The “Great Resignation” Edition

Here are some notes and references from this week’s show:

Jordan Weissmann for Slate: “The Absolute Simplest Explanation for America’s Supply Chain Woes”

David J. Lynch for the Washington Post: “Inside America’s Broken Supply Chain”

Derek Thompson for the Atlantic: “The Great Resignation Is Accelerating”

Matt Bruenig for the People’s Policy Project: “Democratic Child Care Plan Will Spike Prices for the Middle Class by $13,000”

The Unknowns, by Gabriel Roth

Tonja Jacobi and Dylan Schweers for the Harvard Business Review: “Female Supreme Court Justices Are Interrupted More by Male Justices and Advocates”

Kate Murphy for the New York Times: “You’re Not Listening. Here’s Why”

Deborah Tannen for the New York Times: “In Real Life, Not All Interruptions Are Rude”

Elan Morgan for Medium: “99% Invisible Podcast’s Brilliant Response to Criticism of Women’s Voices”

Here’s this week’s chatter:

Emily: Paul Shechtman for the New York Law Journal: “Understanding the Significance of Supreme Court Cert in Shinn v. Jones”

David: Hetty McKinnon for the New York Times: “Sook Mei Faan (Cantonese Creamed Corn With Tofu and Rice)”

John: “One Hour to Think,” in On Democracy, by E.B. White; Vera

Listener chatter from Adrian Monthony: Twitter thread on the strange story of an abandoned airplane by Chris Croy @ChrisCroy; Harish Pullanoor for Quartz: “The Crazy Story Behind a Rickety Boeing 720 Parked at an Indian Airport For 24 Years”

For this week’s Slate Plus bonus segment John, Emily, and David discuss data provided by listener Lindsay Lee about which host does the most interrupting on the Political Gabfest.

Hi Gabfest,

I thought you might be interested in some data on how often you interrupt each other—I am a massive fan of the podcast (in fact this is the podcast that got me started listening to podcasts in the first place), but in a feminist rage in 2016 I became fed up with how often I felt like David was interrupting Emily. So being the massive dork that I am, I thought I would collect some data on this to confirm my perceptions, and then write a blog post, go viral, get rich and famous, etc.

So from June 2016 to June 2017 (for 55 episodes), every week I listened to the episodes in front of my computer and noted each interruption using a simple program I wrote in R. After a year of data collection, I did some basic analysis and found that, actually, Emily is the greatest interrupting offender (as she correctly said this week).

With my feminist rage undermined and my general inability to follow through on personal projects, I never wrote the blog post or got rich and famous. But I thought at least you could have a laugh about what I found.Here’s some more detail (a quick report with figures in the attached):

- Ignoring interruptions on/by guests to the podcast:    

- Emily performs nearly half of all interruptions in the podcast    

- Both John and Emily interrupt David the most often, and David interrupts John the most often    

- Emily has the highest average # of interruptions per episode, and John’s rate is less than half of hers - Including interruptions on/by guests to the podcast, guests are only responsible for 4% of all interruptions and the Gabfest crew don’t interrupt guests nearly as often as each other. Guests also interrupt David the most often.

Thanks to you all for making my favorite podcast, and sorry to David for my misguided ire—you’ve been the victim all along.

All the best,

Lindsay Lee (Nashville, TN)

Tweet us your questions and chatters @SlateGabfest or email us at gabfest@slate.com. (Messages may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

Podcast production by Jocelyn Frank.

Research and show notes by Bridgette Dunlap.