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This week on Slate Plus, avec l’esprit de l’escalier, the gabbers revisit some segments from the past few months to see if their opinions have changed.
On this week’s Slate Culture Gabfest, the gabbers discuss Love: the new Netflix original series created by Judd Apatow, Paul Rust, and Lesley Arfin. Is the genre of the manic pixie jerk girl comedy reinventing the “traditional” rom-com? Next up, the Oscar-nominated documentary Amy chronicles the brief and astonishing life and career of Amy Winehouse. How does it escape the well-worn tropes of movies about musicians? Finally, the critics discuss criticism, the critics of critics, the self-criticism of critics, and A.O. Scott’s new book, Better Living Through Criticism. Is criticism, itself, an art?
Links to some of the things we discussed this week follow:
- Love on Netflix
- Other shows featuring manic pixie jerk girls: You’re the Worst and UnReal
- Catastrophe
- Aziz Ansari’s Netflix show, Master of None
- Togetherness, another sad show about love set in L.A.
- Willa Paskin’s review of Love on Slate
- The documentary Amy
- The songs “Rehab” and “Back to Black” by Amy Winehouse
- A.O. Scott’s Better Living Through Criticism
- “Everybody’s a Critic. And That’s How It Should Be,” an essay adapted from A.O. Scott’s book in the New York Times
- Daniel Mendelsohn’s review of A.O. Scott’s Better Living Through Criticism in the New York Times
- Laura Miller’s review of Better Living Through Criticism on Slate
The Slate Culture Gabfest is brought to you by the Great Courses Plus, a new video service with more than 5,000 lectures. For a limited time, listeners of the Culture Gabfest can watch one of the most popular courses—The Everyday Gourmet: Rediscovering the Lost Art of Cooking—for free. Just visit TheGreatCoursesPlus/culture.
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Endorsements:
Steve: Watching the Oscar-nominated animated shorts (especially World of Tomorrow) and the restaurant Grazin’ Angus Acres in Hudson, New York
Dana: Watching Slate writers act in the video series The Best Case for Best Picture
Julia: The photo correction in the New York Times article, “The Raven, the Original Goth, Makes a Home in New York”
Outro: “Back to Black” by Amy Winehouse
You can email us at culturefest@slate.com.
This podcast was produced by Ann Heppermann. Our intern is Lindsey Albracht.
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