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Welcome to the Double X Gab Fest for Thursday, December 29th.

This is the bland, fertile, and Protestant edition.

I'm Hannah Rosen, double-X editor, calling you from Brookline, Massachusetts,

where I am staying at my in-laws house. I'm joined today in the New York studio by Jessica Gross,

double-ex editor. Hi, Jeff. Hey, Hannah. And also June Thomas, the culture writer for Slate. Hi,

June. Hey, there. Today we're going to talk about three things. The first is maternity leave, and whether 40 weeks is the ideal length for maternity leave, which we're going to talk about three things. The first is maternity leave and whether 40 weeks is the ideal length for maternity leave, which recent studies seem to show.

Second, we're going to talk about Gingrich's, the latest revelations about Newt Gingrich's divorce,

only because it's always fun to talk about things having to do with Newt Gingrich.

And finally, we're going to talk about the year in celebrity marriages and divorces, and we'll do a little end of the year roundup for you.

So let's start with maternity leave. We recently ran a story by Sharon Lerner, suggesting that

recent research showed that there are ideal lands from maternity leave, and my favorite part of

the research showed that you can actually be on maternity leave, and my favorite part of the research

showed that you can actually be on maternity leave for too long or for uselessly long.

But, Jeff, can you describe what Sharon's piece showed us?

Sure.

Sharon's piece was sort of a roundup of several different studies, and what I ultimately glean

from it was that the ideal maternity leave is longer than 12 weeks, but less than a year.

And all sorts of positive things are correlated with maternity leaves that are longer than 12 weeks, like lower infant death rates, lower high school dropout rates even.

So the list kind of was quite long and pretty comprehensive. And so I thought

that it was really interesting. I mean, 12 weeks, you know, as someone who doesn't have children,

...