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Hello and welcome to Slate's Serial Spoiler Special. I'm Slate's senior editor Gabriel Roth, and joining me from our DC studio is Slate's words correspondent Katie Waldman. Hi, Katie.

Hey, Gabe. In case you're joining us for the first time, this is the podcast where Katie and I discuss season two of serial episode by episode, going deeper into the show's themes, exploring its characters and situations, and looking at the ways in which the podcast reverberates in the world.

This week, we're diving into episode 10 of Serial's second season, Thorny Politics.

Katie, what did you think?

What did I think?

Well, I will skip the intellectualizing and just go straight to the judgment, the value judgment.

I thought it was an amazing judgment. I thought it was an

amazing episode. I thought it was so good. I have been thinking that the episodes are picking up.

I've enjoyed listening to them more and more. And this was a high point. I just thought that

the political maneuvering was so interesting and it's surprising right like this is not sort of on the

level of individual psychology anymore now it's sort of image management and like the big

political machines and all the strategy and it's fascinating yes I completely agree I thought this was

the most compelling episode of serial second season that we've

heard so far. I wasn't sure if it was going to play for anyone except for me, because the themes

of this episode are things that I personally am always interested in and love to read about.

Bureaucracy's breaking down and the constraints of political actors and and the particular

problems that people in american government are having right now trying to get things done um and so i

thought oh maybe this episode is just fan service for politics nerds but no everyone that i've talked to

not just you and me uh seems to agree that this episode really had something.

So when you try to summarize this episode, what was this one about?

...