The Culture Gabfest “Expensive Speech” Edition
Slate’s Culture Gabfest on Selma, the cultural response to the Charlie Hebdo attacks, and the new online-only Merriam-Webster edition.
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This week on the Slate Culture Gabfest, Jamelle Bouie joins the critics to discuss Ava DuVernay’s Martin Luther King Jr. biopic, Selma. David Oyelowo is an undoubtedly compelling actor, but can he live up to Dr. King’s legacy? Next up, the cultural response to the terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo has engulfed the Twittersphere with ambiguity, activism, and confusion. The critics talk through their responses to this baffling event. Finally, Stefan Fatsis joins the Gabfest to talk about his recent profile of the Merriam-Webster dictionary, newly gone into its fourth—and, for the first time, online—edition.
Links to some of the things we discussed this week follow:
- Dana’s glowing review of Selma, on Slate
- Jamelle Bouie on Selma’s insights into policing, on Slate
- … and his retort to critics of Selma’s depiction of LBJ, on Slate
- Max Fisher’s explainer regarding one particularly repugnant Charlie Hebdo cover, on Vox
- George Packer’s New Yorker column on Charlie Hebdo and the question of free speech
- Stefan Fatsis’ profile of Merriam-Webster and its new online edition, on Slate
- The Professor and the Madman, by Simon Winchester
- Harvard and MIT’s Culturomics project
Endorsements:
Jo: “That Summer Feeling,” by Jonathan Richman
(Almost) every product recommended on every Slate podcast since the dawn of creation.
Outro: “That Summer Feeling,” by Jonathan Richman
You can email us at culturefest@slate.com.
This podcast was produced by Ann Hepperman. Our interns are Josephine Livingstone and Lindsey Albracht.
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