Slate's Culture Gabfest on HBO's new miniseries The Pacific, Variety's fired critics, and mommy blogging.

Slate's Culture Gabfest on HBO's new miniseries The Pacific, Variety's fired critics, and mommy blogging.

Slate's Culture Gabfest on HBO's new miniseries The Pacific, Variety's fired critics, and mommy blogging.

Slate's weekly roundtable.
March 17 2010 11:12 AM

The Culture Gabfest, "This Is Event Programming, Dammit" Edition

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Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 78 with Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and June Thomasby clicking the arrow on the audio player below:

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In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and June Thomas discuss HBO's new miniseries The Pacific, the firing of critics at the trade magazine Variety, and a New York Times story about the ethics behind mommy bloggers.

Here are some links to the things we discussed this week:

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The official site for HBO's new miniseries The Pacific.
The New York Times sheds some light on The Pacific.
The leaked Variety memo explaining recent firings.
A slanguage dictionary from Variety.
Critic David Rooney's exit interview in Time Out New York.
The "This Week on Broadway" podcast.
Jennifer Mendelsohn's story about mommy bloggers in the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times and her blog.
A roundup of some of the mommy-blogger backlash against the New York Times.
The parenting blogs Dooce and Finslippy.

The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:

Dana's pick: The soundtrack to the Chet Baker documentary Let's Get Lost.
June's pick: Secret Diary of a Call Girl on Showtime.
Stephen's pick: YouTube videos of Blondie's "Rip Her to Shreds," Joni Mitchell's "California," and Radiohead's cover of "Rhinestone Cowboy."

You can e-mail us at culturefest@slate.com.

Posted by Jesse Baker at 11:12 a.m. on March 17, 2010.

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June Thomas is managing producer of Slate podcasts.

Stephen Metcalf is Slate’s critic at large. He is working on a book about the 1980s.

Dana Stevens is Slate’s movie critic.