Happy Friday Slatersters, and to all of my plus listeners, hello, it's been a minute.

If you have been patiently waiting by your earbuds for some bonus content in the week since our election experiment, the surge, wrapped up.

Wait no further.

I am here.

I'm the guest.

This is the inaugural edition of Maine Character Syndrome.

There is such a sea of news these days.

It's a little hard to cover everything in just four episodes a week.

So we are turning to the expert hosts all around the great studios of Slate to help us navigate the Rocky Rapids.

And tell us every other week, what is the one thing,

the one person, place, character that we really have to be paying attention to this week.

And hopefully it's something we've skipped on Maine because this is just for the paying subscribers.

My guest today will sound really familiar to you.

If you listen to What Next, it is Lizzie O'Leary from

What Next TVD, my friend, my colleague. Lizzie, what's up? Hi, how are you? I'm so happy to be here on this

inaugural edition of main character syndrome. That's what we're going with, man. That's what we're going in,

going hard. I wanted to talk to you this

week because this was a week where there's a ton of political news and we had to do a whole lot of

pivoting towards Washington. But at the same time, there is this major story happening in your world,

a story that like I kind of knew I should be paying attention to,

but we really weren't. And I knew you could hold my hand and explain it to me. We got 15

minutes to go through this week's main character. Paige, our producer, is going to put 15

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