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The following podcast contains explicit language.

I'm Stephen Metcalf, and this is the Slate Culture Gap Fest, Meet Your God Edition. It's Wednesday, March 13th, 2013. On today's show, The Bible, it's come to the History Channel as a mini-series, courtesy of Mark Burnett, who's best known for the reality show, Survivor.

And then, are women radically underrepresented in the most prestigious literary magazines and journals?

A new survey indicates, yes, absolutely.

And finally, the fate of the pun has it been destroyed by something called the nealexic portmanteau. To tackle such a subject, it requires nobody less than the editorial director of Slate magazine himself. John Swansberg, John, welcome to the show. Great to be here, as always, Steve. And great to have you. And of course, we have, as always, Slate's film critic Dana Stevens. Hey, Dana. Hey, how you doing, Steve? I'm well. Thank you. I've bounced back. It's awesome to be here, but this is secondary to the real consideration, which is that I wasn't here when we did the group Caval over Julia Turner's twins, right? So let's, let's, an awe on three, one, two, three. Oh. Now, amazing, right? I mean,

she was in an undisclosed location, Cheney-esque, you know, shroud of mystery around her for weeks.

We managed to keep the secret quite well, but we're so psyched for her twin boys. Lots of luck with that.

Anyway, moving on. So the Bible is a five-week

miniseries that started last Sunday, and appropriately enough, it ends on Easter. It costs

$22 million to make. Its producers are a husband and wife team. She, her name is Roma

Downey. She's responsible for the old CBS series Touched by an Angel. He is Mark Burnett, most known for the CBS reality show Survivor.

The first two hours netted 13.1 million viewers.

And to put that in perspective, that's more than any fiction cable show has done yet this year.

And it absolutely crushes anything on NBC over the past month.

So those are huge, huge numbers.

Before we get into it, it's quite a meaty topic.

But before we get into it, why don't we listen to a little bit from the show?

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