Nico sift through the new releases to figure out whether democracy will be saved one six-figure book deal at a time.

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While America's religious revival is being a bit overblown, the fact is that the long decline in church attendance and religious belief is over and a new era of stabilization may have begun. The media focuses on the extreme end of this -- the Christian nationalists, the surge in Orthodox conversion, etc -- but much of this is about the return of the  casual, non-fanatical churchgoer. The person open to being bored in a pew once a week rather than the believer who makes their faith the entirety of their being. Jessa and Nico discuss going back to church, w...

So we made a mistake. We thought, based on the reviews and interviews and podcasts and think pieces we saw, that the Devil Wears Prada sequel would be our topic for the week. Then we saw the film, and it was bad. Bad in that way that resists inquiry, lacking in substance to the point where you feel dumber trying to discourse about it. But we had no other things planned, so here's our episode about it anyway! Jessa and Nico discuss: why the fashion industry lacks sophistication, why media figures fell over themselves to praise and discuss this...

If we didn't have manfluencers and bro podcasts and a mass media owned and operated by billionaires, what would a supportive media environment for men even look like? What are the ideas, problems, and possibilities that men have that are being ignored by the professionals? Jessa and Nico discuss how men's media differs from women's, how magazines like Esquire and GQ in the 90s helped create the reactionary culture men live in now, and whether the suffragettes having social media would have tanked the whole feminist project before it even got started. 

Shownotes and references:

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Yes, we are doing Hasan Piker/Jia Tolentino microlooting discourse. Microlooting is one of those cursed words -- like latinx, like unhoused -- that accomplishes zero things, is politically alienating, and allows a group of millionaires to talk about "the rich" as some other group with zero self-awareness. If woke won't die, it's because our communist millionaires won't let it. 

But a millionaire-led discourse is why these conversations about contemporary ethics always dead-ends in the question, What is the best way to spend money? Jessa and Nico discuss why our rich love anti-social behavior (they always have! t...

The New York Times recently cut ties with a freelancer after it was revealed he had used AI to assist in the writing of a book review. What is the source of the scandal -- that an underpaid worker uses technology to help him meet a deadline, or that your publication uses such a predictable structure in the work it puts out that AI can easily mimic the formula? The outrage that typically greets any use of AI comes out of a fear that maybe we don't need humans to write our book reviews, our movie scripts, our military...

The upcoming elections are littered with former reality TV stars who have pivoted to politics -- from Fboy Island, The Hills, Teen Mom, and more. We already have the archetype of the failed artist politician (from Hitler to Mamdani), so is the reality star politician just the latest iteration or something different? Jessa and Nico discuss our reality star president and the precedent he has created, and why when someone fails to get into art school or get their rap career off the ground, the next step is often public office.

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No one wants to get married, and no one is having children. How can we make this women's fault? Jessa and Nico talk about the frustrating ways we discourse about family in the media, never bringing in relevant subjects like class into the marriage discussion or dropping fertility rates due to environmental poisoning into birth rate hysteria. Scientists are now positing the human race as a whole might only have 8,000 years left to go -- all the better to let octopus civilization thrive. 

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Welcome to the 100th episode of The Culture We Deserve -- we really need to rethink our lives. The novel Shy Girl was recently pulled from publication after accusations that the author Mia Ballard used AI during its writing. As arts and culture is infiltrated with LLMs and slop, it doesn't say great things about the future that Hachette, one of the world's largest publishers, can't tell AI from human creativity. But with our standards so low anyway, does any of this matter? What will save us from the slop machines? Jessa and Nico discuss how we recreate taste...

Daughter of two members of the Weather Underground Hope Reeves went to the New York Times to complain that the Oscar winning film One Battle After Another wasn't an accurate portrayal of what her tenured professor parents accomplished. Beginning to worry that the media class literally can't tell the difference between reality and entertainment at the moment. But also, what is behind the nostalgia for 1968? A time of political failures, chaotic violence, and a total inability to bring about change? And what does this nostalgia for a failed era do to people who need and desire change, desperately? Jessa...

Back in the 2010s, instead of political progress we got role models, little girlboss avatars to root for. Their happiness, we were told, was our happiness. Their success was our success. Well, now them most of them are divorced or bankrupt or hard launching polyamorous relationships that sound nightmarish and torturous, maybe it's time to think about actual political organization around issues like domesticity, equality, and social welfare programs? Jessa and Nico discuss Lindy West's new memoir, why we only get polyamory memoirs from women, and why polyamory is frequently offered as a consolation prize when actual political progress...

With social media filled with AI-generated fake war videos and a war-hawk press eager for regime change and empire building, where does one turn? Jessa and Nico talk about how the death of journalism was not natural causes, it was murder. From venture capital "investment" to Bezos putting the Washington Post through the woodchipper as a gift to Trump to Bari Weiss running CBS news into a wall at high speed, it is beneficial to the select few so they can avoid accountability and oversight. Also: Paramount eats WB and the Fox Empire crackup. 

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Why are we so bad at criticizing or satirizing the wealthy? Is it because we think if we're nice to them we think they'll be less likely to kill us? From Succession discourse to bloodthirsty Taylor Swift fans to Jeffrey Epstein defenders, sycophants and fanboys protect, distract, and play down the egregious acts of the rich. Jessa and Nico discuss how the media protects rather than interrogates the ultra-wealthy and why the self-made man myth needs to die.

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A new book about Tucker Carlson's life tracks how the conservative movement has cracked up over the past several decades, while also showing how one man was able to navigate (and monetize) the changes. But does Jason Zengerle's Hated By All the Right People understand where we are today? Jessa and Nico discuss how conservative media -- from print to cable television to Reddit -- has been evolved from respectable intelligentsia to Holocaust jokes, and whether Jessa can fix Tucker.

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Our major arts institutions are broke. The Met Opera has been reduced to begging for money from the Saudis, and meanwhile they can't sell out their theater even for premieres. Colleges are dipping into endowments, theater companies are shutting down, and the MFA Boston is laying people off. The cosmopolitan globalized art model is falling apart, and (now that Epstein is dead) no one has any new ideas except to head out to the petrostates hat in hand. Jessa and Nico look into the state of affairs, and wonder why we're here in the 21st century using 20th century...

The American century is over, or so say the speakers at Davos. The United States has had hegemonic control over the rest of the world, its markets, its sovereignty, its culture. But now that might be coming to an end. Jessa and Nico discuss what that means for international culture industries, which have also been playing by America's rules for decades. 

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It's France in the mid-19th century, and here we have a group of young men who can't decide how to get along. They waste time and money, they go to nightclubs and restaurants, they have affairs and declare themselves and each other artistic geniuses. Meanwhile, the political situation is crumbling and people are putting up barricades in the street. It's time for Flaubert's Sentimental Education, which examines the listlessness and indecisiveness of a generation coming of age in turmoil. Jessa and Joseph discuss how this in no way resembles the contemporary impulse to podcast through a breakdown.

Rightwing men have been accusing liberal women of having "suicidal empathy" for the immigrants they claim are trying to murder them. But the only people who truly seem to have suicidal empathy are those who identify and sympathize with the ICE agents and the politicians who are likely to turn on them next. Jessa and Nico discuss the popularity of this idea for figures like Elon Musk.

Also, over at the Nation, Anna Krauthamer attempted to reconcile her belief in prison abolition with a horrendous experience of sexual violence, and the whole thing became an illustration of...

Much like the girlboss, no matter how many times the culture tries to eulogize DEI we find it once again, walking around, making a nuisance of itself. Recent pieces in the NYTimes, Wired, and Compact try to reckon with the legacy of DEI, and then there is of course the walking mascot of DEI culture, Bari Weiss, making a mess of CBS News. 

Jessa and Nico talk about the enormous lengths all these people will go to avoid talking about class, why identity politics was a good idea (for a while), and why the most obvious DEI h...

Nico was in Colombia when the United States abducted Venezuelan president Maduro, and he has some thoughts on what people in the United States commonly get wrong about South American politics. But also: predictions for 2026: the USA will do some feminist regime change in Iran, just like in Afghanistan! Serbia will be liberated from the heavy yoke of Trump Family influence! Mr. Beast will be charged with crimes against humanity! And more in politics, culture, and art. 

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