Welcome back to the Slate Culture Gab Fest.

We're all going to

Ficking Die edition.

It's Wednesday, January 12th, 2022.

I'm Isaac Butler in for Stephen Mick Calf.

On this week's show, don't look up as the new,

I guess you'd call it satire from Adam McKay, skewering our nation's failures to meet the challenges of stopping climate change. It's got an all-star cast, including Merrill Street, Jonah Hill, Leonardo

DiCaprio, Mark Rylance, and Jennifer Lawrence. We'll discuss the film and the response

to it over the past month. Then, Sydney Poitier, I mean, where do you even start in talking about

the colossal achievements of the first black man to win an Oscar for Best Actor and a man who had

such a profound impact on generations of actors, filmmakers, and audiences. We'll start by talking to

film historian and friend of the program Mark Harris about Poitiers' legacy. And finally, Catherine

Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and she has a wonderful new memoir out called Lost

and Found. We'll be talking with her about the book and a recent excerpt from it, How I Proposed

to My Girlfriend, which appeared in last week's New Yorker. I'm joined today by Julia Turner, the deputy managing editor of the Los Angeles Times. Julia, it has been a very long time since we've co-hosted this show together. How are you? How are things in Los Angeles? Hi, Isaac. I'm so happy you're here today. Things are hunky-dory. Oh, great. And we are also, of course, joined by Slate's film critic Dana Stevens. Dana, this is the point in the show where Stephen always asks you to recite the title and subtitle of your book, almost like a religious litany. And so as his substitute, the duty now falls to me, What is your book called and what is it subtitle? The subtitle is the hard part. I can never remember all the sections of it. My book is called Camerman, Buster Keaton, the dawn of cinema and the invention of the 20th century. And it's available for pre-order now. And it comes out in only two weeks, almost exactly two weeks, and just a week before your upcoming book, and you now have to tell us that title.

Yes, it is called The Method, How the 20th Century Learned to Act, and this is a perfect

segue to reminding listeners that Dana and I will be doing a joint book event at the Strand to

discuss her book on Buster Keaton and my book on The Method, and it will actually be a live episode of this very show hosted by Stephen Metcalf.

So if you'd like to see our beautiful faces in person,

please join us at The Strand in New York City on February 3rd from 7 to 8 p.m.

All right, shall we make a show?

I'm ready.

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