The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello, Slate Culture Gab Fest listeners, and happy New Year.

This is Dana coming to tell you that we have a special treat for you today. We were not able to come together during this New Year's Day to tape, but instead we're bringing you a best-of show. And the best part of this best-of is that if you're not a Slate Plus member, these conversations will be brand new to you because they all come from our Slate Plus archives. We've decided that we should stick

with the same theme for this roundup as we chose last year, Slot Plus book choices. We don't

often get to discuss books at length on this show, so this seemed like a perfect excuse to bring

you some book-centric content. But before we do that, we thought we would include one non-literary

segment which aired on Slate Plus just last week, in which we talk about the new movie, the Tom Hooper adaptation of the Broadway musical, Cats. Katz is the kind of movie, I will say, that is worth seeing, if only for the conversations that you have afterward. That was true of the group of people that I came bursting out of the theater, scratching our heads talking about it with, and and it is certainly true with Julia's, Steve's, and my conversation about it. So whether or not you have any intention of seeing cats, I hope you will enjoy our conversation about it, we certainly did. To hear segments like that and to get ad-free podcasts, as always, you can sign up for Slate Plus, the magazine's membership program, for just $35 for your first year.

And in return for that $35, you get extended ad-free versions of every Slate podcast, along with many other benefits, including the three of us puzzling over cats.

So if you want to support the show, please go to slate.com slash culture plus and join Slate Plus today to hear segments like these.

So here we go. We'll start with that recent cat segment and move on to the literary segments after that.

Hello and welcome to the Slate Plus segment of the Slate Culture Gab Fest. Today we discuss cats, cats, cats, cats, cats, cats, cats, cats, cats, cats. I'm so excited to talk about cats with you guys. Tom Hooper, he of the King's Speech and Les Miserables, has adapted cats for the big screen starring Dame Judy Dench, Ian McKellen, Jason Derulo, Ballerina Francesca Hayward,

what's her face from Australia, Rebel Wilson, and more.

It's trailer dropped this summer and caused yowls of surprise from the internet.

The movie dropped last week and caused yelps of delight at how bad the film is.

And now we have all seen it.

And for your listening pleasure, Slate Plus listeners, we shall discuss it.

Dana, we'll start with you since you're our film critic.

And this is ostensibly a film.

What did you think?

I mean, I think I have to say just a couple more factual things about cats before we get into evaluating it because it's all part of the bizariness of its sudden appearance on the landscape in Christmas 2019, which is that it had a horribly abysmal weekend at the box office. It's at 19% on

Rotten Tomatoes, so that's how many critics had anything nice to say about it. And the print of

it that was released was just recalled from theaters because apparently Tom Hooper, in his haste

...