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The following podcast contains explicit language.

Thank you. podcast contains explicit language. I'm Stephen Metcalf, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest live in Los Angeles

edition.

I'm now going to tell you the first lie of the evening.

It's Wednesday, March 21st, 2012.

On today's program, the Mike Daisy debacle, or debacle at this American life,

the Zoe Deschanelness of, I'm mispronouncing it, of Zoe Deschanel on display in her new TV sitcom New Girl, and finally were joined miraculously, surprisingly,

completely were incredulous, in fact, by a real live movie star, Elizabeth Banks to talk about her role in the new movie The Hunger Games,

which we all saw it as screening on Monday, I guess it is, and were enormously relieved.

Not only did we love it, we loved her in it, so the suck-up is completely sincerely motivated.

All right, let's dive.

Let's dive right in.

The agony and the ecstasy of Steve Jobs was a one-man show written by and starring Mike Daisy at the public theater in New York City. Its run happened to coincide with the death of Steve Jobs. That made it an enormous cause-celeb. I think it would have been a huge success either way. It was very topical and very urgent in that topicality. It's a theater piece designed to make the audience feel something

about the fact that art stuff is now made in China. So said Ira Glass, host of the public radio

showed This American Life, by way of explaining why Glass asked Daisy to adapt his theater

piece to the radio.

Daisy's adaptation cut away the half of the theater monologue in which he discusses jobs

and kept the half in which he, Daisy, describes his own trip to China, specifically to

Shenzhen, and more specifically to a gigantic factory complex known as Foxcon.

...