Wannabe

In nine lively, incisive essays, NPR Pop Culture Happy Hour co-host Aisha Harris reflects on the cultural touchstones that raised her? contrasting these with past and present sensations to analyze the tropes that have shaped her heart and mind.

Aisha Harris has made a name for herself as someone you can turn to for an engaging and incisive take on whatever new show or movie everyone is talking about, or should be taking about ? first at Slate, then at the Times, and recently as a co-host of NPR's popular Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast. Here, she turns her analytical talents inward, reflecting on the culture that raised her into the person and thinker she is today. In essays that span the personal and political, the high-brow and low, she contrasts the formative touchstones of her 90s childhood with both iconic precursors and more recent sensations to analyze the various tropes that have shaped her heart and mind.

Aisha's observations invite us into her family, her adolescence, her relationships, her work. In the opening essay, an interaction with Chance the Rapper prompts an investigation into the origin myth of her name that becomes an ode to Stevie Wonder, Roots, and her parents. In another, we return to the golden era of the Spice Girls as Aisha is urged by her friends to dress up as Scary Spice though she prefers Ginger, and how perfectly that feeling is later captured by an episode of Pen15. Elsewhere, she traces the evolution of the ?Black Friend? trope from its Twainian origins through Clueless and She's All That to New Girl and the Sex and The City reboot. Later she zooms way out into the overlap of taste and identity in this era, arguing for us to let go of the patriarchal ethos that you are what you like, so we can all be free to just like what we like.

Whatever the subject, Aisha's mind makes a terrific companion, as her many fans can attest. Sitting down with her book is like getting a chance to hang out with your smart, hilarious, pop-culture obsessed friend for longer than you've ever been able to before?and it's a real pleasure.

AISHA HARRIS is co-host and reporter for the popular NPR podcast, Pop Culture Happy Hour. From 2012 to 2018, she covered culture for Slate Magazine as a staff writer, editor and the host of the film and TV podcast, Represent. She joined the New York Times in 2018 as the assistant TV editor on the Culture Desk and became culture editor for the Opinion Desk, where she wrote and edited a variety of pieces at the intersection of the arts, society and politics. Born and raised in Connecticut, she earned her bachelor's degree in theatre from Northwestern University and her master's degree in cinema studies from New York University. This is her first book. Find her on Twitter @CraftingMyStyle or at AishaHarris.com.