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The following podcast contains explicit language.

Thank you. podcast contains explicit language. Hello and welcome to the flight political gab fest for October 17th, 2014, the Is Amazon Evil Edition?

I'm David Plotz in Washington, D.C. On this week's show, the Ebola crisis turns political.

Politicians respond to a couple of U.S. Ebola cases with cynical, useless, and horrible ideas. Then the Democrats have lost the Senate. What will the 2015 Congress do? We're going to just posit that, John Dickerson. And then is Amazon a monopoly and is it evil?

And is it both?

We will discuss that.

Plus, we'll have cocktail chatter.

And then in Slate Plus, mystery meat, which is now mystery vegetable, we will tell you why you should stop complaining, eat your school lunch.

We'll talk about the school lunch.

The school lunch furor.

John Dickerson, Slate's chief political correspondent, is here with me. Hello, John. Hi, David. And Emily Bazelon, who is, I don't know what she's doing. I don't even know. She doesn't even know why she's not here. She's not here. She's not here. She's somewhere else. But who cares? Because Annie Lowry is here in her state. Annie Lowry, you have some awesome title at New York Magazine. What is it? I'm contributing editor. Contributing. I should come up with something better, though. That sounds a little feeble for what you are. You're an anchor. You're a giant, a colossus of New York Magazine. Yeah. Thank you. And you don't edit. No, I don't edit. I don't edit. I just write. Why you're not contributing writer? Empress of New York Magazine. And verily, it is impressive. Well, Annie, and you write primarily about economic and business issues? Is that what's fair to say? Yeah. Good. Before we get to the topics, just a whole bunch of announcement today, but I'll just do a couple of the top and then a couple later. First of all, we have a November 12th live show in Chicago. It's going to be our annual conundrums show. It's going to be at the Park West. You can get tickets at slate.com slash chai Gabfest, C-H-I-Gab Fest.

We're going to have a special guest, Amy Dickinson, of Ask Amy.

It's going to be a fantastic show. And we're going to start collecting your conundrums.

So the conundrums episode, we try to delve into difficult moral or ethical or tactical or tactical or practical questions.

Or stupid questions. And just engage with them. And we're collecting your idea. So, for example, John Dickerson proposed, if you're going to be fluent in a language for one week only, what language would it be? Is it ethical to espouse belief in public schools and send your children to private schools? That could be one we could talk about. If you have better ones, I'm sure you have better ideas. You can go to Facebook.com slash GabFest and give them to us, tweet them to us at SlateGabFest or email them to GavFest at Slate.com. That first suggestion came from somebody who came to our show in San Francisco. Oh, the language one? The language one, yeah. Okay. I can't do it. Was it Robin who suggested that? Anyway, I can't remember who suggested. Do you have any conundrums for us, any?

Not. San Francisco. Oh, the language one? The language one, yeah. Okay. I can't do it. Was it Robin who suggested to that?

Anyway, I can't remember who was suggesting.

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