Andi Zeisler

Andi Zeisler writes about how feminism, consumer culture and media narratives intersect with entertainment and everyday life for Salon. Her work often takes familiar trends or personalities and examines the power, money and ideology behind them, whether in nostalgic ’90s summer imagery, influencer branding or the way readers display their books. She brings a long background in feminist media and cultural criticism to this beat, co-founding the feminist media nonprofit Bitch Media and writing about popular culture and feminism for nearly three decades. Her writing extends beyond Salon to outlets including Mother Jones, the Washington Post, the New York Times, NBC News Think and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is also the author of books on feminism and pop culture and continues to develop longer-form work on how media and pop culture have turned feminism into a personal and brand identity.

Pop culture, nostalgia and power

Zeisler’s entertainment coverage regularly uses pop culture as a lens on nostalgia, power and social norms rather than as pure fan service.

In a piece on ’90s summer nostalgia, she contrasts wistful visions of an easier decade with the economic realities that made that era feel carefree for some and precarious for others, treating the trend as a story about inequality and memory rather than fashion alone. Her writing on figures like Dolly Parton, Morrissey and true crime podcasters examines how celebrity personas embody inclusion, victimhood or “girl-power” marketing, and what those narratives mean for audiences who consume them.

She also uses moments like the Artemis II crew’s “Full House” spoof to trace why certain cultural references endure and how they shape collective feelings about progress, space exploration and generational identity. Across this work, pop culture is a starting point for questions about who gets celebrated, who gets excluded and whose stories are being sold back to them.

Consumer culture and everyday capitalism

Zeisler devotes a significant portion of her Salon work to consumer trends, treating holiday gimmicks, viral products and corporate strategies as stories about how capitalism reaches into daily life. She writes about phenomena like “Summerween,” “boo baskets” and the craze for Stanley cups to show how seasonal rituals and lifestyle branding reflect anxiety, status and gendered expectations, especially among women and girls.

Her coverage of retail formats, from mail-order catalogs to contemporary influencer-driven shopping, looks at how older models of browsing and buying were replaced and what gets lost when algorithms and scarcity marketing take over. In a feature on bowling, she follows private equity’s acquisition and rebranding of hundreds of bowling alleys, framing the loss of league bowling and affordable play as the erosion of a key third place in American life.

Even in lighter pieces on Zara “death pants” or viral social media trends, she tracks how novelty, fear and belonging are turned into sales, making consumer stories part of a larger critique of economic power.

Books, reading and censorship

Books and the politics around them are another core strand of Zeisler’s work, where she combines literary enthusiasm with concern about censorship and cultural gatekeeping. She writes frequently on book bans, covering campaigns against titles for young readers and the broader effort to “dumb down” public life through restrictions on what people can access and discuss. Her essays on banned books often highlight specific cases - such as the targeting of seemingly innocuous “cat books” - to show how expansive and sometimes absurd these efforts have become.

Zeisler also examines how readers’ personal libraries are policed culturally, arguing in a piece on how owning books became “everybody’s business” that the number of books someone owns and how they shelve them now invite social judgment and online performance.

In her coverage of memoirs, feminist literature and novels reimagined for Gen Z readers, she pays close attention to themes like motherhood, coercion and the ways women’s stories are rewarded when they fit certain expectations and punished when they do not. This book-focused work positions her as a critic who treats reading habits, publishing trends and censorship battles as central to contemporary culture rather than niche concerns.

Technology, education and digital life

Zeisler often writes at the point where technology touches culture, education and selfhood, paying particular attention to how digital tools reshape attention and authority.

In her Luddite-focused commentary, she argues for reclaiming the term from its caricature as anti-technology, exploring how offline community projects and screen-free spaces challenge Big Tech’s capture of attention. Her reporting on teachers returning to handwritten exams in response to AI tools looks at how educators adapt assessment to preserve genuine learning and confront the ease of machine-generated work.

She covers influencer and “girlboss” culture through pieces on trademark battles over phrases like “Hot Girls Read,” showing how creators weaponize intellectual property to control communities and monetize identity. Other stories dissect the role of social media in interactions with wild animals or viral mascots like Neil the Seal, emphasizing the ethical and behavioral implications of treating living beings as content. Taken together, this strand of her work focuses on how technology changes the terms of participation in culture - who gets to speak, who gets watched and how those dynamics shape everyday behavior.

Across these areas, Zeisler writes as a culture critic whose entertainment beat is defined by structural questions: how feminism is branded, how consumer trends reveal deeper anxieties, how books and media are contested, and how digital tools organize attention and authority. She brings a consistent feminist and media-literacy perspective to these stories, moving between essays, reported features and thematic roundups while maintaining a focus on the systems that sit beneath pop culture and entertainment.