Hello, I'm Dana Stevens, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest, Baby Girls and Nickel Boys edition.

It's Wednesday, January 15th, 2024, and on this week, we will be discussing

two new movies, Baby Girl stars Nicole Kidman as the CEO of a robotics company, whose relationship

to her own sexuality is somewhat robotic itself until she embarks on an affair with a much

younger man, an intern at her firm who intuitively senses her need to be sexually dominated.

Next, we'll talk about Nickel Boys, an adaptation of the Colson Whitehead novel by that title, from the director Rommel Ross, who adopts a radical first-person perspective camera technique

to show us the world from the perspective of two young black men at a sadistically run boarding school for boys,

all based on horrific real-life events.

Finally, we'll discuss the legal and public relations battle currently taking place between

Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, the two actors who starred in the recent film it ends with us,

also directed by Baldoni. Since that movie's released last summer, its co-stars have become

embroiled in a complicated feud that has taken place on several fronts at once on the promotional tour for the movie,

during which the two actors pointedly did not appear together, and as a proxy battle on TikTok

and other social media sites, now it's headed for court with lawsuits and counter lawsuits.

The way this whole story has played out says a lot about how public opinion is shaped

and weaponized in the Internet era we'll discuss.

I am joined today in studio by Naderra Gauph, Slate Culture Writer and Beloved, nay, indispensable friend of the podcast.

Hey, Nadira.

Hi, Dana. It's good to see you.

Really good to have you.

Happy New Year, because I guess I haven't seen you yet in 2025. And of course,

we're joined, as always, by our beloved Julia Turner, a fellow at the Annenberg School of Journalism in

...