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On this week’s Slate Plus, Dana, Julia, and Gabriel discuss pizza toppings.
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This week, the critics discuss the new Armando Iannucci film, The Death of Stalin, a black comedy about the power struggles in the USSR after Stalin’s death. How successfully does it walk the line between political horror and comedy? Next, they talk about the new television series Rise and wonder whether another series about a high school theater program can succeed so soon after Glee. Finally, the gabbers experiment with Ben Grosser’s Twitter Demetricator, which removes the likes, retweets, and follower data, to see what they can learn from a numbers-free social media experience.
Links to some of the things we discussed this week:
- The Death of Stalin trailer
- Sam Adams’ review of The Death of Stalin in Slate
- Anthony Lane’s review of The Death of Stalin in the New Yorker
- The Thick of It
- Rise
- Friday Night Lights
- Glee
- Drama High by Michael Sokolove
- Benjamin Grosser’s Twitter Demetricator
- “The ‘Demetricator’ Will Change How You Use Facebook and Twitter” by Will Oremus in Slate
- The RescueTime app
- “The Real Scandal Isn’t Cambridge Analytica. It’s Facebook’s Whole Business Model” by Will Oremus in Slate
Endorsements:
Dana: Elena Ferrante’s column in the Guardian
Gabriel: There’s a Riot Going On by Yo La Tengo
Julia: The Moment app
Outro: “For You Too” by Yo La Tengo
You can email us at culturefest@slate.com.
This podcast was produced by Benjamin Frisch. The production assistant is Daniel Schroeder.
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