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This week on Slate Plus, Dana offers a sneak peek at how her book is getting on and talks to Slate senior editor Gabriel Roth about the early life of Buster Keaton.
On this week’s Slate’s Culture Gabfest, the critics discuss Amanda Knox, the new true crime documentary from Netflix, in which directors Rod Blackhurst and Brian McGinn portray the maltreatment Knox received at the hands of the Italian judicial system and the global tabloid press during the murder trial of Meredith Kercher. Next, pop critic Jack Hamilton joins to discuss his new book, Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination, about how an African American genre of music became almost exclusively white. How did the Rolling Stones contribute to rock and roll’s segregated future? Last, Rachel Brewson wrote a first-person testimony about her bipartisan relationship online that was picked up by various outlets—and then it turned out that Rachel Brewson never existed. Who invented this fake internet persona, and what can the scam tell us about the state of the contemporary internet?
Links to some of the things we discussed this week:
- Netflix’s Amanda Knox
- Nick Pisa’s reporting in the Daily Mail at the time of the trial
- Jack Hamilton’s piece in Slate on race, rock, and the Rolling Stones
- Jack’s book, Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination
- Jimi Hendrix’s covers of “All Along the Watchtower” and “Like a Rolling Stone”
- The Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar”
- Pop, Race, and the ’60s, a Slate Academy hosted by Jack Hamilton
- “The Team of Men Behind Rachel Brewson” in Jezebel
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Endorsements
Dana: “Love in Vain” by Robert Johnson
Gabe: Hilda and the Troll with illustrations by Luke Pearson
Stephen: The Raveonettes
Outro: “Love in Vain” by Robert Johnson
You can email us at culturefest@slate.com.
This podcast was produced by Zack Dinerstein and Benjamin Frisch. Our intern is Lizzie Fison.
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