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I'm Stephen Metcalf, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest, The Girl with the Wealth of Boring Details Edition.

This is also the daily podcast from slate.com for Wednesday, June 9th, 2010.

On today's program, the Stieg Larsen Bandwagon. It's growing. Revisiting our own short attention spans. And the World Cup bandwagon, which is also growing. Joining me today are Slate's deputy editor, Julia Turner. Hello, Julia. Hi, Julia. Hi, Steve. And our film critic, Dana Stevens. Hey, Dana. Hello, Steve. Let's dive right in. Steve Larson is obviously a Swedish

crime novelist who died before he saw his own success, which has been international and massive.

He wrote what he considered to be one gigantic six or 700,000 word manuscript. It's been divided into

three novels, the first of which is now basically

wallpaper at airports. And what, Julia, what's always amazed me about this phenomenon,

not having read them, was you walk into the airport and there's blink by Malcolm Gladwell

taking up one entire wall. There's lost symbol by Dan Brown taking up a second. And then one

of these things is not like the other. There's

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a long, and someone might say painstakingly elaborated,

Swedish crime thriller, we decided to dive in and try to figure out what's behind this success.

What did you come up with? Well, before we start, we should give a super brief summary,

right? I mean, these books are epic and a bit hard to summarize, but essentially they feature a

crusading liberal journalist Muckraker named Michael Blomfist and an associate of his, a tiny,

asocial, bisexual, hackrette named Elizabeth Salander, and the two of them

...