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.

Shownotes and references:

http://theculturewedeserve.substack.com

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.

Shownotes and references:

http://theculturewedeserve.substack.com

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 and high standards, how the institutions of academia, publishing, and music have led us here, and whether it matters if your fantasies are written by human or machine.

Shownotes and references:

http://theculturewedeserve.substack.com

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 and Nico discuss our dreams of failure and the end of American cultural hegemony.

Shownotes and references:

http://theculturewedeserve.substack.com

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 for women is stalled.

Shownotes and references:

http://theculturewedeserve.substack.com

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.

Shownotes and references:

http://culturewedeserve.substack.com

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.

Shownotes and resources:

http://theculturewedeserve.substack.com

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.

Shownotes and references:

http://theculturewedeserve.substack.com