Glen Weldon
Glen Weldon is a host of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast. He reviews books, movies, comics and more for the NPR Arts Desk.
Over the course of his career, he has spent time as a theater critic, a science writer, an oral historian, a writing teacher, a bookstore clerk, a PR flack, a completely inept marine biologist and a slightly better-ept competitive swimmer.
Weldon is the author of two cultural histories: Superman: The Unauthorized Biography and The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Slate, McSweeney's and more; his fiction has appeared in several anthologies and other publications. He is the recipient of an NEA Arts Journalism Fellowship, an Amtrak Writers' Residency, a Ragdale Writing Fellowship and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts for Fiction.
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Étoile is the latest series from Amy Sherman-Palladino, the creator of Gilmore Girls and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. It's about the wacky goings-on between two prestigious but struggling ballet companies, one in New York, and one in Paris. -
We cover a lot of TV on this show, but we don't get to everything. Today we're recommending some of our favorite recent TV comedies you don't want to miss, including #1 Happy Family USA, The Righteous Gemstones, North of North, and Deli Boys. -
The last season of the venerable British science fiction series Doctor Who brought a lot of change. The Doctor is now played by Ncuti Gatwa, who is Black and openly queer. And it marked the return of the showrunner who birthed the modern era of Doctor Who. -
The new film Warfare dispenses with a lot of things you've come to expect from Hollywood war movies. It's based on the memories of a platoon of Navy SEALS. -
At a certain point, most of us settle into a groove with our pop culture consumption. We know what we love and what we're not into. But sometimes, all it takes is one great outlier or a willingness to step outside our comfort zone to make us reconsider what we don't like. -
Season three of The White Lotus just wrapped up, but not before serving up a tropical buffet of sex, betrayal, violence, revenge, privilege, incest, drugs, death, and spirituality. We finally found out whose dead body was floating in the pond way back in the season premiere. -
In Daredevil: Born Again, Charlie Cox returns as everyone's favorite blind-but-with-heightened-senses Marvel superhero. This time out, he hangs up his horns and throws himself into his career as a lawyer. -
In the very funny new satire The Studio, Seth Rogen plays a Hollywood studio head desperately trying to do a job he's afraid of failing at every single day. -
In Death of a Unicorn, Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega star as dad and daughter facing off against some angry-as-hell horned beasts. -
In season two of Severance (streaming on Apple TV+), we got a blowout finale with answers to mysteries and even more layers of weirdness.