Jessa Crispin
95 episodes listed below
Culture criticism with teeth and footnotes.
Public Intellectual with Jessa Crispin treats culture as a live argument, not a lifestyle category. Episodes move through publishing gatekeeping, true crime, astrology, migration, happiness, and journalism with blunt curiosity and literary impatience.
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Public Intellectual is primarily an interview show, with host Jessa Crispin sitting down weekly with a different writer, historian, academic, or critic, though some episodes drop the guest format entirely for solo commentary, such as an episode built around a personal 'writer's manifesto.' Crispin, a former founder of the literary magazine Bookslut, argues from a class-conscious, anti-credentialist position, repeatedly returning to how money, education, and institutional access determine whose writing and ideas get taken seriously. Recurring guest Margaret Howie has co-developed the show's 'wife studies' series, which uses cases like the Jeffrey Epstein scandal to examine how wives of powerful, disgraced men absorb reputational damage. Other episodes bring in specialists such as a historian discussing American expatriation, an astrologer discussing the commercialization of astrology, and an author discussing the culture around true crime fandom. Topics regularly connect to publishing industry structures, including MFA programs, literary agents, unpaid internships, and racial and class diversity in hiring. The tone is argumentative and essayistic rather than descriptive, with Crispin steering conversations toward institutional critique even when the nominal subject is pop culture. The show is produced by Forever Dog Productions and supported in part through Patreon. Episodes run roughly 30 to 60 minutes. Listeners who follow literary and media criticism, feminist commentary, or publishing industry politics make up the show's core audience. The format favors depth on a single guest topic per episode over news-cycle commentary or roundtable discussion.
Made for: For listeners who want literary, political, and media criticism that can handle discomfort, contradiction, and ugly institutional history. It especially suits readers, writers, journalists, and culture obsessives tired of publicity-shaped conversation.
What sets it apart: The show turns interviews into arguments without losing intimacy. Its edge comes from connecting apparently separate subjects - true crime, astrology apps, MFA culture, alt-weeklies, and happiness - to class, power, taste, and institutional permission.
Radical firebrand Jessa Crispin excoriates contemporary culture week in and week out in this no-nonsense corrective to the world of anti-intellectualism.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · June 2026
Public Intellectual turns cultural institutions, belief systems, and public taste into brisk arguments about authority and exclusion.
Public Intellectual with Jessa Crispin sits in Society & Culture as sharp conversational criticism. Jessa brings guests into arguments about culture, authority, and the institutions that decide whose work gets treated as serious.
You want Robocop, astrology apps, and MFA gatekeeping on the same witness stand, with Jessa Crispin asking why the paperwork smells like culture rot.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A bracing true-crime discussion that looks past the crime and toward the appetite around it.
Jessa Crispin and Mikita Brottman take direct aim at true-crime fascination, especially the pull of an idealized killer, a certain kind of victim, and the reassuring idea that ugly events can still be neatly resolved.
A skeptical, useful look at who can move, and who gets stuck when the paperwork bites.
Jessa Crispin and Nancy Green push back on the easy idea that crossing borders is just a matter of wanting it badly enough. The episode works best when it gets specific about consular help and legal jurisdiction, and it keeps circling back to the obstacles people hit once they…
A sharp, darkly funny look at Epstein, marriage, and the women left beside bad men.
Jessa Crispin and Margaret Howie keep the wife studies series pointed at the latest Epstein fallout, with the focus on married men in Jeffrey Epstein's orbit and the wives who stayed put.
A sharp, self-implicating meditation on writing, media boredom, and the ethics of saying something real.
Jessa Crispin turns a solo episode into a blunt meditation on what writers owe the work, the people they write about, and themselves. She moves through media obsession, profile culture, and the narrow loop of professional commentary, while also folding in her own insecurity,…
A skeptical take on astrology's boom, its meme era, and the work of keeping it honest.
Public Intellectual treats astrology's rise as a question of seriousness: what happens when a practice built on intuition, rigor, and meaning gets reduced to jokes, apps, and social media shorthand.
A loose, thoughtful conversation about happiness, performance, and the strain of making work public.
Jessa Crispin starts with a blunt question about whether happiness even exists, then lets the conversation move where it wants: into public life, performance, and the way social media can flatten ordinary satisfaction.
A clear case for why small newspapers still matter.
Jessa Crispin and Brandon Soderberg make a plain argument for what an alt-weekly still has to do now: stay small enough to answer to the city that reads it, and stubborn enough to keep going when the wider media climate gets harsher and noisier.
A sharp look at class prejudice in publishing and the gatekeeping around who gets to tell stories.
Public Intellectual lands on class prejudice in publishing and does not let the issue drift into vague talk about diversity. Jessa Crispin frames it as a structural problem, one that sits underneath the familiar gatekeeping arguments.
Rukmini Callimachi's ISIS investigation that became a case study in its own failure.
Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant explain one topic per episode, from the bicameral mind to Boeing's MCAS.
Multi-part dramatized retellings of scandals like OceanGate's Titan and the Lehman Brothers collapse.
Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins dissect Oscar races, new releases, and Hollywood news.
True crime comforts because it gives bad things an ending.
Freedom of movement gets a rude audit.
Wife studies gets grim fast.
Jessa Crispin drops the guest.
Astrology is booming, and the host does not quite trust the boom.
Happiness starts to sound suspicious.
Alt-weeklies are disappearing.
Class prejudice sits beneath publishing's polished diversity talk.
The awards were never the whole story.
Robocop gets hauled back into the room.