At this week's Round Table, Jack, Kenisha, and Skyla engaged with some of our favorite guests—alumni podcast hosts Inica Kotasthane, now finishing her first semester at Barnard College, and Riya Mehta, midday through her junior year at Tufts University. We think you’ll enjoy catching up with these formerly-familiar voices as much as we did. In the spirit of year-end episodes, we started by rating HOW our respective years have been and why and then talked a great deal about the year in pop culture and its intersection with politics. We discussed how it’s becoming increasingly hard to separate art from politics; whether you can–and should–separate the artist from the art; the importance of artistic freedom; and where, when, and how lines should be drawn and artists should be “canceled”--as well as WHO should make such calls, platforms like Spotify, companies like Adidas, or consumers. We also talked about the challenges of free speech and how Twitter is emblematic of our time, with “free” speech being bought by the richest man in the world, leading to use of the N word instantly increasing by 4 times along with geometric increases of other hate speech, huge layoffs, increases in misinformation and lack of civility, and places getting increasingly less safe, in person and online.
This is a really exciting time on a personal level as well as a cultural one. . Many of us have oriented our whole lives around getting into college and, now that three of us podcast hosts have gotten into the colleges we applied early to–yay!--we have to figure out what’s next. We’ve got some exciting ideas, and resolutions, and book recommendations we think will resonate with you and would love to hear yours too. Thank you for listening in 2022 and we look forward to sharing more podcast adventures in 2023!
