Slate's Culture Gabfest on Boardwalk Empire, Catfish, and creative collaboration.

Slate's Culture Gabfest on Boardwalk Empire, Catfish, and creative collaboration.

Slate's Culture Gabfest on Boardwalk Empire, Catfish, and creative collaboration.

Slate's weekly roundtable.
Sept. 22 2010 11:03 AM

The Culture Gabfest, "Velveteen Gabfest" Edition

Slate's Culture Gabfest on Boardwalk Empire, Catfish, and the rest of the week in culture.

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In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics discuss the new HBO series Boardwalk Empire and the controversial documentary Catfish. They are also joined by Slate contributor Joshua Wolf Shenk to talk about John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Shenk's series on creative pairs.

Here are links to some of the articles and other items mentioned in the show:

The official page for HBO's Boardwalk Empire.
Alessandra Stanley's review of Boardwalk Empire in the New York Times.
The Catfish official site.
Dana Stevens' review of Catfish, with optional spoilers.
Joshua Wolf Shenk's series for Slate on creative pairs: the intro; Lennon/McCartney Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
Idiotbooks.com, the Web site of Matthew Swanson and Robbi Behr, the subjects of the next piece in the "Creative Pairs" series.
Shenk.net, Joshua Wolf Shenk's Web site.
The Creative Pairs Facebook page.
The trailer for Nowhere Boy, a forthcoming film about how John Lennon became John Lennon. (A young Paul McCartney shows up to help out.)

The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:

Dana's pick: Jan de Bont's 1996 tornado-chasers-in-love thriller, Twister.
Joshua's pick: The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity by Mark Vonnegut (plus Vonnegut's brand new follow-up, Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness, Only More So).
Julia's pick: The Grammar of Ornament by Owen Jones, a collection of Victorian-era designs from around the world.
Stephen's pick: The bootleg recording of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performing "New York City Serenade" at the Main Point in Bryn Mawr, Pa., in 1975.

Outro music: "New York City Serenade," live at the Main Point.

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

Posted on Sept. 22 by Jacob Ganz at 11 a.m.

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

Joshua Wolf Shenk is a curator, essayist, and the author of Lincoln's Melancholy. Follow him on Twitter.

Dana Stevens is Slate’s movie critic.

Julia Turner, the former editor in chief of Slate, is a regular on Slate’s Culture Gabfest podcast.