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March is Women's History Month!

Pop Culture Happy Hour: Time Travel And The Right Way To Be Pushy

NPR
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We all took ourselves to see Looper last weekend, and we've all got opinions. Was it confusing? Full of holes? Exciting? Moving? Too bloody? Not bloody enough? And what about Joseph Gordon-Levitt's prosthetic makeup and that thing that happened to Paul Dano?

From Looper, we move on to time travel in pop culture more generally. Glen proposes a taxonomy of time travel, we connect time travel with dystopia, and I briefly make it seem like The Jetsons was very confusing to me, even though it wasn't. Does it work better when you can change the future, or when you can't? And can the future be just another place to visit?

And then we tackle what is, in many ways, our reason for existing: pop culture entry points. By this, we mean the ways you go about recommending things to other people for them to try. How do you make recommendations to friends (or spouses) without annoying them? How do you get yourself out of the way and let them make discoveries? How much of something can you expect someone else to try before you leave them to the conclusion that they don't really like it?

As always, we close the show with what's making us happy this week. Predictably, what made me happy this week was the marvelous a cappella comedy Pitch Perfect. What made Stephen happy was reading to kids. (Literacy!) Glen was happy to attend a New York show of one of his favorite podcasts, but was made less happy by the presence of live humans. (Live humans!) Trey was made happy by a Russian play he particularly enjoyed, and by, not to put too fine a point on it, eating bugs.

Please keep in touch with us — you can find us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter: me, Trey, Glen, Stephen, producer Jess Gitner, and our producer emeritus and music director Mike.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Linda Holmes is a pop culture correspondent for NPR and the host of Pop Culture Happy Hour. She began her professional life as an attorney. In time, however, her affection for writing, popular culture, and the online universe eclipsed her legal ambitions. She shoved her law degree in the back of the closet, gave its living room space to DVD sets of The Wire, and never looked back.