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The following podcast contains explicit language.

I'm Stephen Metcalf, and this is the Slate Culture Gap Fest. Oh, my God, it's Roseanne Cash edition.

It's Wednesday, February 5th, 2014. On today's show, it is true.

We have this amazing bonus.

It's like it fell from the sky.

We actually have the glorious Roseanne Cash joining us to talk in studio about her great new album, The River and the Thread.

But before we begin our segment with Roseanne Cash, we have to start the show on a truly down note, which is discussing

the horrible loss of the actor, the great actor, Philip Seymour Hoffman, to a drug overdose.

To talk about his legacy, we're joined by Jason Zinaman, who covers comedy and theater

for The New York Times. Jason, one reason we had you in, of course, is that Philip

Seymour Hoffman was great in film. He was great on stage as well, and presumably you've seen some of those performances. Pause one second.

I'm going to start with Dana. Dana, there's no way to measure this, and yet I'm competent

in saying the sense of the collective punch of the gut with this one is almost overwhelming, right? Yeah, I mean, to the extent that this seems like a hard segment to do, because there's a want so much to say about Philip Seymour Hoffman and his career on stage, his career on film, you know, his beginnings as a director. I mean, he's just so, so clearly an artist at the height of his career that to try to sum up his legacy right now just feels so wrong.

It's like, it's like what if Shakespeare had died in 1593, you know, what plays would not have been written?

It feels different than, much different than an artist who's at the end of his career and who you can talk about their accomplishments.

And also different from someone like Heath Ledger, you know, a very young person whose kind of potential

was taken away before they could begin to realize it. It really feels like this was one of our

...