I'm Stephen Meckhaff, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest, the new weird America edition.

It's Wednesday, October 28th, 2020.

On today's show, for the purposes of this introduction, I will call it the new

Borat movie, or Borat 2. It's out. The Sasha Baron-Cohen alter ego prank fest is both more

scabrous and more tender somehow, I think, than its predecessor. It contains also that scene

with America's mayor, Rudy Giuliani. We will discuss all of the above. And then the

anthology of American folk music, which came out in the 1950s, I will argue remade our world.

I really believe that's a plausible interpretation of that record set. We'll get into how and

why that happened. There is a new sequel collection out just now of the B-sides from those original

78s, but without a subset of very racist songs, we will discuss this intersection of

Americana with old-timey racism. And finally, it's connecting us, it's alienating us,

it's energizing us, it's sapping us, and catching us out. Yes, Zoom. Zoom. We are going to talk about Zoom. I wonder, Jody, if there's some kind of mildly salacious clickbaitie peg for that segment. I can't think of one off the top of my head.

Yeah, I don't know. We'll have to Google that.

Yeah, I think so. We're joined by Jody

Rosen, who is a contributing writer to the New York Times magazine. Hey, Jody. Hey. You are, there are no

FOP levels left. It's like you have met Elron Hubbard himself after having gone through all of the

Scientology courses or Zunan or whatever the god of that religion is. But I can't even fop you anymore. You're beyond, you're beyond it. You've transvalued all those values. You are just the essence of what we've been doing for these 15 years. Oh, well, thank you. I've always wanted to be a fop in all respects. You should, you should see what I'm wearing. I'm not going to put my Zoom camera on, but trust me, I'm looking pretty dandyish right now in my 16-year-old son's bedroom where I'm doing this, I'm doing this recording. And of course, we're joined by Dana Stevens, the film critic for Slate.com. You exist beyond good and evil too, Dana. I'll take that in the

ambiguous spirit that it was meant. Shall we dig in, guys? We ready? Let's go. Yeah.

All right. I will hereby say the entire title, Barat, subsequent movie film, delivery of prodigious

bribe to American

Regime for make benefit once glorious nation of Kazakhstan. We will just say from here on in, I think,

Borat or Borat too. Although the title is one of the funniest things about the movie. Yes, I completely

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