Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 313 with Stephen Metcalf, Julia Turner, and Dana Stevens with the audio player below.

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This week Slate Plus members will hear a portrait of the Culture Gabfest listener: An interview with two fans who enjoy the show so much that their dream bachelorette party took place at our early rainy morning taping. Go to slate.com/cultureplus to learn more about Slate Plus and join today.

The L.A. live show is coming up! We will by joined by special guests John August and Craig Mazin from the much-endorsed Scriptnotes podcast. Tickets for the Boston live show on Oct. 20 are also available.

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

On this week’s episode, the critics talk about A. O. Scott’s rollicking Times piece, in which he rang the patriarch's death knell: He’s not relevant, not interesting, and not on television anymore. Does Scott’s gender-centric take on the end of adulthood get it right, or miss the point? Next up, Slate’s Matthew J. X. Malady thought that "iteration" belonged to him, but he was wrong. The gabbers talk about Malady’s coinage, "fingerprint words"—the vocabulary we deem ours and ours alone. Does the Culture Gabfest have pet words, and, if so, are they a rhetorical crutch or further proof that our critics are just especially excellent at conversations? Finally, wearable tech. Once, we wore a special hat in bed and a watch on a chain. Now, we do high-tech fabrics and Bluetooth headsets. This week Apple trounced Google Glass with something even Back to the Future-ier: the Apple Watch. Would our critics wear such a thing, or is the “asshole factor” simply too high?

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

• A. O. Scott on the death of adulthood
• Mad Men
• The Sopranos
• Breaking Bad
• Knocked Up
• Love and Death in the American Novel, by Leslie Fiedler
• Andrew O’Hehir responds on Salon
• Andrew Sternbergh’s take, on Vulture
• Masscult and Midcult, by Dwight Macdonald
• Matthew J. X. Malady on “fingerprint words”
• Kevin Roose on “delighting” Silicon Valley
• Lingua Franca magazine
• The Dick Tracy show
• Will Oremus on the appeal of the Apple Watch.
• Felix Salmon on its glaring problem, on Slate
• Troy Patterson on wristwatch etiquette, on Slate
• Christian Marclay’s “The Clock”

Endorsements:

Dana: Losing your phone, just for a day.

Julia: “Dry County,” by the B-52s.

Steve: Ian McCulloch’s solo album, Candleland.

Outro: “Dry County,” by the B-52s.

You can email us at culturefest@slate.com.

This podcast was produced by Andy Bowers and Ann Heppermann. Our intern is Josephine Livingstone.

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