How do you like it so far?

To continue our thread on rumours and conspiracy theories, this week Colin discussed the 80th anniversary of the The War of the Worlds broadcast on CBS radio with media historian Nick Cull. Orson Welles' infamous radio drama showed the power of news media to convince populations about a fake event, but it also highlighted the rumours surrounding the broadcast: not everyone thought it was aliens invading, but Nazis, the Japanese etc...

Why are younger people more likely to protest, and less likely to vote? This week, Henry talks with Naja Nielsen from Orb Media. They discuss how youth feels about their relationship with traditional politics, their tendency to focus on issues and not parties, and how they can often feel unwanted in current political systems. Nielsen also walks us through the shift - or need - to look at issues in a global perspective, and how news media needs to reflect it.

This week we talked about conspiracy theories with Wu Ming, the collective, whose books inspired one the main conspiracy theorists on the internet, and Benjamen Walker, whose podcast often focuses on conspiracy theories. We cover: The art of blurring fact and fiction, and non-fiction, discrediting gatekeepers, can we ever really debunk, the role of satire, the hunger for complexity, pizzagate, the “deep state,” QAnon, and of course, president Trump.

This week we explore the role of comedy in civic participation within the Indian context. Rohan Joshi is part of the sketch comedy group All India Backhod, which tackles political and social issues on their YouTube channel. A notable example was their viral video “It’s your fault” that dealt with the issue of rape, focusing on the irony of victim-blaming. Joshi recently spoke at the "The Past, Present and Future of Civic Entertainment in India" a day-long event in Mumbai...

In this episode, we get the chance to talk to Anushka Shah, who works as a researcher at the Center for Civic Media, MIT Media Lab. More recently, she has started a project called Civic Entertainment that explores the intersection of civic engagement with television, radio, and digital entertainment and film...

Henry is currently a visiting scholar at the Library of Congress, where he had the chance to speak about space with Margaret Weitekamp, curator of Space History department or the Air and Space museum. She curates the Museum's social and cultural dimensions of spaceflight collection, more than 4,000 artifacts that include space memorabilia and space science fiction objects...

This week Henry Jenkins talks to Diane Winston, professor of Communication and Journalism at USC, about religion and reality television. Are young people getting how to live their lives from reality TV? Contrary of reality TV as being a guilty pleasure, Winston's latest book talks about reality TV as the "the lived religion of late capitalism". Reality television tells stories that people feel identified with, or see as cautionary tales...

Our podcast returns after its summer hiatus with an episode focused on science fiction as a way of understanding and reimagining the world. We reassembled a panel of science fiction scholars fresh from the World Science Fiction Convention (in San Jose) and eager to dig deeper into the history of the genre, its social and political impact, and in particular, the forms of thought which were enabled and sustained by the emergence of speculative fiction...

Critic Maureen Ryan, showrunner Emily Andras and professor Louisa Stein discuss GLBT representation on TV and the tricky relationship between fans and showrunners.

'How do you like it so far?' producer Andrea Alarcon and Annenberg Doctoral Candidate Rogelio Alejandro Lopez take over this week's episode for a trip to the [Define American Film Festival][1] in Chicago to host [Defining the American of 2060][2]. The pair talk to poet Yosimar Reyes and organizer Erika Andiola about identity, representation and political obstacles in the undocumented community.