I'm Stephen Maccalf, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest, the talented Mr. Quibi edition.

It's Wednesday, April 15th, 2020. On today's show, Good News,

the butt of many Hollywood in jokes is now here for all of us to make fun of. Quibi is a new short form

streaming entertainment app, if I understand it correctly. And then John Prine, the great John

Prine, has died from complications related to COVID-19 at the age of 73.

We discuss a singing, songwriting, Titan with Slate's own Carl Wilson.

And finally, this week's comfort culture offering comes by way of Dana, the 1999 Anthony Mangella adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's deliciously wicked thriller.

The talented Mr. Ripley. I cannot wait to

as Dana why that movie is comforting to her. But first, I know, I'm so weird. I started watching

it and realized, what the hell am I thinking? All right, I'll account for myself later.

Oh, yes, you will. But first, we're joined from Los Angeles by Julia Turner,

who is the deputy managing editor at the LA Times, Herb Bailey Wick, as I understand it, is Arts and

Entertainment. Julia, hey. Hello, hello. How are you? Yeah, pretty good, pretty good,

eager to talk about all three of these, which is always a good sign. And we're joined by Dana Stevens, who is the film critic for Slate.com, the unaccountable Dana Stevens. Welcome. Thank you, Steve. All right, guys, shall we dig in? Please. Let's Quibi. All right, here is what I understand about Quibi after tinkering with it and reading about it for a couple of days.

It's a streaming video service that plays directly to your phone, streams onto your phone.

And it seems to be aimed at your presumably, pitiably truncated attention span.

So it unfolds its various kinds of content, which

includes comedies, thrillers, docs, in short six to ten minute episodes. Quibi comes to us via

Jeffrey Katzenberg, of course, Hollywood Executive Royalty and Meg Whitman, best known, I think,

for being at one point CEO of Hewlett Packard and running for governor of

California. It also comes with piles of funding in excess of a billion dollars. And Julia,

as I understand it, you kind of previewed this for me when we were discussing about doing it,

...