[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming, or On-Demand, I'm grateful you are here on today's show, the New York-based [unintelligible 00:00:21], Why Music and performed alongside Paul Simon, John Legend, and the New York New York Philharmonic.

Now they're marking their 15th anniversary with their first album of music composed and performed solely by the group's members. We will have an all-of-it listening party. We'll speak to actors Patricia Clarkson and Trace Lysette about their new film, Monica, which examines estrangement, forgiveness, and acceptance. We start this hour with the cultural moments that defined the COVID era.

[music]

As you have been hearing on New York Public Radio, today ends the federal government's public health emergency for COVID-19. President Biden signed a congressional resolution last month. Think about what frame of mind you were in and what life was like on May 11th, 2020. Then think about what you did this morning. It is amazing how much has changed. While the virus has not gone and it is certainly a danger to parts of the population, life is normal-ish, but also different than in the before times. Yet there were many cultural moments that we collectively experienced.

Watching Tiger King to escape reality. Baking a lot of bread to comfort ourselves. Many TikTok dances were unleashed on the world out of boredom. The New York Times published an opinion piece called 17 Pop Culture Moments that Define the COVID Era. Joining me now are a few folks who are part of the project. New York Times culture editor, Adam Sternbergh, columnist, Mark Harris, and New York Times Team magazine writer-at-large, Adam Bradley. Adams and Mark, welcome.

Mark Harris: Thanks.

Adam Sternbergh: Thanks for having me.

Alison Stewart: Adam S. as an editor who worked in this piece, why do you think pop culture can be a really unique way to think about that moment in time? How is it useful?

Adam Sternbergh: This whole package came out of this conversation we were having an opinion as we approached the three-year anniversary of the beginning of the pandemic, about looking back with a little bit of hindsight at this era and some of the cultural touchstones that really seem to define it in some ways. When we think further back in history about eras, we often think of decades and you think of the '60s. You can't imagine the '60s without a Bob Dylan record, or you can't imagine a time capsule about the '80s without the movie Wall Street.

There's certain cultural touchstones that just speak to the moment. Even though the pandemic era was only three years, we felt like it was long enough, and there were enough examples that we could think of that we could assemble a bit of a cultural time capsule already. We reached out to some of our favorite cultural writers and thinkers and pose that question to them. If you were going to put something into a COVID-era time capsule, whether it's a show or a song, or any piece of culture, what would be the thing that you would choose? We got some, I think, really interesting and striking resonant examples.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, let's get you in on this conversation. As the Federal COVID emergency ends today, how are you reflecting on how culture's changed since 2020? What is a pop culture moment that you will most associate with this period in our lives? Our phone lines are open, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or you can reach us on social media @AllOfItWNYC.

Maybe you got into a show like White Lotus or a movie or some TikTok trend, or maybe you found yourself consuming pop culture differently than you had in the past. How did COVID influence what you watched, read or listened to? We want to get you in on the conversation, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or reach out on social media, Twitter, or Instagram, both of them are @AllOfItWNYC.

Mark, we have to talk about the dark reality of the pandemic before we launch into discussing the pop culture part of it. How do you think that the idea that it was a really, really dark time influenced people in terms of them not wanting to get away from the news? I think we saw that on this show a lot. A lot of people returning towards pop culture because it was so dark.

Mark Harris: I think it was both. When I think of pandemic-era entertainment, I think, obviously, of things that gave us comfort, our huge appetite for cooking shows and stuff like that, or TikTok videos. I also think of things that are somehow connected to our collective sense of despair or anxiety or dread. Pop culture, this was one of the great things that pop culture always does, but it was quadrupled during the pandemic, which is it connects you to a community of people that you're not in physical proximity to.

In this situation where we were all isolated in our own homes, pop culture was a collective meeting place, both for us to get comfort and hunker down, and for us to find a common language to express the things that were making us anxious, or sometimes, as with the thing that I wrote about, which was The White Lotus, it did both at the same time.

Alison Stewart: I'm going to circle back to White Lotus in a minute, but I want to bring Adam B. in the conversation. What did you notice were some of the common themes or throughlines as you look at this list and as you have conversations with people in your circle about what they consumed during the pandemic?

Adam Bradley: I think the pandemic pulled us in many directions. We're in an era of cultural fragmentation. We had still our little circles that we went to, and yet there was an urge, I think, more so than I can recall in recent years toward something close to a monoculture where we're consuming somehow the same things.

I found myself absurdly on a Peloton bicycle listening to Taylor Swift with my other headphone in on a Zoom meeting with some sourdough bread bacon at the same time. This is the consummate moment of feeling connected to folks who are reaching out to some of the same touchstones in the culture to find solace, to find a connection tenuous though it may be even as we are so divided.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about some of the things we watched. Adam S., for your list, you wrote about Bo Burnham's Inside, came out in the summer of 2021. You wrote about it, "It appeared on Netflix in 2021 like a message in a bottle from a shipwrecked man except when we got it, we were all shipwrecked, too." What did Bo Burnham capture about the pandemic experience, and how did he stretch comedy with this special?

Adam Sternbergh: That was a really interesting example for our list, because one thing we found when we started to compile a list is a lot of the examples, most of them weren't specifically about the pandemic experience at all. They were shows like Ted Lasso, which we flocked to because it was comforting, or music like Taylor Swift because it gave us that collective experience.

The Bo Burnham comedy special when it came out, and we were about a year and a half into the pandemic at this point, it was created within the pandemic. It was a response to not just the pandemic privations, the physical reality that we are in. The whole special for those who haven't seen it is, as the title suggests, Inside. He made it alone in this apartment in LA. It's very much about isolation and the effect that isolation has on you and your mental health. It's also very funny. It doesn't sound very funny when you describe it that way.

It's physically, the show itself was our creation of the pandemic. If there had been no pandemic, that comedy special would not exist and he would've done something totally different, but it was also very much about the emotional reality of the pandemic as well and the isolation. He's a comedian who specifically has always been interested in the ways that we interact online and what it means to have relationships through the internet not in person.

In a sense, he was the perfect person to craft a comedy special out of the material of the pandemic, because these were all issues he'd been thinking about for a long time. He was very candid about his own mental health struggles and the ways in which he was struggling. I think for a lot of viewers, certainly, I felt this way when I watched it, it really did feel like someone was not just making us laugh and giving us an escape from the pandemic, but really voicing all these feelings that we'd also been feeling, and all this anxieties that we'd been struggling with and giving us an outlet.

As Mark said, this is what pop culture can do so well. It takes the feelings we're all feeling and crystallizes them and presents them back to us as kind of a portrait and kind of a mirror. I feel like that special really stood out for me as something during the last three years that I think will forever be remembered. 50 years from now, you could give that to someone and say, "Watch this. It'll help you understand what those years felt like."

Alison Stewart: Let's take a little listen from Inside from that special. This is That Funny Feeling from Bo Burnham.

[MUSIC - Bo Burnham: That Funny Feeling]

Stunning 8K-resolution meditation app

In honor of the revolution, it's half-off

at the Gap

Deadpool's self-awareness, loving parents, harmless fun

The backlash to the backlash to the thing that's just begun

There it is again, that funny feeling

That funny feeling

There it is again, that funny feeling

That funny feeling

The surgeon general's pop-up shop, Robert Iger's face

Discount Etsy agitprop, Bugles' take on race

Alison Stewart: On the other end of the spectrum, Mark, is White Lotus, The White Lotus that you wrote about. Whereas most people could relate to Bo Burnham being inside, struggling with mental health issues, being obsessed with the internet, White Lotus is about the very, very rich acting very, very badly. When you think about The White Lotus's place in the pop culture universe during the pandemic, what was its role?

Mark Harris: I think of The White Lotus as the fantasy island of the pandemic era. I'm old enough to remember the original. I think part of the appeal of The White Lotus was the wish fulfillment of, what if we could all go off and be in the best bubble ever, like a huge luxury bubble where our every need was catered to and we could have whatever we wanted? Then just like the original fantasy island, it turns that idea around and tells its audience this really satisfying thing, which is it doesn't work. Those people don't have it so well because wherever you go, you bring yourself with you.

Also, one of the many things that Mike White, the director of The White Lotus, did so brilliantly was to say that those people whose job is to serve all these people in this luxury bubble, and to make themselves just invisible helpers, are actually real people with their own issues and their own needs. The show was incredibly satisfying as a getaway, but also satisfying as a reassurance that nobody can really have a getaway in a situation like this, that we're all trapped with ourselves no matter where we go. It wasn't just great pandemic-era pop culture, but that's certainly one of the things it was.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a few calls. Let's talk to Louise, calling in from Linden, New Jersey. Hi Louise. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Louise: Hi. I want to talk about from really early on in the pandemic when the Imagine Video came out, where all the celebrities were recording themselves on their iPhones just singing one line from the song, and how it got a ton of backlash similar to The White Lotus that you were just talking about where it was just showing rich people in their biggest-- the most amazing bubble ever.

It felt like something that they wanted everybody to [unintelligible 00:13:31] together and say we'll get through this together, but it showed the differences that all the celebrities were doing in their big mansions and in their houses where they were quarantined were really nice, whereas other people, they were stuck with multiple people in one household and it just didn't do well for them.

It made the careers for some celebrities. I don't think they'll ever really be unassociated with that. It's so strange to see because even, like Pedro Pascal who recently was in The Last of Us and became super big online, he was in the video. It's something that pretty much is never mentioned when we talk about him. It's just something really interesting to see how, three years later, it still comes back to bite people when you think about them.

Alison Stewart: Except Pedro Pascal. I think he's Teflon at this point. [laughs] Adam, this is an interesting point that Louise brings up. We're talking about things that stuck with us that were meaningful that had some quality to them. Not every piece of pop culture was that great during the pandemic. Some of it, to Louise's point, could be tone-deaf.

Adam Bradley: There's a great opportunity for that. I think the thing that Louise mentioned that's so rich, and we should have commissioned her for a piece actually, is the fact that we got an uncommon and sometimes uncomfortable intimacy with celebrity. Whether it was celebrities Zooming into late-night shows or a Zoom Academy Awards, for heaven's sake.

These kinds of moments showed fallibility and showed the gray beards and other kinds of things that were going on that offered an occasion for connection, but also an occasion for artifice and the revelation of folks who were basically, to use maybe a more common phrase, frightened a little bit. You had all of that going on at the same moment.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Laura from Chatham, New Jersey. Hi, Laura. Thanks for calling All Of It. You're on the air.

Laura: Oh, great. Well, listen, this isn't exactly pop culture, but one of the most profound things that happened for me during the pandemic was, I can't even remember what led me to the book, but I did pick up Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson because I had the time to sit and really focus on the book. It's a very long work of art, a masterpiece. I am so grateful for the time that I had for whatever led me to that book to really spend time reading it through, really think about her message, follow her more closely, and really reflect on so much of our communal American history that I just really didn't know about.

I would say-- There's so many things come to mind, but that was definitely the first thing I thought of when I heard your segment today, and I just thought, "I have to share this," because it's been in my heart for years now. I can't recommend it enough. I do think it should be the leading work on any high school history curriculum across the country really. It's just so moving, so profound, and, like I said, just an integral part of our American story.

Alison Stewart: Laura, thank you for calling in. We noticed, Mark, that during, or Adam, whoever wants to take this, we had our book club, our Get Lit With All Of It book club, and then we partnered with the New York Public Library. It really exploded during the pandemic that people were really, really engaged with reading in a way that I'm hoping stays. I don't know if you discussed that. I know there's one book on the list, right?

Adam Sternbergh: There was a book on the list. That's right. There was a novel called Severance, unrelated to the TV show but the same name, which came out before the pandemic but is about a woman living in New York in a imagined global flu pandemic. It seemed to strike a chord with people once the pandemic started, because I think, especially in those opening months, there was not only a desire for a common escapism like your Tiger King phenomenon, but also people were just looking for answers or even some guidance about what questions they should be asking.

Picking up a novel about a pandemic, or, I know a lot of people watched that movie, Contagion, the Steven Soderbergh movie that came out years ago, but it was all about a similar situation. I think it just spoke to the fact that we were all searching for something. The official information tended to be sometimes confusing, sometimes full of question marks, and so we often will turn to cultural items to help us understand. I think that was definitely happening there, and definitely happening for people in a very individual way.

The interesting thing about this conversation, as we put this package together, is there's the big moments that many people can relate to, but everyone also has that kind of story like was just shared about the book that you fell in love with. Someone I work with was like, "That Fiona Apple album, that got me through the pandemic. I listened to it every day. I went for a walk." Just hearing those intimate stories about connection with cultural items too, to me was very moving, and I think also just as much speaks to what this experience felt like for people.

Alison Stewart: We are talking about the recent New York Times opinion piece, 17 Pop Culture Moments That Define the COVID Era, as the Federal COVID emergency ends today. My guests are Adam Sternbergh, New York Times culture editor, Mark Harris, author and New York Times columnist, and Adam Bradley, writer-at-large for New York Times' T Magazine.

You're our guest as well. Listeners, we want to hear from you. What is a piece of pop culture that you consumed during the past three years that had meaning in your life? Maybe it's a pop culture moment that you'll always remember. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Or maybe you found yourself consuming pop culture differently, we want to get you in on the conversation. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Social media is available as well @AllOfItWNYC. We'll have more of your calls and tweets and DMs and more with our guests after a quick break. This is All Of It.

[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC, I'm Alison Stewart. My guests are Adam Sternbergh, Mark Harrison, and Adam Bradley. We are talking about the New York Times opinion article, 17 Pop Culture Moments That Define the COVID Era. Somebody, Christie as DMed on Instagram, pop culture, COVID moment, Mac Barnett and Shawn Harris creating live cartoons on Saturdays that resulted in The First Cat In Space Ate Pizza, really a highlight for my family during that time.

Someone else said, Fiona Apples, Fetch the Bolt Cutters, will also remind me of lockdown. That feeling, and you can just tell by the title that it's strangely relevant, it's angry and frustrated, and was much needed at the time. Adam B., you wrote a piece that early in the pandemic, you and your daughters enjoyed playing the board game, Pandemic The Game, and you wrote, "I'm not sure I've ever before experienced such joy in my life." What was the source of that joy at that time?

Adam Bradley: This board game, this tabletop board game collaborative strategy game for ages eight and up, I had one nine-year-old and one six-year-old at the time. It was a way for us to confront the reality of this seemingly all-encompassing fear that emerged, I think, particularly for children whom we were trying at once to buffer from it, and yet it would seep in. Here was a way for them to talk about it, even to utter the word pandemic, and to do it in a way that was in the context of loving and support. It charged the word with a different energy and urgency.

My family escaped the pandemic without getting COVID until I was writing the piece and I came down with COVID. I'm a method writer, I guess, but it also speaks to the fact that for all the ways that we are calling it into this moment, it's with us, it's staying with us. For many people it will stay with us in the lives that we loved, that are lost.

It'll stay with us in these moments that are beyond the cultural distractions and even obsessions that we had across this period of time. It's personal, and we saw it in the thousand-plus comments that we got on the article with folks weighing in with their own really individuated connections that mostly had to do with people. Mostly had to do with love and with loss and how to cope and confront that.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Diana from Manhattan. Hi, Diana, you're on the air.

Diana: Hi, how are you? I love your show. Well, two things. First, the song New York by Alicia Keys, which the news Station, 1010 WINS, played as an anthem all the time. They'd play it two or three times a day. More important, at 7:00 PM every night, people would lean out their windows and stand on their balconies to show appreciation for the essential workers, the hospital personnel, the supermarket workers, the garbage collectors, everyone. They would bang on their pots and pens. That was a truly moving moment, because it really showed that we were all pulling together in times of crisis. People tend to be better than you think they are.

Alison Stewart: Diana, that was lovely. Thank you so much for calling in. Let's talk to Juliana, calling in from Montclair, New Jersey. Hi, Juliana.

Juliana: Hi. I can't wait to read this piece. When I first heard you talk about this, the first thing that came to mind immediately was Tiger King. I don't know if that's on the piece. I was working advertising at the time, and we were all just talking about it. Usually, you don't have the same shows that you talk about as much anymore, but everybody was talking about it. I don't know if it was just how surreal, wild, crazy. Everything just felt completely like a strange world. It was a setting in that way.

Then a couple other thoughts that came to mind from back in the beginning of 2020 was how everybody was also drinking something called like a dalgona coffee. I don't know if it's because it was a way to get like a fancy coffee from home. The quarantine drinks on Zoom calls, which then finally made me think of the last thing that I absolutely loved was the New Yorker cover with a girl sitting on her chair with a martini or a quarantining, I guess. Her house looked insane and a mess, but she looked perfect on the screen and she was having a little bit of a Zoom hangout or something.

Alison Stewart: From the shoulders up.

Juliana: I just loved it.

Alison Stewart: I know exactly what you're talking about, Juliana. I'm going to take one more call. Let's talk to Dee on line four who's calling from Yonkers? Hey, Dee.

Dee: Hey, how are you.

Alison Stewart: Doing great.

Dee: Love the show. The thing that stuck up in my mind is with everything that was going on, Club Quarantine that was put out by D-Nice. It was a way of us all being able to get together. Friends and I would do FaceTime and we're dancing with each other, listening to Club Quarantine and just putting everything aside.

Then the looking in the comments and realizing you weren't just dancing with your friends, you were dancing with Michelle Obama, you were dancing with Timberland, you were dancing with actresses. You were just dancing with everybody. It was just a way of us being able to collectively come together and just have some joy in the middle of what was a really, really, really tough time. That was what I remembered.

Alison Stewart: Dee, thank you so much for calling in. I love the picture that Dee has painted, Adam S., because one of the things I wanted to ask about was how-- the role of social media, that's the big question. Dee brought it into a nice tributary as that of, that we could experience something together, we could experience joy in a tough time with someone we didn't know, doing something that they did organically. I think that's one thing that I found interesting about during the quarantine. Things popped up organically. Creative people made things organically. Who could think you could have a DJ dance party on Instagram, right?

Adam Sternbergh: Oh, yes, definitely. I'm glad she brought that up, because if you look in the comments on our piece, we did not include that in the piece. So many people in the comments were like you can't have this list without the D-Nice. Of course, I always feel like if you do a list like this and people don't have those examples of like, "Oh, but what about this?" Then we haven't really done our job right.

It's really just about starting the conversation and allowing people to think back and go like, "Oh yes, this was the thing that for me and my friends and family was really the thing that I'll always remember." For me, one thing we do all have on the list, speaking of things that happened organically, was the children's book writer, Mo Willems. Probably the most successful children's book writer in the world, very spontaneously started doing these lunchtime drawing sessions.

If you have little kids as I do, that was our version of D-Nice. I was really curious to ask them about it, because it happened so quickly. It was on the Monday of the first week when school had closed. It got it up and running, and it was really just a spontaneous gesture, I think, of what so many of us were feeling. What are we going to do? How are we going to get through this? Then looking for that sense of connection in whatever way that we could establish it.

He said something in his piece, which really stuck with me, which was the realization in the middle of the pandemic or really at the very beginning of it. Having that moment where he thought, science is going to get us out of this, but art will get us through it. As an artist, what can I do to help get people through it? If there's a common theme through all the things on our list or all the things that the callers have mentioned, it's really that impulse to find, in the art, the thing that's going to get us all through.

Alison Stewart: Mark, you write about film extensively, the film industry, what is something that changed during this time in film and the way we think about film or the way film is presented or distributed that you thinks was a good change, was a change that needed to come?

Mark Harris: Oh, wow. I thought I had an answer to that until you threw in that "was a good change".

Alison Stewart: Well, you could take the first half and then you can think about the second half.

Mark Harris: Of course, the biggest change was that in the minds of a huge segment of the American public of the idea of movies and moviegoing became uncoupled. That those were two different things that moviegoing became a solitary at-home pursuit or a group at-home pursuit. The idea of going to a theater, particularly for an older audience, was still fraught with risk and danger. There was a great discomfort and uncertainty about how that was going to last and how long that was going to last.

I guess, if I'm looking for a good thing, I would say that the good thing is that moviegoing didn't die. Slowly but surely, first, Blockbusters came back, and now I think the industry is hoping that more mid-level movies that were for a long time the kind of bread and butter of the film business will follow. I think it's a great question because we're all saying this is the end of the COVID era and today mark's the big transition.

Of course, it doesn't mean we're going to go back to exactly where we were three years ago, because big traumatic life-changing events never take you back to where you were. They only take you forward to someplace new. I think we're just on the precipice of finding out what that new place in terms of movie culture and movie-going culture is going to look like.

Alison Stewart: Adam B., I have to bring this into the conversation because when I was writing at the top, I was like, oh, May 11th, 2020. Then I thought, well, just three weeks later, we would be all gripped by 8 minutes and 46 seconds of George Floyd being murdered, and the country being gripped by this tragedy and facing itself and facing its history in a way that we really hadn't seen in a such a long time. When you think about that moment and how pop culture responded to that moment, what were the highs in the response and what were some of the things we could have done without?

Adam Bradley: Oh, yes. The most powerful responses I think came in the collective action of people taking to the streets-- often taking to the streets with a soundtrack, whether it was Kendrick Lamar, whether it was Pop Smoke, who we write about in the piece. These artists, who by virtue of the rhythms and the words, gave a point of connection for a community of folks who needed to speak out on this horrific scene that we saw displayed in front of us.

The whole moment of George Floyd and his murder is born out of the capacity of social media to disseminate this information with such rapidity, and it brought out the best and the worst of us, as you suggest. For all of us to be home, seeing that, and then making the tough choice of whether it was worth, sometimes the feeling that we were risking our very lives and certainly our health to take to the streets, to make that decision was something that was, I think, for a lot of folks, a turning point in their own relationship to activism. It's something really powerful, I think, to consider.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Donna from Long Island. Hi, Donna. Thank you so much for calling All Of It.

Donna: Hi. I just wanted to thank you because on your show you had the segment, I need a minute with the yoga, the breathing. That got me through. My husband died, I guess, in October of '20. Shortly after, I found out I needed some surgery, I had cancer. There was January 6th. There was [unintelligible 00:33:23]. It was like the world is caving in. I didn't really have a local support system except for a few very dear friends. Every day at lunch, I listened to your program and that segment would come on, and one day I just said, "I need a minute." I started breathing with you and it got me through.

Alison Stewart: Donna, thank you so much for calling in, and really appreciate your candor. I'm glad that we, WNYC, could be there for you. Thank you so much for calling in. It was interesting. I had a conversation with my team at the beginning of the pandemic, and I was like, "What's our purpose, you guys? What are we going to do? What are we gonna do for people? Who are we going to be in this moment?"

We wanted to be of service. I think that's something that radio, and it might be silly to talk about pop culture, but to your point, it's a way that we connect with each other. It's a way we can have this collective experience. I'm really glad you guys put this list together. Thanks to all of our callers who called in. My guests have been Adam Sternbergh, Mark Harris, and Adam Bradley. Check out the piece, 17 Pop Culture moments that defined the COVID Era. Thanks.

Adam Sternbergh: Thank you.

 

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.