Slate’s Culture Gabfest on The Last Man on Earth, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s travel writing, and the viral phenomenon of the dress.

Knausgaard’s Travel Writing: An Epic Tour de Force, or Pretentious Stunt Journalism?

Knausgaard’s Travel Writing: An Epic Tour de Force, or Pretentious Stunt Journalism?

Slate's weekly roundtable.
March 4 2015 11:45 AM

The Culture Gabfest “There’s No Wrong Way to Use a Margarita Pool” Edition

Slate’s Culture Gabfest on The Last Man on Earth, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s travel writing, and the viral phenomenon of “the dress.”

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Illustration by Robert Neubecker.

Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 337 with Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner with the audio player below. 

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Go to slate.com/cultureplus to learn more about Slate Plus and join today. This week on Slate Plus: Is TV small talk ruining our dinner parties? The critics discuss Daniel Engber’s recent piece in Vulture.

On this week’s Slate Culture Gabfest, the gabbers discuss The Last Man on Earth: a new post-apocalyptic sitcom starring Will Forte. Can a show with this premise last longer than a couple of episodes? Next up, Karl Ove Knausgaard is writing a travel story for the New York Times Magazine. Is it an epic, Tocquevillian tour de force or a self-indulgent piece of stunt journalism? Finally, a picture of a white and gold (or was it black and blue?) dress broke the Internet last week, generating a worldwide existential crisis of perception. What made it such a viral phenomenon?

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

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Endorsements:

Dana: Inside Star Trek: The Real Story by Herbert Solow and Robert Justman

Julia: “Living Like Weasels” by Annie Dillard in the book Teaching a Stone to Talk

Steve: “The Next Next Level” by Leon Neyfakh on n+1

Outro: “One” by Three Dog Night

You can email us at culturefest@slate.com.

This podcast was produced by Ann Heppermann. Our intern is Lindsey Albracht.

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Stephen Metcalf is Slate’s critic at large. He is working on a book about the 1980s.

Dana Stevens is Slate’s movie critic.

Julia Turner, the former editor in chief of Slate, is a regular on Slate’s Culture Gabfest podcast.