The Culture Gabfest “The Rip Van Winkle in Time” Edition

Slate’s Culture Gabfest on Interstellar, the comeback of The Comeback, and the London cabdriver test the Knowledge.

By Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner

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This week, Slate Plus listeners will hear the critics (plus Jody) share their tales of getting well and truly lost. Who tried to break into the Pope’s house, and who just forgot how to hail a taxi?

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This week on the Slate Culture Gabfest, the gabbers talk Interstellar. Is our lantern-jawed hero Matthew McConaughey as transporting as ever, or has Chris Nolan bent reality a little too far this time? Next up, Slate head of podcasting Andy Bowers joins the Gabfest to talk about the reboot of Lisa Kudrow’s reality TV satire The Comeback. A lot has changed in the television landscape since the 2005 first season—is the show keeping up with the times? Finally, Jody Rosen comes into the studio to talk about his deep dive into the world of the Knowledge, the notoriously fiendish testing system designed to drill the entire geography of London into cabbies’ memories. Psychogeography, the changing role of technology in our everyday lives, Julia’s kid’s middle name—it’s all here.

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

Prometheus
Memento
Ghost
Atonement
2001: A Space Odyssey
M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs
Phil Plait’s take on the bad science of Interstellar, and his mea culpa: The black hole is spinning, duh!
Season 1 of Lisa Kudrow’s The Comeback
Laura Dern on HBO’s Enlightened
The Twin Peaks reboot
Episodes, on Showtime
Ricky Gervais’s Extras
Swimming With Sharks
Jody Rosen’s investigation into the Knowledge for T magazine

Endorsements:

Dana: The Web series High Maintenance.

Julia: Billie Holiday’s “Am I Blue.”

Jody: Sasha’s choice, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown: “It isn’t like John Wayne movies, it’s the truth.”

Steve: Suzy Hansen, “America’s Long Holiday: When Narcissism Attacks,” on The Baffler.

A Slate Plus Special Feature:

(Almost) every product recommended on every Slate podcast since the dawn of creation.

Outro: “Am I Blue,” by Billie Holiday

You can email us at culturefest@slate.com.

This podcast was produced by Ann Hepperman. Our intern is Josephine Livingstone.