Gothic doesn't mean dark, although it can, but it means counterculture.

It means oppositional, like to whatever's mainstream at the time.

And that's really its utility, and it's something that we find very attractive and almost necessary.

Christine? necessary. Christine Laskowski is a video journalist and the host of the podcast, TNJ, a limited series

about 6th century Byzantium and the great love story between Empress Theodora and her husband, the Emperor Justinian.

For this episode, however, Christine is going to share with us her research from a sidebar

episode she called Gothic as a modifier. We'll see how a lone barbarian people came to represent everything from the Notre Dame

Cathedral and Flannery O'Connor's writing to the band Joy Division and the edgy

hot topic fashion that marked the 90s and early 2000s and then bloomed into a full-blown

moral panic. I'm your host, Chelsea Weber-Smith,

and this is American Hysteria. I am so excited to welcome a very different kind of guest that's going to give us a different kind of history than we usually get on this show.

So welcome Christine.

Hi, Chelsea, and American Hysteria fans.

It is a true delight to be here.

Well, I would love if you started by just

introducing yourself and the work that you do, especially with the podcast that will kind of shed

some light on the topic today. Sure. My name is Christine Laskowski. I am a video journalist by profession, but my

podcast is a passion project that came about really during COVID. I just moved to Berlin.

Lockdown happened. And because I'm a nerd and I just, as one does, sometimes you just store

random knowledge. And I knew

that the very first pandemic had occurred in the 500s. And I thought, why don't I just order

some books, read about this period? And then when I came out of lockdown, this was all I could talk

...