Slate’s Culture Gabfest is an award-winning podcast from media juggernaut Slate. Each podcast sees the publication’s editors engage in a witty conversation about current cultural trends and offerings. At this year’s Sydney Writer’s Festival, the podcast was recorded live at Town Hall.
Hundreds of Slate fans turned up for what proved to be a very winsome conversation between Slate’s editors, Julia Turner, Dana Stevens, and Stephen Metcalf. First, they discussed 21 Jump Street, honing in on the issue of Zac Efron’s laser-cut abs. Do they represent an ongoing trend towards the promotion of an unhealthily (and unattractively, according to Dana Stevens) fit male beauty ideal, or are they harmless eye candy?
The next topic that arose was more serious, with the panel turning its attention to Hulu’s recent adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, in which a form of fundamentalist, Christian extremism has become dominant and certain women (handmaids) are, essentially, used as breeders. Given the recent election of Donald Trump in the U.S., many have begun calling the novel eerily prescient and the Hulu adaptation exceptionally timely. The panellists concurred with these widely canvassed assessments, but went beyond them to delineate the show from its source material in what was definitely a highlight of this event.
The final topic of conversation — the nature and value of criticism itself — was another highlight. For this final leg of the event, Pulitzer-prize winner and Sydney-sider Sebastian Smee joined the discussion. Smee, who has worked in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia, added an international sensibility to the conversation, outlining transatlantic differences in approaches to criticism (apparently Brits and Australians are more unapologetically vicious) before the conversation turned back to criticism more generally. The panellists brilliantly brought across the idea that context can shape the meaning of art, and that criticism is a part of that context, offering audiences new ways of ‘seeing’.
I left Town Hall with a bundle of new thoughts and a hankering to read a nasty review. This delightful event delivered on its promise of witty repartee and then some.
– Vee
Vee is a Sydney-based writer/editor. When she’s not out and about, she can usually be found drinking coffee and pretending to work on her new novel. @VeeNaidoo
The Sydney Writers’ Festival runs 22-28 May 2017. Read our guide for the top picks.
Disclosure: The Plus Ones were invited guests of Sydney Writers’ Festival.
Image credit: Slate.
