Welcome Back. Welcome Back.

Yes, PopPolitics has risen again — or maybe reincarnated would be the better religious metaphor. While we have been dormant for the first part of 2004 (and had been slowing our rate of posting new articles throughout 2003) we’re now a full-fledged weblog, and we’re ready to hit the cultural streets.

So we are anticipating a few questions. First, for those of you have stumbled upon us in our present form and don’t know our history, you might be asking: what is PopPolitics?

Well, while our medium has changed slightly, our message is the same as it was when we launched in 2000. Let me point you to our original mission statement, which — despite a few dated references (where, oh where, did Jesse Ventura go?) — still guides us.

Also, the foundational article written for the site by Daniel Shea, “Why PopPolitics?“, offers a more in-depth look at the importance of popular culture and does a great job of establishing the continuing context for our work.

These references to our foundations, however, might leave another question lingering: why now?

The simple answer is that we feel that the world needs PopPolitics more than ever. Amazingly it is still the case that few mainstream voices take pop culture seriously and none possesses our particular mission of covering the complicated intersections between pop culture and politics — of seeing the politics in the pop culture and the influence of pop culture on our politics.

It would be easy to point to the popularity of the Daily Show, Fahrenheit 9/11 and other ways in which we are increasingly getting more of our political news and opinions from our pop culture, but PopPolitics has always been more than simply detailing that connection. We work from the premise that all cultural representations are political, if we only look at them in the right way.

Finally, for those of you who are familiar with us and our mission, you might also be asking: why a blog?

No, we haven’t decided to ride the fad-of-the-moment. In fact, for a long time we have considered the many benefits of setting up the site as blog. Most significantly, it enables us to present more of a running, relevant commentary of politics and pop culture by focusing on smaller, more frequent postings, rather than the periodic long-form article. It also enables readers to join in the conversation more easily by commenting on individual posts (thanks Movable Type).

While our home page has become a blog page, however, we haven’t gotten rid of the close to a thousand articles that make up the PopPolitics archive — and we haven’t completely stopped publishing long-form stuff. When we do post a full-length article, we will just be linking to it from the blog.

In the meantime, feel free to go to your ol’ favorite section of the site. If you need it, use the site guide. Many of the articles, especially our focused explorations of issues in Culture Clash, are timeless (if we say so ourselves).

Nevertheless, we are glad to be back in the present. Thanks for your support throughout the years and your continued readership in the future.

Let’s get it on.