The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest, the annual conundrums show.

We are live at the Park West in Chicago, Illinois.

Thank you. at the Park West in Chicago, Illinois. We're live for a night, for a night of moral bickering and ethical wrestling and squabbling of all sorts.

I'm joined on stage. I'm David Plotz of Atlas Obscura and Slate. I'm joined on

stage by Emily Bazelon of the New York Times Magazine. And by John Dickerson of Slate and CBS News.

So let's get to the show. Let's get to the conundrums. During the show, we're going to ask you, if you have a conundrum, please come up to the mic. We're going to interspers the ones that we've gathered from people on the internet and people that tweeted to us about them. We're going to interspers those with ones that are going to be live in the audience. So feel free to come up to the mics

with your excellent conundrum. So let's start with... Oh, and we should say we're going to have

a special guest coming midway through the show. Amy Dickinson is going to be here to offer professional, professional advice on this.

All right, so we're going to do this first question.

We had debates about what our first question would be.

I'm going to make an executive decision.

It's from Ben Heilweil, which is a really weird name.

A good name, an interesting name.

Don't diss our great question asklers. My favorite German

beer. Heilvile. All right. So Ben's, Ben asked a question which really makes you wonder about his marriage,

but here we go. So you, Ben posits the following situation. You propose to dear loved one, and your loved one accepts, and you're going to get married.

And she says to you, just after she's accepted her proposal, there's something I need to tell you,

I have a box here.

It's a little metal box.

It's locked.

It has something in it. You can never know what it is.

...