Popular culture

Film critic David Thomson explains why Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho achieves a kind of unique synergy with American culture, raising unsettling questions about alienation and identity. (33 minutes)

Neal Gabler on the modern devotion to pleasure

From our archives, Michael Kammen compares popular and mass culture, and Philip Fisher analyzes the idea that new cultural forms inevitably dissolve old ones. (26 minutes)

FROM VOL. 21 Robert Higgs looks at the history of sports in American experience and at how organized religion has interacted with that history. (12 minutes)

FROM VOL. 44Thomas Hibbs, author of Shows about Nothing, discusses the nihilism that runs through films and television shows in recent American popular culture. (9 minutes)

James Twitchell discusses a few of the themes in his book about the confusing state of the evolution of shame and shamelessness. (20 minutes)

“If a society wishes to find a way of ensuring that newly emergent and valuable techniques are passed on and preserved, its members must feel themselves under an ethical obligation to leave the best possible world not only for their children, but also for their grandchildren.”