I'm Stephen Meckhaff, and this is the Slate Culture Gap Fest, Lash, Pre-Lash, and Parasocial Relations

edition. It's Wednesday, September 15th, 2021 on today's show., writer-director, Paul Schrader returns with

The Card Counter, an existential noir about the traumatic afterlife of America's Forever Wars.

It stars Oscar Isaac and Tiffany Haddish. And then Hulu has a little charmer out now. It's called

Only Murders in the Building. It's about three true crime obsessives who team up to investigate a mysterious suicide in their

venerable Upper West Side apartment building.

It stars Martin Short, Steve Martin, and Selena Gomez.

And finally, we will discuss something called parisocial relationships with Madison Malone

Kircher of the ICYMI podcast, of course, of Slate Magazine.

Joining me today is Isaac Butler. Isaac, you are the author of a forthcoming book,

The Method, How the 20th Century Learned to Act. Give me the Pub Date again.

February 1st, 2022. And you'll be on the show in the immediate aftermath of that, you promise, to discuss it?

Yes, I promise. All right. I'm very psyched. It is an incredibly cool subject to be writing about,

and speaking of which Dana Stevens has a, I'm going to call it, Dana. I, knowing you and

remembering what you've said about it over the years, this is kind of a book-length essay disguised as a biography

of Buster Keaton, yeah, or nay. Yeah, the thumbnail sketch I've been giving, Steve, and I'm not

good at thumbnail sketches, I should warn you, is that this book is a cultural history of Buster

Keaton's lifespan. So it's not a biography, but it's a sort of way of looking at his lifespan, 1895 to

1966 and all the changes that happened in American culture during that time through things

that happened in his life.

Brilliant.

And the title is...

...