Culture Gabfest - Congratulations! You Finally Got Your Severance.
Slate Books
Slate Podcasts
3.8 • 546 Ratings
🗓️ 19 February 2025
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week’s show, Slate Business and Tech reporter Nitish Pahwa sits in for Julia. The panel discusses Severance season 2 from Apple TV+. They then talk about the Oscar-nominated film No Other Land – a Palestinian documentary following a young activist fighting his community's mass expulsion by Israeli occupation. They end by discussing Nitish’s recent reporting on Buzzfeed’s upcoming AI-infused social media platform, BF Island.
Endorsements:
Dana: The Severance Podcast with Ben Stiller and Adam Scott
Steve: The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner
Nitish: Work by the late author Tom Robbins, particularly Jitterbug Perfume, who recently died at 92
Podcast production and research by Vic Whitley-Berry. Email us at culturefest@slate.com.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Stephen Metcalf, and this is the Slate Culture Gap Fest. |
| 0:16.9 | Congrats. |
| 0:17.6 | You finally got your Severance edition. |
| 0:19.8 | It's Wednesday, February 19th, |
| 0:21.4 | 2025 on today's show. Severance, the Apple TV show, has returned for a second season, |
| 0:27.3 | belatedly, we should note, after three years, I think, away. It stars Adam Scott as an upper |
| 0:32.6 | middle manager at a sinister and mysterious firm where certain employees completely, quote, unquote, |
| 0:37.3 | sever their work |
| 0:38.8 | and home consciousnesses. |
| 0:40.6 | You effectively become two distinct people with no memory, each with no memory of the other. |
| 0:45.6 | It also stars Britt Lauer, John Torturo, and get a lot of Christopher Walken, too, as a bonus. |
| 0:51.9 | And then No Other Land has been nominated for Best Feature |
| 0:55.2 | Documentary for this year's Oscars. It's a joint production of Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers |
| 1:00.2 | whose cameras captured the forced displacement of families from the West Bank over a four-year period. |
| 1:05.5 | There's also a ton of archival footage. Virtually the entire film, in effect, the bulk of the |
| 1:10.7 | entire film was filmed pre-October |
| 1:12.4 | 7th for what it's worth. And finally, the odd but also oddly resonant maybe fate of BuzzFeed. |
| 1:20.7 | We'll discuss, but first I'm joined by Dana Stevens, the film critic for Slate. Hey, Dana. |
| 1:25.3 | Greetings, Steve. And filling in for Julia this week, we're grateful to have Nitish Pawa, the tech reporter for Slate. Hey, Dana. Greetings, Steve. And filling in for Julia this week, we're grateful to have Nitishpawa, the tech reporter for Slate. |
| 1:32.5 | Welcome. |
| 1:33.5 | Thank you. |
| 1:34.2 | Thank you. |
... |
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