Episode 98: Walt Hickey on How Pop Culture Shapes Us

Emerging Form

As a culture, we spend a lot of our time watching tv and movies and reading and popular fiction, but we rarely stop to reflect on the influence these forms of entertainment have on our lives. In his new book, You Are What You Watch, data journalist Walt Hickey takes deep, fun, rambunctious dive into all the ways that movies, television, and other forms of pop culture are fundamentally important to how we experience the world, how we see ourselves and the kind of the values that we embrace. He explains how Jurassic Park inspired him to study math in college and got people interested in paleontology while also increasing funding for the field. He graphs how movies drive tourism and influence what kind of dogs people want. Best of all, the book contains an entire chapter exploring what stories do to their creators. Turns out, writing fan fiction puts a rocket on someone’s ability to write.

Walt Hickey is the Deputy Editor for Data and Analysis at Insider News. He works on cool stories and supports the newsroom through data journalism. In 2022, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Illustrated Reporting. In Spring of 2018, he launched his creator-owned daily morning newsletter Numlock News. It’s all about the cool numbers buried in the news. It’s funny and makes you smarter. He also predicts the Oscars in the Numlock Awards Supplement, a seasonal pop-up spinoff of Numlock. He’s the author of the new book You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everyting.

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