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I'm Stephen McCaff, and this is the Slate Culture Gap Fest to State All the Way Through edition.

It's Wednesday, June 26, 2013.

On today's show, The Downfall of Food Network star Paula Dean and the state of the non-apology apology.

Then we talk about the new Stephen King miniseries Under the Dome, which has premiered on CBS.

And finally, the death of the humanities.

It turns out it may not have been so greatly exaggerated after all.

I'm joining you today from the studios of WAMC in Albany, New York, and joining me today in Manhattan is Slate's culture critic, June Thomas. Hello, June. Hello, Stephen. And, of course, Slate's film critic, Dana Stevens. Hey, Dana. Hello, Steve. All right, well, digging right in, Paula Dean is an American cook, restaurateur, author, actress, and Emmy Award-winning television personality,

and until last week, she was the host of her own cooking show on the Food Network.

It was a huge success. In fact, she had multiple shows over the years on the Food Network.

They had made her a superstar in that world. But when she was deposed in connection with a

sexual harassment lawsuit, she admitted to having

used the N-word in her past, and she was dropped both by the Food Network and her sponsor, one of her

large sponsors, Smithfield Foods. Subsequently, I mean, this has been hashed over to no end in the press,

but subsequently she issued two very peculiar apologies, and it's those that we'd like to focus on.

Why don't we start by listening to her first apology?

Inappropriate, hurtful language is totally, totally unacceptable.

I've made plenty of mistakes along the way, but I beg you, my children, my team, my fans, my partners,

...