What is Culture Trip?
Pop culture can be empty, vapid, junk food for the mind and soul, but it can also raise awareness of important social issues, start crucial conversations, provoke real change, teach us about the past, and imagine a better future. Culture Trip looks for the TV, movies, music, and books doing just that, with enlightened analysis of pop culture past and present and heartfelt recommendations.
One of the major ways that higher states have infiltrated pop culture is through the psychedelic movement, a major influence in 1960s culture that still reverberates today, and is again growing stronger. Psychedelics are moving toward mainstream acceptance as therapeutic and spiritual tools that have the potential to cure us of some of our deepest modern ills. Moms are microdosing, while veterans have been freed from their PTSD. Efforts are underway in several states to lessen or eliminate legal barriers to research and even personal use. Psychedelics have also inspired popular artists from the Grateful Dead and Ken Kesey to Lil Nas X and Kacey Musgraves.
Among its other topics, Culture Trip will explore psychedelics’ colorful history, their contributions to pop culture, their current status in media, and the ways we can prevent another meltdown in public acceptance.
Who is behind it?
Culture Trip is the creation of New York Times bestselling pop culture historian, journalist, and author Jennifer Keishin Armstrong. Her writing takes readers behind the scenes of major moments in pop culture history and examines the lasting impact that our favorite TV shows, music, and movies have on our society and psyches. She investigates why pop culture matters deeply, from The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Seinfeld, to Sex and the City and Mean Girls, to Beyoncé, Taylor, and Barbie. She has written eight books, including the New York Times bestseller Seinfeldia, When Women Invented Television, Sex and the City and Us, and So Fetch.
Jennifer began her career in newspapers and spent ten years on staff at Entertainment Weekly, where she reported from the front lines of Grey’s Anatomy, 30 Rock, Lost, and many teen dramas. Her writing has since appeared in BBC Culture, New York magazine, Billboard, and many other places. She currently curates and writes the Peabody Finds newsletter, featuring recommendations and media history, from the prestigious Peabody Awards in broadcasting. She also speaks and frequently serves as a media expert on pop culture history.
She lives with her partner in New York’s Hudson Valley, where she likes to offset her TV time by climbing, running, doing yoga, playing amateur acoustic guitar covers, and practicing Zen Buddhism.
How often will I receive a newsletter?
Culture Trip will appear in your inbox every other week.
If you can’t find it and you have gmail, check your “promotions” folder.
Why subscribe?
You’ll help to support good, smart, interesting writing on a topic that not only makes great cocktail party conversation, it also might just save the world. You’ll also learn about the shows, movies, music, and books that will lift your spirits instead of miring yourself in the darkest impulses our chaotic world has to offer.
