The Culture Gabfest “(Picnic, Lightning)” Edition

Slate’s Culture Gabfest on Lena Dunham’s Vogue shoot, Woody Allen’s lifetime achievement award, and the wonders of punctuation.

By David Haglund, Stephen Metcalf, and Julia Turner

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On this week’s episode, the critics discuss Lena Dunham’s photoshopped Vogue pictures and the $10,000 bounty that Jezebel offered for unretouched versions of the shoot. Why is this scandal of post-production beautification any different from the dozens before it? Next the critics turn to Woody Allen, whose receipt of the Golden Globes lifetime achievement award unearthed allegations of sexual abuse from his past. Do these allegations diminish his cinematic achievements? And finally, inspired by Kathryn Schulz’s New York magazine piece about the “5 best punctuation marks in literature,” the critics discuss the subtleties of punctuation: When did exclamation points become cartoonish? Are em-dashes hackneyed? And when, if ever, is it OK to use a semicolon?

Links to some of the things we discussed this week follow:

Vogue’s cover story on Lena Dunham.
Jezebel offering $10,000 for unretouched photos from Lena Dunham’s Vogue shoot.
The released and dissected photos on Jezebel.
Jezebel’s initial Photoshop-debunking success story: Faith Hill on the cover of Redbook.
Slate’s Katy Waldman defends Jezebel.
HBO’s Girls.
Tina Fey’s quote about Photoshop in Bossypants via Twitter.
Ronan Farrow’s Golden Globe tweets.
Vanity Fair revisits the Allen-Farrow scandal, interviewing Dylan Farrow.
Slate’s Jessica Winter reviews the evidence against Allen.
Annie Hall.
Manhattan.
Blue Jasmine.
Crimes and Misdemeanors.
Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
The Village Voice reviews the “stomach-churning” accusations against R. Kelly.
Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time.
Kathryn Schulz’s New York magazine piece “The 5 Best Punctuation Marks in Literature.”
Middlemarch by George Eliot.
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot.
“The Autobiographia Literaria” by Frank O’Hara.
Ulysses by James Joyce.
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.

Endorsements:

Julia: A House in the Sky: A Memoir by Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett.

David: “My Adorable One” off of Lee Moses’ 1971 album Time and Place.

Steve: Philip Larkin’s poem “Church Going.”

Outro: “My Adorable One” by Lee Moses

You can email us at culturefest@slate.com.

This podcast was produced by Chris Wade. Our intern is Anna Shechtman.