There Is No Plan
Political Gabfest
Slate Podcasts
4.4 • 8.5K Ratings
🗓️ 14 May 2020
⏱️ 71 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Emily, John, and David discuss COVID without federal leadership; challenges to Trump at the Supreme Court; and novelist Isabel Allende joins the show to talk about her new book A Long Petal of the Sea, and how crisis can be an opportunity for change.
For this week’s Slate Plus bonus segment David, Emily, and John discuss (what would be) epic historical counterfactuals. Slate Plus members get a bonus segment on the Gabfest each week, and access to special bonus episodes throughout the year. Sign up now to listen and support our show.
You can tweet suggestions, links, and questions to @SlateGabfest. Tweet us your cocktail chatter using #cocktailchatter or post it to our Facebook page. (Messages may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.) The email address for the Political Gabfest is gabfest@slate.com. (Email may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)
Here are some notes and references from this week’s show:
Marty Makary for The New York Times: “How to Reopen America Safely”
Norbert J. Michel and Drew Gonshorowski for the Heritage Foundation: “1% of Counties Home to Half of COVID-19 Cases, Over Half of Deaths”
Scott Clement and Dan Balz for The Washington Post: “Many Governors Win Bipartisan Support for Handling of Pandemic, But Some Republicans Face Blowback Over Reopening Efforts”
Zeynep Tufekci for The Atlantic: “How Hong Kong Did It”
Perri Klass for The New York Times: Rethinking Covid-19 in Children
Maria DeCotis @MariaDeCotis performs Governor Mario Cuomo’s comments on his daughter’s boyfriend.
Here are this week’s cocktail chatters:
John: Heran Mamo for Billboard: “Relive Prince & the Revolution's Iconic 1985 Purple Rain Concert During a Three-Night Livestream”; Olivia Clement for Playbill: “Audra McDonald to Host Star-Studded Covenant House Benefit With Meryl Streep, Dolly Parton, and More”
Emily: The Music Lab’s Tone-Deafness Test and Rodham, by Curtis Sittenfeld
David: Haven Orecchio-Egresitz for Business insider: “A White Man Ran Through a Florida Neighborhood Carrying a TV to Prove That Looking 'Suspicious' Wasn't an Excuse for Killing Ahmaud Arbery”; Monica Humphries for Business Insider: “A BBC Sports Broadcaster Held a Zoom Meeting With His 2 Dogs to Deliver Their Annual Performance Reviews”
Listener chatter from Team@shah_of_shaw: Rutger Bregman for the Guardian: “The Real Lord of the Flies: What Happened When Six Boys Were Shipwrecked for 15 Months”
Podcast production by Jocelyn Frank.
Research and show notes by Bridgette Dunlap.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest from May 14th, 2020, the There is No Plan edition. |
| 0:13.9 | I am David Plotz, a business insider coming to you from a cubbyhole just off of my bedroom. |
| 0:22.9 | I'm joined, of course, by Emily Bazelon of the New York Times Magazine and Yale University Law School from her home in New Haven, Connecticut. |
| 0:30.2 | Hello, Emily. |
| 0:31.3 | Hello. Do you feel like cubbyhole is somehow more, like, it's like you have a new job from closet of the last few weeks, a new, |
| 0:38.0 | a new identity. I decided this isn't, this functions, this place functions as a closet, but |
| 0:43.6 | mostly it's a place the cats go and hide. And it's so, hence it's more a hole, a hidey hole. |
| 0:50.9 | John Dickerson of CBS is 60 Minutes is in his tent. |
| 0:56.8 | Emily's the only one of us who's in a regular room. |
| 0:59.2 | John's in a tent. |
| 1:00.6 | Well, yeah, I'm in a tent because of the, |
| 1:03.5 | that's where I've been recording the audio book, |
| 1:05.4 | and it's all very good for the acoustics. |
| 1:07.6 | But I'm also in a tent because it's the only tiny little postage stamp where |
| 1:13.3 | where I feel like I'm not encroaching on someone else and someone else is not encroaching on me |
| 1:19.2 | because I'm, I feel like I'm always in someone else's space and vice versa. |
| 1:24.6 | So it's really everybody should get like a shower curtain and just enclose themselves in it. |
| 1:29.8 | Is that a shower curtain that's around you? |
| 1:31.8 | No, it's actually, it's the drapery that covers the window. |
| 1:35.8 | Okay, the softness of the drapery is more appealing to me than the shower curtain, |
| 1:39.8 | especially if you're giving advice to the world about their tents. |
| 1:43.5 | Well, I just should. But the shower curtain would repel all of the world about their tents. Well, I just... |
... |
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