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100 Pieces of Pop Culture That Defined Obamacore


You know them when you see them — whether they were genius or, well, not.

Its global popularity launched a thousand conversations about the death of Hae Min Lee in addition to a million other podcasts: about the “power of storytelling,” internet sleuthing, true crime as a moral force as well as a feminist project, and the radical fantasy that this new media format could fix journalism and the criminal justice system. Neil DeGrasse Tyson going on Joe Rogan’s podcast, or Kim Kardashian showing her glistening rear on the cover of Paper magazine in late 2014 — each of these things, it was said, had “broken the internet.” The term was an offshoot of a phrase, popular on Reddit, used to describe a viral accomplishment: “You won the internet.” Both spoke to the belief that the internet, diffuse though it was, nevertheless possessed a unified culture. A watershed moment in modern masculinity not unlike Rick Ross dropping the kingpin rap classic Teflon Don after being exposed as a former corrections officer, Drake’s public embarrassment of Meek Mill in summer 2015 after the Philly rapper aired his Canadian friend out for using ghostwriters highlighted a massive shift in fans’ ideals.

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