Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 343 with Stephen Metcalf, Julia Turner, and Dana Stevens with the audio player below.

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On this week’s Slate Culture Gabfest, the critics weigh in on Noah Baumbach’s new film, While We’re Young. Is it an incisive satire or a claustrophobic bore that leaves no one to root for? Next up, Katy Waldman joins to talk about her new Slate piece on the annotation website Genius. Is the site making close reading more accessible or just sucking the joy out of interpretation? Finally, history has been paradoxically kinder to Robert E. Lee than it has to Ulysses S. Grant. Jamelle Bouie joins to discuss some of the reasons for this.  

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

• Kicking and Screaming
• The Squid and the Whale
• Frances Ha
• Seth Stevenson’s review of While We’re Young in Slate
• A.O. Scott’s review of While We’re Young
• Katy Waldman’s piece about Genius in Slate
• The Waste Land
• “King Kunta” annotations on Genius
• Jamelle Bouie’s piece about Grant and Lee in Slate
• The Birth of a Nation
• Gone With the Wind
• Patriotic Gore

Endorsements:

Dana: The audiobook of The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, narrated by Imogen Stubbs

Julia: H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

Steve: It Follows

Outro: “Killa Cam” by Cam’ron

You can email us at culturefest@slate.com.

This podcast was produced by Joel Meyer. Our intern is Lindsey Albracht.

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