Hello Whistle Stop listeners. It's me Leon Nefoc, the host of the slate podcast Slow Burn.

Since John Dickerson is out on vacation, instead of bringing you a new episode of Whistle Stop, we are bringing you episode one of the new season of

of Sloburn.

It's all about the Clinton presidency.

If you like this episode, please subscribe to Sloburn

to get new episodes as they come out over the next two months.

It's the best way to support the show.

John will be back in two weeks with a new Whistle Stop episode.

In the meantime, thank you and enjoy.

Monica Lewinsky didn't know it, but her lunch meeting with Linda Tripp was never going to happen.

Lewinsky was waiting for a trip at the food court, inside a shopping mall in Pentagon City, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C.

It was a typical suburban mall, brightly lit, with a movie theater, a Macy's, and white

tiles in the floor.

Lewinsky had come from the gym. She was still in her exercise clothes and she was reading a

magazine while she waited for her friend. It was Friday, January 16, 1998.

Lewinsky was 24 years old.

About two years earlier, she'd become involved in a precarious relationship

with the President of the United States.

As Lewinsky later told her biographer,

her relationship with Bill Clinton

had come to overwhelm her life.

She found it hard to think about anything else.

...