The Culture Enthusiast

In Linda Holmes ’93’s delightful new novel Back After This, Cecily Foster is an audio editor and producer immersed in the world of podcasts. “She wound up being in podcasting, I think, for the same reason that everybody in rom-coms used to be in magazine publishing,” Holmes says. “It gives you a lot of opportunities to have people have reasons to go out and do things that they’re not ordinarily doing.” 

In Cecily’s case, this means begrudgingly being the subject of a podcast in which she goes on 20 (mostly dubious) blind dates—an experience that complicates her unexpectedly exciting love life. But Holmes, who’s the New York Times bestselling author of 2019’s Evvie Drake Starts Over, also wanted to write about the world of podcasting because she was “frustrated by the quality of fictional representations of audio and podcasting, which range from pretty OK to genuinely terrible. … So part of it was, ‘Where can I offer a new set of eyes into a setting that I know a lot about?’”

Indeed, when she’s not writing rom-com fiction, Holmes is talking about popular culture on NPR, including on the podcast she co-created, Pop Culture Happy Hour. (In the author’s note of Back After This, she stresses that the book is “not a story about my own career, nor is it a veiled expose.”) The podcast consists of smart 20-minute discussions about hot topics people are talking about: the polarizing season finale of The White Lotus; Lady Gaga’s latest album, Mayhem; terrible TV shows you still binge-watch.

Holmes and her NPR colleague Stephen Thompson started Pop Culture Happy Hour in 2010, inspired by the music discussions at All Songs Considered and a belief that the roundtable format would work well with TV and film as well. “The original impetus was we could take these conversations that we have about, like, American Idol and do them as audio,” she says. “We just wanted to have really good conversations.” The pair brainstormed the nuts and bolts of the show in Thompson’s living room, recruiting like-minded colleagues and producing the show in their free time after business hours. 

Holmes didn’t come to NPR to do audio storytelling; initially she was hired to write a pop culture blog. This wasn’t her only unexpected career pivot. After majoring in government—and taking sociology classes and logic —she went to law school directly after graduation. “The two biggest things that I developed academically at Oberlin were writing and critical thinking,” Holmes says.

Even though her life doesn’t involve being a practicing lawyer, she certainly sees ways that law school influences her current work. “If you can put together a legal argument that says, ‘I’m trying to prove to you why I think [something is] true and why I think this is the strongest argument about how to think about this thing,’ you use the same thing in criticism and in trying to work your way through anything complex.” 

And Holmes sees exactly why so many Oberlin alums are drawn to podcasting and audio storytelling. “Public media appeals to people who see a broader mission for the work that they do, and who are focused on, to some degree, community service,” she says. “It's natural to me that you would see a lot of Oberlin graduates.

“I wonder whether it's [also] kind of a combination of being a good-doer and being a ham, which is kind of my vision of Oberlin in some ways, right?” she adds with a laugh. “You have a lot of people who have big personalities, and also a desire to do good, and that will get you into media jobs and maybe jobs with nonprofits.”

This story originally appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of the Oberlin Alumni Magazine as part of the feature "A Pipeline to Podcasts."