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Hello and welcome to this late political gab fest for May 4th, the I'm Not David Plots edition.

I'm in fact John Dickerson, and I'm sitting in for David, who's not with us.

Emily Bazelon, though, is with us, but not in New Haven in New Orleans, which she will explain for us later, perhaps. But we are incredibly lucky to have Tim Noah with us, who may have been, in fact, on like the first

version of this show or one of the early versions of this show long ago when he worked for Slate.

But now he's the lead columnist at the New Republic. And he's here specifically, though he's going to join us on all the other topics, because we're going to have a long chat about his great book called The Great Divergence, which started as a slate project, and is now a book, a Bloomsbury book, and getting great reviews and about perhaps the most central topic of the election, or at least that's what we thought at that Gab Fest we did a couple of weeks ago.

So welcome, Tim.

Thank you for being here.

Thanks for having me, John.

So we're going to talk today about – we're going to first start in China with the story of Chen Guangcheng or Chung, as I've heard it pronounced.

But anyway, his tricky maybe request for asylum, maybe not request for asylum, and the bungling or not bungling by the diplomats in the United States who either did or didn't help him or not help him.

Then our second topic will be the president and the anniversary of Osama bin Laden's death, and then we will get to Tim's book.

But first, before we do that, Emily, you have an announcement.

Yes, I want to encourage everybody in D.C. or anywhere near to come to our live show on May 23rd at the Sixth and I Synagogue downtown at 7 p.m.

We are excited. We haven't been – we haven't done a show in D.C. in a while, and we would really love to see all of you there.

We will do some kind of drinks beforehand.

So let us know if you're coming, send us a note about the drinks, and we hope to see you soon.

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