––What TV show and why?

Dalton: Third Rock from the Sun because it did such a great job of commenting on the oddities of our society through a band of aliens masquerading as humans. Because William Shatner as The Great High Head made me laugh so hard I almost swallowed my tongue.

King: Pants Off Dance Off. This is the show on Fuse where exhibitionists shake it, and then take it off, while a music video plays on a screen behind them. What’s really kind of sweet about the show is that most of the contestants aren’t exactly hard-bodied. I feel like the relative success of this program is proof that our time and place isn’t entirely without a certain charm: we may have irreparably fucked up the world, but we did get naked and dance. We had some merit.

Langer: I wouldn’t be surprised if The Simpsons will still be running in 2058, so no reason to put that in the time capsule. And I’m sure 30 Rock will still be available on DVD too. So no need to stuff that in there either. Instead, I’ll burn a copy of the no-budget show Yacht Rock, the first and one of the funniest shows I ever saw on Youtube, which has allowed me to maintain my familiarity with pop culture without having had cable for more than five years.

Reifler: I’d put in the original Star Trek. Boy, is that not how the future will turn out. But wouldn’t it be cool if it did? And wouldn’t it be cool for the people of 2058 to see what their great-grandparents made of outer space? All the different alien cultures, some complete with empresses in sexy costumes? All the different mental afflictions you could catch from the atmospheres of various planets? Creatures that look like chilled omelets flying through the air and attaching themselves to people?


––What pop ephemera and why?

Dalton: What is pop ephemera?

King: The soul of Lou Dobbs. My thinking here is that if we could somehow extract this tiny, midnight-black moth from Mr. Dobbs, then perhaps future generations could study it, and try to determine how someone can so abruptly go completely fucking nuts. Is it a virus? Is it contagious? If Lou Dobbs's soul bit me, would I suddenly develop an irrational hatred of impoverished, brown-skinned people? Would I dream of building an impervious bubble over my entire country, a bubble made entirely of quick-drying outraged-old-man-spit, and constructed solely by industrious little angry-old-man-imps? I don't know. We don’t know.

We just don’t have the scientific apparatus to properly understand Lou Dobbs's soul. Put it in the capsule – and for God's sake, wear gloves while you're doing it. That thing is dangerous.

Langer: It would be nice for the people of the future to wonder if we were Luddites after all. So, I’ll put in my typewriter, my .78 rpm record player, and my Sony Walkman cassette player. Just to keep everybody guessing.

Reifler: The time capsule has a hard drive, right? Into it I will download the 3.8 MB of Outkast’s song “Hey Ya.” The song is insanely infectious, and it spread like the flu for many months before it became a dormant, low-level virus. But there are reasons that this particular addictive song gets included: A) it’s more complex than you might think. Beyond “shake it like a Polaroid picture” and “I don’t want to meet your mama, I just want to make you cumma” is a narrator who mocks the youthful, romantic ideas about love and relationships that he once had—but who, in growing up and becoming rational and realistic about desire and emotional attachments has also become a boor. A boor who rhymes “mama” with “cumma.” But more than that, I’m putting those MBs in my time capsule because B) Outkast is a product of the highest potential and very best qualities of our culture. Andre Benjamin (Andre 3000) and Antwan Patton (Big Boi) became friends and collaborators when they were students at the Tri-Cities High School in East Point, Georgia, on the outskirts of Atlanta. It’s a magnet school for the visual and performing arts, and it has a diverse student body. Andre is also a painter; Antwan is a passionate Kate Bush fan. Their influences are fantastically expansive. Outkast, for me, is the best example of popular culture in America. Even if they did get sued by Rosa Parks.