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I'm Stephen Metcath, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest Vulture Epilett's edition.

It's Wednesday, July 20th, 2011.

On today's program, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Part 2, and we're joined for that

segment by Dan Coise, Google Plus, the new would-be competitor to Facebook. And finally, with Slate's own Simon Dunin, we traveled to the Met and to the Alexander McQueen exhibit. Joining me today, our Slate's deputy editor, Julia Turner. Julia. Hi, Steve. Julia, you're baiting me with that dress, aren't you? We can't talk about my outfit every week. It seems as though maybe we can, Julia. If you're going to, that's a really, that's a notably, that's a lovely, lovely dress. Thank you. Here we go. Another Facebook page post. It's just going to be an ongoing. But you're on the hook too, Dana Stevens, because you walked in in with kind of it was half Jackie O, half Annie O.

You were Jackie Hall, Annie O. You were Annie O. You really are. You sort of have this floppy hat and these giant, uh, uh, uh, bug-eye sunglasses. Are they called sunglasses? And, you just looked amazing. You look great. Well, thank you. Yeah. Dan, I can't tell what you look like. We're joined by Dan Koyce by phone. Dan, welcome to the show. Hey, I'm in the D.C. Slate offices, and I'm wearing a zoot suit. Nice. Dan, tell me again how we should ID you. I wrote about the Harry Potter movie for you guys last week on Slate. and I'm basically the guy who Dana calls in when there's nerd stuff to talk about.

Excellent.

Well, welcome to the show.

I think this is the first time you and I have really interacted in a segment.

So Harry Potter, this is the final installment in the series.

As we're all discovering, we all woke up Monday morning to discover that this movie made

$476 million worldwide, and that barely edged out the Sarah Palin documentary. But it made 168 million

domestically. I think both of these are records. It beats out the dark night. Dan, I come to this

almost as a full muggle.

I appreciate the craft, but don't speak the language at all.

Nonetheless, I found that this movie was strangely moving and quite beautifully achieved.

Walk us through what this movie means in relation to the whole series, how the whole series led up to this?

Well, for me, it was a movie that was made specifically to serve as a capstone.

And so it was pretty canily balanced, I think, between a movie meant to satisfy, you know, diehards like me and to give a certain emotional jolt to muggles like you.

You know, it offers sort of little tricks and treats for those of us who've been waiting for this movie forever because we, or at least since we read the book in 2007.

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