Slate Daily Feed

On this week’s show, Isaac Butler (co-host of Slate’s Working podcast and the author of The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act) sits in for Julia Turner. The panel first turns their attention to Ren Faire, HBO’s three-part documentary chronicling the surreal power struggle at the heart of America’s largest renaissance festival. Director Lance Oppenheim (Spermworld, Some Kind of Heaven) presents an extraordinary window into the fantastical world, capturing a very specific moment in late-stage capitalism in which society returns to feudalism. Then, the three inspect Janet Planet, Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright Annie Baker’s film debut. Like Baker’s theater work, Janet Planet–a loosely autobiographical tale revolving around an 11-year-old girl named Lacy (played by Zoe Ziegler) and her mother, Janet (played by Julianne Nicholson)–pushes naturalism to the extreme, an approach that some critics love and others, some even on this very panel, abhor. Finally, the great Canadian actor Donald