Hi, I'm Dana Stevens and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest. There are no small parts, only miniature wives edition. It's Wednesday, April 15th, 2026 and this week we'll be discussing first off the Christopher's, the latest movie from the ever prolific and ever chameleonic, Stephen Soderbergh. The star's Ian McKellen and McKayla Cole as two painters locked in a battle of wills that occupies some middle ground between bitter rivalry and nascent friendship. Next we will talk about the miniature wife, a new limited series on Peacock, about an inventor who in the course of developing a size-reducing biotech tool accidentally shrinks his novelist wife down to a five inch tall version of herself. The show stars Matthew McFadian and Elizabeth Banks, it's silly, it's slapsticky but maybe also insightful about the power dynamics of marriage or not, we will discuss. And finally cigarettes, cancer sticks, coffin nails, they're back in a big way on the big and small screen and also in social media representations of youth and glamour, but is that Fad translating to a measurable increase of a real life tobacco smoking among the would be cool members of Generation Z. Joining me this week to discuss these three juicy topics is Dan Coise, Slate Stahlward, co-author of Give Me Some Book Titles, The World Only Spins Forward, The Novels, Hampton Heights and what is your first novel? I read it and I can't remember the title. Vintage contemporaries, there's just, there's simply too many to keep track of. And another work in progress now, which is also going to be a novel, correct? Yes, although we're seven to five hundred years away from that it's completely. So it doesn't even have a title or an elevator pitch yet. All right, but another Dan Coise book is in the works and I can't wait to read it. As ever, also I am joined by critic Stephen Metcalf, who has an even more mysterious book in the works, Steve, about which I guess that you want to say nothing? Now I have to kill you. Like why did you even, Dana? Now I have to kill everyone who listen. No, I mean, it's, yes, it's shrouded in mystery, but it's, it's progressing. All right. All right. A fight meant all around. You're both a step ahead of me. It's non, look, can we call it, can we call it non-chemical? I do feel like that's enough. We can, but I don't quite know what that looks. You mean that it has material existence of some kind? It's been read by official, let's put it that way. Oh my goodness. All right. All right. Stephen Soderbergh's 37th movie, that's right. The man is 63 years old and he's made 37 films already is the Christopher's. It's a small scale art house flick in the mode of say 2024's low key ghost story presence or even his famous debut, sex, lies, and videotape as opposed to one of his big budget glossy star vehicles, Allah, the Magic Mike or Ocean's 11 series. The Christopher's is essentially a two-hander though are, there are a few secondary characters, but most scenes unfold with just two people on screen. Ian McCallan, who plays over the hill painter Julian Sklar and Michaela Cole of I may destroy you fame, who plays Laurie Butler, an aspiring painter and a former art forger who is hired by Julian's money-grubbing adult children to finish a series of half-done paintings from the heyday of Julian's career so that they, the adult children, played by Jessica Gunning and James Corden, can sell those paintings after their father's death and make a fortune. Let's listen to a bit of the trailer from the Christopher's, which should give you a sense of the movie's basic premise as well as its tone. You'll hear the voices of Michaela Cole as Laurie and Ian McCallan as Julian. I was hired by Barnaby and Sally to complete the unfinished Christopher's. And what makes you think that you could do it? I guess that's where the artwork comes in. A poo. The first Christopher series, there's a delicacy colours warm with each successive layer in the third and fourth, the lack of denser and the oil thickened. There was a lift, didn't it? You were falling in love and for the first time, you were free. You had to relax, you're the canvas. I mean, I've said what I've got to say to you. Take that. Take those. Where do you think it goes? All right, Dan, I'm going to start with you here. I'm curious whether for you this movie lived up to its really juicy tagline and premise, but basically just these two actors appearing together in a two-hand or whether dueling painters, that sort of feels like a how can it go wrong premise, but I'm not sure if you feel like the movie completed the thought or not. I think it completed the thought in the sort of understated Steven Soderbergh fashion of his late career, which is to say the movie shows all the evidence of his method, which is super quick shooting, super quick putting it together, no frills, he's operating the camera, he's editing it in the car on the way back to the hotel after a day of shooting. That's a method that lends itself to sort of a skeletal, understated, underplayed version of whatever genre it is that he is turning it. When it was a ghost story, like presence, it was like a very minimalist ghost story. When it's even when it's like a supposed sex romp, like magic, Mike's last dance, it turns into a kind like the most underplayed, almost chilly version of that. And so what I wanted out of this movie was to see what happens when this method meets actors who demand a certain level of material to really be allowed to let loose. I wanted to see what happens when Ian McCall and Michael get to actually spar with one another with each other in the framework of a Steven Soderbergh movie where he's you know that he's going to give them maybe three takes max and no matter what they're doing, they're going to get through like 20 pages every single day. And yeah, in the end, I came away really happy with those interactions. Like I loved watching them bounce off each other. Their rhythms, like the, you know, the very valuable, a rascal old guy and then the sort of watchful, reserved younger person. Like, that's a very familiar rhythm, almost sort of a mismatched buddy movie rhythm. But they're both very, very good at that. And the Kellan in particular, I think, is having more fun in this movie that I've seen him have, I mean, I think in anything since maybe Lord of the Rings. And the energy bouncing between them is plenty to fuel a movie that is only an hour and a half long and maybe even feels shorter. Yeah, certainly slight in size and maybe too slight for me in ambition as well. Steve, what about you? Was it enough just to watch these two great actors face off in a somewhat slap dash atmosphere? Let me begin by saying I like Soderberg in the mode as Dan so aptly described it. For example, I liked the movie Kimmy, which I believe was shot under COVID restrictions. It's got a kind of claustrophobia and economy to it that was quite well done. It's not a great movie. It's a terrific, like it's a terrific airplane movie. It's a terrific, what the fuck should we watch tonight movie? I have no objection to that method and the kind of movie that it produces that's not two hours and 20 minutes long when it should be an hour and 40. It's actually an hour and 40 and he's just an infallibly intelligent filmmaker. Years where I come out on this movie, I liked it in concept. I like the idea of a much older person who's only next chapter is the end, played by an actor for whom I don't want to cut short Ian McElden's extraordinary life, but he's in the final phase of life and there's an intensity and grace with which he plays and a truthfulness to the way in which he plays such a character. I love the idea of someone who is forced to play a character version of himself for money because everything else has failed him. One of the great ironies of this movie is that he's the social media, but he is a very social media-like figure and that he does these cameo videos where he assumes this character that he's been playing, God knows, for decades of this cranky art snob and then sends a personal message to someone for a couple hundred bucks. It's incredibly sad and a weird way and we get it back story about why he's forced to do that, which is for various reasons he aborted his painting career, series painting career, presumably with this series, which was of a younger lover, the name Christopher, hence the title of the movie, and then became kind of a Simon Cowell figure on an art competition show, sort of like that. Yes, as if Julian Schnabel ended up on like a painter's gosh town. And then this younger sort of gen, whatever she would be, I guess, Z artist who is forced to exist in a gig economy and cannot turn herself or has yet to turn herself into a brand and so has to take kind of a piece where a can ship where a canclooting possibly forging these Christopher's as Finnie.
works, right? So it's like the setup is amazing. The two performers are incredible actors and just sheer presences. Problem number one, I, you have to believe that this person is a kind of genius and that beneath this self-characulture is a kind of brilliant man. He speaks constantly in widestisms, illusions and aperçu. I only found that tiresome. I actually didn't find that person captivating. I found him like kind of pathetically over-egged in a way that I don't quite think is what they wanted us to feel about him. And then the second thing is I love the actress so much. I thought I made a story that was one of the most, even though it was universally lauded, but it wasn't widely enough seen. Like truly one of the great Golden TV shows of all time and her performance in this extraordinary. I find here here, manored and kind of oddly manored and like almost two-filled with that sculptural poise that her look suggests by just standing there. And I think it's because she's underwritten in a funny way. Ed Solomon who wrote the screenplay is a 65-year-old white man. Soderbergh is about the same. Both are roughly speaking baby boomer men. She's not real to me because I dare say, I don't think she was very real to them. And I thought someone with the, it lacked the anger of someone who cannot see a future in the art world because of its corruption by money and cannot see other enticing futures because of the way the baby boomers have totally broken the social contract with the younger generation. It's like that rage to me should have been a part of this film. And instead she's cold and removed and sort of studies him with a kind of rhinus that seemed like a strategy on the part of people who couldn't really put themselves into her. I thought it was quick but also kind of boring. I didn't, I never felt engaged with it but Dana, I'm curious to know where you landed. Yeah, I mean in a way this movie reminded me, although the subject matter is completely different. It reminded me of Black Bag, Soderbergh's last movie, even in terms of its reception where I feel like it's a high-concept movie that has a really cool tagline. As I say, it sounds great on paper. You want to see these two actors. You like the idea of them being placed into this two-hand or face-off scenario in the way that Michael Fassbender and Kate Blanchett were in Black Bag. And it sells itself right there in the tagline. And then to me in the case of both movies when I watched them, I thought, wait, why is this so boring? Why is this not living up to the energy that it promised? And I think in both cases it may be exactly Dan that filmmaking technique you're talking about. Both of those movies I would say felt to me half-baked kind of underdone. I would love for Fassbender and Blanchett to be these sparring spies that are so cool but there has to be an actual story and actual characters that are unfolding and not just sort of postures and poses. And I think whether because the script didn't flesh the characters out enough, which I think is the case here, or maybe it's editing in the car under a pseudonym as Soderberg does. But I just didn't feel like the big questions this movie poses about, you know, legacy and about art making and about, as you say, Steve, the changing economy of the art world and the completely different kind of generational universes that these two painters separated by several generations are launching their work in. I didn't think any of those questions really got addressed in a meaningful way. There was a lot of hand waving at the idea that those things were important and meaningful. And I was excited for the two of them to develop whether it was going to be an enmity or a friendship or this forgery relationship. But it always felt like that relationship was just about to be explored and wasn't being explored. And I would also say that a big flaw of this movie that several critics seem to disagree with me on is that the villains are terrible. The two adult children, Ian McKellen, played by James Corden and Jessica Gunning, are they're just total punching bags. You know, they're money grubbing, they're greedy, they're scheming, they're also very stupid. They're stupid, they're cartoons. And they're shot in a way that's just sort of insulting to those characters and yet several reviews of this movie that I've read have said, oh, and one of the upsides of the Christopher's is that it really fleshes out the villains and you feel sympathy for these adult children. And I thought I must have fallen asleep during that scene because I thought they were presented in a very cardboardy way that made it hard for me to root for the other two. Right? I mean, the whole universe that it took place in just did not feel fleshed out to me. It felt contrived. So as to have these, you know, head-to-head scenes between the two main characters. And that felt a bit manipulative to me. A thing that I really liked about this movie is that it's the rare movie about art that I think takes art seriously and takes the offense he takes at the notion that someone might walk into his house and think they can complete his paintings and he can't even complete. I found very moving and maybe my favorite part of the movie. He's annoyed at his children and sort of impressed that they came up with this plot, but he is enraged at the idea that someone might think they can paint like him. And I loved that and found that those moments of sparring between them. Like the one time when the movie really was doing what it wanted to do with the questions that it was raising. All right. Well, depending on what your mileage is with Steven Soderberg, I don't know what you want to call them, sort of, you know, suitcase movies. Movies that he seems to make on the run on the way to planning his next movie. If that's your thing and you're interested in what I will admit is a great premise and great casting, then please check out the Christopher's and tell us what you thought at CultureFestedSlay.com. It's the moment in the show when we talk about business and the only item of business we have is to let listeners know about today's Slate Plus segment. We're going to talk about Artemis to the moon mission that just returned from space and that was at least on my social media, it was really all the rage to talk about an above all goc at the pictures of last week. And we found ourselves realizing in our topics called it for once we were interested in a space mission and we wanted to talk about why we and others seem to be connecting emotionally with Artemis too. In a way, people haven't in a while with a space mission. If you're a Slate Plus member, you will hear that as a separate episode in your feed and if you're not, you should become one by going to Slate.com/CulturePlus. As a Slate Plus member, you will get to hear extra segments like that, you will get ad-free podcasts, bonus content, and of course unlimited access to all of the writing and all the podcasting on Slate.com. These memberships really are what keep us going, what keep the studio I'm currently sitting in, open and running. So please, if you haven't already, sign up at Slate.com/CulturePlus. In a new Peacock series, The Miniature Wife, co-created by Jennifer Ames and Steve Turner, and based on a short story of the same title by Manuel González, Matthew McFadian plays Les Little John, an inventor in the agro-tech space. That's agricultural technology, not aggressive technology, although less is so ambitious and so ego-miniacal that it's actually some of both. His company is developing a top-secret new technology that he swears will end world hunger. After securing funding from a dim-witted tech-bro, played by Ronnie Chang, Les throws himself more deeply than ever into his work. Much to the resentment of his already-neglected wife Lindy, played by Elizabeth Banks. As the two are arguing one night about his workaholic tendencies in their kitchen, Lindy is accidentally doused with the secret substance Les has been working on in the lab, and to both of their horror, she finds herself shrunk down to sub-barby size about five inches tall. Let's listen to a clip from the second episode of The miniature wife here. Banks' character Lindy has just been in small-ified. She's understandably confused and furious, as she confronts her now gigantic to her husband about the nature of the top-secret work he's been doing. "Jesus, oh my god, this is your job? This how you're going to solve world hunger? You're going to make everybody tiny, so so they don't want to eat more? I don't- uh do you want me to answer that or explain it to me?" "Well um it's called cellular reduction and it's the process of militarization and restoration of organic fruit and vegetables and that's how I plan to solve world hunger." "At plain how you're going to make me big again, Jesus, I don't give a shit outwards?" "Oh right well I just reverse the process, that's the restoration part." "Great! Restore me! Now please!" "I can do that um uh but first uh a surprise uh meet me in the dining." All right Steve you know why I'm starting with you here because I remember I think correctly that you have an special affection for Tom Wemsgan's the character Matthew McFadjian played on succession. I remember us talking about that show when you being especially charmed by the Wemsganesian sort of objection and the the um the weasel-y kind of character that McFadjian plays so well who is not dissimilar from the the character he plays now in the miniature wife. I'm wondering how this new iteration of that type struck you? "Well first of all I'd congrats on the agro agro that was very funny that was lie nicely played Dennis Steven. Secondly I'm surprised you're surprised. I mean, I think Tom. Wombs Gans was widely, widely kind of beloved in that queasy way. And Matthew McFadian's performance as him. And it was anyway, I think there was, I'm not alone in my, I think, McFadian fandom. I will say this, I was shocked that this show won me over, but it took a bit. It took a little bit. One of the first things, very early on, I think, in episode one, someone says, this is not a metaphor, right? And of course, one thing says, if you are, that's pretty tongue in cheek, has to be because of course this is some kind of marital. I mean, the marriage is central to the show. And there is an allegorical power to a, you know, narcissistic workaholic husband on a very Elon musk-like mission to revolutionize the world. You know, the idea that he shrinks his wife and makes her small, right? Like makes her tiny, is a literalization of something that I think we can imagine happening in a lot of marriages. Funnily enough, she's kind of right. It doesn't function primarily as a metaphor, and as the show moves away from it being an overly obvious allegory for gender relations within marriage, it just gets better and better and better. Like partially because you get these, it really throws this wonderful curveball at you. In fact, she had her moment as a writer that he could have experienced as belittling, and in some ways maybe did it, but not entirely. It's actually quite subtly in its own funny way, a funny way, quite subtly presented. And they, first of all, both performers are just extraordinary. Elizabeth Banks and Matthew McFadden together is wonderful. And they've committed to the bit utterly. And I found that there's just something sly and unexpected going on here. Let me give you a couple of quick examples. One is that she has relegated her five-inch cell, her six-inch cell, is relegated to this dollhouse. He has the power to minutrize the conceit of it, which you just have to go with is he can use this technology to minutrize anything what he can't do is get it back to regular size. So she's for the moment trapped. And he's put her inside this dollhouse that has many functioning items in it that she can actually live in, including a coffee maker on a TV and on and on and on and on, and very funny robot bit that I found quite charming. But her first night in order to sleep, he draws, we're using a big pen. He draws a little smiley face on his index finger and slides it into bed with her. And of course, it's fundamentally the size of a creature to her, like a, you know, human size creature to her. And she curls up with it and falls asleep. And the following morning, he can't move because it'll wake her up. But he has something he has to do, right? And so it's like the way he slides the finger and you see the little smiley face. It's like, okay, this is starting to work for me. And then you've got this wonderful performance by Ronnie Chen as the like very Elon Musk figure who's kind of underhandedly rigged a purchase of the company that Matthew McFady and the scientists have started and it puts them on a call. It creates a lot of comedy and suspense, like is he can sort of steal this company out from under less little John, the McFady and character. But he has this assistant who's there as a spy played by Zoe Lister Jones Vivienne who's very, very, very funny and she's played as just corporate ice queen. And when when McFady and he's just desperately trying to figure out a way to make his wife ordinary sized again has shrunk the family cat. And this character Vivienne who just never broke it. Why she's just never broken this facade, this ice cold facade. The way she interacts with the tiny cat gives you this, it's like comedically brilliant and it gives you this glimpse into her as this sensual lonely human. And she loves the idea of the little cat. And while pretending it's only for the purposes of business and science, she appropriates it to herself. And like that seems wonderful. And then you suddenly realize there are all these little grace notes in this otherwise like, like, like, crudely broad premise that give it a kind of life in a weird way. Do I think it's a great show? No, but it likes knock up on me. And I'm dying to know whether it did for you guys. Absolutely not. I knew this show would start a fight. I just found them both so reprehensible and they're the situation that the show puts each of them in their marriage and so cartoonish. And what I mean by that isn't that he shrinks her. It's all the other stuff around him shrinking her. In the end, I was very surprised to discover that like I enjoyed the the goofy madcap honey I shrunk my wife. Gags like the index finger and like the tiny cat. And I found myself wanting more and more of those but like the actual setup of the plot, what is going to happen to his company? What will happen with this investor and then her whole plot about a student's short story that accidentally gets submitted to the New Yorker under her name and instantly accepted and is going to be printed in the next issue, ruining her reputation in life. Those were also dumb that I couldn't find any way to care about them even a little. And so the show is it seemed to me was asking me to really invest in their marriage. But I just wanted them to get a divorce. Like it seemed like they should obviously get a divorce as soon as possible. And I understand that if they do that, there's no show. But but that is all I wanted for them. And the show's like trying to do a tricky thing. And Steve, you put your finger on it, which is it's using these flashbacks that are interspers starting sort of toward the end of episode one. It's using the flashbacks to try to build our sympathy for them and their marriage because it's very hard to have any sympathy for their marriage in the present day because they are truly like she is a real herodin and he is a real narcissistic son of a bitch. And but we are allowed to see these glimpses of what they were like when they were younger, when their marriage was new before they had broken each other in various ways. And those helped some for me. It sounds to me like they maybe helped a lot more for you. But they also ran into the problem where whenever we went to one of those flashbacks, part of me, I guess my most infantile part was like I just want to see more small person jokes. I want to see Elizabeth Banks wrestle with her remote control. I want to see a giant Hershey bar. You know, I want to see her trying to work a cell phone. A great continued bit, which I could have probably watched for like an hour. I could have watched a tiny person try to work an iPhone. And so I just I like couldn't get over how uninvested I was in all of the main things that the show feels like I should be invested in other than her being tiny, which I was very invested in. Dana, what did you think? I mean, I'm going to have two critiques that are very specific and that I think we haven't covered yet. So the first one I will say I think relates a little bit to what you were saying about the miniaturization gag stand like this move this show, which should have been a movie this far too long leaves so many jokes on the table when it comes to being a tiny person. And I say this is someone who grew up like my really my favorite kind of fantasy world as a kid and books was anything that was tiny, right? Like the children's class at the bar hours. Yeah, or I don't know. I'm even Marcel the shell was shoes on right that came out a couple years ago. Like a really, really imaginative exploration of this childlike fantasy of tiniest I loved doll houses. I still love miniatures like whenever I go to the art institute of Chicago, I go down to the basement to those incredible. There's a whole room of these like miniature. I don't know the backstory of these, but of basically interiors from different periods in history, right? But at dollhouse scale stuff like that is endlessly fascinating to look at and watch and play with. West Anderson is best, right? When he's doing like fantastic Mr. Fox, it feels like a dollhouse world. This show is not curious enough about the dollhouse world by giving her such an elaborate dollhouse to live in that is essentially an exact replica of her house. That means that when she's in that house by herself, she's just an actress in a set that's into normal scale to her body doing things and you don't get those moments. But when there are little moments like there's a great visual gag where he takes her on a ride in the car and she has a seat belt on. But of course, the buckle is so huge. Basically she's just like a tiny little head rising up above the square buckle and it's hilarious. It's a great image, little moments like that. Or for some reason in her to scale perfect house, there's a pin cushion, like a human normal sized pin cushion that she uses as a footstool. And at one point pulls the pins out and uses as weapons. Those are great imaginative moments that the show kind of throws away by just having her almost always at least as far as I've watched being this to scale set. So that's one thing. It's like get curious about the the dollhouse versus real world. That would say that gets better as the show goes on. She gets out of the dollhouse. Well, maybe that goes to my second critique, which is that all the problems that I have with the show so far. And I'm about halfway in and I probably will finish it just because I want to see what happens where it goes with this.
is pacing. It is far, far too long. It just, this streaming series bloat thing has really gone too far. I mean, this is based on a short story, right? A short story in a collection, which I haven't read, but looking at the length of the full collection, I think that story is probably under 20 pages long. Why does it need to be nearly 10 hours? Why am I putting in a satan tango by Belvatar, a mount of time to watch a goofy, weird, science style? This should have been a movie, like weird science. It should be two hours long, right? There should be a wacky professor. They should lean into the kind of like, you know, Christopher Lloyd, mad scientist, character doing a wacky thing that we don't have to get that much backstory on. And then it should be full of a bunch of gags like the seatbelt gag. And yes, you can still wedge in a story about marriage and about this couple and about the non symbolic, um, smallness and the symbolic smallness of the Elizabeth thanks character. It does not need to march on through 10 episodes that include back stories about the emotional affair that she's having with one of his colleagues totally underdeveloped and uninteresting and really undermines her character because why is she having such a boring affair? It even gets into the affair her agent played by the wonderful Sean Clifford from Fleabag, Love Sean Clifford, but she's barely in the show. And then suddenly we're supposed to care about her affair with a cowboy that she meets in an elevator. There are just so many side stories that I did not care about. And I wanted more cute little dollhouse gags and less bloke. As to the bloke, there were moments when I thought this should have been a two hour movie, an hour and 45 minute, hour and 50 minute movie. Would I recommend this not highly? Will I watch it to the end? I think almost certainly there are a lot of really special talents involved and I like watching them fuck around. I mean, I also did not watch all of succession, but I also love Lam's Gans and I love Matthew McFadian and he does have an incredible facility for this kind of totally pathetic, smart me, running in place desperately trying to get to the next place character. And I found it with banks like legitimately hugely entertaining at times in this show. And so I do agree with you Steve that like this is the right casting for this. And they're doing fun things these two characters and they get a lot of fun opportunities to play against each other. Dana, did you feel like they were evenly matched? Did you feel like they were doing interesting things on screen that helped you get through sort of the sillinesses that annoyed you or the bloke? Oh yeah, I mean actually matching up with the movie we talked about this week, the Christopher's. I feel like they're disserved. They know what show they're in. Their great actors, their great performers. They have really good chemistry, especially considering that because of special effects, they were often not in the room together when they appear to be acting a scene together. So they are what make it worth watching and they are why I probably will finish the second half. I want to see what happens with the pacing and they're fun. They're just really sinking their teeth into this broad humor and the physical comedy and all that kind of material. But just as was the case with Michaela Colony and Michaela and I feel like they deserved a better script. They deserved more time. I don't know on set or entertainment. I mean, no more time in rehearsal. More passes through some sort of filter. I mean, there's just there's something going on that goes way beyond this show. I think with streaming television where in order to create, I guess the most add impressions or add the most viewers or something, just everything has to be serialized and very, very long. I don't think anybody could survive the spinning out of this insubstantial story the way that it's been staged here. But I do agree that it's the two of them and the fun they seem to be having together that make this worth watching. Anyway, the show is called the miniature wife. It's on peacock. It's certainly watchable enough and I think it might be worth. If you do watch it, I'd say at least go through the second episode because that's when she gets small and things start to be at the very least kind of visually funny and interesting. Last year, the anti-smoking group Truth Initiative found that on-screen depiction of tobacco increased for the first time since 2002, with smoking shown in 80% of the 2025 Oscar Best Picture nominees, including Anora and the Substance. So writes Dagen Penner in a feature in the entertainment newsletter The Ancler entitled "Cigarettes Get a Sequel." Hollywood's cool bad habit is back. Whether it's Kylie Jenner on the cover of The latest Vanity Fair or Sabrina Carpenter in Interview Magazine or all manner of online cigarette influencers on TikTok, it seems anecdotally verifiable at least that cigarette smoking is coming back in style for young people, both as a means of stress relief and of social connection. Dagen Penner really reports this out. He goes around LA in particular interviewing young people who are smoking outside clubs and outside their work and outside bars and asking them about why they smoke, getting a lot of very sofistic answers, I would say, justifying their filthy new habit. Dan, I'm definitely going to start with you here because I know that you're a former smoker. So I want to hear your own smoking history. And then what do you think of this this resurgence and is it a real resurgence or is this just something that's still in the representational plane and not necessarily a real life trend? I'm fascinated by the story. I'm sort of an ex-smoker, like I smoke for one really great summer in college and then dropped it. But I am still like an occasional social smoker in much the same manner as a lot of these young people interviewed in this piece, which is if I go out, especially when I'm out of town, when I'm away from my family, all of whom definitely are not interested in every hearing about me smoking a single cigarette. But I will often, you know, it's like I went to Knoxville the other weekend and I bought a whole pack of cigarettes. I smoked seven of them over the course of four days that I threw the rest of the pack of cigarettes away. And so I think I'm like a one pack a year smoker who in order to achieve that has to spend like $80 a year on cigarettes to make that happen. But I really like related to a lot of the answers that these kids gave this reporter about why they are outside club smoking. Like it is very socially enjoyable to like be out in this little knot of people doing this thing outside the main thing. Like I find that a very satisfying experience. It's very satisfying to have two and a half drinks and then go smoke a cigarette to take a break from the drinks like. And so I'm fascinated by young people discovering the socially interesting and enjoyable aspects of this truly reprehensible death causing habit run by probably the most corrupt and horrible industry in the history of the world. And so I guess I feel a little conflicted about this whole thing. The thing that the piece sort of skitters by but that seems likely to change is that in fact cigarette smoking is it like at the lowest level it's been in America in historical memory. You know fewer people actually smoke in America than ever and young people really are not smoking at all. And so this pop phenomenon that the piece presents is as you say Dana doesn't yet seem to be represented broadly in the form of young people forming habits that will eventually kill them. Now will it? Probably that seems not great. Steve, were you ever a smoker? I was never a smoker. It was never tempted to be a smoker. There's something undeniably sexy about it. I don't know if it lazy moments in your novel writing. You suddenly have a character light up because it just has atmospheric a certain kind of atmospheric attens it. It's a thing for a character to do. I mean you understand why Bogart made it so iconic among other actors. As to a theory about what's going on here, I think cell phones were the new cigarettes. You sort of took a pause in a social gathering to look at your phone. Everyone did it. It was addictive. It was in its own weird way. I mean it was not good for you. It was addictive. I think cigarettes are the new cell phones. You take a break now. Only now it's with eye contact and conversation. You can't do it inside most places. It creates an ad hoc group of people outside. Some are probably strangers. You do those things face to face. You have small talk with strangers. Maybe you flirt with them. I think another thing is going on here is that there's a general phenomenon on the world of a theory. It's a theory applied to Trump really and the rise of authoritarianism, which is that people haven't lived through. They haven't lived through. Severe recession, depression. They haven't lived through war. They haven't. We're talking about affluent first world people and especially Americans. They haven't lived through a sustained period of non-democratic or illiberal rule. There's a generation and therefore they are lazy in the face of the threat of it. Similarly because smoking has gotten so comparatively rare, rare, you haven't
You don't have a younger generation that's seen an older generation die off due to widespread smoking-related illnesses like lung cancer. And so I think they come by this blithinist in regard to the product cheaply. I mean, they don't remember the disinformation campaign, young people don't remember the disinformation campaign. They don't understand that tobacco industry is as vile. I mean, to me, Dana, I'm curious whether you ever smoked, but also what your relationship to cigarettes has been, but it's a film critic in history and what is it about the unkillability of a character on screen lighting up, squinting a little bit, sucking in in, and then just that sexy exhalation, every actor has, I'm sure, their own wave exhaling a plume or a ring of smoke. And it's just so erotic. I mean, there's an erotic to it that for someone like me who finds almost every aspect of it disgusting is not immune to. I mean, I think my answer to the question, have I ever been a smoker? And then, you know, what is the mysterious erotic appeal of smoking? The answer's kind of tied up together in my case because no, I was never, ever regular smoker did not appeal to me, not just regular, but, you know, at all. But there was a year that I was studying abroad in Europe in Strasbourg and this town on the the border of France and Germany in a department that had not just a lot of French people, but just international students from everywhere, from Asia, from the Middle East, and obviously lots and lots of them were smokers. Like this was in the mid 90s. So, you know, I think pretty much every, right, every European kid in this program certainly in probably most of the Asians and, you know, people from other nations too would gather outside regularly and smoke in between classes, you know, going out of bars after meals, whatever. And so probably as a part of the socialization, you know, I would once in a while, but I'm a cigarette and it was actually, I think, a very crucial part of my development that I was mocked for this, like openly mocked, as were other American or Canadian, you know, sort of clean cut students who just didn't have that cool Bogart vibe at all and just had like a lollipop stuck in the middle of their mouth and looked like a fool and looked uncomfortable doing it. And I remember specifically, you know, students from various international students, like laughing at me and other Americans saying that we did not look cool at all and we looked dumb. And that was a very important moment in my development as a person and probably a great moment for my health because it never really appealed to me. Yeah, it never really appealed to me and I did start to realize, oh, trying to look cool while smoking is the dumbest, most uncool looking thing in the world. And young people should be told that and openly mocked for it because then they will break this filthy habit. And to me, ah, the idea of being a smoker now with everything we do know about the tobacco industry is it feels like you're doing what they want, you know, you're just a puppet of forces that you aren't thinking about and can't control at all. And all of these really deluded sounding young LA types who were talking to the reporter, Dagen Penner, about their reasons for smoking just sounded so self-justifying. And so I mean, I say it with love, I felt like their mom, you know, they just, they, they seem so delusional. And the idea, for example, that they weren't addicted at all. And I only smoke outside bars. And it's just this tiny part of my life. I mean, Dan, you are now established enough in your life that I think you can't actually say that this is a, plays a minimal role in your life. It's, that's cordoned off to these specific situations of travel or going out drinking. I'm lucky enough that I do not happen to have a seriously addictive personality with regards to cigarettes. That's not true of the vast majority of people. And definitely a lot of these kids are going to end up actually addicted to cigarettes. Yeah. Well, that's how, that's, of course, that's how they get you, right? Like you look cool outside a bar. And then the next thing you know, you need a hit of nicotine. And I know this because I'm married to someone who in college, I think was a, you know, I'm going out partying and I'll just smoke with my friends kind of smoker. And subsequently, I'm, I won't know the exact number of years because I wasn't with him then. But it's for something like 15 years tried to quit, couldn't quit, would go back again, you know, had a relationship to smoking that was very angsty and not at all cool or fun. And now I think Dan has become someone probably like you, but even less of a smoker, I think there's maybe because he knows that me and his daughter do not like it at all. Well, he knows that there's a real risk of going back to what was happening. Yeah, absolutely. So, but maybe two, three times a year, you know, maybe like, I don't know, dancing at a New Year's Eve party or something like that, he'll go out on a balcony and have a cigarette. And he's not proud of it, but it is probably a sort of a socialization aid. All of which I understand, I just, I think that there needs to be a lot of, a lot more PSAs playing in people's brains. And I was going to say as far as the piece of it, the anti-smoking campaign piece of it, that I think the fragmentation of media also plays a role in why this is able to start cropping back up again because there's not a place to put a PSA anymore of, you know, some sad person who has a hole in their throat because they, you know, can't breathe because they smoke their whole life. Those scary kinds of ads that we were subjected to, right? And certainly in the 90s and into the early 2000s, I remember putting in videos, you know, like VHS tapes and they would start with like a scary anti-smoking PSA. But there's not really any place for those to land now because note people aren't all watching the same media. And I would add to that, Dana, that we have no idea how money is getting seated into social media influencers to appear with cigarettes. That's got to be a very grave, very unregulated space. It may not have so, quote unquote spontaneously risen among young people. It could have actually been astroturfed into existence via Instagram and fill in the plank. Right. I mean, one thing that all these articles were not able to do is conclusively prove beyond anecdotal evidence and interviews of people outside bars that smoking is increasing among that cohort. And smoking is far at a general population level far lower than it has been in generations. I think it's something like 9. Something percent, right? It's under 10 percent. But I think that that anecdotal evidence and the general sense that we're having this vibe shift right now and moving back into more unhealthy behaviors, including the use of derogatory language that we were starting to purge from popular discourse is all coming back. It's hard not to relate all this to Trump and to the moment that we're in when everybody's saying, "Actually, maybe it's fine now to litter." Maybe we can stop talking about the environment. The idea that smoking is once again cool to me seems also lumped in with that, which is another reason that I feel very resistant to it and that it feels to me like all you're doing is acting out the desires of a bunch of invisible corporate puppeteers. Steve, your piano to the erotics of cigarettes on screen really made me want to go smoke a cigarette. I'm sure you look cool when you're doing it, Dan. Unlike me. Good job. The problem is what if no one's even looking at you? Like, I just lost 20 minutes of my life and nobody even saw me be Bogart-like on a corner. Oh well. All right. Well, if you want to hear some young people give some serious, sofistic reasons why they are smoking a cigarette outside a bar is perfectly fine. You can read cigarettes, get a sequel. Hollywood's cool, bad habit is back in the newsletter, The Ancler. What we reached the moment in the show when we endorsed Dan, what was the best, most outstanding moment of culture you experienced in the past week? This past week I finished a novel that somehow I never got around to reading in the 90s when it was everywhere, but I read AS by its possession. Oh yeah. I think I was scared off of that novel. Maybe when they made it into a movie, somehow for some reason they gave to Neil LeBute to write and direct, which now seems astonishing. But what a novel that is, what a yarn. It is a literary mystery and it's got academics racing from archive to archive in a dusty old adicts looking for documents and old poems and letters and manuscripts and so you know that is like catnip to me and it's also so funny and surprisingly sexy and it also is filled with pages and pages of this like expertly impersonated Victorian poetry or letter writing like truly like a 40 page section in the middle of letters between these two people from the past, which is incredibly compelling and fun to read. Anyways, I loved it. Great book. Can't believe I missed it in 1991 or whatever. Yeah and genuinely, I mean unlike so many books said in an academic setting, it seems to actually understand at least if maybe things have changed now, obviously things have changed a couple generations later, but as I remember like 90s academia did sort of resemble, I mean a less juicy and gossipy version of it, but you know there was more of a sense of academic realness, I feel like in the setting of that than so many other analogous college set books. Steve, what have you got this week? It's an essay on the New York Review of Books by Anoronian whose byline is simply anonymous for the obvious reasons that the person whose gender I don't think we know is in or discover and of course the piece is in in Tehran and the piece is called from the rooftops of Tehran and this person is clearly a writer either either this person is a writer.
or sorely missed their calling. It is one of the most beautifully written things I've read in a long time. And it's just the first person account of what it's like to be under the siege of American and Israeli bombs in that city. Let me just read a tiny bit of it. As I write this on the ninth day of the war, oil facilities have been hit and black columns of smoke have darkened the horizon, rising to the heart of the sky. I cannot tell where the sun is anymore. And I write quickly for fear that at any moment I might be killed. Writing under such urgency demands an economy of words. If I have only a few more minutes left of my life, with the things I want to say even be considered a value, what should I put down on the page as some kind of trace of myself in this world or as a document of our time? Is it important to write that the aftertaste of my morning coffee seems stronger and more pleasant these days? And I don't feel guilty about it. To write that during this war I've spent most of my time as I did during the previous war on the rooftop. Because when I am stuck in my room, I hear the sounds of explosions that drives me insane, not to be able to see or guess their source. And it's just that it goes from there about what it's like to be out on those rooftop. And then he in fact has purking perfect iron. Yesterday I lay on my back on the bed smoking. I never smoke in the bedroom. But war like wine, sorrow and love, erases one's most basic disciplines and pushes aside all pleasantries. And I hope you do not consider this a sanctification of war, but I want to say that in a time of war, like a time of love, one can sometimes become more beautiful, more courageous. A few moments before I lit my cigarette, someone texted him, it's just like, it just goes on. And I mean, it's quite economical. It's not a long piece, but each piece of it is extraordinary and it's like beauty and poignancy and moral urgency. And I just want to say something that's going to expose me as culpable naive, which is 15, 16 years ago when I discovered Iranian cinema, I would not say that I was a overly gullible recipient of American propaganda when it came to Iran. Nonetheless, I did not have a variegated sense of what the day-to-day life of being an Iranian was. And it's through those movies that you began to realize what an astonishing culture it is, how it itself, every single Iranian movie I've seen is about the battle to exist within a culture that's both absolutely modern and even postmodern and medieval and theocratic. And the degree of self-awareness and nuance and great, enormous tragic beauty that's extracted from that dilemma, I just think it's to be utterly simplistic about it. It is important to remember and be reminded with concrete examples from the viewpoint of the actual people who are on the receiving end of these armaments, what is being destroyed and how incredibly crude and anti-humanistic and debased the rhetoric around our war-making are. And anyway, so in addition to it was just an accident and the seed in the sacred fig and of course, all of Farhaddi's movies, I just cannot recommend this essay from The Root Tops of Tehran by Anonymous in the New York Review of Books. - All right, well, I'm gonna expand on something I've talked about in previous endorsements segments about my love for college radio and how my favorite way to discover new music is to find a DJ who just has a great show that sort of showcases their own taste. And because basically all radio is now streaming, this is really easy to do, you can go way outside your local area and find great stations. So I'm gonna drill down into that and endorse a specific DJ I've discovered and the exciting discovery I made this week that her show is archived, which is quite rare with radio shows. So this was something that was appointment listening for me when I was home on a Saturday night, I would try to listen to Shocking Blue on WFUV, which is hosted by this wonderful DJ named Delphine Blue, amazing name, right? Who just has the coolest voice. She has a really great radio voice that sounds sort of old school, like a little bit gravely. And I don't know, just warm and just somebody whose voice you wanna be in the company of. She also has great taste in music, extremely Catholic with a small sea listens to all kind of music and puts all kinds of music on her show, including she had, I think it was near the beginning of spring, she had some sort of set that was based on songs about flowers that went everywhere from public image limited to classical music about flowers. I don't remember if it was Chikovsky or, anyway, she just, it was all about like the floral themes and just really showcased a broad taste, but she's so fun to listen to Delphine Blue. Her show is on Saturday nights from 8 to 11 on WFUV, the Fordham station. It's actually not a college station, I guess, but a member supported station that happens to broadcast out of Fordham University in the Bronx. And yeah, so the big discovery of this week was that I don't have to have an appointment viewing with Delphine Blue. If I miss her show, they actually archive the show on WFUV.org, along with some other specialty shows. I'm not quite sure how with music rights, that's possible, because I thought radio was something that you weren't allowed to put in archives in that way. But somehow Delphine Blue has gotten away with it. So I still encourage people to discover their own local college radio DJs that they love. But if you want to get started somewhere, listen to shocking blue with Delphine Blue, either on Saturday nights or whenever you want to on WFUV.org. - Dana, I love that endorsement. And I will definitely check her show out. I want to throw in a sideways additional endorsement, which is whenever possible, go listen to the college radio shows of your friends' kids who are now in college, because it is an incredible way to get to know in a granular fashion, the now large and mysterious children that you have known since they were born. - Oh yeah, it's such a great moment. We've talked about this on the gap best many times when your kids' taste starts to shape your taste. The way our daughter has turned us into theater people when we used to just be movie people, right? Like the idea that your kids are now the taste makers or your friends' kids. I mean, I will say that Delphine Blue is definitely not of that generation. It sounds like she's been doing radio shows for decades. So she's not actually a college student, but she does seem to have tastes that ranges from, you know, old school stuff, including jazz and classical to really new stuff that I never would have heard of other ones. All right, that does it for this week's gap fest. You'll find links to some of the things we talked about on our show page, slate.com/culturefest. You can drop us an email at
[email protected]. Our producer is Benjamin Frisch. Our production assistant is Daniel Hirsch. The composer of our theme music is Nicholas Brittle and the executive producer of Slate Podcasts is Mia Lobel. For Dan Coise and Steve Metcalf, I'm Dana Steven saying, thanks so much for being a listener. We'll talk to you all again next week. (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]
PodcastTranscript AI