Slate Culture Feed

The pay-what-you-want business model is mostly found in museums and churches, but this week we’ll hear from entrepreneurs and artists who are implementing it in unlikely places. Guests include: Katie Bishop, owner of Principles G.I. Coffee House in Brooklyn, musician Jeff Rosenstock of Bomb the Music Industry!, and Aimé Nuñez, owner of Pegasus Creative Reuse in Dallas.
We also hear from Shelle Santana, assistant professor of marketing at Bentley University, who studies the PWYW model and tells Anna why its success is so confusing to economists.
Podcast production by Cameron Drews.
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If you’re new to the show, welcome. We’re so glad you’re here. Find us and follow us on Instagram and you can find Anna’s newsletter at annasale.substack.com. Our email address, where you can reach us with voice memos, pep talks, questions, critiques, is deathsexmoney@slate.com.
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Many women are hiding their boyfriends online, or losing followers if they hard-launch. Some go as far as to say having a boyfriend “feels republican.” Is this heterofatalism gone too far, or a long-overdue correction to the patriarchy? On today’s encore episode host Kate Lindsay was joined by writer and content creator Josh Lora, who also goes by TellTheBees. Josh’s Substack essay, Boyfriendland, was cited in the viral Vogue article written by Chanté Joseph, “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?”

This podcast is produced by Daisy Rosario, Vic Whitley-Berry, and Kate Lindsay.
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When an actor opens their mouth to sing in a movie, chances are high that the voice you hear will be their own. Even in music biopics, movie stars without much singing experience regularly go to great lengths to impersonate the most beloved vocalists of our time. Why not simply play Johnny Cash or Bruce Springsteen’s actual recordings, the reasons why we care about them in the first place? When the world is full of beautiful singing voices, why force Pierce Brosnan to bray his way through Mamma Mia?

What you hear when an actor unhinges their jaw is a matter that Hollywood has been negotiating since the dawn of sound. So in this episode, we’ll learn about the “ghost singers” of classic Hollywood musicals, find out why they went extinct, and why today’s music biopics so often fudge the music. Then we leave Hollywood for Bollywood, where the rise of the celebrity “playback singer” shows what can happen when good singing is the highest priority.

In this episode, you’ll hear from Slate’s pop music critic Jack Hamilton; musicologist Dominic Broomfield-McHugh, editor of The Oxford Handbook of the Hollywood Musical; Stephen Cole, co-author of a memoir by the ghost singer Marni Nixon; Isaac Butler, longtime Slate contributor and scholar of American acting; and Nasreen Munni Kabir, who has written several books on Hindi cinema and curates Indian films for the UK’s Channel 4.

This episode was written and produced by Max Freedman. It was edited by Willa Paskin and Evan Chung, our supervising producer. Decoder Ring is also produced by Katie Shepherd. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director.
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The rise of AI has led to a rise of distrust, but the “tools” used to identify AI and plagiarism are perpetuating preexisting biases. Jason Arday, the former Cambridge professor who was found dead in his home last month, is the latest in a string of headline-making scandals targeting writers and academics of color, while white infractors fall quickly out of the news cycle. In today’s episode, host Kate Lindsay is joined by The Drey Dossier to discuss why plagiarism and AI accusations are our weapon of the moment, and why institutions, not individuals, should bear the brunt of our frustrations.

This podcast is produced by Vic Whitley-Berry, Daisy Rosario, and Kate Lindsay.
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Porn. It’s something that people use in their most intimate, private moments. It’s a way to acknowledge desire — without any of the attachments of intimacy. For some of you, that's incredibly freeing. For others, it's caused some real problems.
This episode originally aired in 2016 and was produced by Chester Jesus Soria and Katie Bishop
If you have stories about using AI porn, experimenting with deepfakes, or seeing yourself depicted in one, record a voice memo and email it to us at deathsexmoney@slate.com.
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And if you’re new to the show, welcome. We’re so glad you’re here. Find us and follow us on Instagram and you can find Anna’s newsletter at annasale.substack.com.

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