Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 418 with Stephen Metcalf, Laura Miller and Dana Stevens with the audio player below.
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This week on Slate Plus, the critics discuss how Jimmy Fallon’s apolitical, celebrity-friendly persona became problematized when Donald Trump appeared as a guest on the Tonight Show last week. Fallon received a huge media backlash from his “softball” questions to the GOP candidate: What should he have done differently?
On this week’s Slate Culture Gabfest, the gabbers discuss Don’t Breathe, the movie from Fede Alvarez that reached No. 1 in its first two weekends and made back nearly seven times its $9.9 million budget. What made this late-summer hit so successful? Next, the beloved cult web series High Maintenance has made the switch from Vimeo to HBO. Was the transition a successful one? Last, Slate’s book critic Laura Miller talks about her piece on how the phenomenon of Harry Potter coincided with the rise of the web. The critics discuss how the series abolished the stigma surrounding fan culture, simultaneously laying the groundwork for the coming together of adult and young-adult fiction.
Links to some of the things we discussed this week:
- Trailer for Fede Alvarez’s Don’t Breathe
- Alvarez’s remake of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead
- Willa Paskin’s review of HBO’s High Maintenance in Slate
- Dana’s interview with High Maintenance’s creators in Slate
- Laura’s piece on Harry Potter fandom in Slate
- Harry Potter fan fiction sites: FictionAlley, MuggleNet, FanFiction.net
- Lord of the Rings fan fiction
- Samantha Bee on Fallon’s Trump sit-down
- Willa’s piece on Fallon’s point of no return
The Slate Culture Gabfest is brought to you by Rocket Mortgage from Quicken Loans. Rocket Mortgage brings the mortgage process into the 21st century with an easy online process. Check out Rocket Mortgage today at QuickenLoans.com/culture.
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Endorsements
Dana: Audubon’s guide to the Greater Honeyguide and the On Being episode, “The Grandeur and Limits of Science”*
Laura: The Crochet Coral Reef at the Museum of Arts and Design
Stephen: Dead Calm and Chris Arnade’s Twitter
Outro: “Harry Potter” by Harry and the Potters
You can email us at culturefest@slate.com.
This podcast was produced by Zack Dinerstein. Our intern is Lizzie Fison.
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*Correction, Sept. 25, 2016: This show page originally misspelled Audubon.
