The Culture Gabfest “The New York Review of Taylor Swift” Edition

Slate’s Culture Gabfest on Taylor Swift’s 1989, The 50 Year Argument, and that street harassment video.

By Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner

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In honor of the latest board game movie adaptation Ouija, this week’s Slate Plus listeners will hear the critics contact whatever spirits dwell at the Gabfest recording studio.

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This week on the Slate Culture Gabfest, Slate’s own music critic Carl Wilson joins the Gabfest to interpret the new monster record from Taylor Swift, 1989. Will Steve ever come around on the ex-country starlet? Next, Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi have made a New York Review of Books documentary, The 50 Year Argument. The magazine is twice as old as Taylor Swift, but is it half as good as her album? Finally, the viral Hollaback video recording the catcalls one woman received over the course of one day in New York has inspired interesting conversations and caught flak for its racial politics. The critics discuss the video and their experiences of street harassment.

Links to some of the things we discussed this week follow:

Carl Wilson’s review of Taylor Swift’s 1989 on Slate
Alison Griswold on Swift pulling her music from Spotify on Slate
Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off”
Her dorky turn in the video for “You Belong With Me”
The Lana Del Rey–esque “Wildest Dreams”
The New York Review of Books documentary, The 50 Year Argument
The Hollaback video of one woman’s day of street harassment
Amanda Hess explains street harassment’s invisibility to men on Slate
Hanna Rosin on the racial politics of the catcalling video on Slate
Dee Lockett interprets the other ways white men dominate social space on Slate

Endorsements:

Dana: Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experiences, by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Julia: Scouting New York, the microhistorical gem of a blog written by a location scout in New York

Steve: The early albums of The Who, specifically the song “Substitute”

Outro: Tina Turner’s “River Deep, Mountain High”

A Slate Plus Special Feature:

(Almost) every product recommended on every Slate podcast since the dawn of creation.

You can email us at culturefest@slate.com.

This podcast was produced by Ann Hepperman. Our intern is Josephine Livingstone.

Update, Nov. 5, 2014: The audio of this podcast has been updated to reflect the correct date, Nov. 12, for the Chicago Political Gabfest Annual Conundrum Show.