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Stranger Things is a show invested in the biopolitics of black life in the United States, though we watch its racial engagements through 1980s visions of white suburbia and explorations in…

My relationship to Stranger Things is ambivalent. As a child of the 1980s, I remember the analog technologies and cultural objects that the show obsessively brings back to life. Now I’m old…

It has become commonplace to lament the loss of an American childhood in which unsupervised play and everyday encounters with moderate danger build independence, resilience, and creativity. Today’s highly-regulated kids…

“To create an authentic period world requires thousands of specific decisions — that sheet, that cassette tape on that bedroom dresser.” — Shawn Levy1 “It has always been something of a lifelong dream to create a…

1. Vanishing from the charts only to appear again years later, pop songs are good at evoking memories of the past. When George Michael’s “Freedom 90” resurfaces now, decades after…

1 After a game of Dungeons and Dragons, two boys bike home from their friend’s house on a night in 1983. They are unaware of the awful and awesome events…

The second season of Stranger Things concludes with a junior high dance, Snow Ball ’84. Barely emerged from recent horrors, the kids discover the rituals of straight adolescence by awkwardly slow dancing,…