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  • Brian Jay Jones, "George Lucas: A Life" (Little, Brown and Company, 2016)
    2026/08/26
    The essential biography of the influential and beloved filmmaker George Lucas. On May 25, 1977, a problem-plagued, budget-straining independent science-fiction film opened in a mere thirty-two American movie theaters. Conceived, written, and directed by a little-known filmmaker named George Lucas, the movie originally called The Star Wars quickly drew blocks-long lines, bursting box-office records and ushering in a new way for movies to be made, marketed, and merchandised. It is now one of the most adored–and successful–movie franchises of all time. Now, the author of the bestselling biography Jim Henson delivers a revelatory look into the life and times of the man who created Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Indiana Jones in George Lucas: A Life (Little, Brown and Company, 2016) If Star Wars wasn't game-changing enough, Lucas went on to create another blockbuster series with Indiana Jones, and he completely transformed the world of special effects and the way movies sound. His innovation and ambition forged Pixar and Lucasfilm, Industrial Light & Magic, and THX sound. Lucas's colleagues and competitors offer tantalizing glimpses into his life. His entire career has been stimulated by innovators including Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola, actors such as Harrison Ford, and the very technologies that enabled the creation of his films-and allowed him to keep tinkering with them long after their original releases. Like his unforgettable characters and stories, his influence is unmatched. Brian Jay Jones is the author of the New York Times bestseller Jim Henson: The Biography, as well as Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of An American Imagination and Washington Irving: An American Original. His most recent book is The Capitol: The Surprising Biography of an American Building. He continues to believe that Han shot first. Daniel Moran’s writing about literature and film can be found on Pages and Frames. He earned his B.A. and M.A. in English from Rutgers University and his Ph.D. in History from Drew University. The author of Creating Flannery O’Connor: Her Critics, Her Publishers, Her Readers, he teaches writing and co-hosts the long-running podcast Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, available here on the New Books Network and wherever podcasts are found. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture
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    1 時間 16 分
  • Robyn Hitchcock, "Stranded in the Future" (Akashic Books, 2026)
    2026/08/26
    Robyn Hitchcock's second memoir, Stranded in the Future (Akashic Books, 2026), explores the formation of his seminal 1970s band the Soft Boys, and the obsessions that fueled his early creative output. Stranded in the Future is a kind of dystopian self-portrait. It's about obsession, and obsessive behavior. Spanning from 1968 to 1978, it takes in the mythology surrounding Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett (though it doesn't name him) and hinges on Robyn Hitchcock's teenage girlfriend (she isn't named either). The book explores the way that Hitchcock, in his own head, linked these two figures to each other, although they never actually met. On the way, the story mines the incremental hangover of the 1970s as Hitchcock begins to play live, teaches himself to write songs, and eventually forms the Soft Boys. There's a side order of trolleybuses too! Hitchcock's beautiful prose will resonate far beyond the fans of his music, and build on the literary following he established with his first book, 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture
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    42 分
  • Brian Callaci, "Chains of Command: The Rise and Cruel Reign of the Franchise Economy" (U Chicago Press, 2026)
    2026/08/25
    Chains of Command: The Rise and Cruel Reign of the Franchise Economy (University of Chicago Press, 2026) is a surprising look at the big business of owning small businesses and what America's franchise economy means for its workers. Walk into a McDonald's anywhere in the United States, and it will be identical to every other McDonald's in the country. Yet, that particular store is almost certainly owned and operated by an "independent" franchisee. While McDonald's presents an image of centralized uniformity to the consumer, it shows a different face to the small business owners operating its stores under its control and the workers preparing its product to its standards. How then does McDonald's—and its big business peers—manage to be two things at once? In this revelatory work, economist Brian Callaci shows how franchisors have altered the legal treatment of corporations in their favor through a decades-long crusade of lobbying and litigation. Their efforts subsequently unleashed a slew of legal and economic sins upon the US economy and labor force, allowing multinational corporations to control continent-spanning empires while outsourcing employment and scapegoating legal responsibilities onto small businesses. The result: the unfettered growth of some of America's most recognizable businesses, at the aggregate expense of America's workers. Remarkable in both its scale and synthesis, Callaci's story is the first chronicle of this business movement—initially resisted by US courts before experiencing a dramatic reversal of fortune after decades of campaigning by some of America's most established entrepreneurs. An urgent and erudite history, Chains of Command reveals how the US labor market was tamed one small business at a time. Brian Callaci is Campaigns Director at the Strategic Organizing Center, and previously served as Chief Economist at the Open Markets Institute. He researches and writes about market structure, antitrust law, and their relationship to worker and employer power. Anna Olteanu is a senior in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University, where she focuses on intellectual history. Her interests include political ecology, the history of economic thought, and literary criticism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture
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    39 分
  • Ed Park, "Three Tenses" (Random House, 2026)
    2026/08/21
    Three Tenses (Random House, 2026) by Ed Park is not quite a memoir, not quite fiction, not quite poetry and not quite prose—and yet it transcends the sum of all its not-quite parts as a resonant portrait of its young artist. Written when he was 28, Park’s “transmission from the nineties” displays his more earnest, more vulnerable version: a writer toiling away in upstart obscurity, working thankless New York jobs, who has yet to reach the triumph of publishing his first book. Three Tenses would not be that book. Instead, Park stashed it away in a manilla folder. Fast forward to the dog days of the pandemic, 2020, when Park rediscovered his old manuscript, tinkering with it while he worked on other projects, including his novel Same Bed, Different Dreams, which went on to be a Pulitzer Prize finalist after its 2023 publication. Fascinated and charmed by its lack of convention, I knew that I wanted to speak to Park about Three Tenses, and he was kind enough to join me for a chat about the process of confronting—and publishing—his younger self. Ed Park is the author of the novels Same Bed, Different Dreams, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Personal Days, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, as well as the story collection An Oral History of Atlantis. He is a founding editor of The Believer, and his writing appears in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Harper's, The Atlantic, and other publications. In 2025, he received the Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Deborah Pease Prize from A Public Space Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture
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    1 時間 16 分
  • Mulholland Drive at 25: Film Quarterly
    2026/08/21
    In this episode, J. M. Tyree, the editor of Film Quarterly discusses a dossier of articles about David’s Lynch’s 2001 Mulholland Drive on its 25th anniversary with dossier editor Eileen G’Sell. Film Quarterly (FQ) is published four times a year by the University of California Press. For more information about the journal, including subscription and submission information, please visit FQ’s website. If you are interested in supporting the work of UC Press and its Journals Program, please consider making a charitable donation to the UC Press Foundation. To learn more about the UC Press Foundation and how to contribute, please visit UC Press’s Support Us page. Articles mentioned: “Uncanny Intimacies, Abject Desires,” by Eileen G’Sell (Film Quarterly 80 no. 1, Fall 2026) “The Radical Intimacy of Rot: Mulholland Drive's Queer Proliferations,” by Laura Westengard (Film Quarterly 80 no. 1, Fall 2026) “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This): David Lynch, Simone de Beauvoir, and ‘Feeling Like a Feminist’,” by Lori Jo Marso (Film Quarterly 80 no. 1, Fall 2026) “‘That’s Not My Voice’: Telephonic Logics and Paranoid Listening in Mulholland Drive,” by Temperance Aghamohammadi (Film Quarterly 80 no. 1, Fall 2026) “‘This Is the Girl’: Mulholland Drive, Naomi Watts, and the Double Abjection of the Hollywood Starlet(s),” by Eileen G’Sell (Film Quarterly 80 no. 1, Fall 2026) A complete list of University of California Press journals is available at UC Press Journals. J. M. Tyree is the editor-in-chief of Film Quarterly and an associate professor in the Cinema Program at VCUarts. A Rabkin winner for arts journalism, Eileen G'Sell is a film critic and teaching professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture
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    19 分
  • Happy to Help: Adventures of a People Pleaser
    2026/08/20
    As a big sister, Girl Scout, personal assistant, sitcom sidekick, and, finally, mother of three, Amy believed it was her destiny to be a people pleaser. She learned to put others first and to look like she had everything under control, even when she very much did not.Along the way, she started to wonder why doing it all had been her job. When she tried to hand over some of her to-dos, no one was interested in taking them. And when she asked for help in return, she got advice: have a sense of humor, quit nagging, and stop trying to be perfect.Happy to Help: Adventures of a People Pleaser explores how you can be the one everyone else depends on and still be struggling—how you can be “happy to help,” even when, for your own sake, you shouldn’t. Guest: Amy Wilson is the author of the memoir When Did I Get Like This? and the co-host of the award-winning podcast What the Fresh Hell. She is also an actor who has appeared on Broadway, in sitcoms and in films. Happy to Help is her award-winning second book. Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast. Playlist for listeners: What's On Her Mind Recipes for very busy lives... Attention: How To Gain Productivity Breaking free from overworking and underliving The Burnout Workbook What Do You Want Out Of Life? My What-if Year Tell Me What You Want Managing Your Mental Health During Your Ph.D. The Good- Enough Life PhDing While Parenting Mindfulness Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You help support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture
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    44 分
  • Jehnie Burns on Mixtape Culture
    2026/08/18
    Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel, talks with writer and researcher, Jehnie I. Burns about her book, Mixtape Nostalgia: Culture, Memory, and Representation (Lexington, 2023). This conversation builds on earlier ones on music and technology, especially our earlier episode with Anthony Kwame Harrison about the ethnography of hiphop. Vinsel and Burns chat about the rise of mixtape culture, how it played out in different subcultures, and how it was wrapped up in and transformed by technological change. We also announce some big news at the beginning of the episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture
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    54 分
  • Vincent Haddad, "Next Time on Dragon Ball: Playing with a Manga and Anime Franchise" (U Minnesota Press, 2026)
    2026/08/18
    Since its debut in 1984, Dragon Ball has become one of the most popular, influential, and lucrative media franchises in the world. In Next Time on Dragon Ball: Playing with a Manga and Anime Franchise (U Minnesota Press, 2026), Dr. Vincent Haddad investigates how the franchise has maintained huge global demand despite its formulaic plotlines. Examining its exhaustive repetition of storytelling forms across comics, TV series, games, and merchandise, Haddad argues that the convergence of play, fandom, and narrative made Dragon Ball an unlikely success—and a harbinger of broader shifts in the media landscape of franchises from the 1980s to the present. Dr. Haddad conceives of Dragon Ball as a “franchise toy,” a corporate media property that is constantly remixed by its fans in ways that its owners resist but also ultimately embrace: appropriation is essential to the franchise’s popularity. Over the past forty years, Dr. Haddad argues, Dragon Ball’s deployment of familiar tropes, cultural references, and narrative forms—from classical Chinese stories and the films of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan to American franchises like Superman and Star Wars—has invited unique transcultural play. Through diverse examples of how fans use its characters as “playthings,” Dr. Haddad shows how Dragon Ball travels across international networked fandoms, highlighting the queer, gendered, and racialized dimensions of this play. Parsing the dynamics of “sites of conflict” between authorized media and fan content, Next Time on Dragon Ball illuminates how fan engagement across the Americas changes the parameters of what a manga and anime franchise is and can be. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture
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    55 分