The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hi, I'm Dana Stevens, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest, beautiful Blind Spot edition.

It's Wednesday, January 23rd, 2018, and on today's show, first, the fire festival

was a faux luxury music experience, which was described by Slate's Sam Adams as the equivalent

of a Ponzi scheme for would-be social media influencers, a snowball that gathered victims

and cultural significance as it went. Now it's the subject of two documentaries released days apart

Netflix's Fire and Hulu's Fire Fraud. But does either one get to the heart of who's really

to blame for the debacle? We will discuss. Then the wife won Glenn Close a Golden Globe Award

and her seventh Oscar nomination for her star turn as a loyal self-effacing spouse of a soon-to-be

Nobel Prize-winning novelist.

This role has made close a frontrunner for best actress, but is the film itself anything more than just a vehicle for her performance?

And finally, we will chat about the Oscar nominations, which were released just a few hours before we came in to record this morning.

Stephen is out this week, and Julia is off editing furiously for our first segment,

but I'm joined to talk about the Fire Festival and the two documentaries about it by Sam Adams,

the editor of Browbeat and a culture writer at Slate. Hello, Sam. Hello. And also here with us

in the studio for this first segment on fire is Slate staff writer and for today our millennial

slash music festival correspondent Shannon Pallas. Hi Shannon.

Hi. Sam will be here as our third co-host for the whole show and Shannon is joining us just for the

first segment on the fire festival. All right. Well, let's let's dive in with fire. There's a lot to talk about

here. If every generation gets the musical gathering it deserves, millennials may have grounds to sue the

fire festival for mass defamation of character.

So writes Sam Adams and his piece on Netflix's Fire and Hulu's Fire Fraud,

...