Designing meaningful rituals on your terms

Weddings are such a rich text. Maybe the richest text? At least how they're performed today, at the intersection of conspicuous consumption and cultural capital. What do your wedding favors say about you? What about your cell-phone policy? The number of times you post your wedding photos? If you have three separate wedding outfits, is that extra? But is just one... not enough? And if people talk so much shit about weddings (going to them, paying for them, planning them) why don't we just get married like it's 1962?

Amanda Montell — author of The Age of Magical Overthinking and architect of an extremely extra wedding — joins the pod to unpack wedding culture's turn towards content creation (with a bunch of bonus talk about how to do what actually feels right for you). What a wacky, joyful, yet still classically Culture Study ep!

Via Pinterest, of course

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Show Notes:

Follow Amanda Montell on IG here: https://www.instagram.com/amanda_montell/?hl=en

We talk a lot about Amanda's wedding/wedding photos — a peek here: https://www.instagram.com/p/DK2R0NzsruX/?hl=en&img_index=1

Buy The Age of Magical Overthinking here: https://bookshop.org/a/56144/9781668007983

Buy Cultish here: https://bookshop.org/a/56144/9780062993168

Listen to Amanda's podcast, Sounds Like a Cult: https://www.soundslikeacult.com/

And her other podcast, Magical Overthinkers: https://bio.site/magicaloverthinkers

We're currently looking for your questions for future episodes about:

BOOK CONCIERGE... BUT FOR IRISH LITERATURE. We're so thrilled to have Maggie O'Farrell (author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait) on the pod to do an Irish version of our book concierge: tell us what books you love, and Maggie and I will suggest Irish books to check out (or ask us Maggie O'Farrell-related questions! Her new book, Land, is set in Ireland before and after 'The Great Hunger')

HEARTTHROBS with return guest Adib Khorram! Who are the heartthrobs in 2026, where did they come from, who gets to be one, etc etc

WHITE LADY HAIR! Cultural critic Sarah Mesle will be joining us to talk about her new book Tangled: Seven Iconic Moments in White Women's Hair and What They Tell Us About Power, Pleasure, and Complicity. If there's a white lady whose hair interests you, I guarantee you it interests Sarah, too. We can talk about specific celebrity/actress haircuts but also specific styles/trends. I cannot wait for this one.

BOOMER MOMS! Tracy Clark-Flory and I need your questions about why boomer moms (very broad designation here, I realize) are the way they are — we're specifically going to talk about the constrictions of growing up in '60s/'70s U.S., particularly around femininity, race, education, body image, employment, and motherhood. This one's gonna be really good, I know it.

INTERGENERATIONAL FRIENDSHIP with Andrew Sean Greer, author of Less (and Villa Coco, a new book with an intergenerational friendship at its center). You can ask questions about how to find intergenerational friends, how to sustain those friendships, what people seem to love so much about them, wherever your heart takes you.

HOW TO FALL IN LOVE WITH A CITY with Lilah Raptopoulos, editor of the Financial Times city life vertical. We're going to talk about how to fall in love with cities WHILE VISITING (for fun, for vacation, for work) and how to fall in love with the city where you currently live. What tips do you want? What city are you struggling to fall in love with?

Anything you need advice for/want musings about for the AAA segment. You can ask about anything, it’s literally the name of the segment.

As always, you can submit your questions (and ideas for future eps) here

For this week’s discussion: How have you observed the content-ification of weddings in your world... and how have you seen people resist it?

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