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Hello and welcome to Slate's Serial Spoiler Special. I'm Slate's senior editor Gabriel Roth.

Katie Waldman was supposed to be with us today, but she's experiencing Christmas Eve

travel nightmares, and so she was unable to make it for this week's podcast.

Fortunately, I have two guests ably filling in, Jacob Brogan, who writes for Slate about

technology and culture.

Hi, Jacob.

Hi, Gabe.

And June Thomas, the editor of Slate's

LGBTQ blog Outward. Thanks for being with us, Jim. Hey, Gabe. What's up? What's up, indeed.

So every week, this is the podcast where we discuss season two of the Uber Popular Podcasts

serial, 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. Jacob, let's start with the bigger picture.

What are you thinking of this second season of Serial so far?

What this season has really drawn out for me is to some extent that cereal as a whole might

be called uncertainty. We're spending so much time questioning

the veracity of everyone's stories. And we got a lot in this episode about these fragments

of intelligence that might tell us something, might tell us nothing, might lead somewhere

...