Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Wednesday 31 May
7:30 PM - 9:00 PM
Location
Plenary 3 at Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre
1 Convention Place South Wharf Victoria Australia
Get directions
The Slate Culture Gabfest is both a stalwart and a pioneer of American podcasting, and one of its most consistent successes. For almost a decade, the show’s fizzing erudition has been collecting fans with its precise, entertaining and illuminating discussions of culture – high, low, and other – and its social and political implications.
Each week, hosts (and Slate staff critics/editors) Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens and Julia Turner choose three topics to discuss, sometimes joined by an insightful guest. Their quick-witted (and typically self-effacing) rapport underpins lively, substantial arguments about their chosen texts. They’re funny. They disagree, sometimes furiously. But whether they’re elevating or eviscerating each other’s points, their love of culture – and awareness of how inescapable it is, for what it says about how we live and understand our lives – is a constant.
In Australia for the first time, and live in Melbourne, Turner, Stevens and Metcalf will record an episode in front of an audience, joined by indie rock auteur Courtney Barnett. So, whether you’re into music or film, or premium or reality TV, or books, or theatre or longform essays – whatever your entertainments – come and talk it out.
Presented in partnership with Triple R.
Featuring
Stephen Metcalf
Stephen Metcalf is Slate's critic at large and a host of the Culture Gabfest. He is working on a book about the 1980s.
Dana Stevens
Dana Stevens is Slate's movie critic. Previously, she wrote the Slate television and pop-culture column Surfergirl for two years. She has also written for the New York Times, the Washington Post Book World, Bookforum and the Atlantic. She has a PhD in comparative literature from UC–Berkeley and lives in Brooklyn.
Julia Turner
Julia Turner is Slate's editor in chief. Working from Slate's New York office, she oversees the magazine and edits pieces on technology, culture and design. She also writes regularly for the magazine (all too often about the TV show Mad Men) and is one of the hosts of Slate's weekly Culture Gabfest podcast.
Before joining Slate, she worked at Time Inc. – first in magazine development and later at Sports Illustrated Women.
Courtney Barnett
‘I’m not your mother, I’m not your bitch.’
Since her debut album Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit, Courtney Barnett has been celebrated as one of the most distinctive and compelling voices in rock, an artist who mixes insightful observations with devastating self-assessment. Her second solo record, Tell Me How You Really Feel, was released in 2018; a profoundly realised and politically astute rock-record which had both the Sunday Times and Rolling Stone hailing her as the ‘voice of a generation’.
She is the first female artist ever to win the ARIA for Best Rock Artist (she’s won five ARIAs now), she was APRA’s Australian Songwriter Of The Year in 2016. Barnett has also received the Australian Music Prize and Triple J’s Australian Album of the Year. In 2015 she was nominated for a Grammy Award. Barnett is the founder and owner of Milk! Records.