Shows
UConn PopCastThe Politics of Andor (Season 2 Episodes 7-9): Truth and DisciplineIt’s the UConn Popcast, and we continue our analysis of Andor season 2 with episodes 7-9.
We break down the politics of these episodes, focusing on the question of when in a rebellion must you break cover and insist - publicly - on the truth. We see a second major theme of this arc as discipline. The rebellion is moving from a para-military to a military posture, and requires increasing discipline from its members as it does so. Further, Cassian fights a battle in this arc between his belief that he makes his own decisions, and the dis...2025-05-111h 10UConn PopCastThe Politics of Andor (Season 2 Episodes 4-6): Too Much InformationIt’s the UConn Popcast, and we continue our analysis of Andor season 2 with episodes 4-6. We break down the politics of these episodes, focusing on the mirrored political challenges faced by figures from the Empire and the Rebellion. We see a big theme of these episodes as “too much information,” as both sides struggle to distinguish friend from foe, signal from noise, the authentic from the inauthentic. We discuss classic political problems portrayed in the episodes such as collective action problems, anticipatory compliance, preference falsification, and treating people as means or as ends in and of themselves. ...2025-05-0355 minUConn PopCastThe Politics of Andor (Season 2 Episodes 1-3): The Personal is PoliticalIt’s the UConn Popcast, and today we react to Andor Season 2, episodes 1-3. We break down the politics of these episodes, focusing on the motives and aims of the rebellion and the Empire. Both sides have major coordination problems in these episodes, although the causes are very different. We explain and analyze the recurrent problems of authoritarian control and rebellion against it, and the way Andor comments upon them. We see a major theme of these three episodes as “the personal is political,” as micro motives are tied to macro causes on all sides. We also explore the dynamic...2025-04-2651 minUConn PopCastWill AI Transform What it Means to be Human in the Next Ten Years?It’s the UConn Popcast, and what impact will AI have on being human in the next decade? Elon University’s Center for Imagining the Digital Future just released a big report on this question, based on a survey of nearly 300 global tech experts.These insiders predict major changes in the very near future to the way we think about work, life, and ourselves.We talked with Lee Rainie, the director of the center and co-author of the report. We also discuss another center report, on the impact of AI on higher education, as well as Lee’s...2025-04-191h 01UConn PopCastThe Great Gatsby is an American DystopiaIt’s the UConn Popcast, and on the 100th anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel, we explore what The Great Gatsby means in America today.In this deep-dive we ask:
What did Gatsby mean in 1925, and how have those meanings changed in 2025?
What mythologies of America does Gatsby circulate, and challenge?
How does Gatsby read to a Brit who never read it in high school, and to an American who only encountered it as an adult?
Is Nick Carraway right that Gatsby is the only pure soul in the story?
Can we rescue utopian imagi...2025-04-111h 47UConn PopCastJames Boyle Draws the Line Between Humans and AIIt’s the UConn Popcast, and we spoke with Duke Law Professor James Boyle about his new book The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood (MIT Press, 2024). We spoke with Boyle about how our legal and moral understandings of personhood are being challenged by advances in AI. We discussed the role of the law, popular culture, tests of sentience, and our capacity for empathy in shaping this urgent debate.James Boyle is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School and founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain. Le...2025-04-0553 minUConn PopCastSex and Love with Robots and ChatbotsIt’s the UConn Popcast, and can you fall in love with ChatGPT? Can, and should, you have sex with a robot? We asked Professor Kate Devlin, a leading researcher on intimate relations between humans and artificial intelligences, to help us navigate the new landscape of sex and love with robots.Kate is a Professor of AI & Society in the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London. She’s the author of the excellent book Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots (Bloomsbury, 2018), which examines the ethical and social implications of technology and intimacy.We had a rich...2025-03-261h 05UConn PopCastLessons on Living with AI from the Home Computer Revolution: Revisiting Sherry Turkle’s “The Second Self”It’s the UConn Popcast, and we've been experiencing a revolution in the past few years, as artificial intelligence becomes an increasingly common part of everyday life. Powerful AI tools are now integrated into our work, our schools, our creative industries, and our experiences of dating and companionship. This is a disorientating experience, one that changes not only our views of technology, but of ourselves. Can we look to a past technological revolution for help? We revisit Sherry Turkle's classic text The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (MIT Press, 1985) on how the sudden spread of the perso...2025-03-1058 minUConn PopCastIn “The Beast,” AI Puts Limits on Human EmotionIt’s the UConn Popcast, and “The Beast” is a 2023 sci fi / romance movie by French director Bertrand Bonello, in which artificial intelligence has determined that human emotions are a danger, and must be surgically controlled. In this deep dive, we ask whether this is really a film about AI, a transhistorical love story, a narrative of societal decline, or something else entirely. The Beast stars Lea Seydoux and George McKay. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices2025-02-221h 16UConn PopCastOur History with AI is (much) Longer than You Think (with Kevin LaGrandeur)It’s the UConn Popcast, and when did we really start dreaming about the promise, and the danger, of artificial intelligence? When ChatGPT was released in 2022? When IBMs Deep Blue defeated Chess world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997? When Stanley Kubrick introduced us to HAL 9000 in 1968? Or perhaps you think it was much earlier. Maybe we have had the dream of AI since the development of the first computers by Von Neumann, or even earlier, by Babbage. Or maybe you think the dawning of the age of science itself is ground zero for our thoughts of artificial intelligence.Kev...2025-02-081h 05UConn PopCastA.I. is Spielberg & Kubrick’s Dark Twisted FantasyIt’s the UConn Popcast, and A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Steven Spielberg’s 2001 movie, is a strange and profound text on human-AI relations. Centering on David, an artificial child who is embraced and then abandoned by his adoptive human mother, the movie has the structure of a fairy tale and the sensibility of a horror film. We found the text to have significant things to say about the ethics of creating, and rejecting, artificial life, as well as functioning as something of a meta-commentary on related movies like Blade Runner and 2001: A Space Odyssey. But we were most intrigued by St...2025-01-281h 24UConn PopCastWhat Ex Machina Tell Us About Human-AI PsychologyIt’s the UConn Popcast, and Ex Machina, Alex Garland’s 2014 sci fi movie, is a provocative examination of what an updated Turing test for a super-capable AI might look like, if the designer of the test was a megalomaniacal tech-mogul / genius. The movie, starring Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson, and Alicia Vikander, is a rich and often confounding text, which seems to posit a horrifying possibility: what if the real alignment problem is teaching AI the worst of humanity’s manipulative and instrumental traits? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices2025-01-111h 11UConn PopCastAI: How We Got Here in Three Powerful TalesThis episode is based upon three readings:
Alan Turing’s Computing Machinery and Intelligence aka The Turing Test paper. Turing starts his paper by asking “can machines think?” before deciding that’s a meaningless question. Instead, he invents something he calls “the imitation game” - a text conversation where the player has to guess whether they are chatting with another person or with an AI. ChatGPT was such a bombshell because it easily and consistently passes this “Turing Test” by giving human-like responses to questions. Here’s the issue: the Turing Test is based upon AI deception, not thinking. Turing s...2024-12-261h 07UConn PopCastThinking Machines: Will Robots Have Rights?It’s the UConn Popcast, and in this episode of our series on artificial intelligence, we discuss Joanna Bryson’s essay “Robots Should be Slaves.”We dive headlong into this provocative argument about the rights of robots. As scholars of cultural and social understanding, we are fascinated by the arguments Bryson - a computer scientist - makes about who should, and should not, be rights-bearing members of a community.Does Bryson mean we should enslave robots now and always, regardless of their claims to rights? How does Bryson deal with the natural human tendency to anthropo...2024-11-2029 minUConn PopCastThinking Machines: The First AI Takeover StoryIt’s the UConn Popcast, and in the second of our series on Thinking Machines we consider Karel Čapek’s “Rossum’s Universal Robots” (1920). Čapek’s play invented the word “robot” and pioneered the genre of the AI uprising. The play - a clear influence on works such as 2001, Blade Runner, The Terminator, and Battlestar Galactica – is a deep rumination on the boundary between the natural and artificial, the mechanical and the ineffable, and the sacred and the profane.We react to this seminal work in popular thinking about artificial intelligence, written more than a century ago yet retaining deep re...2024-11-0233 minUConn PopCastThinking Machines: The Turing Test at 75It’s the UConn Popcast, and this is the first episode in our new series about artificial intelligence and popular culture. In this first episode, we revisit Alan Turing's seminal1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, in which he asks "Can machines think?"In the paper, Turing proposes what became known as "The Turing test," a game of deception which, if a machine were to pass it, could be said to herald the onset of the age of machine intelligence. With large language models (LLMs) today easily passing this test, we react to the paper and examine the im...2024-10-2329 minUConn PopCastP. Djèlí Clark on Why He WritesP. Djèlí Clark is the author of acclaimed and award-winning speculative fiction, including the much-loved Dead Djinn universe books, Ring Shout, and his most recent, The Dead Cat Tail Assassins.We speak with him about why he writes, how he sees speculative fiction as a genre, whether we can expect to see more Dead Djinn books, the origins of his acclaimed novella Ring Shout, his new book The Dead Cat Tail Assassins (Tordotcom, 2024), and much more.For our conversation about the author’s academic work in history, see our previous episode: “Dexter Gabriel: Slavery and Film, C...2024-10-1429 minUConn PopCastSlavery and Film, Creativity and Academia, and Is Slavery a Good Metaphor for AI?Dr. Dexter Gabriel is an associate professor of history at the University of Connecticut. He’s published and taught widely on the histories of slavery, resistance, and freedom, including teaching a superb class on slavery in popular culture, particularly film. He’s the author of the 2023 book Jubilee’s Experiment: The British West Indies and American Abolitionism (Cambridge UP, 2023).But in addition to this, Professor Gabriel conducts a second, equally impressive intellectual and creative life in a wholly different register. As P. Djèlí Clark, he’s the author of acclaimed and award-winning speculative fiction, including the much-loved D...2024-10-1248 minUConn PopCastThe Political Evolution of Taylor SwiftIt’s the UConn Popcast, and today we offer a political science / popular culture studies view of Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election. We situate Swift’s endorsement within the wider moment of popular culture, and consider her long journey from a self-imposed moratorium on political speech to her current position as the most sought-after endorsement in the election cycle. What does the endorsement mean? Why did she do it? And why did she sign her endorsement as from a “childless cat lady”?Our previous discussion of Taylor Swift and politics i...2024-09-1224 min
Mission Creep47. Top Gun (1986) and Top Gun: Maverick (2022), with Stephen Dyson and Jeff DudasStephen Dyson and Jeff Dudas, hosts of the UConn Popcast, join us to talk about whether there is any redemption (in all the senses) for Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, whether Glen Powell's "Hangman" is supposed to be a reincarnation of Iceman or of Maverick, what Jennifer Connolly's Penny Benjamin has to teach Maverick, and -- ultimately -- whether it's possible to defeat two 5th-Gen enemy fighters in an F-14 the characters describe as "so old," a "bag of ass," and a "museum piece."2024-08-271h 11UConn PopCastCan "Alien: Romulus" Revive the Alien Franchise?Fede Alvarez’s "Alien: Romulus" hit cinemas on August 16th. It’s set between the events of Alien and Aliens, two science fiction classics. We review the movie and ask whether it continues the thematic work done in its lauded predecessors, touching on capitalism, AI, body horror, subversion of sexual and reproductive systems, colonialism, class, and genre. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices2024-08-1957 minUConn PopCast40 Years of Purple Rain: What to Make of the Movie/Album in 2024It’s the UConn Popcast, and Purple Rain, Prince’s semi-autobiographical, semi-concert film, hit cinemas 40 years ago this week. The movie followed the album of the same name by a few short weeks. While the album is considered a defining musical achievement, the movie met a mixed reception at the time, and later critics have been both troubled by its misogyny and perplexed by its surreal qualities and uneven acting.We consider the movie and the music at the four-decade mark, centering our discussion on the figure of Prince (who plays a character called “The Kid” in the movi...2024-07-251h 15UConn PopCastAI and Music: The Future is Here (featuring "There I Ruined It")It’s the UConn Popcast, and recently UConn’s Center for the Study of Popular Music hosted a panel discussion on Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Music. The panel featured Dr. Mitchell Green, Professor of Philosophy, University of Connecticut; Dustin Ballard, a musician and creator of the social media channel “There I Ruined It”; and Dr. Aaron Dial, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Humanities and Technoscience Lab at Purdue University.The conversation addressed AI music creation, production, composition, aesthetics, trends, copyright issues, and algorithms.The panel was moderated by Professor Jeffrey Ogbar, Director of the Cen...2024-07-131h 00UConn PopCastOn Richard Linklater and “Hit Man”It’s the UConn Popcast, and “Hit Man” is writer and director Richard Linklater’s latest film, available on Netflix after a brief theatrical run. We analyze the movie through Linklater’s classic themes: identity and its malleability, American sub-cultures, and American mythologies. “Hit Man” is a less challenging watch than much of Linklater’s canon, but it works best, we argue, when seen as part of his wider project of examining the permeable boundary between fantasy and reality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices2024-06-1459 minUConn PopCastRobert Farley on how "Andor" recreates "The Battle of Algiers" (and it works)It’s the UConn Popcast, and today we are joined by Professor Robert Farley, author of “Andor: Star Wars Recreates the Battle of Algiers (And it Works).” We talk about how Andor, the Disney+ streamer, was deeply influenced by Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 movie The Battle of Algiers. Both texts tell the story of a rebellion against authoritarian colonial overlords, and both do so in a documentary style. We consider how Andor relates to other entries in the Star Wars universe, what myths and meaning structures Andor engages, and whether the show qualifies as great television, or merely pretty good Star Wars...2024-05-031h 09UConn PopCastAdapting Liu Cixin’s "Three-Body Problem" for TelevisionIt’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 accom...2024-04-021h 21UConn PopCastReading Taylor Swift as a Cultural and Political TextIt’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...2024-03-111h 04UConn PopCastProphet Song: A Novel about a Totalitarian Takeover in IrelandIt’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 I...2024-01-231h 17UConn PopCastThis is the Best Statement of the Simulation Hypothesis We've SeenIt’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, con...2023-12-081h 28UConn PopCast'For All Mankind,’ An Alternate History About the Possibility of UtopiaIt’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...2023-11-151h 22UConn PopCastCan You Fall in Love with ChatGPT?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 relatio...2023-11-1058 minUConn PopCastA Deep Dive into Olivia Rodrigo's "Guts"Olivia Rodrigo's new album "Guts" offers a compelling perspective on early adult uncertainty, societal expectations of young women, and the craft of songwriting. We take a deep dive into the art and persona of this chart-bestriding performer. The UConn PopCast is proud to be sponsored by the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. Learn about our MA Program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices2023-11-091h 04UConn PopCastWhat Reality TV Says About UsReality TV shapes and reflects how we see ourselves, and what we regard as normal. Professor Danielle J. Lindemann watched thousands of hours of reality tv to decode its influence on society. She joins us to discuss her book True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us (FSG, 2022). Danielle J. Lindemann is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Lehigh University interested in gender, sexuality, the family, and culture. She is the author of Commuter Spouses: New Families in a Changing World and Dominatrix: Gender, Eroticism and Control in the Dungeon. Her research has been featured in media outle...2023-11-0844 minUConn PopCastThis Will Change Your Perspective on James BondThe Bond movies have influenced portrayals of masculinity and femininity for decades, but the Daniel Craig-era saw a revolution in depictions of sex, gender, and inclusivity. The UConn PopCast discusses with Professor Susan Burgess, author of LGBT Inclusion in American Life: Pop Culture, Political Imagination, and Civil Rights (NYU Press, 2023)The UConn PopCast is proud to be sponsored by the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute. Learn about our MA Program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices2023-11-071h 17UConn PopCastTrailerComing soon, the UConnPopCast in audio-only form. Check out our video back catalogue here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_b2Y769B2BKLX5sGP7oWHg Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices2023-08-2902 min