The following podcast contains explicit language.

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I'm Stephen Metcalf, and this is the Slate Culture Gap Fest, the Ken Burns Flinch Edition.

It's Wednesday, October 5th, 2011. On today's program, Ken Burns' new documentary, co-directed with Lynn Nov Prohibition on PBS, the ubiquitous home furnishings and social democratic chotchkes of IKEA.

And Michael Kinsley joins us to discuss the issue of Chris Christie's weight, whether it's an issue, whether it's a non-issue, that'll be fascinating.

The first time Mike Kinsley has come on this program, Julia, are you excited? I'm very excited. Yeah, I mean, he can't. He's just a no-brainer.

It's going to become Crossfire, culture fire. Does that make me, what was his name, Bob Novak,

tonight on Crossfire. You should talk like that more often.

Crossfire. Joining me today are that more often. Crossfire.

Joining me today are Slate's own deputy editor, Julia Turner. Hey, Julia. Hi, Steve. And our film critic, Dana Stevens. Hey, Dana. Hey, Dana, correct me if I'm wrong. If you were born 100 years earlier, you would have been an anti-saloon league janissary. I see you as a hatchet-wielding feminist in this century, but then you would

have had a place to deploy your hatchet more effectively. I would have been drinking on the

slide. But you would have been shit-faced while you did it. That's the Dana Stevens I know and

love. Ken Burns, obviously, is most well known for his Civil War documentary.

He subsequently made documentaries about baseball and jazz.

He himself is in danger of becoming a massively somnolent American institution.

You associate him with, like, the tinkling of New Age piano and and portentious uh voiceover new age piano it's

fiddle it's the it's the fiddler's union of america that dusts off their bows when the when the

ken burns dot comes right but at the very trust me on this there's a george winston-esque uh a piano music

that that leads in right at the top of all of his documentaries. But I sort of have, I do the

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