Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 280 with Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner with the audio player below.

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On this week’s episode, the critics discuss Philomena, the dark horse in this year’s Oscar race for Best Picture, starring Judi Dench and Steve Coogan. Based on the true story of an Irish mother’s 50-year search for her son, Philomena does more than satisfy the Academy’s appetite for Anglophilic historical dramas. Next, the gabbers turn to Broad City, a new show on Comedy Central about two young women in New York City. Can we stomach another Brooklyn-based series about female life post-graduation? And finally, the critics discuss Atlantic editor Scott Stossel’s new book My Age of Anxiety, in which he uses his own experience with phobias to explore the history and treatment of acute anxiety disorder.

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

• 2014 Academy Awards nominations
• The Lost Child of Philomena Lee by Martin Sixsmith
• High Fidelity
• My Beautiful Laundrette
• The Queen
• The King’s Speech, directed by Tom Hooper
• Kyle Smith’s scathing New York Post review of Philomena
• Willa Paskin’s review of Broad City on Slate
• The webisodes of Broad City that inspired the Comedy Central show
• Portlandia starring Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein
• Alessandra Stanley’s New York Times review of Broad City
• 2 Broke Girls on CBS
• Girls on HBO
• Key & Peele on Comedy Central
• 30 Rock on NBC
• Brooklyn Nine-Nine on NBC
• My Age of Anxiety by Scott Stossel
• An excerpt of Stossel’s book at the Atlantic
• Louis Menand’s New Yorker review of the book
• The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon

Endorsements:

Dana: Ida, a total marvel from director Pawel Pawlikowski that screened at the Sundance Film Festival

Julia: Going to a museum with no particular goal in mind and finding a corner that transports you. For her, it was finding a Ghirlandaio portrait at the Met.

Steve: W.H. Auden’s epithalamium “In Sickness and in Health”

Outro: "Swing for Ninine" by The Cook Trio

You can email us at culturefest@slate.com.

This podcast was produced by Ann Heppermann. Our intern is Anna Shechtman.

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