UConn PopCast Stephen Dyson and Jeff Dudas

It’s the UConn Popcast, and today we discuss Netflix’s new screen adaptation of Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin’s Three Body trilogy. We discuss the battle between the eye and the idea in film and television science fiction, and whether the new show strikes a successful balance. We consider some of the challenges involved in adapting this distinctively Chinese literary work for a non-Chinese audience, and what might have been lost in doing so. And we think more broadly about the genre of hard science fiction: to whom does it appeal and what is it trying to accomplish?
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It’s the UConn Popcast, and Taylor Swift is by some measures the most popular person on the planet. Her periodic reinventions set the mass cultural terms of debate, and her political interventions – through exhorting her fans on social media – lead to huge spikes in voter registration. It is hoped by Democrats, and feared by Republicans, that a Taylor endorsement of Joe Biden in 2024 might meaningfully tip the scales in favor of reelection.
In this episode, we consider Taylor Swift as a popular and political text, over which she exercises substantial, but not total, authorial control. What role in the culture does she play? How should we interpret her recent association with the NFL? How do the parasocial relationships of her fans – “Swifties” – to the artist herself contribute to authorship of the Taylor text. And how should we read the counter-subversive conspiratorial responses to her halting forays into electoral politics?
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It’s the UConn Popcast, and today we discuss Prophet Song (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2023), Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize winning novel about a totalitarian regime coming to power in Ireland. We discuss the novel’s theorization of individual rights and political power, its success in depicting a family’s unraveling and its failures in telling a broader, more universal story. Why have critics lauded this novel, and who is its intended audience? More fundamentally, what is the role of literary fiction in popular culture?
The UConn Popcast is proud to be sponsored by the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. Check out the institute’s Popular Culture Initiative.
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It’s the UConn PopCast, and in this episode we discuss Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1973 movie World on a Wire, shown on West German television over two nights, and then lost for decades. When it was restored and re-released nearly 40 years later, the movie quickly gained acclaim as a lost masterwork of science fiction cinema.
We discuss the movie’s sophisticated and pioneering presentation of the simulation hypothesis, and its deep engagement with Jean Baudrillard’s concepts of simulacra and simulation.
We examine the deep influence of the movie on blockbusters like The Matrix and Inception, consider the Cold War context of its production, and ask where World on a Wire places in the pantheon of philosophically informed - and philosophically influential - cinema.
The UConn PopCast is proud to be sponsored by the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute.
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It’s the UConn PopCast, and in this episode we tackle ‘For All Mankind,’ Apple TV’s alternate history about a space race that never ended. We first react to episode one of season four, which portrays a well-established human base on Mars. What does this first episode portend for the rest of the season, and the overall trajectory of the show?
We then dive deep into the political, social, and technological themes of the show over the past three seasons. What does this text say about the malleability of the structures of contemporary societies? Can technological advances ‘overleap’ political problems? Is the show’s portrayal of gender as progressive as it seems at first blush? Most fundamentally, what type of politics is ‘For All Mankind’ trying to sell us, and is it convincing?
The UConn PopCast is proud to be sponsored by the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. Check out the Popular Culture Initiative.
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The University of Connecticut Humanities Institute recently sponsored a panel discussion on the topic, “Can you fall in love with ChatGPT?” and we recorded this discussion as a live podcast. The panel, which brought together a computer scientist, humanities scholars, and social scientists, focused in part on the latest advances in sociable AI, but much more on the impact these technologies are having, and are going to have, on human relationships.
As our AI becomes more able to anticipate and perform human-like conversation and emotional responses will we, as the sociologist Sherry Turkle suspects, develop ever deeper relationships with our machines? What will this mean for our relationships with other humans? In an America beset by a loneliness epidemic, is the future of companionship, and of care, to be found in the artificial? To put the issue at its starkest: can, or should, you fall in love with ChatGPT?
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