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Get a free book when you sign up for a 30-day free trial at audiblepodcast.com slash x-X. Welcome to the Double X Gab Fest for Thursday, June 14th, the Muppet Show edition. I'm Hannah Rosen, editor of Double X here in the Washington, D.C. studio. I'm joined in the New York studio by our other double X editor, Alison Benedict. Hi, Allison. Hi, Hannah. And also Noreen Malone, who writes for the New York Intelligence or Blog. Hi, Noreen. Hey, Hannah. Our three topics today are first, we're going to talk about subversive graduation speeches. Second, we're going to talk about a new study that asks if gay parents are just as good as non-gay parents. I was going to say regular parents and then I stop myself.

And third, are you a chaos muppet or an order Muppet? A very important question that was raised by our own Dahlia Lithwick, who's going to join us as a guest for the final segment of this show.

Let's start with subversive graduation speeches. This came up because of a graduation speech

delivered by a Wellesley high school teacher whose name is David McCullough. And it really stood

out to me because I had recently watched Rushmore, which if any of you remembers, it starts with

Bill Murray giving this kind of demented graduation speech in which he's telling the graduates that they need to rebel and not do any of the things that the school tells them to do.

And this particular commencement speech, I don't know what you guys thought.

I kind of thought it was fabulous when I read the whole thing.

I had just read the little clips of it. And it's kind of like you sort of imagine he's

drunk up there. Like it was so Bill Murray. You know, he has this, it starts out with this riff about

weddings and how weddings are bride-centric pageantry. And it's like wildly inappropriate. You know,

he talks about how they're going to go through a midlife crisis.

How when they're older, this is like the second paragraph of it.

He says, you know, you'll go through a midlife crisis and passably attractive sales reps at trade shows in Cincinnati.

And I mean, the reason this got so much attention is something he says later in the speech, which is this phrase, none of you is special. You are not exceptional. And it's a comment, it's a comment on this particular generation and their sense of entitlement, a subject we've talked about before. But it comes across as this kind of like cranky old man melting down on the speech.

And as we will talk about has a kind of, you know, he has Michael Lewis also gave a speech, which we'll talk about.

And then Dave Eggers has a famous graduation speech, which also gives the You Are Not Special Message in his own special way.

Noreen, were you moved by the speech?

Did you think it was just like an obnoxious old man, you know, haranguing?

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