Air isn't an object, right? Wrong. This week, climate comms expert and historian Dr Alice Bell makes Dan and Kasia think hard about ephemerality via a jam jar of polluted air, captured 'fresh' from the Euston Road in north London. In doing so they explore the history of the climate crisis – where it came from, who covered it up, and when people sta…

Is there actually any moral value to hard work? From the Dignity of Labour to CEO Mindset, Girlbossing and Instagram Hustle propaganda, our entire culture is full of messages that working hard and 'loving what you do' will make you a good person. Aspiring idlers Kasia and Dan are here to tell you why that's wrong. Prompted in part by the Wellcome C…

The early 2000s were a fever dream: why was pop culture so mean? Specifically, why was it acceptable to write off entire cities - and the people within them - as crap? This is the question posed by our special guest Isaac Rangaswami, journalist, writer and brains behind Instagram sensation Caffs not Cafes. Isaac’s object is the wildly popular 2003 …

They are marketed as democratised holiday rentals, where you get an ‘authentic’ experience by literally living in someone's home - so why are Airbnb’s full of crap, generic art? The answer is obvious (predatory venture capitalism), but the effect is cursed in uniquely jarring ways. Welcome back from your summer holidays - to a new season of Cursed …

If smart, humane, pro-migration Ed Miliband really hated Labour’s infamous ‘Controls On Immigration’ coffee mug – both of his parents were Jews who escaped the Nazis and found refuge in Britain – then why did he let it happen on his watch? Why is there so much cowardice, ignorance and fiction at the heart of our immigration conversation? Why does L…

How do you start collecting objects for a cursed museum? Kasia and Dan spend all of their money in the gift shop of the Museum of Neoliberalism (well, it wouldn’t be a Museum of Neoliberalism if you left with more money than you entered with). They find a world curated by Darren Cullen - artist, activist and collector of some of the most mundanely …

Troubling war merch, Van Gogh bucket hats, Soviet space dogs and the scourge of ‘world’ history - Kasia and Dan stage their first-ever live show to celebrate 100,000 downloads! They tell a sell-out crowd about some of their favourite cursed objects from museum shops, plus some of their favorites from the podcast. And we heard from YOU - via audienc…

A record etched onto an x-ray of a (probably, now) dead Soviet citizen’s head. That is the uniquely cursed object Stephen Coates came across in a Russian flea market in 2014. Weird, eerie, and almost polyphonic in quality, these DIY records captivated him and sparked a mission to find the bootleggers who had risked up to *five years* in a gulag for…

Oh god, not another one! When BREAKING NEWS bursts through the wall, we spring, gently and apologetically, into action, with a (cough) emergency p for the snappy g. That’s right guys, we’ve got a bootleg Keir Starmer mug and we’re not afraid to do a podcast about it. Real change. Change you can believe in. Change for you, change for me, change for …

What if there was an object so cursed that it was never even made? This week we are joined by culture studies don Prof Anamik Saha to discuss anti-racism, racism and corporate diversity in pop culture - via Agatha Christie, Yellowface, American Fiction and One Day - woke agendas and cultural elites, colourblind casting, sensitivity readers and cult…

Were you into Cursed Objects before it was cool? Like Grandpa Simpson remembering the war, this week Dan and Kasia are holding a seance for those perennial whipping boys and girls, the hipsters – and recalling the green remembered hills of artisan beards, cereal cafes and small-batch trucker hats. Kicking off with a revisit to seminal, frequently p…

The police just follow the law, right!? Our guest Melayna Lamb thinks we need to flip this thinking around - and see the police as a law unto themselves. Using the example of the very cursed ‘thin blue line’ police badge, Melayna challenges the police’s foundational idea that they are the ‘thin blue line between order and chaos’. What happens if - …

How do you like your eggs in the morning? Hopefully not wet?? It’s Easter, so in the spirit of bringing you some seasonal #content, Kasia and Dan explore what came to be known as ‘wet egg discourse’ via a Morrisons food-to-go container of six hard-boiled eggs. Is it ever appropriate to eat an egg on a train? Why are eggs eaten around the beginning …

Forget everything you thought you knew about the housing crisis! This week we have a very special guest, housing lawyer Nick Bano, with a hugely enlightening and at times shocking lesson in just how we got into this mess. Drawing on his searing new book Against Landlords, Nick argues that the YIMBY / NIMBY argument is distracting us from the real p…

Kasia and Dan are earning their lunch. And it’s a big, steaming bowl of cuteness! They go to the Somerset House ‘Cute’ exhibition to unravel how this seemingly benign cultural phenomenon has come to infect our brains with adorable kittens and kawaii. Often seen as infantile and saccharine - can cuteness be emancipatory or is it an escape from the g…

This week, Dan and Kasia are getting into a submersible and heading into the dark blue depths, poking around the extremely cursed domain of Britain's unnatural party of government, THE CONSERVATIVE AND UNIONIST PARTY. The Tories. The true Blues. That lot. Specifically, we're talking Tory merch. Just what the hell is going on in the Tories' online s…

We're baaaack! And we're feeling FIT, while also reassuring you that it's what's inside that counts. Kasia and Dan return with a new series, where today we're talking about the beauty industry, vanity and gender, and - following a Cursed Objects outing to the Wellcome Collection's new exhibition The Cult of Beauty - early modern German wife-prettyi…

It's a classic Haunted Dickensian Cursed Objects Office Christmas Party! If you think Halloween is the spookiest time of year - you’re dead wrong. We’re gathering round the metaphorical office photocopier to delve into the pagan origins of festive ghost stories. What can a mysterious RNLI lifeboat poster in Kasia’s hallway tell us about the ‘happy …

Service! This week, we are hovering around ‘the pass’, checking our plating is okay, and asking how a simple labour-saving device, a coffee shop palette knife, caused Kasia so much angst and strife – “like a dagger to my heart”? Maybe it’s because of the uniquely painful and exhausting nature of working in food and drink service. Kasia and Dan disc…

Mice, lice, moths…and prehistoric-looking ‘weta’ grasshoppers. We are in the grips of a pest control moral panic. Could the humble hedgehog be the solution to the bedbug APOCALYPSE that newspapers keep telling us is wracking London? From Ancient Greek prayers for worms to eat someone else's crops, to lousy experiences of the Spanish Civil War, and …

Recorded on a hungover rainy Sunday, it's a history-on-TV episode, and it's an episode about HISTORY IN THE FIELD. Literally in the field, or rather in a field: metal detecting, archeology, and a little bit of mudlarking on the side. Don't we all want to find some buried treasure? This week, Dan and Kasia talk about the sweet and gently profound Ma…

It's our 50th episode! Sort of. There's an asterisk. But it's sort of our 50th episode! To mark the occasion, Dan and Kasia are tackling their own logo, the Cursed Objects avatar and icon: the beans clock. They take on the politics of time, and discuss the use of the clock to discipline people into docile worker-drones. They learn the helpful unit …

What happens when a revolution dies? Jack Shenker witnessed firsthand the phenomenal Egyptian strike waves of the late 2000s that led to the toppling of the Mubarak regime, reporting from Tahrir Square and the towns and factories beyond - in 2016 publishing The Egyptians. This episode, our very special guest brings in a mug from the April 6th Youth…

Welcome to a new series of Cursed Objects! For the first episode back, very special guest historian Charlotte Lydia Riley brings in a souvenir mug commemorating the British Empire Exhibition of 1924 – where the very normal exhibits included a working coalmine, a model of the Prince of Wales sculpted out of butter, and… actual human beings brought b…

For the next Patreon-only Cursed Summer Session, Dan and Kasia get stuck into a decades-old British institution, with a TV review of Antiques Roadshow - comparing the huge gulf between the show in 1990 and 2023. Is it the most suffocating, reactionary show on TV? Twee middle-class commodity fetishism? Or is there more to it than that - couldn't thi…

Sit up straight, hippies! Kasia and Dan have some questions for you, and it's high time you answered. Where did all this magic mushroom merch come from? What makes tye-die and flares swing in and out of fashion? What is the thread between psychedelia in 1960s pop culture and medieval dance manias? What does Camden market have to do with all this? A…

Pukka! We’re dancing in the moonlight with the king of the English culinary world, Jamie Oliver. How did someone so cringe achieve such dizzying levels of fame and power? How did he end up being an unofficial advisor to Tonty Blair? Special guests Jonathan Nunn and Biz take us through Jamie’s Naked Chef years, the Downing Street years and the Jerk …

Come fly away with us and Alain de Botton (sorry but he's coming too), and take a trip on Venga Airways - but we're not leaving the ground: you're trapped with us in the departure lounge, for ever. Are airports the most cursed spaces in the modern world? Liminal spaces between nations and cultures, a surveilled, high-security purgatory, with access…

It's a source of strength, life, sickness, disgust, delight and deep nausea. It's fraught with climate controversy and tensions over rights, care, state power, social democracy, misogyny and outrageous colonial history. Where did we learn that strong kids drink milk? Why is the Laughing Cow not laughing anymore? Why have neo-Nazis adopted it as a w…

Oh so you're 6 months old and you say you're a true Guns 'n' Roses fan? Name their top 3 albums then! Coming to you live from the furious and cathartic heart of the moshpit, this week Dan and Kasia take on the golden age of RAWK, homemade metal 'battle jackets', music fandom and nerdery, masculinity, authenticity and the long history of rock 'selli…

Smoking is almost too on-the-nose a subject for Cursed Objects. But vapes - candy-coloured, daftly-named, targeted at children, making wads of $$$ for the same tobacco companies - vapes are perfect. How are these cursed little dummies - cheap plastic disposable tat, destined for landfill - marketed? Why did fags disappear from the movies? How has B…

The desire to feel like you are 'part of history' can turn even the most ardent republican into a flag-waving monarchist shill. So why are we all so desperate to tell subsequent generations that we were 'there' and how does this urge corrode politics? Just in time for the King's Coronation, from our Patreon to main feed, we explore the period of na…

Kasia and Dan address their toughest question yet: are cats left wing? Springing from a shared love of feline friends, they trace the history of cat-obsessed activists and intellectuals through Kasia's cat The Professor's very gross lost claw. Why did the left choose to welcome these ruthless killers into their homes? Are cats incapable of love, or…

There is a gift shop in Guantánamo Bay. That’s it. That’s the episode. From ‘mindfulness’ mugs to lip balms, Kasia and Dan explore the extremely cursed Guantánamo merchandise and everyday objects on offer - alongside ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ like waterboarding, and the kidnapping of foreign nationals for long-term detention without charg…

A plain ham sandwich, a bottle of still water and a pack of ready salted crisps – it's a meal (deal) fit for a King, and a Cursed Objects x Lecker collab! This week, legends in their own lunchtimes Kasia, Dan and special guest Lucy Dearlove delve into claggy sandwiches, terrible sushi and supermarket psychology and ask: what the hell is going on in…

Could we BE any more cursed? This week, Dan and Kasia talk about the strange, mutant afterlife of Friends, the world's least cool situation comedy. On the agenda, such questions as: has some kind of Friends merchandise atom bomb been detonated in recent years? What does the show tell us about the politics and culture of the 1990s - and why is that …

Kasia and Dan explore the crisis in British swearing through Robert Peston’s very cursed book ‘WTF’. What does it say about our society that a leading political pundit sells his books through expletives? And with groans of despair viscerally being felt across the UK whenever someone calls Matt Hancock a ‘cockwomble’, what has become of swearing as …

What happens to the space-time continuum if you open an advent calendar in April? What are the healing properties of "different flavours of damp twig"? This week, Kasia and Dan are exploring the quasi-mystical powers of herbal tea, via an out-of-time advert calendar covered in a thick layer of dust. We talk about measuring the passage of time with …

Go east! Kasia and Dan tackle a satirical boardgame about queuing in Cold War-era Poland and go deep into 'Ostalgie' -- how do people remember the Soviet era, especially people who don't actually remember the Soviet era? Pioneers, communist pickles and coffee made from acorns all feature, along with 'Good Bye, Lenin!' and an immersive theatrical ex…

IT'S CUUUUUURSEDMAAAAAAAS! We're having a work Christmas party and you're all invited -- we've got some festive VKs and gingerbread milk stout, and we're going to finally determine who's been naughty and who's been nice - with help from Gary Barlow, our designer Archie and our producer Nick Wilson. Along with some dangerous live DIY we have tales o…

It's spooky season, it's harvest season, it's pumpkin season, it's nesting season, it's hygge season, it's cuffing season, it's christian girl autumn -- but where do all these labels and ideas come from?? As the nights draw in, Dan and Kasia ask how we got from the ancient Celtic pagan festival of Samhain - where the boundary between the mortal wor…

FROM PATREON TO MAIN FEED: it's a Hot Geist Summer episode where Kasia and Dan take a cursed journey into the darkest parts of the experience economy... from yuppie ballpit bars and escape rooms in Shoreditch, to the commodification and historicisation of the Holocaust, it's a wild ride with the spiritual godfather of Cursed Objects on his 130th bi…

We've done our duties Paddington, now take us to straight to hell (boy). Two weeks of pent-up angst, hilarity and bewilderment comes out in a wild ride through Britain's "period of national mourning". What on earth is a 'national mood', what are its rituals, who invented them and when? What do these offerings - these marmalade totems - reveal about…

Postcode paraphernalia – check! Neighbourhood nationalism – check! Commodified cities? All here. We are very excited to be joined by iconic sociologist Les Back as he reflects on his much beloved, but equally cursed, House of Catford bottle opener. When did we start wearing I Love *insert misc. borough* branded t-shirts? How do we tell the differen…

Nectar selectors and club card members: where do your loyalty cards lie? This week, Dan and Kasia are discussing how supermarkets became so all-powerful that they can "campaign" on political and environmental issues (slash greenwash cynically) and the state can only follow their lead. Also, why are full shelves in the supermarket oddly soothing whe…

This week, we're asking what Gen Z kids mean when they say "My aesthetic is looking like a terrible 90s market stall in Camden Town!"? (NB this may not be a direct quotation, but close enough.) Kasia and Dan take us on a wild journey through 'cybergoth internationalism', fluokids, retro culture, futurism and modernity, chaotic teenage ideas of cool…

FROM PATREON TO MAIN FEED: Are we heading for a 'summer of discontent'? Are we going 'back to the 1970s'? Three day week and a four-day bender? What really happened when the lights went out? Why do we cast particular eras as 'dark ages' or periods of decline, and who does it serve when we do so? Why were the 70s such an excellent time for white uti…

Celebrating Walter Benjamin's 130th birthday with a truly cursed journey into the darkest end of the experience economy... from yuppie ballpit bars in Shoreditch to the commodification of the Holocaust, it's a wild ride with the spiritual godfather of Cursed Objects. Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick Artwork: Archie Bashford…

Health warning!!! Kasia and Dan are cracking through the radioactive, ever-expanding global energy drinks market LIVE ON AIR... From patriotic energy drinks brought to you by Albion's sovereign bulldog, to middle-class FBPE Euroshopper cans... what unites jocks, bros/bruhs, ravers, skaters, bungee jumpers, construction workers who actually have to …

Are we heading for a 'summer of discontent'? Are we going 'back to the 1970s'? Three day week and a four-day bender? What really happened when the lights went out? Why do we cast particular eras as 'dark ages' or periods of decline, and who does it serve when we do so? Why were the 70s such an excellent time for white utility candles? This week, Ka…