Offline Recs: Mall nostalgia, downward mobility, Aphex Twin sample-mashing
Plus, a Season Three mood guide
Welcome to Offline Recs, The Culture Journalist’s monthly digest of books, music, TV shows, recipes, and other cultural ephemera we can’t stop thinking about — regardless of where they fit in the news cycle.
We’re celebrating the end of our third season, which we wrapped last week with a fascinating conversation with Mat Dryhurst about AI and its ramifications for artists. If you’re new here, or still catching up on the season, we’ve put together a little guide to all ten episodes, classified according to “mood.” *Cue fireplace jazz*
You’ll find our Offline Recs from this month behind the paywall (Aphex Twin’s new app! Shady wristwatch salesmen! Easy hot weather recipes!). First up, though, you can enjoy a list of recommended reads of the more “online” variety: The Culture Journalist is a podcast about culture in the platform age, after all.
Online Recs
Dirt’s own Terry Nguyen on how the line between authors and influencers is becoming increasingly blurred
Other Internet’s Toby Shorin looks back at the 10s as the decade when direct-to-consumer brands with sans-serif fonts turned culture into “a service industry for the supply chain”
TCJ guest Max Collins, aka Eve 6 Journalist, draws on his experiences as a musician in the Spotify era to throw cold water on Big Publishing’s war against the Internet Archive, a non-profit library for digital books
DanT, from the excellent Technopoptimism Substack, on how Netflix’s invention of binge-watching helped lay the groundwork for its current financial woes
Alexander Iadarola put together a list of “the 21st-century creator’s most important characteristics,” explaining popular culture’s decline into “informational-affective fast food”
Anna Aguiar Kosicki examines our collective nostalgia for the American shopping mall in the context of the evolving relationship between capitalism and public space
Jenny G. Zhang on how Tiktok’s joking obsession with “White People Food” risks rendering “non-white people and their food a monolith”
Yasmin Rafiei put her studies as a med student on pause to do an investigation for The New Yorker on why nursing homes acquired by private equity companies have higher death rates
Jayson Buford on the “painful mediocrity of white boy rap” (also: boyfriend-of-the-pod Drew Millard on the strange world of MAGA rap)
Rich Cohen on the downward mobility of the Gen X generation, the millennial generation, and basically anyone who is too young to have benefitted from the “Boomer Ballast” effect
Delia Cai on the contemporary management class and its “preoccupation with the appearance of hypercompetence over the actual thing”
Season 3 episodes, by mood:
If you can’t get enough of the back-to-school feeling in the air:
The secret history of Dark Academia and post-pandemic aesthetics, with Biz Sherbert
If discussing your career prospects or politics with your parents always devolves into a fight:
The Boomer Ballast effect, with Kevin Munger and Joshua Citarella
If you’re curious about how the other-other half lives, or bewildered by the politics of the NYC downtown scene:
The tricky business of reporting on the New Right, with James Pogue
If you’re wondering if the kids are alright:
Coachella vibes: a serious investigation, with Katie Bain
If you can’t shake the feeling that sites like Twitter and Spotify are slowly stealing your soul and destroying everything you love:
Is it time for platform socialism? With James Muldoon
If you favor collectivism over individualist competition:
What is a Metalabel? with Yancey Strickler and Austin Robey
If you wish you had a mentor, and that mentor was the guy from Eve 6:
We are all outsiders, with Max Collins
If you’ve fallen down the Midjourney rabbit hole and want your life back:
Is AI good or bad for art? with Mat Dryhurst
If you want to know what it’s like to write a biography that people don’t want you to write:
Who owns Mac Miller’s story? with Paul Cantor
If you’re tired of releasing your art on extractive platforms and wish there was another way:
Inside the new digital musical counterculture, with Mark Redito
Offline Recs
Watch
Dopesick, Hulu
In a year of knockout TV, it was easy to overlook this drama miniseries based on Beth Macy’s excellent nonfiction book, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America. I did, until its recent Emmys recognition put it back on my radar (and by proxy, re-instilled award shows with some existential relevance for me).
The series offers a riveting, complex portrayal of the opioid epidemic across the U.S., told through four character-driven, intertwining storylines from the 1980s through the present day: That of an Appalachian coal mining town; the bureaucratic quagmires of the FDA, the DEA, and the Justice Department; the Purdue Pharma sales force; and the nefarious Sackler family. The Succession-worthy writing and performances (Michael Keaton deserves every ounce of his Emmy for his portrayal of an Oxy-addled doctor) inject some badly needed humanity and intimacy into a crisis so massive, protracted, and omnipresent that it can otherwise be difficult to comprehend. At a time when we crave escapism from our entertainment more than ever, it’s heartening to see a show get made that dares to ground us in our reality. —Andrea Domanick