How prominent is the male gaze in music reviews? Why are there no guilty pleasure songs? And how authentic can artists in an industry like the music industry really be?

In this episode, Antonia delves into the world of music, more specifically, music reviews. Together with her guest, Alex van der Hulst, she explores the shift from rockism to popism, asks whether we can separate artists from their art, and remembers iconic and extremely inauthentic pop groups (yes, it’s Milli Vanilli and Boney M.).

Alex van der Hulst is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Arts, where he researches popular music. His research focuses on how music reviews have shaped popular music and how they were shaped by it. Next to doing research, Alex also works as a journalist and is a writer of music reviews himself.

If you want to know more about music reviews and popular music, make sure to follow Alex’s suggestion and read or watch High Fidelity.

Edit: Jara Majerus

Cover: Antonia Leise

Do we need to treat nature differently? How can philosophy help us do so? And what makes documentaries about cats a good starting point?

In this week’s episode, Jara explores nature. More specifically, she investigates how humans relate to nature, why we like to see ourselves as separate from it, and why we treat nature the way we do. As always, she does so with an expert guest. For this episode, Marjolein Oele joins the podcast to offer insights and explanations on why humans and nature might not be so different after all.

Marjolein is a professor in the Humanities at the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Philosophy, Theology, and Religion at Radboud University. One of her many interests is environmental philosophy, which examines the natural environment and the place humans occupy within it.

If you want to follow this train of thought and explore the human-nature relationship further, take Marjolein’s advice and watch the documentary Inside the Mind of a Cat.

Poison, medicine or magic potion? Drugs can probably be all of that. But what makes a drug legal or illegal? Or rather: who decides on that?

“Who will ever relate the whole history of narcotics? It is almost the history of ‘culture’,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche more than a hundred years ago – and he might be onto something. In today’s episode, Antonia and this week’s guest, Brigitte Adriaensen, talk about how drugs have been perceived throughout time and why colonialism wasn’t only built on the drug trade but continues to influence how we view substances like cocaine.

Brigitte Adriaensen is a professor of Hispanic Literature and Culture. For her VICI project ‘Poison, Medicine or Magic Potion’, she and her team research the perception of peyote, ayahuasca and coca across time.

Would you like to learn more about the history of drugs? Then follow Brigitte’s recommendations and watch the movie Embrace of the Serpent (2015), visit the website Microcosms: A Homage to Sacred Plants of the Americas or read the book One River by Canadian anthropologist Wade Davis.