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Speaker A: I’m Stephen Metcalf and this is the Slate Culture Gabfest. One Last Taylor Swift Edition. Dana, what do you think? Like one last Taylor Swift throwdown, Mud wrestling match. Debate society fight to the death. Yeah, the death. Celebrity death match.

Speaker B: Yeah. The White House UFC has nothing on Studio A. It’s late.

Speaker A: Nothing. Anyway, it’s Wednesday. The pay per view opportunities here alone are really nil. But Nonetheless, it’s Wednesday, June 10, 2026. On today’s show, Masters of the Universe. That is one funny piece of ip. Oh, man. It’s from Mattel, who you might know as the Barbie Corporation. This one is a sword and planet, I’m told, superhero thing based on a 1987 movie which was based on a cartoon which was based on a toy. Oi. This one stars Nicholas Galitzine as a young exiled prince of something called Eternia, and Idris Elba as his mentor and various other people. For that segment, we’ll be joined one last wistful time by our superhero whisperer and most esteemed friend of the program, Jamel Bowie. Very excited to talk to Jamel always. And then the feature film is God Is. It’s a wild picture, picaresque and often very violent revenge thriller. I think that’s a reductive way of putting it. But for now, let’s. Let’s capsule it that way. It stars Kara Young and Mallory Johnson as twins on a revenge quest against their birth father who tried to burn them alive when they were three years old. It’s written and directed by Alicia Harris. It’s based on her stage play. And then. And finally, Dear God, you asked for it. Be careful what you wish for. One last in time, the culture gap. Best we’ll talk about Taylor Swift, pegged to her, nominally pegged to her new song for the Toy Story movie. Upcoming Toy Story movie with special guest Jody Rosen and a cameo by Julia Turner. It’s a cameo by Julia because she’s not in today, but we are delighted to be joined by Nadira Gough, Slate’s culture critic extraordinaire, Nadira face to face.

Speaker C: Yeah, it’s good to be here. Thanks for having me back. One last time.

Speaker A: One last go around. Bittersweet. But it’s lovely to see you and I can’t wait to chat. And of course, Dana Stevens, the film Critic extraordinaire for Slate.com and dear friend, Dana.

Speaker C: Hello. Hello.

Speaker A: How’s it going?

Speaker B: Pretty well.

Speaker A: Good. As befits a movie based on a line of toys, the new Masters of the Universe is cheeky, if you’re being charitable. A kind of winky and knowingly unserious fun ride, or less charitably, a sprawling and pointless mess. Here’s one thing I know. It comes to us via a series of pretty silly begats. It was a line of toys from Mattel, then a cartoon, I think in the 80s, then a kitschy feature film in the late 80s. Anyway, our hero is he Man, a prince who’s been plucked out of his planet, Eternia, thanks to the evil scheming of a warlock, Skeletor. He’s now living in Oklahoma City as sort of a doofy normie himbo in an HR job who will talk your ear off if you let him about his lost status as son and heir of blah, blah, blah. It’s like Kinboat in Pale Fire almost, except not at all. Anyway, reunited with his empowering sword, he becomes his he man self and goes to rescue his beloved home planet from ruin. It stars Nicholas Galitzine as Prince Adam, Camila Mendez as his childhood friend, now hottie badass, and Jared Leto as Skeletor. Let’s listen to the clip. It’s from the trailer.

Speaker D: Even though I was stuck light years away on Earth, I never stopped trying to get back home.

Speaker C: Everything changed since you left.

Speaker D: Skeletor took my family.

Speaker A: You know, Skeletor took my family, too. But somehow this material didn’t. Just that just didn’t land for me. But anyway, we’re joined now. It’s like I can scarcely say the words. It’s so freaking heartbreaking. But what a pleasure also to talk one last time in the context of the culture gabfest. To Jamelle Bouie, the columnist, of course, for the New York Times Slate alumnus multimedia platform talking. What’s he even call him? Opinionator? Talking head. Public philosopher. Jamelle Bouie. Jamelle, welcome back to the podcast.

Speaker E: Thank you so much for having me for this movie.

Speaker B: It’s definitely a movie.

Speaker A: All right, so as it’s a movie, I’m going to start with Slate’s film critic, and then Jamel will double back to you and of course, Nadira. But, Dana, starting with you, I mean, it does seem obligatory to treat it as a movie. Did you feel it was a movie as you sat through its two hours and improbably long, two hours and 20 minutes?

Speaker B: I mean, I don’t know. I guess I feel like we’re kind of biasing listeners by starting off like, oh, this horrible piece of junk. Ha ha, that we’re talking about it. But first of all, let me point out that Jamil Jamel picked it. True.

Speaker E: This is true. Yeah. I can’t. I can’t get away from that.

Speaker B: It was his choice. There were other higher brow choices that he could have gone with. And secondly, I think there was something. There’s something valedictory about choosing this for our last conversation with Jamel because he has long been one of our comic book gurus. Right. When we were talking about Marvel movies, we’d often try to have him on or something from the, you know, DC universe. And so it makes sense that in the new era that we’re in, the post Barbie Mattel movie era, we would maybe get his take on one of those kinds of movies. And secondly, I mean, everything sounded very somber in that trailer and in your setup to the movie. But this movie is lighthearted. It is definitely in the Guardians of the Galaxy, James Gunn sort of tradition. Right. Of lighthearted fare that’s based on these kinds of properties. And I kind of enjoyed it, I have to say, if only because I thought the casting was really charming. I mean, this is certainly the most I’ve liked Jared Leto in anything, you know, a very long time. He’s so regrettably good in this movie, and I didn’t know it was him. And he’s doing a British accent and he’s pretty good at it. And the whole time I was thinking, like, did they get Ralph Fiennes or something?

Speaker C: He rolled his Rs in the perfect moments every time. It’s upsetting, but he’s so good, and he just.

Speaker B: He gets the right level of campy humor into that character. His Skeletor is almost sort of like a Mr. Burns kind of figure or something who tries to glory in his own evilness, but, you know, is also making a fool of himself at the same time. I mean, this isn’t reinventing any wheels whatsoever, but I thought it was kind of lovable. And it was the kind of thing that I think you could take a kid, maybe an older kid, because it’s a little scary in parts, but I think you could take a kid and have a good time with your kid and have a good time yourself. I don’t know, Jamel. You’re both the comic book guy and the one with maybe kids in the age range that you might take to this movie. Do you agree? It’s kind of fun.

Speaker E: Yeah, no, it’s long. I mean, I think my issue when I saw it last night was that it’s a solid, like, two hours and 20 minutes long. And I just think it could be significant significantly shorter than that. And that kind of made it feel. It made it. I don’t know, I just, I. At a certain point I was like, come on, get on with it. You know. But I agree, Data, that it is, it’s fun. I mean it’s. It’s basically sort of like. It’s like eating. It’s like a candy bar of a movie. It’s tasty in the moment. There’s not much there afterwards. But I, in general, I didn’t leave it feeling like I had a bad time. I agree. I didn’t realize that was Jared Leto either as Skeletor. And I was like, who’s, who’s the guy played Skeleton? He’s really cooking. And I really had a good time with that character. I had a. I had a good time with Alison Brie who played his sort of henchmen, his chief henchman and her kind of weird quasi sexual thing going on with them. I thought that was pretty funny. And I thought kind of the conceit of the movie, which is that Prince Adam, right, he leaves he’s take. He has to escape as a child. And so his memory is of this place or as a child. And so he’s relating to it all as a child would. Which is sort of like the whole deal with Master of the Universe. And he man, the original property, which is just like, you know, toys is that it’s quite stupid, right. As they allude to in the film. What’s a he man anyway? Like, what does it even mean? And it’s very much geared towards like the whole property is geared towards sort of like an 8 year old’s idea of what’s cool and fantastical and how an 8 year old would approach that. And the movie kind of takes that perspective as well. And it works, it works for what it is. So, you know, my, my son is 7. He’ll be 8 next month. As a matter of fact. I feel like he. There are parts you write that are a little scary. He might be a little disturbed by the. Just the concept of a Skeletor, but I think he might. I think he would enjoy it. There is. Yeah, I think he would enjoy it. And really kind of the, the basic problem, I say is that it’s. There’s nothing new here. Nothing. You know, they’re not reinventing the wheel. You mentioned James Gunn. I actually thought this was very reminiscent of Thor Ragnarok.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker E: And if it were just like 30 minutes shorter, I think I would have had like a much better time. But maybe that’s because I saw it at 9pm and I was like, I got to go to bed.

Speaker A: Nadira.

Speaker D: We.

Speaker A: We live in a Barbie world in some sense, where every Mattel figurine is set to get its own movie. This we’ve heard a little bit about what the flavor of this one is. It has something in common. Am I right to say that it has something in common with Barbie in that it is meditating on, in the way that Barbie meditated on the femininity and the feminine ideal of the figurine in the context of a very intelligent movie, this one is attempting to meditate on masculinity as derived like a highly preposterous and stereotypically desirable or whatever ideal idealized version a boy, a little boy’s version of what a grown masculine human being is. It’s meditating on masculinity in ways that are at times arch and quite funny a la Barbie, and at other times at least attempting to maybe deconstruct that notion. Or am I maybe.

Speaker C: I mean, it has the sort of, like Jamal was saying, the Taika Waititi. I’m making a superhero movie and I’m very self aware about that comedy strain to it that I enjoy but is not new. But I do think I had one expectation of this movie. I should say that from the front, as someone who is not a big he man person, I was not very familiar at all with the ip. This movie needs to explain why he’s called he man. And it needs to not give me an answer that will p*** me off. And it did that successfully. And so all of my boxes were checked. But I think there were a few things throughout the movie that were really funny and how quickly they were let go of. And this contemplation about masculinity is one of them. Adam is someone who worked in HR and is conflict avoidant, but is very trained in dealing with conflict somehow. And that’s a big part of his narrative. And when he first, I guess, has this resurgence as being being entered back into the world of Eternia and supernatural beings and such, he at first is grappling with this idea of, well, we shouldn’t cheer because I ripped this guy’s arm off or we shouldn’t, whatever. And then as soon as he turns into he man, they forget that completely. And he has no qualms of just beating the crap out of people. And I thought that that was hilarious, if a failed attempt at what you were asking about. Steve Overall though, I think that this movie is fun. It’s directed by Travis Knight, who is the son of Nike co founder Phil Knight and also was a longtime animator and is the current CEO of Laika. And so trust anyone to actually make a fun movie, at least if they are the CEO and animator of Laika. And I think it achieves that. But there were definitely a few things that I thought were silly. But I think at this point I don’t expect much from superhero films except to at least not be boring. And So I fully 100% agree that if this was 20 to 30 minutes shorter, I would like it a lot more.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think that was the big problem I saw my, my note was it’s lovable, but sort of Stockholm syndrome lovable, like when you know, you’re trapped with it for those, you know, professional via professional obligation for that amount of time you can derive some enjoyment out of it. I cheap and kind of sort of AI composed sounding dialogue doesn’t in itself make it light hearted. This movie and candy bar shouldn’t bloat. In the end, this didn’t really work for me. One thing I will say in my own defense about, about the sort of gender, you know, semiotics of it is there is in fact a whole Wikipedia page about he man and Masters of the Universe as gay iconography.

Speaker C: Oh, 100%.

Speaker A: Oh yeah. There’s a huge, you know, scholarly, you know, and popular discourse surrounding that.

Speaker C: One thing that I have to get off my chest about this movie. Well, one thing that I do want to mention is that one of my favorite skeletor through lines is also to what you were saying, Steve. His coded but not so coded homosexuality in how often he was mentioning how much he loved he man Adam Nicholas Galitzine’s thighs. I thought that was funny. What was not funny was the sort of very, very present of mind reminder that Amazon has since bought mgm and there is a moment in this film where Amazon kind of inserts themselves and tries to save the day with this gag with an Amazon truck that oh God, really just does not bode well for the future of cinema. And so I just wanted to mention that because it is like a candy bar except like, I don’t know, there’s a raisin in my candy bar and I don’t want a raisin in my candy bar unless I do, but I don’t.

Speaker A: Jamel it occurred to me when I was prepping this segment that I think our show started in 2008. Iron man was in 2008. I believe we did Iron man one for the show. We certainly did two. But like, our show is funnily enough, coterminous with a lot of things right? The post financial crisis world, the Obama presidency is followed by the Trump presidency, Taylor Swift, the iPhone, social media. Like all these things advented in the time that we started doing the show. Well, one of them is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but also just the tent poling of Hollywood to IP based on comic books. And in all seriousness, we do talk to you in part to get your intelligent opinion on a phenomenon that’s become extraordinarily popular. And anyway, any reflection on that era and what its current status is, is it starting to wheeze and buckle a little bit or is that just my imagination?

Speaker E: No, I think, I don’t think it’s your imagination at all. I mean, it’s interesting to, you know, you sit down and watch a movie like this and I went into it and first I kind of, I have any background with Masters universe or he man or whatever, know the character is or whatever, but I didn’t go into it like, you know, excited or anything. It’s just like, I’m going to see a movie here. And there was no big, there’s no big, big. There’s been no big scaffolding around the film. You know, not a ton of promotion. It’s not, you know, hotly anticipated. It’s just sort of like, yeah, you know, one of these is coming out, let’s go see it. And that is in such marked contrast to like the first five years of the IP era, where every one of these releases was treated as like a huge deal, where there really was the zeitgeist. The zeitgeist was what? How are we transforming this comic book IP or this video game IP or whatever on the screen? And that sense of excitement is gone. I really do feel as if there’s a level of exhaustion with it. All in part because of its success, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, at least in its first 10 years, was hugely successful. Really reshaped blockbuster filmmaking, reshaped Hollywood, reshaped people’s expectations of the movies. And since then, it’s just sort of petered out. Both because the attempt to kind of capture the old magic meant that they’re just pumping out these things two, three, four at a time. And they began to import this model to other franchises. And so famously the other big Disney franchise that they tried to do this with, Star wars, and it totally flopped in the end. I think this year, right, was the first new Star wars movie in some time. I think a direct product of the way that this flopped. And I think we’re at this place where the, it’s not that the IP era is gone, like these kinds of movies are still going to be produced, but I do think that they’re no longer dominant. I’m not sure that they will be dominant. And that we are seeing the emergence of sort of a new model for blockbusters. You know, lower budget, much lower budget, a little more experimental. These are the recent horror pictures in particular that have done smashingly well. And I think we’re in the midst of studios kind of reconfiguring and readjusting to the fact that while there will always be an audience for these films, I’m sure that the upcoming Spider man movie will do gangbusters that it’s not going to be the case where you can release a half dozen of these in like six months and, and make money on each of them. It’s going to be the case that you might get, you know, two, three, four tops of these big kind of IP tentpole films in a year. And that’s going to be it. Because audiences are just, they’re just tired of them. I’m tired of them. Right. Like, it’s just like, I’m done. All right, I’m done.

Speaker C: Yeah. I was 12 or 13 when the first Iron man came out.

Speaker E: Jesus Christ.

Speaker A: I know, sorry.

Speaker D: I was 46.

Speaker C: Sorry. But I just say that to say that I’m probably the perfect demographic, right? I fit into the demographic that these movies were catering to my whole life and am a huge, I’m a huge Marvel fan, was a big fan of those movies and of a number of stories in the D.C. world. And even I am exhausted with them now. And it really is sad to sort of compare the way that I entertain these films now with the sheer magic that that first era of Marvel really felt like. And I know that I’m older now, but it is also just because everything has catered to this format. I mean, even non superhero movies having post credits scenes right now we have to stay through the credits, which is good. We should be staying through the credits. There are lots of important people’s names there. But now we have to stay through the credits for any movie just to see if there’s more tidbits at the end, which is a Marvel creation. And so the way that they’ve really defined my overall movie watching experience of my life, I think is so hard to reckon with and divorce yourself from, especially if you’re staring into the face of it with not quite eternal love or pleasure.

Speaker B: Well, then everybody should brace themselves for Supergirl, which was being very heavily promoted at the showing of this that I saw. But I will actually say that the Superman movie from last year did for me, as somebody who. One of my earliest crushes was Christopher Reeve in the original Superman movies. That did kind of awaken that feeling of magic. I love that Superman from last year. So the idea that there’s like a spin off from it. Yeah, it does feel a little bit like we got to keep squeezing this lemon till all the juice is gone, but at least it was a tasty lemon. So maybe there’s one more squeeze left in it.

Speaker C: Agreed.

Speaker A: Oh, man. Well, there’s the valediction right there. It was a good squeeze. Jamel, what can I say? It’s been just. It really has been a privilege and an honor to talk to you all these years. It’s very sad making that it’s coming to an end, but I hope we all find a way to stay in touch. Thank you so much for having been a huge contributor to the project that was this podcast.

Speaker E: Oh, it’s. It’s my pleasure. Really happy, really happy to have been a contributor and, you know, great job, guys. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know what to say that at the end of something like this. Great job. This has been. This has been great.

Speaker B: I mean, I feel better thinking that we will talk again in some other context into some other microphones one day.

Speaker A: You’re here.

Speaker B: It’s the time in the show when we talk about business. And our only business this week is to tell Slate plus listeners about what our Slate plus segment is going to be this week. It’s actually a bonus episode you’ll see separately in your feed and this week. So because we have Jody Rosen on the panel for our last topic, and he’s also going to stick around for plus, I thought it would be a good week to talk about the closing of Hampshire College. The college in western Massachusetts is part of that five college consortium with Amherst, Smith, Mount Holyoke, that whole area. Hampshire College, very abruptly in April of this year, announced that it was going to be closing immediately. That this year’s graduating class would be the last graduating class. These were. This was for financial reasons that were not clearly outlined in the statement. But I think Jodi will help us understand more about. But why this is so. I think interesting and important to talk about at this moment in higher education is because Hampshire College was a different kind of school that had a different model, a somewhat radical model for what higher education should be. So we’re going to talk a little bit about that radical experiment and what it means that that experiment is over. So if you’re a Slate plus member, you will get that a separate episode in your feedback. I wanted to say thanks to all of our listeners, and especially you who do belong to Slate plus for supporting this show and supporting Slate. The gabfest may be winding down, which makes me very sad to even say, but you can find more smart, funny and irreverent work on all of Slate’s podcasts and everything we publish on the site, including our culture coverage and criticism, including by Nadirikoff here, that you would recognize from this show.

Speaker A: Your membership is what keeps Slate going, so please stick around for all of it in the feature film Is God Is Anaya and Racine are twin girls who were disfigured in a fire when they were three years old. The fire was set by their birth father in an attempt to kill both his wife and his kids. That effort failed, but it left his daughters viciously burned. One is facially disfigured. The other sister can hide her wounds, literally and figuratively. She’s capable of not always presenting them, but they are very much deep within her and express themselves throughout the movie in various ways. As we learn right away, the two sisters are telepathically close in that unique twin way with Racine, whose arm is badly scarred but whose face was spared the more protective, aggressive, and I think it’s fair to say, enraged of the two, and she’s her sister’s protector and bodyguard. And then there’s Anaya, her sweeter, more tender, more vulnerable and wounded sister whose face has been badly disfigured. They grow up in a foster system, believing that their mother was killed in that fire. When they receive a letter from her as adults saying she’s alive and summoning them, it kicks off a revenge saga. The film stars Kara Young as Racine, the tougher, harder sister, and Mallory Johnson as her more vulnerable twin. It also features Janelle Monae and Sterling K. Brown as their father and Vivica A. Fox plays their mother. You’ll hear her in the clip we’re about to play.

Speaker B: I think I might just jump in and say, to somewhat explain the very confusing and ungoogleable title is God Is that? That is a reference to a moment early in the film when one of the two twins talking about their mother and her directive of vengeance for the two daughters Compares the mother to God. And essentially they start calling her God almost as a nickname, like she made us, so she must be God.

Speaker A: In the clip, we hear the sisters at their mother’s bedside. She’s surrounded by attendants and smoldering, literally. And she gives them their marching orders in no uncertain terms.

Speaker C: Something I need to ask y’ all to do. But I don’t know if y’ all up to it. We up to it.

Speaker B: We can do anything. We strong. Ain’t we strong?

Speaker C: Nyah.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker C: I’m gonna keep this real simple for you. Make your daddy dead. Dare to dad. And everything around you, you can destroy it too. I think he took up with some b**** killer spirit, then the body like he did me. Make him dead. Well, dead.

Speaker A: Nadira, let me start with you. You called this the great black horror movie or the headline writer did for your piece. A distinction we should always make sort of a two part question, right? That’s obviously become a totally compelling genre, right? Black horror. Talk a little bit about that and where this fits in. And I just want to quote you, you say this is a tour de force that perfectly blends Afro surrealism, humor and gritty drama. Talk about the genre and this example of it.

Speaker C: Well, ever since Jordan Peele really broke out from Key and Peele and started making his weird little, very enticing horror films, I think black horror as a genre has really, really catapulted. And I have found that since his films, a lot of them have felt very similar. This is one of the first ones that really, really feels set apart from the rest of them in the genre that I’ve seen. And it is shaping up to be one of my favorite movies of the year. It’s not perfect. I have my quibbles with it, particularly with the ending, but the performances are great. The score done by Moses Sumney, who’s someone I’ve endorsed on this show before, is stunning. And it’s such a rich text, I think, for a directorial debut and for a stage to screen adaptation, which is usually a creative endeavor that fails for me cinematically. I really, really loved this. One of my favorite things, though, is the way it’s structured. Almost like a Hellenistic epic, a Greek revenge tragedy where the protagonists go from town to town to town throughout the Black South. They encounter different people and different obstacles that they have to defeat or figure out in order to get their final revenge goal. And the archetypes of the characters that you meet as they travel through the Black south are so lovingly wrought and yet harshly comedically skewered. In a way that you can only balance if you have a deep understanding of and love for who these black people are within the diaspora. And I. I just think this movie is doing such great work.

Speaker A: Nadir, I couldn’t agree with you more, right that that I think maybe I semi plagiarized this from you, but I think I was thinking it while I was watching it that there’s a kind of aeschylian Sophoclean horror behind this. I mean, provoked also by the fact that it was a stage play. And I want to return to you in a moment about how that plays out in the context of this film and the deep sense of trauma and repetitive trauma that has that Greek feel to it, tragic feel to it. But Dana, let me turn to you and ask you, what’d you think about this movie? What’d you bring to it and what’d you get out of it?

Speaker B: I mean, it’s definitely worth watching. So arresting, so original. I do agree the third act falls apart some. I mean, because we’ve been led to expect so much. It sets up, sets your expectations so high. For the end. I had one word to say about genre at the top because we were actually talking when deciding whether or not to cover this as a topic about whether it was a horror film, because we had just talked about a horror film backrooms last week and I remember you saying, Nadir, that it isn’t 100% horror, right. It’s almost more. To me, it’s a revenge thriller, right. That has. That certainly uses some of the tropes of horror, but it’s not a supernatural movie. It is about real world harms, which you say in writing about the movie to you are scarier than any supernatural villain you could think of. And I just. The movie that it reminded me of, a recent movie that it reminded me of, that is also very genre straddling was Sinners, you know, in the sense that it was. It was this sort of portrait of a whole community, right. Not just one particular family, and that there’s elements of it set in the black south, although it’s also a road movie where the twins drive to other places. Just that sense that there’s a sort of historical horror, you know, a trans historical horror embedded in the particular story of this. This family. So I feel like they’re in conversation together and they would make an amazing double feature. A very intense, exhausting double feature, but a great one.

Speaker C: Yeah, I 100% feel that those two movies are in very deep conversation with each other. And What I think is so interesting is one of them is centering around two twin brothers and the other are centering around two twin sisters. And the conversation that people. Viewers had about these two movies, even though they both are on a pursuit to kill their abusive fathers, is very different. This movie caused a lot of controversy and ire from black fans, particularly black male viewers, who felt that the movie depicted black men as needlessly, endlessly violent, as too destructive or too harsh or too cruel. And that is not something that anyone has said in response to Sinners, which has a very similar story. And so it really brought up a very big question of black women on film and their sort of. To take from Maya Cade, who wrote a great blog about this, their cinematic right to revenge. And I think those conversations being had are also very illuminating about where we are in terms of the genre, in terms of who gets to be these protagonists in these revenge or horror tales. Yeah.

Speaker A: So I thought this was like a remarkable journey. And incredibly, incredibly, it is not raw. As a piece of filmmaking, it’s actually quite beautifully delivered. But it is depicting a depth and rawness of rage that was quite powerful to confront. I think the two principles are amazing, and I like that they hover between speaking to one another explicitly. But they’re also. They do have a kind of. It’s almost literally a telepathic connection. They sometimes communicate without speaking, and we get the subtitles the way they move in unison with one another. Which it’s interesting to you because they’re not physically overly similar actresses. But the effect of them as twins is portrayed, you know, extraordinarily well. And the rage of one and the kind of tender. Tender and tender woundedness of the other are both completely affecting and carried me through the whole movie. I love Moses Sumney so much, I’ve endorsed him on the show. The score is incredible. The song songs that he contributed are amazing. I suspect I would have gone with this a lot further as a stage play because in the context of a stage play, with the violence off stage, which is very in keeping with the Greek tragic tradition, one would have a sense of the cycles of violence and trauma that the play is about. Right. It sort of would have embedded more in the tradition of Greek tragedy in a way that would have contextualized what is really intense violence in the context of the film and in. And films. Maybe it’s me, but films always, to my mind, commercially made films always demand that revenge somehow be satisfying or somehow cathartic. Catharsis means something different in the context of American film, popular film, than it means in the context of Greek tragedy. Right. Catharsis into Greek tragedy brings you to this kind of realization of man’s relationship to fate and how cycles of revenge play out inexorably. Whereas catharsis in the context of film is a kind of, you know, it’s really sort of about the good triumphing over the wicked and the wicked being adequately punished, often, you know, through a physical torment by the good person. And when that. There was a very specific moment in this movie where I was with it almost completely. And then with. I’ll just say that it involves Janelle Monae. I don’t know if that rings a bell with you, Nadira, but from that moment on, I really thought, I don’t know if I can follow this movie there. You want revenge to happen in this kind of cathartic Hollywood way when you’re watching the film. Maybe that’s me, but Nadira. Anyway, I’m sort of throwing verbiage in your lap, but I’m curious.

Speaker C: Oh, that’s a really good sort of. I don’t know, various temp holes that you’ve set up, I think base. It’s a story about how violence and abuse begets more violence and abuse. Right. And what I think is so interesting is all of the different characters that they meet along the way are characters who have shielded their father from taking accountability, but they are also characters who are all of them who have been abused by him or are victims of his abuse or neglect in some way. Right. Even the Erika Alexander preacher character, who is so. She’s so good in those few minutes that we see her. But even her and her son, as they encounter her, are also victims of neglect of the father’s character. And I think that in doing that, the movie is making a much bigger statement about how these systems really enforce or at least withhold accountability from patriarchal violence in a way that is very modern and in a way that is hard to talk about. And it’s also, I think, very particularly hard to have feelings about if you are someone who is a victim. Right. To look at another person who has maybe kept your abuser from being held accountable, but because they were abused themselves is a really hard person to look in the mirror at and to. And to try and figure out your feelings for. And I do think what is really helpful about movies with a binary, sort of like twins is that you can always have one twin that’s like, I’m going to be the more extreme version of this. And you can always have another twin that’s like, I don’t think that’s a good idea.

Speaker B: Just like smoke and sack in centeries, right? I mean, except the internal division here is even more extreme and more sort of mythic. I mean, I think, as probably people put together from this conversation, this isn’t exactly. It’s a sort of psychological fable, right? This isn’t exactly a realist story, but really each twin represents a different side of someone who’s seeking vengeance in that way. And just like all the great revenge thrillers going back to Aeschylus, actually, this movie has a huge question mark throughout as to whether this revenge is really going to be cathartic or a good idea at all. And that’s the argument the twins keep having, is they’re going on this crazy road trip, right? So Anaya is the one who has more moral qualms, who doesn’t want to do the actual killing. And Racine, who they explicitly say sort of inherited her father’s gene for violence, basically is the one who really wants to take bloody vengeance and get satisfaction from it. So that debate as to whether it’s a worthwhile pursuit or not is one that the twins are actively conducting as they drive across the country.

Speaker C: Country, yeah. And I think that underlying this whole movie is a lot of things. It’s a very rich text. But underlying this whole movie is a question about morality. But what does morality mean when you recontextualize God? Right? If you recontextualize worship as being the mother or something else, then where does morality fit in? What? Where does duty fit in? And I find that to be such an interesting question. I don’t know that the movie successfully answers it for me, though, I think, because like we were saying, the third act sort of falls apart. But I think it’s a really good try, right? And I really appreciate the way that the movie is really just swinging for the fences on many different fronts.

Speaker A: All right, the movie is God is. It’s in that initial release window on platforms where you can pay up for it. It’s expensive, it’s not free, but it is there. You can watch it. If not.

Speaker B: And it’s in some theaters, I think, as well.

Speaker A: It is in some theaters. And I think all three of us heartily recommend that people go see it and grapple with its challenges.

Speaker B: I meant to say that when I was trying to Google how to watch this on Apple, I typed into Google is God is Apple? And the. The AI result was, no, they’re entirely different concepts. God and apples.

Speaker C: God And Apple.

Speaker A: Only yesterday, I think it was, we got an email from one of our listeners asking if we would please do just one last hoedown, one last throwdown, talking about Taylor Swift, specifically asking for me and Jody to go at it one last time on this subject. But coincidentally, we’d already booked it and here we are. So let me welcome back Jody Rosenberg, very, very, very senior most friend of this program. Hey, Jody. Hey, Steve. Fun to see you.

Speaker F: Did you just call Jody old?

Speaker A: No, no. Just in the context of the show.

Speaker B: The show itself is old.

Speaker A: Nobody is.

Speaker D: Nobody is senior. Momentist.

Speaker C: The show can vote. The show can vote.

Speaker F: Just trying to start. S***. Trying to get this segment off on the right.

Speaker B: But he can’t drink it.

Speaker A: Exactly, Julia. As you know, nobody associated with this product is older than me, so I wouldn’t be flinging that around casually, but anyway. And you’ve also heard the voice of Julia Turner joining us from la. Julia. Hey.

Speaker F: Couldn’t resist. Couldn’t resist. One final ride on the bucking bronco.

Speaker A: It’s funny that people associate me and Jodi with this kind of, you know, whatever. Now, sadly, decades long argument about. Supposed argument about Taylor Swift and her merits and demerits. But funnily enough, it was you and me, Julia, who got into it so intensely. There was like a mommy and daddy are fighting anxiety among friends of mine who listened. They were like, are you guys going to be okay? Like, is the show going to continue? Like, how do you. How do you move on from that?

Speaker B: That’s secretly why the show is wrapping. The bitterness that’s been boiling.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: All these years.

Speaker A: Yeah, the boil finally lances. But anyway, so here we all are. Let me begin by saying that Taylor Swift is a recording artist that you may have heard of. She’s got a new song out on Spotify. I think it’s breaking all kinds of streaming records. It’s called I knew it. I knew you. The occasion is it’s a song for the upcoming movie Toy Story 5. It reunites her with Jack Antonoff. Jodi will give us the specifics, I’m sure. Let me properly say it, by the way. Jody Rosen is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and the author of the very, very beautifully delivered Two Wheels Good Of History of the Bicycle. Jody, lovely to see you.

Speaker D: Thank you, Steve.

Speaker A: And of course, Julia is the head of the LA material, which our listeners know. All right, let’s listen to the song.

Speaker B: I remembered I loved you Came back when it mattered I saw you standing there in the light of the Window Wearing that same smile. Man, it’s been a while But I knew it, I knew you. I knew it, I knew.

Speaker C: Yeah, I knew you. All your blues Like a mood ring changing colors. You did too.

Speaker A: F****** exhausting listening. Oh, my God.

Speaker C: All right.

Speaker B: Speaking of fighting like brothers, let’s get into it.

Speaker A: Jody. A lot of the. Obviously, there’s a valedictory conversations. The culture gap is just going away. This will be the last time we talk to you on mic. On and on and on and on. So in that context, it’s obviously, it’s apposite to talk about this specific song. It’s also relevant to talk about Taylor Swift and where she is in her gigantic world engulfing arc, but then also, you know, just sort of the larger subject of pop music in an era like kind of, you know, in no small way, really dominated by her and artists maybe like her or analogous in important ways to her. So we’re going to go a lot of different places, but let’s start someplace relatively banal. It’s another Jack Antonoff collab. It has sort of pop, country, indie elements. The harmonica at first is a little bit like attention getting, and then it goes. We go to Taylor Land pretty quickly. Is it a new and different place this time around, or what do you think?

Speaker D: I like the song. Okay. I thought it was good. How’s that for a critical judgment? No, I mean what I noticed about it, you know, sonically, in terms of its arrangement and everything like that, it’s a little more spacious than the typical Jack Antonoff production, which tends to be a bit cluttered and full. It’s. Yes, as you say, there’s a harmonica. There’s kind of winks at country. That may be because of the context here, because she’s singing, I guess, in theory, singing in voice of the cowgirl Jessie Doll character from Toy Story. So there’s maybe something going on there with genre. But I also noticed Antonoff brings in what to me sounded slightly hackneyed horn arrangement, which was more of a retro soul kind of gesture, but really struck me about the song was that it sounded very relaxed for a Taylor Swift song. And she doesn’t usually sound relaxed to me. She sounds stressed, like she’s got something she’s trying to do. But she sounds very easeful here.

Speaker A: Very, very nice vocal performance, I thought.

Speaker D: Just kind of just felt like she was out there having fun. And the lyrics seemed a bit hard to me to parse. And I assume again, that’s because it’s addressing some sort of narrative situation in Toy Story 5 that I don’t currently have insight on, but we’ll.

Speaker B: I haven’t seen Toy Story 5 yet. I don’t think it’s available to see, but I know from context and from previous Toy Stories that this is the song that the cowgirl character Jesse will sing or imagine, you know, express in some way when she re meets her original owner. If you remember the. I think it’s In Toy Story 2, the extraordinary Randy Newman song When she loved me. Sarah McLachlan’s the singer that’s about the separation. It’s so heartbreaking. I’m just start crying just talking about it. It’s just Jessie remembering the little girl who loved her outgrew her. Right. So I guess In Toy Story 5, that girl has grown up now and she meets Jesse again. And this is the song of recognition.

Speaker C: I. Okay, could someone rehash the. The debate and who was on which side of the debate? And then after the song finished playing, Steve went, well, that was exhausting. And I feel I got some idea. But, yeah, what was. What was this whole massive argument that the fans are clamoring for?

Speaker A: I mean, I could do a quick characterization.

Speaker D: You go ahead, and then I’ll correct you where you lie.

Speaker A: I was gonna say I could do a quick mischaracterization.

Speaker F: You walk off the plank first, Steve.

Speaker A: From my point of view, I think relatively early on in the show, Taylor Swift was becoming bigger maybe, than I had figured out. And I was just in one of those, like, haggard moods where I was like, what the f*** are we doing talking about this? And there was a moment where I thought the rhetorical inflation surrounding the material we were discussing was just, like, wildly out of control. And I actually think maybe Carl was on the show when I said this, but I was like, it’s like you’re talking about a can of Coke and treating it like it’s f****** Michelangelo’s David or something. It just was one of those things like, this is the whole. This show works because people say s*** that they haven’t written down or maybe even overly digested and thought about first, like, that it’s conversational in its essence.

Speaker D: And so there go all my notes that I have on my laptop in front of me.

Speaker A: I have to speak extemporaneously, you know, but it’s like. It’s just like another f****** trip to Regretsville, you know, one after the other when you’re talking in that way, in a format that actually is memorialized and made eternal on the web. And that was one of Those moments where it just wasn’t a. It wasn’t a considered opinion. And I got sort of stuck with it a little bit because I actually don’t like her music. And I will just say very, very quickly about that. She just has become an icon in the way that Madonna and Elvis were icons. Something about the iconography has overwhelmed the music. Which doesn’t mean that Elvis and Madonna didn’t make extraordinary path breaking music. But something about that has gotten, in my estimation, out of whack to the point where it’s very hard to think about her as a musical phenomenon. And the other thing I would say is that over the years I’ve pioneered a really pocket heuristic about dyads, right. That if you are a Tolstoy person, you may not be a Dostoevsky person, if you’re a Beethoven person, you might not be a Mozart person. There’s certain artists in Lennon McCartney being like the most obvious example from popular culture maybe, but there are certain artists that seem to exist in active antithesis to others. I think I am a Lana Del Rey person. And somehow in my mind Taylor Swift is in that dyad, in my mind with her. And there is something about. There’s so many of the things that could be said about Taylor Swift can also be said about Lana Del Rey. There’s a lot of co writing. There’s like she works with Antonoff. There’s the, you know, she’s an author in one sense, but not an author in the Dylan sense. Exactly. And on and on and on. That music has resonance for me. This music has none. That’s an entirely personal reaction to it. And that’s what I would say. And then there was a massive, like Carl had a very considered poptimist in that highly developed Carl way response to my dismissal that was withering. I mean it really was like. And it was intellectually considered and very withering. And then Julia and I, I think when we talked about this just one too many times, right. It was like it just had that frayed nerve, like why the f*** are we even talking about this? And why are you stereotyping what I’m saying? And we got actually legitimately angry with one another. And so it made this weird impression that, you know, anyway that I represent something vis a vis this person’s work, which I don’t think is true or should be true.

Speaker F: Can I speak to what our most heated conversation about this was? And then Jodi, I’m curious for your recollections as well, but the disagreeing with you on matters of taste is obviously the whole point of the show. And we often dislike different things. The thing that made me not just furious, but bewildered because of my respect for you is that there was one conversation where you, like, insisted that she didn’t write the music and that.

Speaker D: And I was present for that. That was very early on, Julia. He may have repeated that argument, but that was the essence of the initial conflict as I recall it.

Speaker A: I’ve forgotten that. Yeah, well, that’s obnoxious.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker F: And it was so not grounded in fact. And especially given that you do tend to respect singer songwriter types. There was like. Like you are not a sexist person in any way. You are not. Occasionally, Dana and I have gotten misguided notes from, you know, listeners who hope to protect us from your overbearing machismo. And I would just like to say to those listeners, mind at ease, like, we’ve been fine. Like, you really aren’t. But you were so het up about her that you, like, insisted that somehow she didn’t. She wasn’t writing the work. And I was just like, I’m not used to arguing with you when you’re hung on to wrong facts and facts that are wrong in a way that could be construed as sexist. Again, not calling you sexist. Didn’t think, like, I was just like, who is this guy? This isn’t Steve. Like, Steve would usually be like, she wrote it and she’s a s***** writer. Like, so it was. It was confounding the way you were making the argument to me. Go ahead, Jodi.

Speaker D: I think it’s worth actually historicizing Steve’s f***** up argument. Because the truth is, that’s a very old argument. And Steve definitely did. That was definitely what triggered our initial conflicts around Taylor is cause that Steve was insisting, if I’m recalling correctly, that she was Svengalied up and that she wasn’t writing her own material. In fact, you sort of just said that now that she’s co writing this stuff. And the fact is she has written many songs all by herself, so that’s something she can do. She does do a lot of what’s called top line writing, where maybe one of her producers will come up with musical material and then she writes words and melodies to the music. But that’s like both a very prominent current form of pop songwriting and an old one. I mean, that’s happened a lot. But also arguably that’s what Bob Dylan does because he’s drawing on traditions. You know, he’ll take old folk tropes melodies and write new words and lyrics to them. So it’s like. So that kind of attempt to strip Taylor Swift of her agency seemed wrongheaded to me. But also it’s not. Steve’s not alone in that misapprehension or that argument. In fact, one of the reasons I think Taylor Swift started doing things like putting voice memos of her early demos on putting them out with her records was to refute that sexist large, not just, but argument that she wasn’t doing herself. It also was, interestingly, a power move within the world, positioning herself relative to other pop stars, male and female, who weren’t capable of bringing in a song like Blank Space and saying like, here’s a nearly written song of Blank space. Look what I brought into Max Martin and Shellback, who essentially cooked up some production.

Speaker C: But that’s also a middle stage Taylor Swift argument. Like her, the. The myth of her is that she is just a girl with her guitar. And that is very much how she listen. Guys, as a massive Jonas Brothers fan in my youth and still to this day, I’ll admit it, when her and Joe Jonas broke up, you couldn’t pay me to believe that anyone else wrote the scathing song that she wrote about him after they broke up.

Speaker F: Wait, which one’s about him? Which one’s about him?

Speaker C: Oh, I think it’s White Horse from Fearless. I would have to fact check that. But it was very clear, I think, especially in her earlier days, that a lot of her, not to put it juvenile in a bad way, but juvenile because she was a child, juvenile feelings were expressed in a juvenile way that came fully from. From her was. Were very relevant to all of us in the demographic at the time. And I think after that is actually, interestingly enough, when I started to fall off from being a massive fan of hers. I was a big fan of hers from the beginning, up until about 1989, which is the last wholesale Taylor Swift album that I loved. And after that I sort of fell off for me. But she really. She had something going with. With her grit and her pure emotion and that. Those teardrops on her guitar.

Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, I think she. She definitely. I mean, to my ear, she still has it, but I mean, but I do. I mean, back to Steve’s point about not liking her music, I don’t have unambivalent feelings about Taylor Swift’s music, to say nothing of Taylor Swift’s position in the culture, her dominion over the pop industry and over pop culture in general. The fact that she’s the one top 1% of the 1% and what that ramifications are and positioned herself as an artist rights activist. And is she or isn’t she? All this stuff to me is interesting, but that doesn’t mean that I like every Taylor Swift song. And I think she has a lot of weaknesses in her songwriting and a lot of things about Anne that she’s also a brilliant, fluent song crafter, which doesn’t mean you have to vibe with her like Steve says. I mean, I think that she, you know, Nadira was just talking about her like kind of in. Not infantile, but her juvenile high school thing. And she’s never really left that. And I, at first, that really bugged me because I was like, you know, other white singer songwriters like her, when they were much younger than her, had a lot more worldly culture. Think about someone like just you invoke Dylan or Joni Mitchell, okay? Think about where they were at and the traditions in art and history they were drawing on relative to Taylor Swift, who basically sees everything to the prism of high school. And then I came to appreciate that as her niche in the same way that her metaphor system, the same way that Lil Wayne’s metaphor system is, you know, talking about gangster s***. Yeah, gangster s*** and f******. And Springsteen’s metaphor system is cars in the open road and the highway, you know.

Speaker A: Yeah, fair enough. But one thing I’ll say is that, is that, yes, I’m familiar with that tradition of Dillian and the folk music that he drew upon. Leonard Cohen. There’s the authorship questions vis a vis some of Leonard Cohen’s biggest songs, including Hallelujah and Chelsea Hotel. You know, Dylan co wrote an entire album with a lyricist desire. Shakespeare co wrote some of his plays. Probably. Lennon and McCartney can’t be disentangled fully, at least until midway through their career as Beatles. At the end of the day, I can tell you exactly the circumstances under which I made those statements. I was sitting in a basement in rural New York. I probably had a kid who hadn’t slept the night before, and I said some stupid s***. Julia, I’m going to throw it to you. I want to know where, having heard all this, where you want to take it.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker F: And I will say like that. I feel like we talked about Taylor a few times again after our most heated argument. And, you know, the authorship question kind of moved to the side and it became more of a kind of normal question about taste. And then I think we just felt like we’d done it too many times. But it’s Interesting to think about her. Okay, so she’s 36 now, which means she was 18 when we started this podcast, right? She’s nearly 40. She’s about to get married. Married. And she does have this kind of sort of petulant high schooler ecosystem. And I think you’re right, Jodi, that she’s always trying to put something over. I feel like the last album, the Showgirl album, I think she’s in the middle of a transition of some kind in terms of her music. Like, I, I really. There are so many songs of hers that I really love that I feel like capture do the thing that a lot of my favorite songs do, which is like put their finger on a specific kind of emotional moment in the same way that great fiction can do it. They like articulate something that you recognize as a human moment or passage in a really specific way. And it is sometimes a petty one or a vindictive one or a self important one, or it’s not all the human emotions and qualities that one might most aspire to, but they feel real to me. And I think she’s often quite inventive still in how she does it. And even her different range of partners, I think has produced different songs that I like. But I do think she’s a little unmoored. Like without a Joe Jonas type to be angry at. Like, what is it not. What is a not vindictive Taylor sound like?

Speaker C: She would just take a break, then we would find out. Like, I really. Gosh. I think to speak of her celebrity, which is, you can’t do that in just 15 minutes. But I think it like most very, very famous songwriters or pop stars, their celebrity 100% influences their work and their craft. But Taylor seems so strongly to me as someone who is so unwilling to seed the stronghold that she has on the industry in order to just take a few years and step back and take a break from all this and come back with something inventive and new and maybe this newer version of herself where she can just figure it out, you know. Instead she’s releasing so many albums at such a breakneck pace. Some of them re recordings of her previous albums, some of them new works. And she’s biting back at Charli XCX and misunderstanding that sort of part of the pop pantheon. And it’s, it’s. I just want to know who, who she actually is. And I feel like if she doesn’t give herself grace to figure it out for ourselves, we may never know. And then the work will suffer because of that. We’ll just stay in this same note because of that.

Speaker F: Well, and it’s interesting to think about it with the, the, you know, there is this metaphor about people who became famous and notable young of a sort of arrested development. Like, she really did become go from high school to superstar without any of the steps in between. So I don’t know.

Speaker B: I do.

Speaker F: I would like to see her slow down and find an adult mode. But, Dana, I’m curious, as the peacemaker, the arbiter, the kind of person who has to duck when all the tomatoes are getting thrown on this subject, where have you landed with her?

Speaker B: Yeah, I’m the middle child in real life, and on this show. I mean, I think Nadira sort of spoke to my feelings about Taylor’s recent work, but from a different point of view, like not having been, you know, a teenager or preteen when her first album started to come out, and there was suddenly this teenage country singer, which was what she sort of was at the time, Right. A teenage country pop sensation. I have this kind of maternal feeling toward her. I talked about that when we talked about her ERAS movie, you know, the Movie of the Eras tour, where I felt a little bit this way about Lena Dunham, too, when she first broke really big, where it was sort of like, this person is so talented and they’re so young, and I think they’re too young for this much fame. And I hope they handle it okay. I really did. And I remember when Tortured Poets Department came out, feeling this moment of both kind of annoyance that she was still writing about diss tracks, about ex boyfriends, Right. And that she had not grown beyond that and that the whole album was that and that ridiculous dump of extra songs that she made, I think the day after the album came out or something. Just had this feeling of, yes, you need to slow down, you know, take a breath. She needs to have an assignment, you know, like the guy who wrote Georges Perek, who wrote the novel without an E. She needs to write an album without a boyfriend, without a single heterosexual relationship complaint in it, Right? And maybe after she marries her football player in Madison Square Garden and they have a baby, then maybe she’ll. Maybe motherhood will bring her to a different place or something. But, yeah, I, I, I’ve lost patience with the subject, the narrowness of her subject matter. But I still do have a part of me that feels like I’m glad she’s handled her fame okay. I’m glad that she didn’t never had to go into rehab. You know, I’m glad that she seems to be able to manage this massive amount of fame and talent that she’s leveraging.

Speaker D: She manages it through this profusion of releases. That’s her neurosis. That’s her. And the thing that I’ve. Like, I have a very strange relationship to this subject because, I mean, I know I’m carted in here on one of those dollies every three or four years to talk about Taylor Swift, even if it’s the only thing I think about.

Speaker A: You’re not that senior. I want our audience to know you walked in here.

Speaker D: I did walk in here on two feet, more or less, but I actually haven’t spent that much time thinking about Taylor Swift over the past 10, 15 years, which is. There’s an irony here, which is that. And I felt ambivalent and a bit alienated from her music for all the reasons that have been spoken about here. But. And here comes the big but. A couple years ago, I realized I needed some money, I needed a book deal. And I decided to write a book about Taylor Swift. And I did that. I will confess, at first, a little bit like, I could get a book deal about Taylor Swift. Would it be interesting to write about Taylor swift in the 21st century and what she means, try and write a quote, unquote smart book about Taylor Swift and why all of this happened and what it means culturally and in music and all that stuff. And like. And maybe it’s Stockholm syndrome. But the thing that has really surprised me is I’ve become a much bigger fan and admirer of her music by doing close listening and in fact, have really tuned in and vibe with the music that you guys aren’t liking so much, which is her recent stuff. Because one of the things that I’ve noticed about her that I think is fascinating is that, like, her big subject, you could say her big subject is, you know, that, like, none of her songs pass the Bechtel Bechdel test. Like Daniel was saying, all she ever writes about is her boyfriends. I think what she really writes about is herself, her songwriting. It is extremely. She is the only artist who’s ever ascended to the heights that she has, who has done it, embracing the Persona as a songwriter, a singer songwriter first and foremost. The other great singer songwriters never became massive pop stars. The other massive pop stars did not self identify as singer songwriters. And that was the basis of their relationship with their fan to their music. So that’s her thing. Her authorship is, in some certain ways her subject. And what’s interesting, I think Is that it’s true. She has this, like, white knuckle grip on the scepter at the top of the throne atop the Mount Olympus of Papa or whatever f****** metaphor you want to use. She does not want to be number two. And maybe that’s why she pushes out so much music. But that’s a subject she discusses in her music. And it goes right back to the beginning. That’s what I’ve noticed. Like, she has song called Long Live From, I think her third album, which is basically about her own obsolescence. She’s been thinking about and fighting her own obsolescence in pop straight through. It’s right there in the title track of the new Showgirl album in a very interesting way where she projects herself into the Persona of like a kind of grizzled old showgirl who’s. Well, you know, who’s past her prime. While the new girls are. It’s certainly they’re an antihero. There’s lots of songs where she reckons with this in what I think is a fascinating way. And what’s also interesting about it is like, her relationship to time in her songs is very weird. You know, like, famously, she has these relationships for like three weeks and then gets like four albums out of them. That’s not normal. But it also, like tracks with the velocity at which culture moves in the age of the Internet, right? Everything moves hyper, hyper fast. Her favorite term, eras. That’s a term that we usually apply to like the f****** Jurassic era. It can be centuries or even millennia. For her, it’s an album cycle. And that’s actually the way I think her music functions too now. And she is doing this very tricky thing with the Taylor’s version re releases and with her Eras tour, which is. She’s the first artist, I think, who is both at the top and a legacy artist at the same time. Most artists do their revisit their old stuff, go out on their, like, tour where they play their old stuff in a considered way after they’re past it and they got to figure out how to like. But she’s been kind of engaging with. In some sort of kickbacking, kickboxing max with her archive right at the height of her fame and all that, to me, makes her very interesting and makes these albums, which seem crazy, like Tortured Poets department a lot more interesting, I think. I mean, that album is just like a crazy big blurt where she just pushes out a million zillion songs. But to me, it’s all part and parcel of this weird thing. She’s going through where she’s trying to reckon with her fame, her obsolescence, and her desire never to be obsolete.

Speaker B: All right, Jody, may we never discuss this subject ever the f*** again, but may we read you on it one day?

Speaker D: Yeah, please. 2027, I think.

Speaker A: But may we not stop this dialogue here? Please stick around and endorse.

Speaker D: Yes.

Speaker A: And join us for plus Lovely. All right, now is the moment in our podcast when we endorse. Okay, I’m going to find four different ways to say your name. The wince on Dana’s face tells me. Tells you how fresh this f****** routine is. D***.

Speaker B: All right. Respect for the minimalism. All right. My endorsement this week is going to be the last time on the show. I promise that I take my endorsement from Rusty Foster of Today in Tabs. Julia, this is your fault. You introduced me to that newsletter and he has such good picks. He’s like the Kott Key of his generation. And I’ve often endorsed things from that newsletter and the newsletter itself. You also, Julia, introduced me to Rusty Foster when I was younger guest at the National Magazine Awards, and I was completely dumbstruck and didn’t say a word to him because I’m in such awe of him as a writer and a finder of stuff. But this site is called trainjazz.com. have any of you heard of Train Jazz? No. No. It’s one of those kind of sites, like I love to find these to endorse on the show that does one weird thing that only that site does, and it does it really well. So Train Jazz is designed by this guy named Joshua Wolk, who is a designer, an engineer, you know, a computer knowing guy, and apparently also a music knowing guy. And what he did was he took the New York subway system. He assigned each subway line, if I’m understanding this correctly, an instrument. So, for example, the B line is a tenor sax. The A is a jazz trombone. The number three train is an upright bass. So he created a jazz combo out of the various intersecting trains and somehow programmed it so that in real time, you’re hearing the traffic on the subway system as this kind of freeform jazz. And you can also. It’s an interactive site as well, where if you enter your location data, it will make the things that are closer to you louder. So, for example, at rush hour, of course it’s going to sound like this cacophony, but if you listen at 3am it’s like a mournful few instruments playing. It’s a really, really cool idea. It’s amazing white noise, or very not white noise. Sort of like multicolor noise to write to or have on, if you like to have sort of, you know, formless abstract music in the background as you’re working, which I do. Train jazz is great. So the idea is really cool. The execution is great, and it’s a very simple, elegantly designed site where you see some of the visuals. You sort of see, like, intersecting lines. Hard to describe, but go to trainjazz.com and just experience it. It’s really nervous.

Speaker A: That is amazing. Nadira, what do you got?

Speaker C: I have two. The first one being somewhat in conversation with, is God Is, which is the Black Film Archive created by Maya Cade. It’s a living register of black films made from 1898 to 1999 that are currently streaming. And it’s an invaluable resource for getting more into the black film canon, particularly for the nicher films that no one really knows about or talks about. And then, as always, I have to present a music endorsement. And since it’s my last one, and I’m a very sentimental and retrospective person, I have a big thing with decades and anniversaries, and it is 2026, which means that it’s a great time to look back at 2016, which I think is a year in music that radicalized me in a way. There are so many incredible releases from that year. You have Lemonade by Beyonce. You have Blonde by Frank Ocean, Blackstar by Bowie. Tribe Called Quest came back. The Avalanches came back. Rihanna’s Anti Mitsky, Big Thief, the last great Kanye west album, the Life of Pablo. So if you have any time this year, I would definitely suggest looking back at 2016 in music.

Speaker B: I have one thing to say about Maya Cade and the Black Film Archive, which is that as a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, I’m so proud that we gave her an award. I think it was maybe the year she launched it, but there was a year that we gave her New York Film Critics Circle Award for the Black Film Archive. That’s how I discovered it. And, yeah, I just. It is such an extraordinary site. And she’s wonderful to follow on social media, too. She’s just so knowledgeable and so, yeah, just somebody who’s really introduced me to a lot of great new cinema.

Speaker A: Jodi, what do you got?

Speaker D: Well, first, I have to take a moment just to say, guys, thank you. You’re the best. I’m really going to miss hearing you, like, really and you. And like, this show is the best show. It’s the best podcast. And then as far as an endorsement, I was thinking about this, which is that like, you know, I had to do something audio because I got to give something to the gabfest listeners. Some little bon bon. What I listen to most and sometimes watch on YouTube, because this is my primary platform for this stuff, are academic lectures and papers. This is what I do for fun. And I feel like this is like a secret that’s not out even for most people. I mean, obviously everyone knows there’s just endless shitloads of this stuff on YouTube.

Speaker B: It’s just you can basically take entire college classes, right? Graduate seminars.

Speaker D: It’s a huge trove of this stuff. And I’m talking about like, you know, great academic conferences from 2017, like the association of Medieval Scholars of Britain or whatever the h*** it is. But. So my particular rabbit hole that I’ve fallen down over into over the last few years is Dana knows this. At least I think maybe Julia does too, that I’ve become like an art history obsessive, particularly interested in 19th century French painting, especially like the social history of France, like around the Franco Prussian War, 1870, you know, the Paris Commune, birth of Impressionism, all that stuff. Like, that’s my bag. And so a lot of the, the lectures I listen to are around that especially, especially art history as it intersects with social, cultural history, that kind of stuff. But I’m going to recommend some lectures that are not in that vein at all. There’s a guy named John Walsh who’s a kind of eminence in the world of the art world. He’s an art historian trained at Yale, I think, like that, and a specialist in Dutch painting and Old Masters or whatever. But he spent most of his career as a museum director and curator, I think, at the Met and the Frick. And for like 20 years he ran the Getty Julia and he’s out there in LA now. But he does these things which I think are called the John Walsh Lectures, and he does them more or less every year, maybe interrupted by the pandemic where he comes and does like a week’s worth of lectures at Yale, at the Yale Art Gallery, focusing on a different painter. So again, like the kind of art history that I vibe with normally is stuff that’s like social history plus the art and how the two enlighten each other. But he’s very much an older school kind of scholar, like really just attuned. He’s like into close looking and aesthetic judgment and that kind of scholarship, you know, connoisseurship maybe, but just a super patient and thorough close reader of painters who. Whose lectures really enlighten what these great artists are up to. And he did a. He has done a series of lectures about kind of post Impressionist modernist masters. So Van Gogh, or as he says, because he’s a. He’s a Dutch guide. Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian. And he does this amazing thing where he’ll be one of the first things. Or he does this throughout all of his lectures. He’s like, I want to take a minute for everyone to look and put up a slide. Let’s take a minute to look at this painting. There’ll be like three minutes of silence while, you know, a packed auditorium just looks at the painting and then he goes through. And so it’s almost like Zen quality to his scholarship and to the lectures he gives. And he’s just like a lovely, genteel older gentleman who just steps you through what these great artists are up to. So highly recommended. And I just want to also quickly, because this is. Sorry, Ben, you can like. Normally he might just f****** cut me out, but this is the last time, so I’m filibustering a little. I just want to recommend two lectures that I really liked in a totally different vein, totally different subject. This guy named Eric Lott, some of you may have heard of him, he’s a great American cultural historian. He’s actually a friend of mine. He wrote the kind of benchmark work on blackface, minstrelsy, Love and Theft, from which Bob Dylan took the album title, Love and Theft. And he is just one of these, like, brilliant. Like his writing and his lecturing. It’s like one of those things where you feel like you’re struck by lightning, like your mind’s on fire. Listening to this guy do his thing. He’s like, up there moving in group like a great mc, spitting bars. And so he has two lectures that are online that I especially like. One was at Hampshire College, RIP in 2011, which was about Philippe Petit’s World Trade Center Walk. This was from a book he was working on, which I don’t think he’s yet finished, about the 1970s, but it’s really just like a brilliant reading of that event in the context of 1970s urbanism and talking about New York in the 70s, the World Trade center itself, and also Petit’s own French cultural lineage. He reads the Wire Walk as a kind of situationist detournement in, like, the Guy Debord situationist mode. Anyway, it’s a really highly, highly recommended to get into Merrick lot. And then also super, super quickly, there’s one from a conference. Should I shut up now?

Speaker A: Never.

Speaker D: There’s another one from a conference in 2016 called Racial Masquerade in American Art and Culture at the National Portrait Gallery in the Smithsonian. And this is a lecture about Obama’s presidency and the traditions of blackface, minstrelsy, ethnic burlesque, racial caricature that were invoked both in representations of Obama and in Obama’s own mischievous self representation. You’re hearing like the guy who wrote the best thing ever about black faith ministry talk about Obama in this tradition. And it’s fascinating.

Speaker A: So that was worth it. Julia, what do you got?

Speaker F: All right. Well, in my spirit of recommending with honesty the thing that I am most enjoying in a given week, I’m gonna say that the sky is blue and the Pope is Catholic. Patrick Radden Keefe’s new book is good, guys. Just it’s London Falling. It is the extrapolation of the piece that he wrote for the New Yorker a few years ago about a British teenager who fell to his death from a luxury tower and who, it turned out, had been presenting himself as a Russian oligarch’s son, despite not being one. But as with all of Patrick’s work, the just sheer skill in both reporting and writing Married Together is breathtaking on every page. And I feel like I hadn’t picked this one up as quickly, in part because I just had other stuff on my reading shelf. But also it feels more niche maybe than some of his other subjects, like the Sacklers, the opiate epidemic. Big important theme. You know, say nothing. The trouble is political strife, political conflict. Big important theme. This feels at first, when you hear the contours of it, like maybe a smaller and more personal and more psychological story. But in his hands, it is both a much bigger thematic story about super wealth and its rise and indeed even Steve Oligopoly. And also, you know, just the way he’ll in any transition scene, set sudden new way into a topic. You’ll you can see the like, you know, snowdrifts of microfiche and research behind every minor character. It’s clear that Patrick’s gone through and found the kind of absurd, interesting, fascinating, want to tell your friends about it? Detail and figured out how to pull that into the story. It’s just so dense with really good reporting and reporting done with an eye for human absurdity and frailty and coincidence and insight. I don’t know. It’s great if it’s on your list. Move it further up. That’s one. My other endorsement as a shout out to Summer Strut’s past and a friend of mine who. Who deeply loved Bruce Springsteen is. I want to note that last summer a couple or one listener recommended a couple Patty Shelfa solo tracks which I had never listened to. How do you say her name? Surely Jody.

Speaker D: You know, I’ve seen in Italian it would be Shelfa, but I think think Bruce himself says Scalfa.

Speaker F: Anyway, there’s a couple of tracks of hers that made our big list and that made my shorter list, and we didn’t discuss any of them on Stret last year. We’re gonna have Melanfeon before we depart these airwaves to give a proper pouring out to Stret as an institution. But I just would like to recommend in honor of my Springsteen loving friend, the song Come Tomorrow by Penny Patty Scalpa. It’s beautiful.

Speaker A: All right. Very quickly, I had been. I just started or gotten maybe a third and a half, half of the way through the book Disgrace by I’m never going to pronounce his name right, JM Kotzeh. And when I sent it out to listeners that I wasn’t quite. I was probably about a third of the way because anyway, I didn’t quite know what I was dealing with when I started. And I was sort of having Ian McEwan cognitive blend or something or confusion, because were the book by Ian McEwan, the sort of incredibly intellectually superior, Chilly kind of coldly removed self regarding main character would be a figure of admiration and McEwen wouldn’t be in touch with what a f****** obnoxious creepy was. Coetzee is so deeply in touch with what an obnoxious creepy is. And in a way, Disgrace is a response to the Chinua Achebe critique of Heart of Darkness, which is why would one care about the breakup of one petty European mind in the context of the crime that was committed in the Congo and disgraces by a white South African? And he’s asking what condition. What condition? And what conditions would need to be. I think he’s asking in the book what conditions would need to be true for empowered white men, especially in the condition of radical racial minority, apartheid and oppression in South Africa to achieve grace. And I think that is. It is an absolutely stunning moral performance in that regard, and it is a stunning literary performance because it is a slim book that brings in an enormous amount of history and suffering and buried suffering in suggestive and economically presented ways. I mean, it’s an Arid way of putting it, but quite emotionally powerful ways that do not require bulk. And then very quickly, I’m at the same juncture with a book called Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald, the English writer who, among other things, I believe, won the book or twice, which puts her in rarefied company and didn’t start publishing until she was in her 60s. She’s wonderful, by the way. I’ve read the Blue Flower by her. I loved it. Offshore is wonderful. It brings you into the world of Thames boat dwelling people, and it’s the economy with which she brings you gently but vividly into a subculture and makes you feel as though the subculture is real and that you want to be embedded in it desperately. And eavesdropping on its micro folkways for the course of the book is like, enormously powerful and really well done. She won the booker for that one. It’s called Offshore. One word. Check it out. Jodi, thank you so much for coming in. Thank you so much for having me and for sticking around. Nadira. Oh, God. It just. It’s kind of gutting, right? It’s like, what the f***?

Speaker C: We’re gonna see each other in person and it’s gonna be lovely. But as someone who used to be a PA on the show, I’m really grateful for you guys for letting me come on mic and talk about all of my favorite things and some of my least favorite things and to debate. Yeah, Great job, guys. And thanks again for having me.

Speaker F: Wow.

Speaker A: What an immeasurable enhancement of this show to have had you be a voice on it these many years. So a heartfelt goodbye and thank you so much. See you off mic and see you off mic. Dana, you’re not.

Speaker B: It’s not the final farewell.

Speaker A: We’re not done yet. So dry up those tear ducts, but more soon. And Julia, farewell.

Speaker F: Thanks for letting me come back on to sing Taylor’s praises and ride to her defense. Somebody had to.

Speaker A: You’ll find links to some of the things we talked about today at our show page. That’s slate.com culturefest and you can email us@culturefestlate.com our introductory music is by the dearly departed Nicholas Patel or the absent, perennially absent Nicholas Patel.

Speaker F: I wish I forgot.

Speaker C: Wait, did you see what he’s doing?

Speaker A: What?

Speaker F: Did you see the piece in the. In the Times that he. He’s been. He wrote new music for the NBA with Nas. That’s why he can’t come on, because he’s doing the new sound of the NBA. So check. So he has a good excuse.

Speaker A: That is a very good excuse. That’s funny. Anyway, Nicholas Patel composed our introductory music. Our production assistant is Daniel Hirsch. Our producer is Benjamin Frisch. For a cast of character. Character is too big to enumerate. I’m Stephen Metcalf. Thank you so much for joining us. We will see you next week.