Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 295 with David Haglund, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner with the audio player below.

And join the lively conversation on the Culturefest Facebook page here:

The sponsors of this week’s show are Bermuda Tourism and Audible. Discover Bermuda’s dramatic beauty and charming villages on your next vacation. Get a free audiobook from Audible’s collection of more than 150,000 titles and a subscription to a daily audio digest when you sign up for a 30-day free trial at www.audiblepodcast.com/culturefest. This week’s pick for the Culture Gabfest Bucket List—the books you’ve got to read to be a smarter culture hound—is The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, read by Jesse L. Martin.

Sign up for Slate Plus to get ad-free podcasts, special bonus segments, discounted event tickets, a streamlined Slate reading experience, and more. Go to slate.com/cultureplus to learn more and join today. (You’ll also see a video from Steve, Dana, and Julia welcoming you to the program.)

Culturefest is on the radio! “Gabfest Radio” combines Slate’s Culture and Political Gabfests in one show—listen on Saturdays at 7 a.m. and Sundays at 6 p.m. on WNYC’s AM820.

And don’t forget you can find Culture Gabfest T-shirts for sale in the Slate store.

On this week’s episode, the critics discuss Locke, an existential road movie shot in real time, staring Tom Hardy as a construction foreman on a late night drive. The film’s minimalist conceit—and Hardy’s handsome face—make for surprisingly gripping cinema. Next, the gabbers turn to Adventure Time, an animated Cartoon Network series with cross-demographic appeal, attracting kids, stoners, and philosophers alike. And finally, inspired by Cubed, Nikil Saval’s history of the workplace, the critics discuss the perils, privileges, and power trips of office design. Are we disgruntled because of our work—or our workplaces?

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

• Dana’s review of Locke on Slate
• Manohla Dargis’ New York Times review of Locke focuses on Tom Hardy’s face
• Robert Redford’s All Is Lost
• Adventure Time on Cartooon Network
  
• Emily Nussbaum’s rhapsodic review of Adventure Time in the New Yorker
• Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away
• Nickelodeon’s The Ren & Stimpy Show
• Shrek
• The Simpsons
• Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace by Nikil Saval
• Jill Lepore’s New Yorker review of Cubed
• Seth Stevenson discusses the philosophy of open offices on Slate
• Herman Miller’s “Action Office.”
• Billy Wilder’s The Apartment
• King Vidor’s The Crowd
• Working Girl
• 9 to 5
• NBC’s The Office
• HBO’s Silicon Valley

Endorsements:

Dana: The parody music of the Disney Channel’s Phineas and Ferb, the best of which is compiled in the show’s “Cliptastic Countdown.”

David: Ted Hawkins’ voice—both gravelly and bright—as featured in his original recording “The Good and the Bad.”

Julia: The work of the children’s book author Mo Willems, especially We Are in a Book, about the experience of reading.

Outro: “The Good and the Bad” by Ted Hawkins

You can email us at culturefest@slate.com.

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

Follow us on Twitter. And please Like the Culture Gabfest on Facebook.

Correction, May 15, 2014: In the "things we discussed" section of this post, Adventure Time was mislabled as being on Comedy Central, it is on Cartoon Network.