Hi, listeners. This is Dana Stevens, co-host of the Slate Culture Gab Fest. I have a message for you this week.

We are so sorry to tell you that a technical issue means we can't share a new episode with you this week.

We actually recorded a new episode and we're very excited to put it on the feed.

And for technical reasons, it is not available.

We're so sorry about that, but we do have a new Slate Plus available in the feed this week.

In the meantime, we're going to rerun one of our favorite episodes from last year.

It's the listener call-in show for 2024. This was actually released on January 1st of 2025, but we taped it a bit before

that. The call-in show is a culture gab fest tradition where listeners have a few weeks to send us

questions about whatever they want to know about, cultural or not. We compile those into a list

of crowdsourced questions and pick some favorites to answer

in an unstructured, freewheeling conversation.

This year, that conversation included such listener questions as somebody asked us to talk

about ephemeral media that doesn't typically get covered on the show.

Somebody asked about cooking, which we always like to talk about, whether we ever cook just

for ourselves and how we feel about solo cooking. And then I love this. somebody asked about cooking, which we always like to talk about, whether we ever cook just for

ourselves and how we feel about solo cooking. And then I love this prompt from a listener,

is there a better song and movie pairing than ghost, the good old Patrick Swazey movie ghost

and Unchained Melody? We answer those and other questions on this year's listener call-in show.

If you haven't heard that yet, maybe give it a listen now.

And thanks for your patience.

We will talk to you again for the new episode next week.

I'm Stephen McAfee.

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