Your favourite clever pop culture sites/podcasts/lectures

Alan Sipenwall reviews (and recaps) TV shows over at http://www.hitfix.com/whats-alan-watching with lots of great insight. The comments are usually interesting, and the community standards are similar to MeFi's, which makes for pleasant reading. Note that his blog is a strictly spoiler-free zone, but once the reviews go up they will cover the entire episode in depth so if you don't like being spoiled wait until you've seen something before you go there. For the trashier side of things there's http://www.grantland.com/blog/hollywood-prospectus/. The recaps are so funny that you don't even need to watch the shows to enjoy them, but there's all sorts of fun stuff there.

The http://www.earwolf.com/show/how-did-this-get-made/ podcast

I'm watching http://redlettermedia.com's reviews now (trigger warning for some of the Plinkett Reviews). http://www.overthinkingit.com/ http://www.outlawvern.com/ (Movies only)

If you are interested in reading about video games http://nightmaremode.net is pretty great.

http://philosophybites.com/links-to-past-e.html on all manner of subjects, including ethics, political life, the internet and kids... http://www.cbc.ca/ageofpersuasion/ on advertising For something quite different, check out the archive of the http://gporter.net/great/episodes.php... not sure how to describe this show from Newfoundland on CBC, but I loved it.

I don't think its online but if you can obtain the Dead Dog Cafe comedy hour, highly recommended! Probably at many Canadian public libraries on CD. The http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/masseys/ are often great to listen to, and one is Dead Dog Cafe author Thomas King. I also highly recommend Margaret Atwood's Massey Lecture, and still sometimes talk in Ursula Franklin's voice when talking about technology...

http://filmcrithulk.wordpress.com/ is genius. And give the AV Club another shot.

I listen to a fair number of podcasts like this (many of which have already been mentioned, like Filmspotting, the Slate Audio Bookclub and Pop Culture Happy Hour), but my absolute favorite is the http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/culturegabfest.html. You have to learn to enjoy Stephen Metcalf's curmudgeony attitude, but once you've done that, it's legitimately pretty great. For podcasts that are more specialized to one field of culture, I also like https://www.google.se/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&ved=0CDEQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hitfix.com%2Fpodcasts%2Ffien-print.rss&ei=yyQJUdSdNoTh4QSz2YGYBw&usg=AFQjCNHw2N90hmr1lspaXNlKRzIhfXngHQ&sig2=4laTOyPxZr0dbjwhVWAbMg&bvm=bv.41642243,d.bGE for TV (that's the RSS feed), for music, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00lvdrj, and the http://www.giantbomb.com/podcast/ for video games. That last one is more light-hearted, for instance the latest show contained a lengthy exegesis on the movies John Carpenter made in the 90's (apparently Vampires is quite bad, despite starring James Woods as a vampire-hunter), but it also contains the most interesting and in-depth discussion of games on the internet. Also, this one isn't exactly pop culture related, but http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl on the BBC is pretty fantastic. It doesn't really cover anything that happened after 1930 (which makes the name somewhat ironic) but if you want to hear a 45 minute discussion of Lord Byron's poem http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00xmx42 between a host and three British professors of literature (and really, who wouldn't?) this is the place to go.

Grantland is a good example of a site that isn't necessarily pop-culture focused but tends to have a lot of interesting stuff in that realm. The Awl's spinoffs http://thebillfold.com/ (personal finance), http://thehairpin.com/ ("women's issues"), and especially http://splitsider.com/ (comedy) are up there too.