Summary
“Oi Mista! You me dad?” …The evocative phrase heard around the world thanks to a beautiful little thing called memes. As per one definition by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, the meme is a unit of cultural transmission that can be perpetuated and remixed for all eternity. These nifty visual soundbites have been around forever, but really took form in the Darwinian halls of 4chan. Evolving from image macro, to utopian “open work,” to hate symbol, to ironic shitpost where no object of consumption is sacred (not even Joan Didion… or Geese), the meme has become the true darling of our internet age. In this episode, Hannah and Maia question the purpose of the meme - is it an object of benign humour, a piece of art, a tool for bespoke branding, or a malignant “selfish” gene that has the capacity for great evil? Listen to find out. Tangents include: the Timothy vogue cover, and Hannah’s one-sided beef with Goth Shakira.
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SOURCES:
Alexis Benveniste, “The Meaning and History of Memes,” The New York Times (2022).
Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine, Oxford University Press (1999).
Roy Christopher, “The Meme is Dead, Long Live the Meme,” Post Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production, Punctum Books (2019).
Travis Diehl, “The Many, Many Heads of JD Vance,” Spike Art Magazine (2025).
Tom Gerken, “Is this 1921 cartoon the first ever meme?” BBC (2018).
Ara H. Merjian and Mike Rugnetta, “From Dada to Memes,” Art News (2020).
Scott Wark and McKenzie Wark, “Circulation and its Discontents,” Post Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production, Punctum Books (2019).
Olivia Whittick, “Feminist Meme Queen Goth Shakira,” Ssense.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I know it's old news at this point, but I was in a story yesterday, and I saw the Timothy |
| 0:04.8 | Shalamey Vogue cover in person, and I truly, like, I went, uh, and jumped back, and that was |
| 0:11.4 | crazy. I also got to inspect it like really up close, you know, the physical object, and I was like, |
| 0:15.7 | yeah, it's bad. It is a crazy note to end on for Miss Anna Wintour. No, this is Chloe Males cover. No, this is Anna's last cover. What? Wait, I'm so confused. I thought that the whole thing was that this is Chloe Males. I think that that's what people assumed, but it's actually Anna Wintore's last cover that she's like oversaw. Because it's Annie Leibowitz, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that would explain why it's Andy Leibowitz. Because I can't imagine Chloe Mall, like, working with Annie Leibowitz immediately when I feel like that's Anna Wintour's girl. That's her beat. One thing I appreciate about it is that it brings me back to that image of Timothy Shalomey and the galaxy pants on a red |
| 0:56.0 | carpet for like, it's like the nymphomaniac premiere. Because we've talked about that on this |
| 1:01.6 | very podcast, and maybe that's what the reference is. I certainly doubt it, but to me, that's |
| 1:08.0 | what the place I go to. So at least I appreciate that. |
| 1:11.9 | It was an internal callback. |
| 1:13.0 | I like Annie Leibowitz. |
| 1:14.3 | You know, she's done her thing. |
| 1:15.5 | I do think she's a little overused. |
| 1:17.0 | But her penchant for like gray saturation is really fascinating to me. |
| 1:22.0 | Like derogatory. |
| 1:22.8 | The coloring on Timothy is so bad. |
| 1:26.4 | Like it looks like, um, it's like the wash on a piece of film or |
| 1:30.7 | like filmmaking before you color grade it. Like, that's what it looks like. It looks like the first |
| 1:34.9 | draft of an image. It looks like it hasn't really been adequately edited. And then like also, |
| 1:39.9 | like she has sort of a history of really not knowing how to photograph people with like |
| 1:46.5 | darker skin tones because I don't know her like neglect of well it's kind of that but also she |
| 1:53.0 | does just actually make everyone look gray it's just like a widespread making people look gray thing |
| 1:57.8 | that just like obviously doesn't work for everybody but I don't I don't know if it's necessarily like not knowing and more like an active choice to make everyone look gray. Like she likes this desaturation. It's giving Tim Burton. Yes, which worked really well for her during that Tim Burton era, like Alice and Wonderland and stuff. It's really bad, but I kind of just appreciate it for how gauche it is. |
| 2:18.1 | Like, I am a little bit like, okay, Vogue has gone low culture. |
... |
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