Culture Gabfest: Alien is Back Now With More Aliens Edition

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4 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 20 August 2025

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week’s episode journeys to dystopian corporate hellscapes present and future as Julia, Dana, and Steve dissect the horror and philosophical underpinnings of Alien: Earth, Noah Hawley’s new series adapting the Ridley Scott sci-fi masterpiece. Next, they set their course to Arlen, Texas where they’ll assess the return of Hank, Peggy, and Bobby in Mike Judge’s rebooted King of the Hill. Finally, they venture to Hollywood and greet its “new face” and the medical specialists who reconstructed it in their discussion of the Hollywood Reporter’s special issue on cosmetic surgery. In an exclusive Slate Plus bonus episode, it’s time for lunch as they chat about Lauren Collins’s recent New Yorker piece “The Case for Lunch.” Email us your thoughts at [email protected]. Podcast production by Benjamin Frisch. Production assistance by Daniel Hirsch. Endorsements: Dana: A request seeking a good book about the cultural impact of Napoleon. Steve: The poem “Empathy and New Year” by James Schuyler.Julia: Crate diving into your own ancestry and visiting places significant to your family's history—Ancestry proves to be a useful tool to track down public records. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Julia Turner, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest. Alien is back now with more aliens edition.
0:18.3	It's Wednesday, August 20th, 2025. And on today's show, we're talking about
0:22.9	Alien Earth, a new TV show based on Ridley Scott's legendary sci-fi saga that brings the creepy,
0:29.7	crawly, slithery, slimy, dripping somehow always creatures to our own planet for the first time.
0:37.6	Then we'll check in on the return of King of the Hill,
0:40.7	Mike Judge's animated portrait of a Texas family,
0:43.7	and examine what Hank Peggy and Bobby make of today's American landscape.
0:48.4	And finally, we'll dig into the Hollywood Reporter's new package on plastic surgery
0:52.3	and how conversations about cosmetic work have
0:55.1	moved out of the shadows and onto our feeds. Should we want the Kylie Jenners of the world
1:01.0	to be sharing their breast implant protocols? Dana and Steve, the gang is all here. Welcome, Dana.
1:07.7	Hey, hey, good to see you, Julia. Hey, Julia. How you doing? You'll be very familiar with this phenomenon flying back from the West Coast yesterday, three and a half hour.
1:18.0	Delake, it was a long travel day.
1:21.2	I'm really fucking tired today, slightly jet lagged, but raring to go.
1:26.4	You sound like it, and that's very exciting.
1:29.1	Can I just do a brief announcement to our listeners that I flew American for the first time in a while,
1:35.0	and they gave free food to us and coach?
1:39.8	Right?
1:40.9	No.
1:41.2	They were like, for coach, we've got little snack boxes.
1:44.3	I was handed like a beautiful little cheese plate that would usually run me 14 bucks on any other airline.
1:49.8	I'm still bold over.
	...

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