Slate's Culture Gabfest on Oprah Winfrey, the "data-driven life," and Please Give.

Slate's Culture Gabfest on Oprah Winfrey, the "data-driven life," and Please Give.

Slate's Culture Gabfest on Oprah Winfrey, the "data-driven life," and Please Give.

Slate's weekly roundtable.
May 5 2010 12:22 PM

The Culture Gabfest, Optimization of Selfhood Edition

Listen to Slate's show about the week in culture.

1_123125_2187915_080423_cgf_header

The Culture Gabfest has moved! Find new episodes here.

Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 85 with Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, June Thomas, and Julia Turner by clicking the arrow on the audio player below: You can also download the program here, or you can subscribe to the weekly Culture Gabfest podcast feed via iTunes or directly with our RSS feed. Find the Culturefest Facebook page here. Leave us a note and see what other Culturefest listeners have to say about the latest podcast. Tickets to the live show in New York on May 17 are sold out, but send your catchphrases for the Live Culture Gabfest drinking game to slatejb@gmail.com, and follow along at home. You can also join us in reading Sam Lipsyte's new novel, The Ask, which will be one of our subjects of conversation.

Get your 14-day free trial from our sponsor Audible.com, which includes a credit for one free audiobook, here. (Audiobook of the week:It's Only a Movie, written and read by Mark Kermode.)

In this week's Culture Gabfest, our critics Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, June Thomas, and Julia Turner discuss Kitty Kelley's unauthorized biography of Oprah Winfrey, the "Data-Driven Life" as quantified by Gary Wolf in the New York Times Magazine, and Nicole Holofcener's new film Please Give.

Here are some links to the things we discussed this week:

June Thomas' review of Kitty Kelley's Oprah: A Biography.
Deborah Solomon's New York Times Q&A with Kitty Kelley.
Gary Wolf's New York Times Magazine piece "The Data-Driven Life."
Nicole Holofcener's new film, Please Give.

The Culture Gabfest weekly endorsements:

Dana's pick: Berlin's Film Museum.
Julia's pick: The Arnold Arboreteum in Boston..
Stephen's pick: Shane Meadows' film This Is England.

You can e-mail us at culturefest@slate.com.

Posted on May 5 by Matt Lieber at 12:22 p.m.

June Thomas is managing producer of Slate podcasts.

Stephen Metcalf is Slate’s critic at large. He is working on a book about the 1980s.

Dana Stevens is Slate’s movie critic.

Julia Turner, the former editor in chief of Slate, is a regular on Slate’s Culture Gabfest podcast.