The Podcast for Social Research · The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

(Pop) Cultural Marxism, Episode 13: Things of the Year 2024 — Part I

·1 hr 50 min·4 clips

Episode 13 is the show’s 2024 retrospective. Izzy Lipke and Ajay Singh Chowdhury open by naming the premise directly. They say the year felt lackluster in cultural objects. That lack becomes the episode’s main problem and its main source of energy. They spend the opening stretch moving through films and cultural items with a kind of weary amusement. Gladiator 2 comes up. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes comes up. Twisters comes up. It Ends With Us comes up. Alien: Romulus comes up. The Wild Robot appears as one of the few titles that feels newly made rather than inherited. The Garfield Movie and Joker: Folie a Deux arrive late in the list. The hosts treat the list as evidence for a larger thesis. Most of what dominated the year was familiar property. The conversation is funny, but the joke keeps circling back to a real pattern. Ajay and Izzy keep revising, correcting, and sharpening the frame as they go. That makes the segment feel live rather than scripted around a fixed verdict. After the break, they pivot toward the things they actually liked. The mood changes, but only a little. There is still fatigue in the room. Then the episode starts finding examples of cultural life that felt worth caring about. They mention restorations showing in theaters. They mention Tarkovsky screenings in New York. A friend gifting Ajay the restored Stop Making Sense disc gives the discussion a brighter ending. The extra songs and restored footage matter because they point to craft, not novelty. The show closes on a modest claim. Not everything is exhausted. Something durable still survives in old work, in restoration, and in the people who still want to hear it well.

As heard by us

A rueful 2024 retrospective that lands as diagnosis, then opens into a slightly brighter close.

The episode treats a 2024 retrospective as a problem worth sitting with: what the year offered, what it repeated, and why that gap feels so plain.

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Why you'd press play

You want a year-end culture roundup that admits the year was kind of a dud.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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