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Pop Culture Happy Hour: In One Year And Out The Other, 2018 Edition

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[Note: In this discussion, I refer to Guardians Of The Galaxy, Vol. 2 as the third-highest-grossing movie of 2017, after Beauty And The Beast and Wonder Woman. We recorded this episode before the holidays, and Star Wars: The Last Jedi has since surpassed all three.]

It's become a Pop Culture Happy Hour tradition to open each year with four great big chewy opportunities to embarrass ourselves. First, we introduce our pop-cultural New Year's resolutions (opportunity #1) by revisiting our resolutions from last year (opportunity #2); then, we revisit the previous year's oft-misbegotten pop-culture predictions (opportunity #3) before announcing what we're pretty sure is going to happen in the year to come (opportunity #4). You've heard us be wrong before, but rarely in such sustained and concentrated doses!

For the third year in a row, Code Switch's Kat Chow joins Linda Holmes, Glen Weldon and me for a rollicking roundup of wrongness and accountability. Linda gets to crow about actually having written her novel, Glen promises to relearn a skill he'd inexplicably unlearned, Kat tries to get out into the world (here, by the way, is the Instagram feed she mentions), I attempt to combine parenting with pop-culture blind spots, and so, so much more.

Finally, as always, we close with what's making us happy this week. Because I am nothing if not a fount of high-culture insight, I'm smitten with a years-old dog meme. Glen loves a new and absurd parody of homemaking TV shows. Speaking of parodies, Kat loves a series of book-cover parodies on Instagram — scroll down a bit to see the ones she describes. And Linda is very worked up over the promise of a certain Idris Elba tweet.

Find us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter: me, Linda, Glen, Kat, the show, producer Jessica, and producer emeritus Mike.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)