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Welcome to the waves for Thursday, July 5th, the Big D-E energy edition.

I'm Christina Cauterucci, a staff writer at Slate.

And for once, everybody involved in the making of this podcast is in one homie studio.

So here with me in Slate's Brooklyn studio is our producer, Verlin Williams.

Hello. How are you, Christina? I'm doing all right. How are you? Good to see you. Yeah, I know. This is incredible. It feels like one big family. Joining the family for the first time on this podcast is the senior politics editor at The Intercept, contributing editor at Current Affairs, and co-host of the podcast, Swoati, or someone's wrong on the internet, Brianna Joy Gray. Welcome, Brianna. Thank you. It's so great to be here. Yeah, we're so happy to have you. I've been reading a lot of your work recently because of a piece I wrote, so I can't wait to ask you about it. Oh. So today's episode is going to start with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 28-year-old Democratic Socialist and likely future

Congresswoman who is striking fear into the hearts of establishment Democrats around the country.

Then we will apply our critical and intellectual faculties to the very important and very timely

concept of big dick energy. Does it exist? What does it mean?

And why are we talking about it? And finally, we will discuss the debates around the Atlantic's

recent cover story on kids who identify as trans. Also today in our Slate Plus segment where we take a

topic and rate it from 1 to 10 on how sexist it is, we will decide is the media's coverage of Ali Watkins, the New York Times reporter who had an affair with James Wolfe, a senior aide to the Senate Intelligence Committee, which she covered at the time, sexist.

If you're not yet a Slate Plus member, you should be and you can start your free two-week trial by visiting slate.com slash the waves plus.

So before we get into our discussion, we have a little bit of business.

You are probably sick of hearing about this if you listen to the podcast, in which case, I hope you bought your tickets to our live recording in D.C.

It's going to be me. It's going to be

Varelin, June and Hanna. It's Tuesday, July 17th at the Hamilton. We're going to have a live set

from an awesome DC post-punk band, Backeye. The tickets are $20 to $30. And if you're a Slate Plus

member, you can get 30% off at slate.com slash live.

I'm really excited to meet some of you there.

And Verlin, why should people come to the show?

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