The Culture Journalist

During the pandemic, it seemed like the internet, and specifically TikTok, was coughing up one fringe aesthetic after the next: Cottagecore! Trad Cath Coquette! Old Money! Coastal Grandmother! And of course, our personal fave, Dark Academia. We even did a whole episode on it [https://theculturejournalist.substack.com/p/dark-academia-biz-sherbert?utm_source=publication-search], as part of a larger examinatin of post-pandemic aesthetics. Fast forward to today, and the churn of social media-born aesthetics seems to have slowed somewhat, leaving behind a landscape that feels more fragmented and difficult to parse. So we’ve brought back our guest for that episode — style writer, trend forecaster, and bonafide Cool Girl Biz Sherbert [https://www.sherbert.biz/] — to give us a lay of the sartorial land. Along with continuing to co-host the influential fashion and culture podcast Nymphet Alumni [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nymphet_Alumni], and writing for places like The Face and AnOther Magazine, Biz recently launched a new publication called American Style on Substack (subscribe! [https://bizsherbert.substack.com/]), which she says is about “what people are really wearing and why.” If you’re a CUJO subscriber, you already got a little taste via our Coachella collab [https://theculturejournalist.substack.com/p/coachella-trend-report-2025] with American Style a couple weeks ago. Either way, you’re in for a treat: Biz joins us to talk about American Style’s origin story and what’s she’s learned from documenting what young people are wearing out in the real world, at places ranging from a Deftones concert in Atlanta [https://bizsherbert.substack.com/p/what-deftones-fans-are-wearing], to Disney World in Orlando [https://bizsherbert.substack.com/p/eating-dole-whip-in-rick-owens-646], to a rave in North London [https://bizsherbert.substack.com/p/raving-in-north-london]. We also get into the state of countercultural and subcultural fashion in 2025; why men and boys seem, for the first time in a long time, to be leading the style conversation; the role that festivals like Coachella play in the wider image-making ecosystem; and the strange staying power of the festival cowgirl. Subscribe to American Style [https://bizsherbert.substack.com/] and follow Biz on Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/bizsherbert/] (fka @marcfisherquotes). Listen to Nymphet Alumni on your pod platform of choice. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe [https://theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Franchises, reboots, crossovers, live-action remakes, interpolations… Why does the entertainment industry keep churning out content that is derivative of something that came before, like Nicki Minaj rapping over “Barbie Girl” at the end of the Barbie movie on an endless loop? According to Andrew deWaard [https://communication.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/dewaard-andrew.html], a professor of media and popular culture at UC San Diego, it’s because of Wall Street. In his brain-expanding new book, Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture [https://www.ucpress.edu/books/derivative-media/paper], Andrew pulls back the curtain on how popular culture has become derivative in a deeper, more insidious way: it’s private equity buying up entire song catalogs, activist hedge funds staging hostile takeovers of entertainment conglomerates, and the cultural industries getting consumed wholesale by the financial sector — actual derivatives trading included. That wave of financialization is having an increasingly palpable effect on what we see and hear when we open up apps like Spotify and Netflix — not just in terms of the kinds of works that get funded, but increasingly, in the character of the works themselves, leading Andrew to posit that “the stock exchange has been embedded within the media text.” Andrew joins us to talk about how finance-world strategies impact both the companies that fund the culture we consume and the labor of those who produce it — and how they result in an entertainment landscape that is increasingly inhospitable to taking big risks. And we get into how the logic of the derivative has become embedded in media products themselves, from Jay Z turning lyrical wordplay into a champagne empire, to The White Lotus casting K-pop star LISA. Order [https://www.ucpress.edu/books/derivative-media/paper] a copy of Derivative Media — or download an open-access PDF for free. Read more by Andrew: The Cinema of Steven Soderbergh: Indie Sex, Corporate Lies, and Digital Videotape (Columbia University Press [https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-cinema-of-steven-soderbergh/9780231165501/]) “Independent Canadian Music in the Streaming Age: The Sound from above (Critical Political Economy) and below (Ethnography of Musicians)” (Popular Music and Society [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03007766.2021.2010028]) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe [https://theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Since Trump took office in January, you may have picked up on a certain, shall we say, visual vibe. Think: AI slop memes, gilded neoclassical decor, men clad in dark suits and red ties, women decked out in high heels and flowing hair—not to mention an ambiguous blend of plastic surgery and contoured make-up that the Hollywood Reporter recently dubbed “Mar-A-Lago Face [https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/plastic-surgery-trend-mar-a-lago-face-1236065450/].” If you’ve noticed some of these recurring themes, you’re not alone. The arts journalist and critic Carolina Miranda [https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/carolina-a-miranda/] has been keeping tabs on the intersection of visual culture, society, and politics for years, and she recently came up with a name for the look and feel of the current administration: Trump Trad. Her recent column for the Washington Post, “Welcome to the Era of Trump Trad [https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2025/trump-trad-presidential-aesthetics/?itid=ap_carolinaa.miranda_5],” is worth a read—and it’s the first in a monthly series providing an ongoing aesthetic analysis of the Trump era, which is among her new endeavors since taking a buyout from her longtime role at the LA Times last year. (She also writes the Arts Insider newsletter [https://www.kcrw.com/newsletters] for KCRW, which Andrea edits.) Carolina joins us to explain the three core pillars of Trump Trad: a yearning for the past (architecturally and otherwise), traditional gender roles, and—fascinatingly—professional wrestling. We also get into how to reconcile all the trad-ness with this administration’s simultaneous embrace of Silicon Valley and AI, whether or not Biden or Kamala aesthetics exist, and how Trump’s obsession with taking control of the programming at the Kennedy Center and issuing executive orders about architecture fits in with his politics of resentment against so-called “cultural elites.” Want to continue the conversation? For access to our member-only Discord (and all our bonus episodes), sign up for a paid subscription. Sign up for Carolina’s KCRW newsletter [https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374538651/subprimeattentioncrisis/] Read more from Carolina: “How Silicon Valley boys came to rule politics” [https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2025/musk-doge-tech-silicon-valley-politics/] (WaPo) “Influencer Jenny69 calls herself a ‘buchona.’ How a narco-inspired style came to rule social media” [https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2021-11-03/how-buchona-flamboyant-narco-style-came-to-rule-social-media] (LA Times) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe [https://theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Today we explore how many of the habits and customs we associate with American bourgeois life — religiously reading the Sunday Times, buying organic produce, building your entire identify around excelling at a career you love, etc. — stem from one generation in particular. Friends, we’re talking about the yuppies, that notoriously status-obsessed, hyper-educated cohort of young urban professionals who came to cultural prominence in the ’80s and ’90s, setting off a series of transformations in our cities, media, and consumer culture that we’re still witnessing to this day. It’s easy to see the Boomer worldview as a reflection of the fact that they had it much easier than us Millennials, economically speaking. But a new book called Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/tom-mcgrath/triumph-of-the-yuppies/9781538725993/], by Philadelphia journalist and author Tom McGrath [https://www.tommcgrathwriter.com/], subtly challenges that idea, reframing the yuppie obsession with money, achievement, and unimpeachable good taste as a response to the rough economic headwinds of the 1970s and ’80s. Along the way, it explores how yuppiedom was equally a reaction to suburban post-war monoculture — and perhaps most perplexingly, a kind of impossible attempt to reconcile a newfound love of capitalism with the egalitarian values of the hippie era. Tom joins us to discuss the yuppie origin story and the historical factors that rerouted a generation from protesting the Vietnam War to working on Wall Street. We get into who — and what — the yuppies were rebelling against, and how their emphasis on not just consumption, but consuming the right things, laid the blueprint for everything from urban gentrification, to contemporary food culture, to the news and television we consume. We also talk about whether or not the yuppie still exists — perhaps in the form of Millennials? — and, of course, where Trump, then and now, fits into all of this. Purchase Triumph of the Yuppies [https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/tom-mcgrath/triumph-of-the-yuppies/9781538725993/?lens=grand-central-publishing]. Follow Tom on Substack [https://tmcgrath.substack.com/]. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe [https://theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

The Culture Journalist is a podcast about culture in the age of platforms. Episodes drop every other week, but if you want the full experience — including bonus episodes and our eternal parasocial friendship — we recommend signing up for a paid subscription. Paid subscribers also get access to CUJOPLEX, a private Discord server [https://theculturejournalist.substack.com/p/introducing-cujoplex-a-digital-third] and online hangout zone where independent culture fans who like talking about things like creative economies, media theory, current events, and the future of entertainment and journalism can congregate, share links, and talk about the news of the day. Climate disasters like the Los Angeles wildfires in January and Hurricane Helene last fall aren’t just laying bare the realities of global warming; they’re exposing the hidden dynamics of another kind of ecosystem: Media and information. From journalists compiling mutual aid spreadsheets to country music radio shows that became community message boards when the internet went out, these calamities are shining a spotlight on the evolving role of journalism and how we access information. They’re also raising new questions about what that information should be, whose responsibility it is to vet and disseminate it, and what the media of the future might look like — you know, as climate disaster becomes a more regular feature of life. There’s a lot to unpack here. So we’ve tagged in two media experts who, like Andrea, are based in LA and have had to confront climate disasters firsthand. Matt Pearce [https://mattdpearce.substack.com/] is a former Los Angeles Times reporter (and co-founder of its first union) with experience covering everything from hurricanes to internet culture; these days, he writes a Substack newsletter on the state of local news and media policy and is a senior policy advisor for the nonpartisan think tank Rebuild Local News [https://www.rebuildlocalnews.org/]. Longtime listeners might remember Emma Kemp [https://emmakemp.com/] from one of our earliest episodes on ghost kitchens [https://theculturejournalist.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-the-clickbait-restaurant?utm_source=publication-search]. She’s a researcher and writer and assistant professor at the Otis College of Art and Design who specializes in environmental media studies, and co-founder of the non-profit land conservation coalition No Canyon Hills [https://www.instagram.com/nocanyonhills/]. Matt and Emma join us to talk about their experiences on the ground as both media consumers and producers during the wildfires; the sources of information that became essential, and the sources of information that just sort of fell away; the limitations (and opportunities) of AI in a crisis; and how climate disasters will transform what both traditional and non-traditional media look like. Follow Matt on Substack [https://mattdpearce.substack.com/] and X [https://x.com/mattdpearce?lang=en]. Check out his pieces on Watch Duty [https://mattdpearce.substack.com/p/the-power-and-limits-of-watch-duty] and on AI use during the wildfires [https://mattdpearce.substack.com/p/people-stopped-using-ai-during-las]. Check out more from Emma on her website [https://emmakemp.com/] and at No Canyon Hills [https://www.instagram.com/nocanyonhills/]. She also sells chickens, eggs, and coop supplies over at Party Fowl [https://partyfowl.la/]. The cover of “California Dreaming” by Jarvis Cocker featured in this episode was purchased from the LA fire benefit compilation Los Angeles Rising [https://losangelesrising.bandcamp.com/album/los-angeles-rising]. Check it out, along with a collection of other compilations released to fundraise for wildfire relief, here [http://kcrw.com/musicrelief]. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe [https://theculturejournalist.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]