Shows / The Culture We Deserve
The Culture We Deserve
Hosted by Jessa Crispin, The Culture We Deserve covers the state of the arts.
Episodes
- The Culture We Deserve
Europe Is Over (If You Want It)
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
A Culture of Gore
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
We Don't Deserve Tom Cruise
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
Vigilante Season
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
The Invention of the Goddess
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
Monstrous Women
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
True Crime Main Characters
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
The Love We Deserve
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
Everyone is a Book Influencer Now
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
But Does This Actually Advance the Plot?
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
Your Job is to Feed the Machine
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
Elon Musk: Protector of the West
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
The Films that Define the US
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
The Beautiful Game
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
Jackass: Can a Man Do Anything Without It Becoming a Statement About Masculinity?
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
The Language of Emergency
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
The Politics of Dignity
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
Are People Lonely or Just Alone?
Lately social media has been inundated with the loneliness influencer, the people (mostly women) who glamorize and romanticize a cozy little life alone: frozen…
- The Culture We Deserve
The Pope Declares Holy War Against the Robots
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
How to Be an Anti-Authoritarianism Grifter
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
Let's All Go to Church
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
The Most Beautiful Job in the World
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
Men's Media
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
Why Are All of Our Communists Millionaires?
Yes, we are doing Hasan Piker/Jia Tolentino microlooting discourse. Microlooting is one of those cursed words -- like latinx, like unhoused -- that…
- The Culture We Deserve
AI Losers
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 Culture We Deserve
Our Reality Star Overlords
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
Are We Doomed?
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
Taste Will Save Us from AI
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
Revolutionary Nostalgia
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
The End of Lifestyle Feminism
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
Who Killed the Media?
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
Gilded Guilt
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
We Are All Tucker Carlson
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
The Money Runs Out
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
The End of American Freedom
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
Revolution and Ruin: Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
Suicidal Empathy
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
Die, DEI
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
Predictions for an Unpredictable 2026
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…
- The Culture We Deserve
Obligatory Best and Worst of the Year Episode
2025 may be over, but its cultural production lives on in our hearts. Nico and Jessa debate the best and worst movies, TV shows, books, and museum exhibits of…
- The Culture We Deserve
Revolution and Ruin: George Eliot's Felix Holt: The Radical
A very special Christmas treat for our listeners. Joseph and Jessa discuss George Eliot's Felix Holt: The Radical, which asks the very important question: is…
- The Culture We Deserve
The Art Goes Home
For the last five years, museums around the world have been struggling to answer the question of, who owns cultural heritage? Certain objects, from the Elgin…
- The Culture We Deserve
United Ireland (Take Two)
Jessa and Nico return from their visit to Ireland. All along the way, the subject of whether or not Ireland should be united kept coming up. But beyond the…
- The Culture We Deserve
The Crisis of Darkness
Our pop culture has become insipid. What is the difference between Tom Cruise and Glen Powell? Tom Cruise has darkness within him. Watching him is thrilling…
- The Culture We Deserve
Revolution and Ruin: Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons
A young man goes home to announce his exciting new political and philosophical ideas to his family, only for the family dinner to devolve into shouting…
- The Culture We Deserve
Ladies Ruin Everything
Did women ruin the workplace? Is wokeness feminine? Is this credit card my friend? Is cancel culture Malthusian? etc etc. Yes, the political right will do…
- The Culture We Deserve
Copaganda Returns
PBS recently decided to schedule the documentary The Last 600 Yards, about American troops fighting in Fallujah, after having shelved it for over a decade for…
- The Culture We Deserve
American Heroes
Once an archetype has been constructed, it's really difficult to dismantle it. And one of the prevailing archetypes of the 20th century was that of the…
- The Culture We Deserve
Trickle Down Morality
In the new book Motherland, Julia Ioffe discusses how the Soviet feminist revolution was state sponsored. During and after 1917, the government mandated…
- The Culture We Deserve
The American Uncanny on Film
Nico's got that funny feeling again, that the program the United States ran in South America for decades has come home. We talk about the uncanny feeling that…
- The Culture We Deserve
Revolution and Ruin: Charlotte Bronte's Shirley
In the industrial age, there was a widespread disruption of communities. Traditional methods of charity and redistribution of resources were undermined by the…
- The Culture We Deserve
Exploit or Be Exploited
In the creative economy, it is more profitable to be a dead creator than a living working writer. Or that is the lesson learned from the lawsuit the Michael…
- The Culture We Deserve
Recovered Panic
One of the bestselling nonfiction books of the moment is a memoir about a wealthy and successful woman dealing with memories of horrific sexual assault by her…
- The Culture We Deserve
The Charlie Kirk Effect
The political right has been looking for a George Floyd figure, a martyr they can name streets after and get protests around and use to pass sweeping…
- The Culture We Deserve
The Biological Gig Economy
When Cindy Bi hired a surrogate to carry her baby, she neglected to tell her that she had health issues that could put her life in danger. It turns out, she's…
- The Culture We Deserve
Revolution and Ruin Book Club: William Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon
When a man is down on his luck, what is he to do? His fortune squandered, his estate mishandled, his love unfaithful, Barry Lyndon goes to war, and to prison…
- The Culture We Deserve
The Smithsonian is on Fire
The dumbest culture war in history continues, as the Trump administration seeks to purify the national collection of knickknacks and souvenirs. And the…
- The Culture We Deserve
Seeking Utopia
What is behind the drive for small communities of like-minded people? The MAHA millionaire farm, the white nationalists in Arkansas, the makeshift Texas…
- The Culture We Deserve
Eugenics Season
The fuss over Sydney Sweeney's jeans/genes ad, and there are those who accused her of "normalizing eugenics," misses an important point: we are already doing…
- The Culture We Deserve
Variety Hour (and Twenty Minutes)
As we were recording between two long work trips and through various mishaps, this week Nico and Jessa just go through headlines and updates on previous…