Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 290 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 The Unknown Known, Errol Morris’ confounding portrait of Donald Rumsfeld. After 33 hours of interview footage and tens of thousands of dictated memos, the former secretary of defense remains cagey, cryptic, and above all unknown. Next, the gabbers turn to the new HBO comedy Silicon Valley, Mike Judge’s incisive parody of Palo Alto’s startup culture. But are techies in on the joke? And finally the critics wrestle with Spritz, an app that promises to make its users speed-readers, based on its efficient, nonlinear layout of text. For the next generation of readers, is faster necessarily better?

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

• Dana’s reviews The Unknown Known and interviews Errol Morris on Slate.
• Dana and David Weigel discuss the film in a Slate Spoiler Special.
• The Unknown Known on Amazon Instant Video.
• The Thin Blue Line.
• The Fog of War.
• Standard Operating Procedure.
• The Act of Killing, produced by Errol Morris and Werner Herzog.
• Willa’s review of Silicon Valley on Slate.
• Farhad Manjoo praises the show for its authenticity in the New York Times.
• David Auerbach pokes holes in the show’s satire of tech culture on Slate.
• Silicon Valley on HBO.
• Beavis and Butt-head.
• Office Space.
• Idiocracy.
• Portlandia.
• Spritz, a new app that promises to make speed-readers of its users.
• James Camp reviews Spritz in The New Yorker.

Endorsements:

Dana: “Bach Psychology: Gothic, Sublime, or just human?,” Michael Markham’s essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books about the perils of Bach biography.

Julia: I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan, a collection of clandestine poems by Afghan women. It’s great book of poetry and offers more insight into modern Afghanistan than anything she’s ever read.

Steve: Mark Danner’s series of essays about Dick Cheney in the New York Review of Books.

Outro: “Springtime Can Kill You” by Jolie Holland (and Steve’s newly hatched chicks!).

You can email us at culturefest@slate.com.

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

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