The Gist

On The Gist, how coverage of bisexuality has changed (for the better). Thanksgiving approaches, and with it all the tension that comes with mixing family and politics in the age of Trump. In that setting, Ike Barinholtz saw grist for a political comedy. He directs and stars in The Oath , in which a family reunion is cleaved by the federal government's push for Americans to sign a "loyalty waiver t...

On The Gist, Beto O'Rourke and Ted Cruz. At first The Good Place on NBC appears to be a light and easy sitcom about a bad apple accidentally dropped into heaven, but look at little deeper and you'll find a smart and dense comedy about moral philosophy. Creator Mike Schur joins us to discuss this show's moral compass, baseball, and the Kant of it all. The Good Place airs on Thursdays on NBC. In the...

On The Gist, should we continue to trust Facebook with our data? Saudi Arabia's disastrous war with rebel tribes in Yemen is 3½ years deep, as is America's support for it. Michael Knights, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, details the kingdom's goals: stopping the missile attacks sailing in from Yemen, restoring the country's ousted leaders, and countering the rebels'...

On The Gist, it would be cynical to view the Supreme Court as illegitimate. Brett Kavanaugh has done it. But how will the other members of the Supreme Court treat him? And does his promotion affect the American people's faith in the nation's highest court? Slate's courts correspondent Dahlia Lithwick joins us to discuss. In the Spiel, back in the private sector, Nikki Haley can look forward to mak...

On The Gist, after all of that, not a single senator changed his or her vote to back (or stop) Kavanaugh. In the interview, Jill Lepore's new book focuses in part on the marginalized groups forgotten by other American histories. It also denounces the polling industry born in the '30s, which turned politics into business even as it ignored black Americans, slowing their march for civil rights. Lepo...

On The Gist, the hippocampus has its moment. Tom Arnold believes incriminating tapes of Donald Trump are out there, and he wants to find them. In his new series for Viceland, The Hunt for the Trump Tapes , he's looking for anything from more Access Hollywood obscenities to the infamous pee tape. But would publishing any of these actually change anything about politics today? In the Spiel, the rhet...

On The Gist, Brett Kavanaugh's high school and college buddies had some weird nicknames, and it's not helping his case. Rebecca Traister is angry, and she knows other women are too. Events from Trump's election through the #MeToo movement inspired her new book, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger . In the Spiel, Mike read the New York Times' expose on how Donald Trump got rich—s...

On The Gist, Beto O'Rourke has the momentum but also a mountain to climb. In the interview, Neal Katyal has argued 37 cases before the Supreme Court, and (better yet!) joined Mike Pesca on stage at Slate Day in Austin, Texas. Our condensed version of the interview covers the implications of a confirmed Brett Kavanaugh, why Robert Mueller "will have the last laugh" when it comes to taking on Trump,...

On The Gist, guest host John McWhorter considers campus safe spaces. In the past few years, college campuses have been shifting away from havens for free speech to safe spaces that bar divisive speakers from campus. But is this the right move, or are we damaging the growth of college students by creating these spaces rather than offering intellectual challenges. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt e...

On The Gist, guest host Isaac Butler talks about all the news we forgot about thanks to the Kavanaugh hearing. The Constitution is a sacred text in America, but should it be? Heidi Schreck's play What the Constitution Means to Me tackles that question through her high school experience of giving speeches about the Constitution to put herself through college. Today, she and her director, Oliver But...

On The Gist, the Kavanaugh hearing. By all accounts, Derek Black was supposed to become the next David Duke. He was the man's godson, after all, and his father, Don Black, had founded Stormfront, the world's first and biggest white nationalist website. But then Derek went to New College of Florida, where—as told by the Washington Post's Eli Saslow—he was shunned by many of his peers for his racist...

On The Gist, the GOP hired a woman! Nicole Holofcener's films have centered women for more than two decades, but her latest one, The Land of Steady Habits ,focuses on a man's tumultuous story arc. She joins us to talk about adaptations (it was a novel before Holofcener made it into a movie), the slow and deliberate process of directing, and why she hates hearing people chew. The Land of Steady Hab...

On The Gist, Trump gets laughs at the United Nations. After a few eccentric comedy specials, Bo Burnham next turned to his sympathy for the anxieties of middle school girls, and made a movie. If Eighth Grade (starring Elsie Fisher) seems to imitate life so well, it's because Burnham watched hundreds of vlogs made by today's junior high generation. In the Spiel, standards of proof in the Kavanaugh...

On The Gist, how the breaking news machine bungled the Rod Rosenstein story. In the interview, California is set to ban certain restaurants from serving straws unless customers ask for one. But given that straws represent a tiny fraction of the plastics choking our oceans, can initiatives like these really make a difference? Ban-the-straw advocate Dune Ives says targeting the straw is, in part, a...

On The Gist, National Review has one good take on the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation story … and a lot of bad ones. In the interview, we're used to thinking of societies along the "liberal/conservative" spectrum, but cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand has her own axis to consider: tight versus loose. They aren't quite the same: Abu Dhabi, for instance, may be conservative, but its role as the cro...

On The Gist, Christine Blasey Ford deserves a hearing on her own terms, and that's all we can say for now. Bert Kreischer is a comic who started out as just the biggest college partier in America according to Rolling Stone magazine in 1997. Since then he's been grappling with fame, how much of his own life to use for comedy, and the way his father shamed him into doing stand-up comedy. Kreischer's...

On The Gist, the latest in inane Trump statements. Climate change is bigger than any one of us, including the president of the United States. Given his backward policies and denials of scientific fact, he deserves his share of criticism in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence. Climate scientist Andrea Schumacher explains which aspects of hurricane season can be expected to get worse as the planet w...

On The Gist, taking issue with the sloppy headlines about the support (or lack thereof) for Brett Kavanaugh. In the interview, Stacey Abrams' run for governor in Georgia has been criticized because of her huge outstanding debt. That got Ozy.com reporter Nick Fouriezos wondering how much political candidates typically owe as they run for office. He dug into the finances of 396 political candidates...

On The Gist, Hurricane Florence. Ethan Hawke has stunned us with his earnest, moving performances on-screen, but he's also a talent behind the camera. His new directorial feature Blaze explores the life and love of the largely forgotten musician Blaze Foley. He joins us to talk filmmaking, the difficulty of music, comic book movies, and why we should appreciate criticism from our elders. Blaze pre...

On The Gist, Vladimir Putin, RT, and the Salisbury poisoning. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might have scary values to conservatives. But to the national director of the Democratic Socialists of America, she's a moderate. Maria Svart calls the DSA a "big tent organization," meaning it makes room for everything from AOC's Scandinavian-style social policies to the more radical workforce ownership of busi...

On The Gist, John Hockenberry's piece in Harper's. Donald Trump is no stranger to settlements, and the latest of these come between his administration and hundreds of asylum-seekers. They were rejected after making their cases under the duress of being separated from their children … or their parents. "How are the kids supposed to say why they fear persecution? Try having that conversation with a...

On The Gist, Vladimir Putin's "private citizen" excuse doesn't hold water. In the interview, philanthropic billionaires are better than villainous ones, but Anand Giridharadas argues they could do better. Instead of insisting on the superiority of private efforts, they ought to pay more taxes and leave some things to the government. Giridharadas' book is Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Chan...

On The Gist, Mike is thinking he'll vote Andrew Cuomo—but he's open to you changing his mind. The 2014 shooting of Michael Brown upheaved many things in the U.S., including the career of DeRay Mckesson, who quit his job as an educator to become a full-time activist. Now he uses his podcast Pod Save the People as a national platform to speak out against police violence and highlight news that flies...

On The Gist, are we having a national crisis? The New York Times' publication of an anonymous op-ed has sparked rounds of speculation as to who's behind it—and the deep-state trappings it describes. Some see the word "lodestar" as signature Mike Pence, but as Sadia Afroz explains, stylometry—the analysis of prose to uncover its author's identity—is a little more complicated than looking at individ...

On The Gist, Lincoln, Kennedy, and Lincoln Kennedy could all speak better than President Trump. If you're old enough to remember November 2016, you know that telling a good story—even an untrue one—wins elections. Author Yuval Noah Harari worries that populism has liberalism beat on this front, especially given an uncertain future looming with AI, biotechnology, and the possible obsolescence of th...