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The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for May 15, 2015, the I don't mean to yell at you, but I feel good doing it edition. I'm David Plotz of Atlas Obscura.

Emily Bazelon of the New York Times Magazine joins me from New Haven. Hello, Emily.

Hello, I'm so happy you picked one of the titles I proposed, brought to us by Seymour Hirsch, who we will be talking about shortly.

And then from New York today is John Dickerson of Slate and Face the Nation of CBS.

Hello, John.

Hello, David and Emily.

How does that microphone smell, John?

It doesn't smell so much as it envelops your head in an entire kind of other person's body.

So it's really, it's an olfactory sensation that's going on here.

If only we could podcast smell.

How great that would be? By the time we reach our 20th year, we will be smell casting for sure. Oh, that would be awesome. We're going to be like the original smellcasters. I don't think we would be good smellcasters because first of all, this studio is very close. And so by the end of every episode, I'm a little bit fragrant. Well, you know what, though?

We could, in fact, have a smell cast. In fact, people could just, like, open a jar of peanut butter and have it sit next to them as they listen to it. Although the people who go running, that might be a little bit of course. Why peanut butter? I don't know. It was the first thing that came to mind when I was thinking of it. I think that's the smell that represents the GF.

Do you eat peanut butter?

...