The Culture Gabfest “GGM FTW” Edition
Slate’s Culture Gabfest on Under the Skin, the death of Gabriel García Márquez, and Gawker’s ban on Internet slang.
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On this week’s episode, the critics discuss Under the Skin, Jonathan Glazer’s art-house horror film, starring Scarlett Johansson as an extraterrestrial femme fatale. Next, the gabbers welcome New Republic contributing editor Paul Berman to discuss the legacy of Gabriel García Márquez, titan of Latin American literature and magical realism. And finally, the critics debate Gawker editor Max Read’s decision to ban Internet slang from the site. Is it a sign of maturity or misguided conservatism?
Links to some of the things we discussed this week follow:
- Dan Kois reviews Under the Skin on Slate
- Anthony Lane’s “lusty, vapid” profile of Scarlett Johansson in the New Yorker
- Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey
- Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, starring David Bowie
- Sexy Beast, directed by Jonathan Glazer
- Birth, directed by Jonathan Glazer
- Paul Berman’s tribute to Gabriel García Márquez in the New Republic
- Gabriel García Márquez: A Life by Gerald Martin
- The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
- News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel García Márquez
- Paul Berman’s Slate review of News of a Kidnapping
- Max Read’s Gawker memo banning Internet slang, republished on Poynter
- Slate’s editors debate the magazine’s profanity policy
- John McWhorter writes about the unsuccessful history of banning slang in the New Republic
- Adrien Chen joins the Culture Gabfest to discuss his long-form Gawker piece about Reddit
- Jezebel editor Anna Holmes writes in the New York Times about the unexpected history of magazines’ banned words
- Rebecca Solnit’s “Men Who Explain Things,” reprinted in the L.A. Times
Endorsements:
Julia: Roman Polanski’s Chinatown and the funny peculiarity of watching 1930s styling through a 1970s lens.
Steve: A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 by our guest Paul Berman.
You can email us at culturefest@slate.com.
This podcast was produced by Ann Heppermann. Our intern is Anna Shechtman.
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