Culture Creep: Notes on the Pop Apocalypse

"It’s fair to say that I have been anticipating Alice Bolin’s new essay collection since I turned the last page of her dagger-sharp debut Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession in 2018. If in Dead Girls Bolin probed what’s underneath our appetite for true crime stories – and what our desire for such narratives reveals about our culture’s attitudes toward women – in Culture Creep she widens her lens to interrogate a seemingly disparate array of millennial pop culture obsessions, from NXIVM to nostalgia for the teen magazines of the aughts. Under Bolin’s gimlet eye, what connects these topics is the overlap between (post)feminism, late capitalism, and technology, which all inspire cultish thinking. It all makes for an ambitious and unexpected collection."