The following podcast contains explicit language.

I'm Stephen McHaff, and this is the Slate Culture Gapfest, Slow Mo Nuns Soccer Edition.

It's Wednesday, January 18th, 2017.

On today's show, The Young Pope is the new, and one must say, highly improbable

TV show from HBO. It started Jude Law as a newly chosen pope. He's not just young, but he's

also American and Brash. Concepts do not go any higher than this. We'll see whether it flies or

crashes. And then a monster calls is the story of a young boy visited by a giant U-tree come to life as voiced by Liam Neeson.

It also sounds high concept, but it's actually a sweet and excruciating lesson on grief from the Spanish director, J.A. Beona, and screenwriter Patrick Ness, who adapted his own novel of the same name.

And finally, who are you calling Neanderthal? It turns out everything we thought we knew

about our predecessors may be wrong. Joining me today is Dana Stevens, the film critic for Slate.

Hey, Dana.

Hello, Stephen. And I'm very pleased to announce we're joined today by Sam Anderson, the extremely

very extra special friend of the program. Sam Anderson is a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine. Sam, welcome. Thank you. I'm very excited to be here. I feel like I won some kind of fan contest or something. Well, we feel the same way, Sam. Huge fans of your work. And it is such a pleasure to have you here. Dana, before we dig in, Shirley, we have some business?

Yes, I'm today's Julia, I guess. So I'm announcing our business. My first piece of business is about a slate event that if you live in New York or will be in New York on January 25th, you should consider attending. I think I'm going to go. It sounds fascinating. Not the new normal, how the media should cover the Trump presidency. And it's essentially a discussion among journalists about what lies ahead during after the inauguration for journalism. And our own beloved

Julia Turner will be there as part of the discussion, as will Jacob Weisberg, the chairman of

the slate group, David Remnick of the New Yorker, and also Lydia Polgreen, recently of the New York Times

now at Huffington Post, and many other journalists. If you want to get your bearings about what's happening in the fourth estate in the Trump era, consider going to that event. It's Wednesday, January 25th. It's at 7.30 p.m. at the Skirball Center at NYU. You can get more information at slate.com slash live. And my only other announcement is that our Slate Plus segment today, thanks to you, Steve, is going to be about a post that you wrote for the New Yorker.com about the philosopher Richard Rorty. And it was great to read you in that context. And both Sam and I had a lot of questions about it. So we're going to grill you about Foucault, Richard Rorty, and philosophy in the 21st century.

You ready?

I got my philosopher pants on.

Incredible.

To be here when the magic happens is amazing.

So if you want to hear Steve put his philosopher pants on and strut his stuff, you should become a Slate Plus member.

...