Title: Can We Be Funny? Why Start Now? Weird Pop Culture After 9/11
Author(s): Breanna Mroczek & Jason Sheridan
Publisher: Agatha Press
Year: 2026
What’s that? A plane’s hit the World Trade Center?
Oh...
It goes without saying that 9/11 has cast an unthinkably long shadow over this still-relatively-young century, not just for America, but for the rest of the world by extension. This little pamphlet by Canadian author Breanna Mroczek and American podcaster Jason Sheridan traces that shadow wonderfully, with the mixture of humour and horror I try to maintain in my own head.
Anyone who remembers waking up that day and feeling, in some deep and hidden thoughtspace, that the train our world was on had jumped the tracks, and was now on another course altogether...well, you’ll find a lot to love here. And I suppose anyone who was still blessed with pre-natal non-existence the morning we jumped those tracks...you’ll probably find some gentle explanation for why the world you’ve inherited is so weird.
Not that it wasn’t weird before.
25 little essays covering moments in pop culture that either directly resulted from that tragic September morning, or were otherwise only made possible by the world-train’s appearance on this new set of tracks. Most of them are very funny, without being irreverent (no mean feat, to be sure), some are more mournful, but all are resonant in one way or another.