Slate Daily Feed Culture Gabfest - Bad Bunny Spikes the Football Edition
Feb 11, 2026
Rebecca Onion, writer and history podcaster, and Nadira Goffe, cultural critic specializing in Caribbean and Latinx culture, join to unpack Bad Bunny's Super Bowl spectacle. They dive into Puerto Rican everyday life onstage, joy as a political act, cinematic production choices, and how language and representation shaped the show. They also discuss a tense new film about motherhood and why a history podcast became wildly popular.
AI Snips
Chapters
Books
Transcript
Episode notes
Visual Storytelling Over Language
- The performance was crafted to be legible without subtitles by using cinematic staging and universal party moments.
- That visual storytelling let non-Spanish speakers still access emotional and cultural meaning.
Prepare Before Watching Rose Byrne's Film
- Watch Rose Byrne's performance in If I Had Legs, I'd Kick You for a study in escalating maternal unraveling.
- Brace yourself: the film is intense, anxiety-inducing, and designed to unsettle viewers.
Mother's Subjectivity Is The Film's Lens
- The film centers the mother's point of view by largely hiding the daughter's face and making the child a persistent voice.
- That choice forces viewers to inhabit the mother's claustrophobic subjectivity rather than sympathize automatically with the child.
