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In this week's gabfest, DoubleX founding editor Hanna Rosin, along with Slate senior editor Jessica Grose and special guest Slatesenior editor Daniel Engber, discuss Rick Perry and the HPV vaccine, a new study about fathers and testosterone, and the trends in fall TV.

The DoubleX weekly "coffee talk" endorsements:

Dan Engber endorses a return to an era when people with untreatable illnesses were allowed to indulge their desires, rather than deny themselves pleasure. He was inspired to give this recommendation because he read an account from the book Robert Koch: A Life in Medicine and Bacteriology about a man dying from cholera in the late 19^th century, which was then untreatable. The poor soul was given lots of iced champagne.

Hanna Rosin is loving the novel This Beautiful Life by Helen Shulman, which is about a viral video and its implications for a New York City family.

Jessica Grose reread a recent true crime classic, Pamela Colloff's 2009 piece in Texas Monthly, "Flesh and Blood."

Here are some links to other things we discussed this week:

"Political Inoculation" in Slate.
"Remark on HPV Vaccine Could Ripple for Years" in the New York Times.
"Tarzan the Diaper Man" in Slate.
"Fathers and the XX-Factor" in the New York Times.
"Longitudinal evidence that fatherhood decreases testosterone in human males" from PNAS.
"Primetime's Looming Male Identity Crisis" in the Atlantic.
"Bunnies, babies and broads: What is TV trying to tell us about women?" in the Washington Post.