Slate Arts & Culture – Spoken Edition

Your daily arts & culture update, brought to you by Slate. Hear more Slate articles at Slate.com/Voice. Want to hear a daily selection of the magazine’s best stories? Learn more at slate.com/voice A SpokenEdition transforms written content into human-read audio you can listen to anywhere. It's perfect for times when you can't read - while driving, at the gym, doing chores, etc. Find more at www.spokenedition.com

Your daily arts & culture update, brought to you by Slate. Hear more Slate articles at Slate.com/Voice. Want to hear a daily selection of the magazine’s best stories? Learn more at slate.com/voice A SpokenEdition transforms written content into human-read audio you can listen to anywhere. It's perfect for times when you can't read - while driving, at the gym, doing chores, etc. Find more at www.spokenedition.com

Your daily arts & culture update, brought to you by Slate. Hear more Slate articles at Slate.com/Voice. Want to hear a daily selection of the magazine’s best stories? Learn more at slate.com/voice A SpokenEdition transforms written content into human-read audio you can listen to anywhere. It's perfect for times when you can't read - while driving, at the gym, doing chores, etc. Find more at www.spokenedition.com

Your daily arts & culture update, brought to you by Slate. Hear more Slate articles at Slate.com/Voice. Want to hear a daily selection of the magazine’s best stories? Learn more at slate.com/voice A SpokenEdition transforms written content into human-read audio you can listen to anywhere. It's perfect for times when you can't read - while driving, at the gym, doing chores, etc. Find more at www.spokenedition.com

Your daily arts & culture update, brought to you by Slate. Hear more Slate articles at Slate.com/Voice. Want to hear a daily selection of the magazine’s best stories? Learn more at slate.com/voice A SpokenEdition transforms written content into human-read audio you can listen to anywhere. It's perfect for times when you can't read - while driving, at the gym, doing chores, etc. Find more at www.spokenedition.com

Your daily arts & culture update, brought to you by Slate. Hear more Slate articles at Slate.com/Voice. Want to hear a daily selection of the magazine’s best stories? Learn more at slate.com/voice A SpokenEdition transforms written content into human-read audio you can listen to anywhere. It's perfect for times when you can't read - while driving, at the gym, doing chores, etc. Find more at www.spokenedition.com

Your daily arts & culture update, brought to you by Slate. Hear more Slate articles at Slate.com/Voice. Want to hear a daily selection of the magazine’s best stories? Learn more at slate.com/voice A SpokenEdition transforms written content into human-read audio you can listen to anywhere. It's perfect for times when you can't read - while driving, at the gym, doing chores, etc. Find more at www.spokenedition.com

“None of us thought that much into it,” Ed Sheeran says, right before breaking down in great detailed bit by detailed bit just how much thought went into creating this year’s biggest musical hit, “Shape of You.” As they’ve done in the past with other popular songs, the New York Times released a fascinating video in which the artists give a behind-the-scenes tour of their inspirations and creative processes.

In 2009, Chris Brown viciously assaulted then-girlfriend Rihanna. His sentencing as ordered by a judge included five years probation, as well as a five-year restraining order. (In 2011, the restraining order was lifted, conditionally.) In 2015, Brown was accused of forcibly ejecting a woman off of a bus during a video shoot. In 2016, former tour manager Nancy Ghosh alleged that the singer threatened her with violence, and she subsequently cut ties with him.

It’s that time of year again: Love Actually season is upon us. The modern holiday classic is full of egregious flaws, from the not-so-romantic cue card scene to the constant body shaming of a healthy, attractive woman—flaws that fans such as myself have had to come to terms with in order to enjoy the holiday season staple.

When the entire cast belts out “THIS IS THE GREATEST SHOW” a minute into your movie, the film itself had better live up to it. The Greatest Showman—how shall I put this?—doesn’t. Something feels off right from the beginning, as we see Hugh Jackman’s P.T. Barnum making his way through the space behind the circus bleachers in silhouette, pounding his cane to the rhythm of crashing drums.

Dave Grohl, who many lifetimes ago was in a band called Nirvana, stopped by Saturday Night Live with his new band the Foo Fighters, and he brought some Christmas cheer with him! After starting off with “Everlong,” from 1997’s The Colour and the Shape, the Foo Fighters turned in a rocking performance of “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” by Darlene Love (off Phil Spector’s 1963 Christmas album) and a guitar arrangement of the Vince Guaraldi classic, “Linus & Lucy,” which first appeared on A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965....

There’s no shame in revisiting a classic, and on this week’s Saturday Night Live, host James Franco riffed on one of the show’s most iconic sketches: Dan Aykroyd’s legendary French Chef bit where, as Julia Child, he sliced a finger and merrily bled to death. Franco’s character, a gift-wrapper at Bloomingdale’s, is motivated by Christmas cheer rather than Bordeaux and chicken livers, but the basic premise is the same: blood, blood, and more blood.

The Hollywood Reporter revealed on Wednesday that the 2018 Screen Actors Guild Awards ceremony will be presented by women, women, and more women, as a mark of what womenfolk have been through this year and since the dawn of time. Like many award ceremonies, the SAG Awards usually pairs a man and a women to announce each winner—but this year, only women will have that honor.

On Monday, a 27-year-old man tried to blow up a pipe bomb at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, but really he only succeeded in inconveniencing a lot of people, since he was the only one to sustain serious injuries. Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah, both of whom tape their shows in New York, were not impressed with this attempt to bring chaos down on the city’s transit system, which is already pretty chaotic.

Hannibal Buress, the comedian whose 2014 stand-up routine about Bill Cosby was, in many ways, the opening bell for the current wave of sexual harassment scandals in entertainment, was arrested early Sunday morning in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood, the Miami Herald reports. According to the police report, Buress approached an officer standing on a street corner and asked him to call him an Uber.

Jimmy Kimmel is taking the week off to spend time with his family after his son’s surgery, but Jimmy Kimmel Live! has continued to air new episodes with a roster of celebrity guest hosts filling in. On Tuesday, Tracee Ellis Ross took the reins and used the opportunity to talk about sexual harassment in the news. “First of all, let’s start with the fact that it isn’t a sex scandal. It isn’t a Hollywood scandal,” she said. “It isn’t even a scandal.

Johnny Hallyday, the singer whose French-language covers of American songs helped bring rock ’n’ roll to France, has died of cancer at the age of 74, Variety reports. He had been ill for several months. Hallyday, whose real name was Jean-Phillipe Smet, was born in Paris. An Elvis movie inspired him to start studying music and performing, and he released his first single, “Laisses les Filles,” in the spring of 1960.

NBC fired Today host Matt Lauer on Wednesday morning following a complaint by a colleague describing “inappropriate sexual behavior,” noting in the statement that “the first complaint about his behavior in the over twenty years he’s been at NBC News, we were also presented with reason to believe this may not have been an isolated incident.

What would we do without Slate? No, I don’t mean Slate Magazine. I mean Jenny Slate, actress, comedian, and—today at least—queen of our hearts. In a week of news ranging from the gross to the harrowing, Slate has gifted us with not one but two pieces of objectively good news.

One might call Melodrama—Lorde’s critically acclaimed, Grammy-nominated sophomore album—high art. The album is not just an aural splendor but a visual one too, with a moody, blue-lit painting of Lordeby Brooklyn-based artist Sam McKinniss on the cover. One fan, it seems, definitely does.

After a miserable day like Wednesday, we could all use a news story—just one!—that isn’t part of the torrent of garbage that’s been raining down for the last year. So here’s that story: Aardman Animations, the beloved studio behind Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep, has a new movie coming out. It’s called Early Man, it’s directed by Nick Park, and here’s its trailer.

There hasn’t been a better feel good story in a long time than Project Veritas’ hilariously inept attempt to trick the Washington Post into publishing a false story about Roy Moore, even if, as Slate’s Osita Nwanevu argues, conservative buffoon James O’Keefe won’t face any real consequences. I mean, have you ever seen anything more satisfying than watching Veritas operative Jamie T.

Pixar has always been known for making children’s movies adults can love too, occasionally to the point of giving their youngest viewers more than they are ready to handle. The tear-jerking opening montage of Up is the classic example—a four-minute lesson in the cruelty of time and mortality that is way beyond the emotional reach of many children—but let’s not forget the resigned embrace of death in Toy Story 3’s furnace scene, Mr. and Mrs.

Thanksgiving! Is there any other word that so perfectly embodies the spirit of Thanksgiving? If there is, we should change the holiday’s name to whatever that word is, probably. But whatever name it goes by, Thanksgiving can only mean one thing: Playing 12 hours of turkey sound effects at increasingly high volume until your family goes home and leaves you in peace.

Law & Order recently experimented with true crime, but the franchise hasn’t given up on their usual practice of taking real news stories and turning them into fictionalized, police procedural entertainment. If anything, it’s almost surprising that it took this long for Law & Order: SVU to announce that an episode addressing the Harvey Weinstein scandal is headed to a TV near you in 2018.

In 2013, L.V. Anderson wrote this sharp, controversial takedown of a culinary Thanksgiving tradition: Apple pie. Just in time for this year's festivities, we've reprinted the story below. It’s practically a law that in late November, every publication must offer a Thanksgiving guide. This year, I would like to draw your attention to two exceptional ones (other than Slate’s).

Lil Peep, who earlier this year was dubbed the “future of emo rap” by Pitchfork, died on Wednesday at the age of 21. Through his woozy, melancholic songs like “White Wine,” “Girls,” and “Drugz,” he drew from ’00s emo influences like Limp Bizkit and Panic! At the Disco as well as rapper Gucci Mane, while garnering millions of fans on social media and Soundcloud.

Disney released the first official trailer for Ava DuVernay’s adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time on Sunday night—that last one was just a teaser—and this time around they’re focusing on the thing we want most from trailers: exposition, and lots of it! The first minute or so of the teaser is built around an explanation of fifth-dimensional travel involving an ant and a piece of yarn.

Given that Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy won a combined 17 Oscars and, when you throw in the three Hobbit movies, grossed nearly $6 billion worldwide, you would think that the entertainment industry might be inclined to leave it way-more-than-well-enough alone.