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Welcome to the double X gab fest for Thursday, October 3rd, the What the Heck is Dry Shampoo Edition?

I'm Hannah Rosen in D.C.

And I'm joined in New York by June Thomas and Allison Benedict. Hi, guys. Hey, Hannah. Hi. We're all Slate editors, so that's good enough who do interesting things at Slate. And Noreen is off. She's out reporting. Yes, Noreen is off. So she's the outsider. So we're all to Slate people today. Today on our show, first, we're going to talk about the government shutdown and what it means for women. Second, we're going to talk about the new lineup of fall TV shows, single moms, sad dads, what pictures are the network serving up of America. And we're going to be joined by special guest Slate TV critic, Willa Paskin. And third, BuzzFeed put up a list of the 40

things under $50 every woman in her 30s should own, which we found strange, insulting,

possibly inspiring, we will discuss. Before we get going, I want to announce that Hang Up and

Listen, the Slate Sports podcast is doing a show at City Winery in New York on November 11th with a special guest Bob Costis.

So please buy your tickets for that.

And then one last thing, read a response from Joe.

If you listen to the show last time, you know that we talked about programmers, which Joe found very annoying.

He writes, I find it incredibly annoying and ridiculous

that the concept of the programmer, which started as a joke, has been turned into serious

concept by journals looking for pop stories. The programmer jokes started because of the great

contrast between a frat bro and a tech nerd. Therefore, portraying programmers as cool frat guys

who hit on women is funny.

So he's saying it's supposed to be a joke. There's no real such thing as a programmer.

As Anne Friedman points out, a bro is no bro without his bros. I'm a programmer. Who are my

bros? Well, I'm pretty introverted. So my wife and my daughter are my main bros. We are largely

...