Single source for staying up to date with current events and culture?

December 29, 2014 10:19 PM

I'm looking for a consolidated, curated source for recent pop culture. More inside.

Hi all,

I was watching a TV show called The Thick of It earlier (great show, by the way; I would definitely recommend it) and one of the central plot elements for an episode is a "zeitgeist tape," which shows clips of music videos, TV shows, and movies for the week. In the show, it's meant to clue the British Prime Minister in to recent pop culture so that he can sound "with it," and is accompanied with a document of recent happenings.

I've been looking for something like that for a long time, and I was wondering if anyone knows of a consolidated, curated source for recent pop culture (e.g. important music, TV shows, movies, sports results, etc.). The closest thing I've found is email alerts from news websites about a single topic at a time (e.g. sports for that week or important financial news for the day) but I haven't been able to find a single source for everything important that's happened recently.

Thanks!

posted by jdgreen to Society & Culture (7 answers total)

Best answer: The category "recent pop culture" is too broad for me to fully get ("important" is only obvious in hindsight, isn't it?), but you might have luck with one of these:

Cool Hunting
Vice
Flavorwire

I think the kind of thing you describe with the Zeitgeist tape would be very difficult these days, as pop culture becomes more global. Is Taylor Swift important, or is KPop? Or maybe Taiwanese punk?
posted by frumiousb at 10:39 PM on December 29, 2014 [2 favorites]

There is a magazine (and website) called The Week. It bundles all of the week's news from a myriad of sources in about 25 pages, including some celebrity gossip, album and movie releases, and art shows. It also covers works events from multiple perspectives and scientific discoveries. I quite like it.
posted by jander03 at 11:59 PM on December 29, 2014 [1 favorite]

The A.V. Club has TV/book/music/movie/game reviews, non-vapid entertainment news, interviews, retrospective features, and "best of the web" highlights.
posted by Rhaomi at 1:56 AM on December 30, 2014 [3 favorites]

assuming you're looking for strictly pop culture without any hard news thrown in, i'm gonna second Flavorwire, mentioned above.

their main focuses are TV, movies, books and music. very occasional think pieces or celeb stories. not much sports to speak of though, so in those terms I guess it won't qualify as a single source. but i'm not aware of a site that does all that plus sports too.
posted by isaacq at 5:46 AM on December 30, 2014

It's yearly, but Google Trends does a good job.
posted by blue_beetle at 6:07 AM on December 30, 2014

Hi, my solution to this problem is to:

a) Create a Twitter account
b) Follow the key sources of info in the topic I'm interested in - can be 1000+ Twitter accounts
c) Give Nuzzel - http://nuzzel.com/ - access to the Twitter account
d) Nuzzel then sends me a daily email telling me which were the most shared news stories among the Twitter accounts I'm following

This email then becomes my daily, "curated", news briefing.
posted by Speculatist at 6:32 AM on December 30, 2014 [4 favorites]

I find that most of my pop culture needs are met by ohnotheydidnt. What I particularly like is that it covers movie trailers, new song releases, nasty gossip and trends from most of the English speaking world. It can be perused in ten minute increments.
posted by msali at 9:10 PM on December 30, 2014