Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 317 with Stephen Metcalf, Julia Turner, Dana Stevens, and Dan Pashman with the audio player below.

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This week on the Slate Culture Gabfest, the critics talk about the new spin-off from This American Life, the narrative nonfiction podcast Serial. Is reporting on crime at odds with the imperative to tell a good story, or can radio veterans Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder pull it off? Next, Dan Pashman joins the critics in the studio to talk about his new book, Eat More Better. How do you eat fries in your car, anyway? Pashman applies his scientific mind to the snack problems of our day. Finally, Zadie Smith’s essay “Find Your Beach” has hit a nerve for a lot of New Yorkers. The gabbers talk about living in and writing about this most paradoxical of cities.

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

• Serial, the new spin-off from This American Life
• David Grann’s The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession
• The Sporkful podcast
• “What’s the Most Ethical Way to Eat Snack Mix?” An excerpt from Dan’s book, on Slate.
• Dan Pashman’s new book Eat More Better: How to Make Every Bite More Delicious
• Yeats’ buffet poem, “The Second Coming”
• Zadie Smith’s essay “Find Your Beach”
• Colson Whitehead’s “Lost and Found”
• Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That”

Endorsements:

Dana: The Last Bookstore, in Los Angeles.

Julia: Hiking from Baker to Marshall’s beaches, in the Bay Area.

Steve: John Gray’s takedown of Richard Dawkins in the New Republic.

Outro: “Manhattan,” by Cat Power

You can email us at culturefest@slate.com.

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

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