The Magpie Writers Nostalgia: A Critique of Pop Culture and Late Capitalism in Alice Bolins Culture Creep

In the year 2025, there has been a proliferation of essay collections by millennial women reflecting on the frenetic moment in which they came of age. These books, including Culture Creep by Alice Bolin, Y2K by Colette Shade, and One in a Millennial by Kate Kennedy, share a fascination with various aspects of pop culture, including glitter, paparazzi, reality TV, AOL chat rooms, multilevel marketing, and diet culture. These writers approach pop culture and consumer goods as ciphers for the contradictions of late capitalism rather than trivialities. Bolin's Culture Creep explores how the rise of the internet transformed pop culture into a compulsive and corrupting force that stagnates social progress as it accumulates. She argues that our collective nostalgia for the 2000s obscures its more noxious elements, making us susceptible to pernicious forces like misogyny and consumerism. Nostalgia serves as both a radar and a distraction in her work, as she is an uneasy critic who tends to get gummed up with apologies and disclosures of complicity. Technology offers endless opportunities for nostalgic escapism, from buying old issues of Twist off eBay to streaming media that was once available almost exclusively on discs. However, consuming content from childhood can be challenging due to the overwhelmingly offensive portrayals of women or casually racist remarks. Two television series that Bolin can't help returning to are Star Trek: The Next Generation and Sex and the City. They hold up for the modern viewer not for being free from faux pas, but because their interrogative structures tackle the same dilemmas we face in contemporary culture, such as the ethical quandaries presented by technological advancement or dating under rapidly shifting social norms. Bolin also explores how self-tracking apps like FitBit and MyFitnessPal have enabled the resurgence of dangerous diet culture that has tormented millennial women since their youth. The rise of social media has added additional incentive to these rigorous beauty standards. We are more susceptible because teen magazines with their personality quizzes and parables of which women not to be made us more accustomed to choosing from a curated catalog of identities. In that sense, social media can be compared to Shrinky Dinks, the special canvas that transforms drawings into little plastic charms when baked in the oven. Platforms like Instagram use algorithms to push people to make their bodies smaller and preserve their image so it can be marketed, turning individuals into products. The final essay of the collection, "The Rabbit Hole," is a near-50-page examination of the Playboy empire born out of Bolin's self-conscious obsession with celebrity tell-all memoirs that eventually brought her to Down the Rabbit Hole by Holly Madison. The reality show followed the girlfriends of octogenarian founder Hugh Hefner through an incessant string of parties at the Playboy mansion. Bolin reckons with her penchant for these women, as well as with Spears and Paris Hilton, all of whom perpetuated and profited off the oppressive patriarchal ideals of thinness.