Yeah, you're ordering us to party like it's 1996, but what does that entail?

Party Like It's 1996 is a six-week newsletter challenge in which I am encouraging Slate readers and listeners to, uh, live their leisure life, their social life in some of the ways that we did back in the '90s before, uh, smartphones and plan-making and always knowing what everyone else was doing took over our social lives.

So it's a series of five challenges with a lot of reader interaction, urging people to get out there in the world, uh, and experience the world without all the, the mediation that comes between us and the world in the year 2026.

Mm-hmm.

I can be in contact with them in a million different ways.

I can text them or I can see their Instagram posts or whatever, but I feel less close to them in a lot of ways than I ever have because so many of the ways that I interact with everyone are mediated by technology and by the knowledge of everything else that I could be doing at any moment.

And so in this newsletter series, I'm encouraging readers to un-mediate those interactions and get face-to-face or paper-to-paper or text-to-text or email-to-email with people in your lives, and spend unstructured, serendipitous time with them and see what springs from it.

Yeah, you are ordering us to party like it's 1996, but what does that entail?

Party Like It's 1996 is a six-week newsletter challenge in which I am encouraging Slate readers and listeners to, uh, live their leisure life, their social life in some of the ways that we did back in the '90s before, uh, smartphones and plan-making and always knowing what everyone else was doing took over our social lives.

So it's a series of five challenges with a lot of reader interaction, urging people to get out there in the world, uh, and experience the world without all the, the mediation that comes between us and the world in the year 2026.

Mm-hmm.

I can be in contact with them in a million different ways.

I can text them or I can see their Instagram posts or whatever, but I feel less close to them in a lot of ways than I ever have because so many of the ways that I interact with everyone are mediated by technology and by the knowledge of everything else that I could be doing at any moment.

And so in this newsletter series, I'm encouraging readers to un-mediate those interactions and get face-to-face or paper-to-paper or text-to-text or email-to-email with people in your lives and spend unstructured, serendipitous time with them and see what springs from it.

For instance, going on a road trip, I'm assuming that means no GPS, right?

I'm encouraging people to minimize their use of GPS, yes.

Like obviously if you get lost in some kind of like Friday the 13th type situation, you're allowed to use your phone to get out of it.

But what I'm really encouraging on that road trip is something that I'm really stressing throughout this newsletter series, which is embracing serendipity.

And understanding that on this road trip, even if things go wrong, you are still going to have a good time with the people who you're with.

And on the road trip in particular, the other thing I'm bracing, which you maybe haven't given as much thought to as how much you're dependent on GPS.

is what everyone is listening to in that car.

And so, like, the friction is worth it.

And I just wanted to hear both some of your childhood associations with Irish Spring and just, yeah, why it was that you chose the through line of that particular brand.

It's totally unjustifiable, my love of Irish Spring.

Like, it's indisputably not that good of a product.

And in fact, as an industrial-grade, like, big corporation soap, it actually shares with Body Wash some of the problems that I find with Body Wash. Irish Spring is petroleum-based, for example, unlike much more artisanal or homemade soaps, which are usually made from olive oil or other non-petroleum products.

But yet, I still have this...

Um, maybe it is like an ancestral memory, this sense that this is, this is the thing that I smell like, this is the thing I have always used.

And so therefore it's a kind of, um, note about my character that I continue using this soap long into adulthood, long after I know that there are things that are better for my skin that are less drying for my skin that are better for the world, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

It was very raved about.

What does it feel like for one of your favorite books to be getting such an unusual screen adaptation?

Yeah, Train Dreams is probably my most gifted book.

I've given out probably like a dozen copies of this book to people over the course of my life.

It's a novella that was first published in the Parish Review and then published as a standalone book by Dennis Johnson, who readers might remember from Jesus's Son.

He is a very incantatory writer.

He writes beautiful sentences.

And often his writing is almost hallucinogenic in its vividness.

Dan, what about you? Were you, like me and Steve, spellbound by Peter Hujar's account of a fairly average day?

Hmm.

They would sail a number of boats, but the, the Rainbow Warrior was their flagship.

Um, they would sail these ships, you know, out into the North Atlantic to confront whalers and to, you know, put their boat between a whale and a harpoon.

They would, um, sail to nuclear plants that were dumping nuclear waste into the water and chain themselves to outflow tanks.

You know, they did all these sort of very high profile, attention getting actions that were meant to confront environmental wrongdoers in a way that would make the news.

(laughs) So they made enemies but they were like wily.

Yes.

They were, I mean, they...

In it, we talk to the Slate writer Dan Kois all about his quest to rediscover a famous chocolate cake from the 1960s.

The first tunnel of fudge I made, which was from a recipe on the Pillsbury website, it was a total disaster.

Like, 10 minutes later, the thing collapsed like there'd been an earthquake in my house.

It wasn't just that I'm a bad baker.

Pillsbury had fudged the recipe.