The Year's Best Gabfest Edition
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 2 January 2015
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In segments culled from throughout 2014, David Plotz, Emily Bazelon, and John Dickerson discuss when to call the cops, the rise of political partyism, and whether to read Hillary Clinton's Hard Choices.Show notes at www.slate.com/gabfest.
Need to set up your Slate Plus feed? If you subscribed through Slate.com, check out our FAQ at slate.com/podcastfaqs for easy instructions. Members subscribed via Apple Podcasts get automatic access—no setup required.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains explicit language. |
| 0:10.7 | Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for January 2nd, 2015, the year's best |
| 0:15.4 | Gab Fest. |
| 0:16.0 | I'm David Plotz of Atlas Obscura in Washington, D.C. |
| 0:19.1 | John Dickerson, Slate Senior Editor and CBS News. |
| 0:23.4 | You're not Slate Senior Editor. |
| 0:24.4 | You're something at Slate. You're CBS News and Slate. Emily Bazelon. He writes about politics, remember? Yes, Emily Bazelon of the New York Times Magazine. Hello, John Emily. Hello. Hi, David. We, because we're on vacation and we can't do a show this week, we picked our favorite segments from 2014 and we stitched them together in a show. |
| 0:41.9 | So we're going to have three segments. |
| 0:43.9 | One is going to be about whether you should ever call the cops if you see a child alone in a playground. |
| 0:51.5 | Also, we're going to have a segment about the rise of political prejudice |
| 0:54.7 | or partyism. And we'll have a segment on the worst book published in 2014, Hillary Clinton's |
| 1:00.6 | memoir. And we'll have an amazing chatter from John Dickerson, the year's best cocktail chatter. |
| 1:05.2 | It was about Andrew Jackson. And a Slate Plus segment, of course, too, which is the interview I did last summer with Richard Rubin about his great book, The Last of the Do Boys, the legacy of World War I for the United States. |
| 1:17.8 | First up, we had a great fight in July about when, if ever, you should call the cops if you see a child alone on a playground. |
| 1:27.4 | Emily's position was amazing. |
| 1:29.6 | My anger was profound. Enjoy it. Deborah Harrell, a 46-year-old single mom in South Carolina, |
| 1:36.4 | has been arrested for endangering the life of her nine-year-old daughter. Harrell works at McDonald's, |
| 1:41.9 | and she had been taking her daughter to work with her. |
| 1:48.1 | The daughter sat in the restaurant, played on the family laptop on the McDonald's Wi-Fi. |
| 1:55.4 | The laptop was stolen from their house and the child asked to go spend the day on a busy playground instead. |
| 1:59.0 | Her mother gave her a cell phone and dropped her off. |
| 2:17.9 | And after three days of this, another parent spoke to Harold's daughter, asked her where her mom was. She said her mom was at work. This parent reported it's to the cops. The cops arrested Harold took her daughter into the foster care system. How much rage can we work up? Do we all agree? Do we all agree? |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Slate Podcasts, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Slate Podcasts and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.