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Welcome to the Double X-Gab Fest for Thursday, February 21st. The Don Henley was Hot edition. I'm Hannah Rosen, editor of Double X. I'm joined in New York by Noreen Malone of the New

Republic. Hi, Noreen. Hey, Hannah. And also Alison Benedict, the other editor of double X.

Hi, Allison. Hi, Hannah. Before we start, I just want to thank everyone for coming to our live

podcast in D.C. last week, and particularly the people who came to our awesome cocktail party

before the podcast. And I want to thank Ginny, who gave me through Noreen, a really beautiful green hat for my hopefully soon-to-be-born baby. Thank you. That was really sweet. A hand-knit hat. A hand-knit hat. Yes. It's beautiful. Thank you. I'm going to do a really quick thank you to Liana Eaton, who's a podcast fan who showed us around Berlin a few weeks ago and is like the best tour guide and the coolest person who ever lived. So that's my thank you. Okay. Our three topics today. First is we're going to talk about the second season of girls. Second, we're going to talk about whether women tweet differently than men. And third, we will do an interview with our own Emily Bazelon, whose new book, Sticks and Stones, about bullying, is out this week. So let's start with girls. We want to check in on the show's sophomore season. After a debut season that could not have gotten more attention, we want to see if we could still call the show groundbreaking, revolutionary, as many people did in the beginning.

Is it fulfilling its first season promise?

Is it still making people angry or related?

Or is it just become another show?

The living configurations of the four girlfriends at the center of the show have shifted, but it still continues some themes from the first season.

Hannah, who's played by the show's creator, Lena Dunham, is still struggling to be a writer and still think the world revolves around Hannah, and she also still gets naked

a lot, which we will talk about. Also, some of the minor characters, Ray, for example, a dude

friend who's now dating Shoshana are playing more major roles this season. For this conversation,

we are joined by David Hagland, Slate's browbeat editor, who's been conducting a Guys on Girls conversation for every episode this season. Hi, David.

Hey, Hannah.

So you have expressed, and tell me if I'm reading this wrong, some disappointment with this season. Is that true? And if so, tell us why.

Yeah, that's true. And I've been wondering lately whether it's just that the show felt like such a breath of fresh air when it started. And this season, we've just become used to what it is or whether the show has gone a little bit further in the direction of kind of conventional sitcominess, which has been present to varying degrees, I think, since it started,

but feels like a bigger part of the show now. I would say my slight disappointment with the

...