Culture Gabfest - I Love Boosters Heightens the Contradictions Edition
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3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 27 May 2026
⏱️ 59 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
This week, the OG three Steve, Dana, and Julia dig into the visually stuffed, Marxist smorgasbord that is Boots Riley’s latest film I Love Boosters. Starring Keke Palmer and Demi Moore, the candy-colored agitprop is about exploitation, the fashion world, shoplifting as class warfare, and— as they discuss—perhaps more than one movie can handle.
Next they turn from Marx to Freud and analyze the critically adored reality TV phenomenon Couples Therapy, now entering its fifth season. Is the office of Dr. Orna Guralnik a site of transcendent psychological revelation or panoptic exploitation? They unpack.
Finally, they talk lingvo itself by way of a recent article in Harpers by Katie Thornton about the unlikely resurgence of interest in the artificial language Esperanto.
In a bonus episode for Slate Plus subscribers, they answer a listener question about what long-running pieces of culture they’ve stuck with over years.
Äśuu!
Endorsements
Dana: The book The Artificial Language Movement by Andrew Large about the centuries-long history of utopic language projects.
Julia: Lena Dunham’s memoir Famesick and Dialed.gg, the internet’s latest color perception test.
Steve: The music of the indie shoegaze band Slowdive—particularly the album Souvlaki—and the solo efforts of its frontman Neil Halstead—particularly the song “Witless or Wise” and the album Palindrome Hunches; check out Steve’s mega playlist for more.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Stephen Metcalf, and this is the Slate Culture Gap Fest. |
| 0:13.4 | I love boosters, heightens the contradictions edition. |
| 0:16.9 | Dana Stevens, heightens the contradictions is from where? |
| 0:21.7 | I mean, it's a Marxist phrase. |
| 0:22.9 | I wasn't sure if that would ring any bells with listeners because you have to have had your share of, you know, indoctrination, the left-wing indoctrination that... |
| 0:32.0 | You and I both got. |
| 0:35.2 | But, yeah, we're bringing in some dialectical materialism this week. |
| 0:38.8 | Why not? |
| 0:39.7 | Even a capitalist dummy likes me, like me, he knows that phrase. |
| 0:43.9 | And what college did you go to again? |
| 0:46.0 | Undergrad, I can't remember. |
| 0:48.8 | It was Wharton. |
| 0:51.0 | It was Wharton by your tongue. |
| 0:53.6 | All right, I absolutely, on today's show, I absolutely 100% defy you to assign a genre |
| 0:58.3 | to I Love Boosters, the new movie from the filmmaker, and everything else. |
| 1:02.8 | Renaissance man, Boots Riley. |
| 1:04.6 | This one stars Kiki Pomeras Corvette, the leader of a shoplifting gang in the Bay Area, |
| 1:09.3 | who they're targeting one designer in particular for reasons that we'll get into a little bit, played by a hilariously blonde Demi Moore. |
| 1:17.7 | The movie also stars Naomi Acky, Taylor Page, and Poppy Lou. |
| 1:22.5 | And then the reality TV show Couples Therapy is on season five, which means we've taken four, count them four hard passes, but in the spirit of compromise and learning to listen and like, I just feel like I see you, Dana, and I now hear you so much better. |
| 1:38.2 | I'm making a therapy joke that's going nowhere. |
| 1:40.0 | But anyway, learning to listen and use our words, we watched it and are ready to talk through our feelings about it. |
... |
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