Hey everyone, quick heads up here.

There's a little bit of spicy language in this one.

So Margaret, can you give me like a personal vibe check

on this week's presidential debate?

Margaret Sullivan writes about the media and politics over the guardian.

Well, there's a certain amount of wanting to just hide under a couch or something, which I'm also hearing from a lot of other people like, oh no, it's going to be so weird and so strange do I have to watch it.

This debate is somehow the only thing anyone can talk about and also something a lot of people

seem to be carefully avoiding.

I think they, I think it will actually have pretty high audience ratings.

I think people are extremely curious about it and it just could be, I don't know, I may be doing a lot of cringing, I'm not sure.

Tonight's debate is going to be strange for a lot of reasons.

It is the earliest a presidential debate has been held.

Before the political conventions of

technically selected Donald Trump and Joe Biden as their candidates and

well before any polls open. It's being run by a TV network with Trump and Biden directly, which bucks decades of precedent.

Then there's the fact that this debate was a bit of a surprise.

You know, well into 2024, it was really unclear if any debates would happen at all this year.

Yeah.

Trump had famously sat out the GOP primary debates and Biden wasn't committing to debating Trump and there were some people who were like don't do it like don't give him the airtime.

Why do you think there is so much uncertainty until now?

Well, there's a lot of cons for each of them.

So, you know, I think for Biden, for both of them,

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