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What's Making Us Happy: A guide to your weekend reading and listening

This week, the Olympics got underway, we glimpsed a high-profile attempt to sound like an icon, and Disneyland avoided a strike.

Here's what NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour crew was paying attention to — and what you should check out this weekend.

GWAR covering “I’m Just Ken”

The A.V. Club was recently acquired by Paste Magazine and they’ve just brought back A.V. Undercover. This is a series where they provide a list of songs that artists can choose to cover. As the season goes on, the list gets smaller and smaller, so if you’re a band near the end of the season, you have fewer and fewer choices. They brought the series back with GWAR covering “I'm just Ken” from the Barbie soundtrack. It brought back memories of GWAR's Tiny Desk Concert. I was the founding editor of The A.V. Club, and I'm just delighted to have the series back and delighted to have The A.V. Club in good hands. — Stephen Thompson

The "Tested" series

/ Illustration by Luke Medina/NPR; Photo/Getty Images
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Illustration by Luke Medina/NPR; Photo/Getty Images

Tested is a 6-part series from NPR's Embedded and CBC. The first episode is about Namibian runner Christine Mboma, who was suddenly told by the sporting authority that she had to artificially reduce her testosterone levels in order to compete in women's track events. This series explores a fuller context of sex and gender and sport, which have gotten reduced into binaries in questions about trans athletes. This series tells a fuller, adjacent story — I am so grateful for this context and for the work that went into it. Plus, the show has a lot of joy in it because it’s about athletes — Mboma is soooo excited about running and she’s so beloved in Namibia where she’s from. It's hosted by producer, editor and general audio smarty Rose Eveleth. — Linda Holmes

This Is How You Lose The Time War

/ S&S/Saga Press
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S&S/Saga Press

If you are into romance, letters, poetry — I have a great book for you. It's called This Is How You Lose the Time War by two authors, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. (El-Mohtar has previously written book reviews for NPR — you can read them here.) Imagine a sentient plant falls in love with a machine and they're traveling through time and they share letters. It's very abstract. But my God, the romance! You will be swept away by the most poetic letters you've ever read. It is epic. It's a short, slim, little read. If you're like me, and you like to annotate books with great quotes, your whole book will be marked up. This is my third time reading it. I'll probably read it a fourth. I'm obsessed. — Joelle Monique

More recommendations from the Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter

by Linda Holmes

The Olympics are kicking off this weekend, and NPR is following all of the ways to wrap your mind around the enormous event. Three years ago, when the (delayed) Tokyo Olympics were happening, I reported back on my project of watching at least some of every sport. I'll be watching a lot of those sports again.

Elizabeth Blair rounded up some clips and reactions to the potential appearance of Maya Rudolph's Kamala Harris on Saturday Night Live.

I am very late to HBO's Industry, which PCHH host Aisha Harris hosted an episode about in 2022. But just as I was late to Succession and then learned to love it, I am learning to love Industry, and it's absolutely worth catching up on before it comes back for a third season in a couple of weeks.


Beth Novey adapted the Pop Culture Happy Hour segment "What's Making Us Happy" for the Web. If you like these suggestions, consider signing up for our newsletter to get recommendations every week. And listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Copyright 2024 NPR

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Linda Holmes is a pop culture correspondent for NPR and the host of Pop Culture Happy Hour. She began her professional life as an attorney. In time, however, her affection for writing, popular culture, and the online universe eclipsed her legal ambitions. She shoved her law degree in the back of the closet, gave its living room space to DVD sets of The Wire, and never looked back.
Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)
Joelle Monique