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The following podcast contains explicit language.

Welcome to the Double X Gap Fest for Thursday, May 15th, the narcissistic Looney Tune edition. I'm

Honorosen, editor at Slate.

I'm in D.C.

and I'm joined in the New York office by June Thomas, an editor and writer at Slate. Hi, June. Hello, Hannah. And Noreen Malone of New York Magazine. Hi, Noreen. Hey, Hannah. So before we begin, I want to announce that the awesome L.V. Anderson, who writes about food for Slate and who has joined us in the past in the podcast,

is hosting a screening of the movie Resistance about superbugs. You can find out about it at the

URL, www.slate.com slash live slash NYC-screening. Find out more. She's going to talk to the

directors and talk about bugs. And you all want to talk about bugs, right?

That's in New York, right? That's in New York. Yes. That's for our New York listeners, not our D.C. listeners. Or the rest of the country. Or anybody else, unless you want to fly to New York to talk about bugs, in which case, I think you have a problem. Okay, before we actually begin, I know that Noreen only has Beyonce and Solange

on the brain because she sent frantic emails saying if we could at the last minute talk about

Beyonce and Solange. And I will say, like, I don't know what to say, except they got in the elevator

and attacked each other. Like I just all makes me happy is all I have to say to break through Beyonce's sort of perfect sheen.

That's the only thing that makes me happy. But she didn't break through. That's what I want to talk about is she just stood there and just let the whole thing go down and they walked out of the elevator and she'd a perfect smile on her face. And like clearly there's so much more going on, but she preserves that sheen, that calmness. Well, her whole life seems like an effort to preserve sheen and calmness, like her Instagram, her Twitter, her video, you know, her, that, that biopic she made about herself. Like it's all just like, really everything's perfect. I promise. Like so I fired my own father as my manager. It was totally It was totally not stressful. It was like a wonderful occasion and we hugged each other. Like, that's her whole thing, you know? Yeah. I just think the sister dynamics of it are fascinating and who sides with whom and how they, you know, how they played it out in public and how they played it out in private. But I will just continue reading every internet article about it as a hobby, not professionally. If something terrible happens, like she like, you know, starts to choke JZ and it's like recorded in an elevator, we'll have a proper conversation about it. Is that, is that a right? Deal. Okay, deal. So our three topics for today. First, we have Monica Lewinsky. She's back in a Vanity Fair article where she tells her

side of the story. What does it mean for Hillary? Second, we'll talk about the horrible story

of the kidnapped girls in Nigeria, why this has become such a big story, what has gone

wrong in that case and what we can do about it. And finally, baby names, Jacob, is knocked off the list after many years of dominating as the first most popular boy's name. Why and how do names come into fashion? Let's start with Monica Lewinsky. Now 40, which was shocking for me to read. Monica Lewinsky's now 40. She's written written a story in vanity fair about her relationship with Bill Clinton. She insists that the relationship was consensual, that all her real pain and abuse came in the aftermath from the Clintons who made her a scapegoat so they could preserve their power, from Moore Meen Dowdy, her name for Maureen Dowd and the other members of the press, and from feminists who did not know what to make of her. This forces us to think about the less serious aspects of the Hillary campaign, but maybe that's a good thing. Let's start with the story itself. Noreen, how did you come away feeling about Monica after reading the story? Did you feel like, oh, this is a woman I wouldn't mind having coffee with? Like, did she seem more appealing to you after you

read the story? Yeah, she was totally impressive. In what sense? Well, she was eloquent.

She, I mean, sure, that's going to be edited to within an inch of its life, but, you know,

...