How Do You Like It So Far?: Here's What You Missed This Season

When we started our podcast, How Do You Like It So Far?, the title was something of an inside joke. We were trying something neither of us had done before. We wanted your feedback so we could get better. We didn’t get much feedback, to be honest, because we didn’t have many listeners but we did get better — practice makes perfect. And our title became about something more — encouraging us to reflect each week on popular culture in a changing world. This has been a rough year and it has pushed us to reflect more deeply. And as a result, we finished what my cohost Colin Maclay and I think has been our strongest season yet. We had great conversations with great quests and I wanted to share them with you as a package having recently wrapped that season, Here’s what you missed:

Episode 67 Pandemic, Pedagogy and Politics — This was an end of summer reflection about the world around us that ranged from reflections on how the Covid-19 lockdown was impacting various media and how it shaped the Republican and Democratic national conventions to thoughts about the Black Lives Matter protests, the census, and home schooling.

Episode 68 The Business of Fandom — Susan Kresnicka is one of the leading fandom researchers consulting with the media industry as they seek to understand their fans; Suzanne Scott wrote Fake Geek Girls; Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry and has been a sharp critic of how the media industry interacts with its fans. They had never met before and we thought something interesting might emerge if we brought them together for the show. They took over the show and we could barely get a word in edge-wise during this stereotype-shattering conversation about fandom and the media industry.

Episode 69 The Power of Fan Activism — Here, we brought together Janae Phillips from the Harry Potter Alliance and Shawn Taylor from Nerds of Color, for a far-ranging discussion of fan activism as a model for social change. They had much to say about how merging fan and activist identities increased the sustainability of social movements by bringing more joy and pleasure to the effort.

Episode 70 How the Babysitters Club Changed Asian-American Culture — We are joined by Sue Ding, whose film, The Claudia Kishi Club, launched on Netflix alongside their recent Babysitters Club series and interviews a range of contemporary Asian-American artists and writers about their childhood fascinating with Claudia Kishi. We use this topic as a starting point for considering representational politics and amplifying the voices of Asian-American producers, ending with some cool reflections on the importance of the Fast and Furious franchise.

Episode 71 The Undocumented Document Themselves — Set Hernandez Longkilyo is an undocumented queer filmmaker who documents the lives and political struggles of other undocumented peoples. His films also considers the everyday practices by which these people document their own lives and find the voice to tell their own stories. Here, he sounds off about the struggles for self-representation the community faces and their efforts to organize to tell their own stories in their own terms.

Episode 72 Religion, Sports and Popular Culture Are the Same/Seeking Sanctuary During the Apocalypse: USC’s Dean of Religious Life, Varun Soni is a remarkable guy who has a unique perspective on popular culture. Here, we range from his work counseling students during the pandemic to discussions of sports and ritual and Bob Marley as a religious prophet.

Episode 73 Increasing Visibility Is Essential for Native Communities — We check in with Crystal Echohawk, founder and CEO of IllumiNative, a research-driven initiative created and led by Natives that is challenging negative narratives and supporting accurate and authentic portrayals of Native communities in pop culture. She shares what’s been happening for Natives during 2020, from land rights struggles to coping with Covid-19 to achieving some real breakthroughs in terms of representation in popular culture.

Episode 74 Horror, Social Change, and Experimentation — In this discussion of the horror genre as a site of protest and experimentation across media. we talk to Campfire’s Michael Monello about his Shutter podcast Video Palace and Qiana Whitted who wrote a Eisner-Award Winning book about EC Comics. Between us, we cover horror in film, literature, radio/podcast, comics, and television, not to mention in the context of our everyday lives. I am a longtime monster buff while Colin is horror-curious but mostly new to the genre. A good time was had by all.

Episode 75 Play as a Precursor to Participation — Benjamin Stokes wrote a book about games as tools for enhancing civic engagement and Reanne Estrada is an artist and advocate in Los Angeles. They think we should take to the streets, when it’s safe to do so, not only to protest but also to celebrate, create, perform, and play as a means of rebuilding our connections with each other.

Episode 76 Skateboarding Subcultures Surprises — Neftalie Williams is a lifelong skateboarder and skateboarding advocate, while Zoe Corwin is a newbie who is grounded in educational research. They have been working together to study the educational and social benefits of skateboarding culture especially for youth of color around the world. Much of what they have found will surprise you — it certainly surprised us — but like the last episode, it gives us hope in terms of what’s going to happen next for American cities.

Episode 77 From Hip Hop to TikTok — Dexter Thomas is a Vice reporter who shares reflections about subjectivity and American journalism, his doctoral research on the Hip Hop scene in Japan, and explores how he thinks TikTok is changing American culture and politics. This is like our interview with Varun Soni an expansive discussion, one that hits one high note after the next, and the perfect way to end our season.

There’s something here which should grab your attention — otherwise, I don’t understand why you are reading this block. Check us out. Look at our notes which allow you to drill deeper into everything being discussed. And then try some of the other episodes, because we are mapping contemporary popular culture and its connections with social change; there’s a method to our madness and we see the topics being discussed as connected, as part of a larger culture shift changing our world. How do you like it so far?