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Culturally Determined is leaving BhTV, so here's how to keep following the show ... Tom Friedman's controversial column, "Biden-Cheney 2024?" ... Why Israel's anti-Netanyahu coalition could never happen in the US ... Aryeh's defense of Friedman's column ... A Hamilton song on Zoom, and other absurdities of centrist liberalism ... Chris: Any "grand coalition" would need to have Bernie and AOC in the lead ... Returning to the "is Trump a fascist" debate ... Has Trump moved on to other grifts? ...

The strange history of the Transformers action figures ... Diving into Transformers: The Movie (1986) ... Unicron, the giant planet-eating robot god voiced by Orson Welles ... Why the film is more than a glorified toy commercial ... Does the movie have any sort of politics? ...

How Doug came to run the leftwing book publisher Zer0 Books, and why he got kicked out ... Dave Chappelle, cancel culture, and the attention economy ... Doug narrates his ejection from Zer0 ... Doug's new company, Diet Soap Media ... How Bloggingheads was ahead of its time (yet failed to conquer the globe) ... How you can help shape the future of Culturally Determined ...

Max's new newsletter, Read Max ... The significance of Buzzfeed's underwhelming IPO ... Where are the cool kids online? ... Private equity squeezes a bit more blood from online media ... What is web3? And is it bullshit? ... Why Melania Trump is embracing NFTs but Elon Musk isn't ... Max's typology of '90s Dad Thrillers ...

David's podcast, Election Profit Makers ... Riding the waves of political prediction markets ... David: I don't think there's a limit to the depravity of the GOP ... Weighing the odds of American politics ever becoming normal again ... Can J.D. Vance out-crazy Josh Mandel in Ohio? ... Elon Musk, Time's Person of the Year and EPM's Bad Boy of the Week ... Esoteric rabbit holes into which the podcast digs deep ...

The many disappointments of The Many Saints of Newark ... Was any Sopranos prequel doomed from the start? ... How the opening scene undermines a key theme of the series ... Clumsy dialogue, broad acting, and flashes of the classic Sopranos wit ... Why Erin loves The Masked Singer ... An anti-narrative that rejects the meritocratic ethos of reality TV ...

Is it still possible for America to have a great leader? ... Why the pandemic sparked division instead of unity ... Why Obama was not a transformational president ... Will America just muddle through? ... Matt sees possibility on the anti-corporate right ... "Let's Go Brandon" and the return of conservative moralism ...

Mike's new book, The Memeing of Mark Fisher: How the Frankfurt School Foresaw Capitalist Realism and What To Do About It ... Subconscious narratives today and in interwar Germany ... Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse in the digital world ... Mike wants memes that will slow people down ... How "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" has been misread ... Mike's Kafkaesque book publishing experience ...

Seth's newsletter covering comedy from the left, Humorism ... Seth: Saturday Night Live is conservative ... Is being hired by SNL a Faustian bargain? ... Lawsuit alleges SNL ignored Horatio Sanz's sexual abuse of a minor ... The bizarre nature of SNL as a cultural institution ... How the pandemic has and hasn't changed comedy ... Is standup comedy an inherently conservative form? ...

Justin: It is morally imperative to not say true things on social media ... Why Justin loves Substack ... Pros and cons of writing without an editor ... AOC's real audience at the Met Gala ... Are social media editors purposefully riling up the mob? ... Sally Rooney and Israel, the Twitter Discourse perfect storm ... The "false representative class" of online pundits ...

Kat's new novel, No One Will Miss Her ... Writing YA vs. adult fiction ... A narrator speaking from beyond the grave ... The subtle art of crafting a twist ... Kat reviews Hillary Clinton's new thriller novel ... Who are all these political children's books actually for? ...

Dara's new book, People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present ... Anne Frank, Jewish self-erasure, and the actual lessons of the Holocaust ... Unique features of Jewish literature and history ... The case for Jewish anger ... The myth of Jewish immigrants' names being changed at Ellis Island ... Debating Shylock ... The dark truth behind the comic relief of the "last Jew in Afghanistan" ... Dara: American society is fine with hating Hasidic Jews ... Dara's path to daily Talmud study ...

A new YouTube channel for Culturally Determined ... Meet the man who tweets as William Shakespeare ... The most secret and most grave truths of @Wwm_Shakespeare ... Spying a kind of hope in Shakespearean ambiguity ... Have you heard the joke about the old lady who reads Hamlet for the first time? ... Productions that hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature ... Shakespeare's shameless stealing ...

Gershom's new book, War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East ... How Gershom rediscovered forgotten heroes from Bletchley Park ... Fascist mythology and Italian colonialism ... The strategic importance of the North African front ... Debunking the myth of Rommel as a military genius and "good German" ... The strange story of the isolationist American military attaché in Egypt ... The real exploits of the man who inspired The English Patient ... The North African campaign as the prequel to the Arab/Israeli conflict ...

How #MeToo shaped Jacques's new book, The Philip Roth We Don't Know ... Jacques: Roth aimed to obliterate the critic ... Is it unethical to write a nasty fictionalization of an ex? ... Three levels of analysis of the misogynist charge ... Fiction and morality ... Roth's underexamined ideas about the existence of the self ... The fallout from the sexual assault allegations against Roth's biographer ...

Sophie's exploration of the use and misuse of "the Irish goodbye" ... The strange joy of watching a Picasso painting fall to the ground ... NFTs and the question of authentication ... What makes an object a valuable collectible? ... Sophie investigates the hidden melodies of subways ... The pathos of lost pet signs ...

Katie's recent essay, "Nickelodeon’s Generational Divide" ... Children's entertainment that didn't pander ... The early '90s as a midpoint in the shifting cultural battle of kids vs. parents ... The ultimate childhood dream: the Super Toy Run ... The people behind Nick's creative ferment ... Aryeh's brief childhood encounter with Nickelodeon stars ...

Joe's new essay on online disinformation ... Does advertising actually work? ... Joe: Maybe the real critique of Facebook is that it's a worthless product ... The ivermectin craze and the end of media gatekeeping ... How do you solve a problem like Bret Weinstein? ... The indigenous American berserk and the Internet's garbage ouroboros ...

Why John hated The White Lotus ... Is the show more of a farce than a satire? ... Debating whether the staff was thinly characterized on purpose ... John critiques the show's treatment of race and class ... Why the 1619 Project made so many people mad ... The controversial idea that Black Americans are the truest Americans ... Will we ever agree on what America means? ...

Joshua's new novel, The Netanyahus ... How Harold Bloom inspired a novel about Bibi Netanyahu's father ... Other influences: Philip Roth, classic sitcoms, and Yiddish anecdotes ... Jewish assimilationism vs. Jewish identitarianism ... The semi-forgotten history of Revisionist Zionism ... Those shameless Netanyahu boys! ... Why Aryeh thought the novel was targeted at his personal demographic ...