The Gist

President Donald Trump's management style has created lots of big, messy legal questions. With his new executive order on immigration, and his calls for a congressional investigation into wiretapping, Trump is plunging the government into uncharted territory. Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution is here to explain. Wittes is the editor in chief of the Lawfare blog. In the Spiel, the fight...

Anthony Salvanto , CBS News' elections director, explains the CBS Nation Tracker poll and why it's different from the surveys that tell you if you're a Jessa. In the Spiel, can you trust the job numbers? Today's sponsors: Wunder Capital , allowing individuals to invest in solar projects. Earn up to 8.5 percent annually while diversifying your portfolio and combating global climate change. Create a...

President Donald Trump has overseen many shady deals, but New Yorker staff writer Adam Davidson thinks he may have found the most questionable one. Davidson says a Trump Organization hotel in Baku, Azerbaijan, links the president to some shady oligarchs as well as Iran's Revolutionary Guard, a shadow-government ideological group. Read Davidson's piece, " Donald Trump's Worst Deal ." Maria Konnikov...

Donald Trump has promised lower costs, broader coverage, and better premiums in his health care plan. Well, the new bill is out , and it's uniting liberals and conservatives in outright disdain . "I've only heard from two outside groups who like this bill," says Vox health care correspondent Sarah Kliff . Everybody else hates it. Kliff walks us through the implications of "Trumpcare" and whether i...

In books like Moneyball and The Big Short , Michael Lewis has written about people who think in a completely different way from their colleagues. For his latest, The Undoing Project , Lewis profiles the patron saints of different thinking, Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. The two men completely upended the study of decision-making in the early 1950s. For the Spiel, the artis...

Henry Winkler is an icon of American comedy. Between roles in Happy Days , Arrested Development, and Parks and Recreation , Winkler has been writing children's books starring the character Hank Zipzer . Winkler says the stories have helped him come to terms with his own dyslexia, which he only discovered as an adult. His newest book is Always Watch Out for the Flying Potato Salad . For the Spiel,...

The Gist's Billboard charts Sherpa Chris Molanphy returns to hearken back to more recent musical history: the hits of 2012. We learn why Psy's ubiquitous "Gangnam Style" isn't technically on the list and how a Swedish stable of songwriters dominated the charts with "turbo pop." Molanphy writes the Why Is This Song No. 1? column for Slate . In the Spiel, chasing down a lesser-known lie. Today's spo...

The inexplicable oddness of Florida takes on a sort of logic after you listen long enough to Dave Barry , Pulitzer Prize–winning humorist and longtime denizen of the state. On The Gist, Barry provides a mental atlas for the various regions of weird within Florida, its incompetent government (but what a bargain), and its unrivaled weirdos. His book is Best. State. Ever.: A Florida Man Defends His H...

Three years ago, Maeve Higgins left a successful career as an author comedian in Ireland to try her hand at New York City. Since then, she's been obsessed with fellow immigrants, people who have chosen to make their life in the USA, often against formidable odds. In her podcast, Maeve in America , Higgins tells these stories, from Syrian refugees to Korean academics to English comedians. For the S...

China isn't a boogeyman, North Korea is genuinely frightening, and we could stand to be more diplomatic with Russia. Those ideas come from Richard Haass , president of the Council on Foreign Relations , who says the U.S. can be a stabilizing force in the world, so long as it does a better job of discerning when to speak softly and when to use the big stick. Haass is the author of A World in Disarr...

Who was Jim Henson, and why did he see something special in a couple googly eyes glued on felt? Best-selling history writer Brad Meltzer says he was inspired to tell Henson's story not because of The Muppets or Sesame Street , but because of Henson's tenacity. Meltzer's book, I Am Jim Henson , is the latest edition of his biography series for kids, Ordinary People Change the World . For the Spiel,...

George Saunders' first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo , is a bit of a head trip. Half of it takes place in the liminal phase between life and death. It's about Abraham Lincoln's son, Willie, who died at the age of 11, but we almost never hear from him. And it takes about four to five chapters to understand what's going on. "My goal is the early difficulty pays off later," says Saunders. "Once the boo...

Jon Ralston has decades of experience covering politics in Nevada, as a columnist for both major Las Vegas newspapers and a host on local TV. But as the major news outlets have cut their politics coverage, Ralston has launched an experiment to save local political news: a nonprofit site called The Nevada Independent . Ralston is also a contributing editor to Politico . In the Spiel: Republican law...

John Nixon was the lead CIA analyst tasked with studying Saddam Hussein during the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. It fell to Nixon to identify Hussein when he was captured, interrogate him while in U.S. custody, and present what he learned to the Bush White House. Nixon's book is Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein. In the Spiel: Don't blame the provocateur, blame his followe...

There's a term in poker called tilt —when players become overwhelmed by bad news and it starts clouding their decision-making. Poker star Annie Duke talks to guest host Maria Konnikova about the psychological tricks that pro card players use to get through rough patches and how it applies to our political climate today. Duke has written several books about poker and sits on the board of How I Deci...

For years, Andy Zaltzman and John Oliver took on the powers that be in their influential podcast The Bugle . But the show went on hiatus in 2014 when Oliver became the host of HBO's Last Week Tonight . Now, Zaltzman is rebooting the show at a most opportune moment for satire. "It's like throwing the javelin of truth into the swamp of corruption," says Zaltzman. "But javelins in swamps don't always...

Jedediah Purdy understands President Trump's supporters better than most champions of the left, having grown up in rural West Virginia (he has the greased-pig award to prove it). But he's still befuddled by the prospect of peeling away voters from the president's camp. Purdy's recent piece in the New Republic is titled "America's New Opposition." For the Spiel, an annotated history of one of the T...

Chris Licht is the executive producer for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert , which has surpassed its late-night competition since the inauguration of President Donald Trump. On The Gist, Licht explains why he's not worried about going viral or catering to a younger audience: "I think you can be likable and pointed." For the Spiel, who was it, again, who warned us that Trump was in cahoots with t...

John Darnielle has always had a facility with words. As singer and songwriter behind the Mountain Goats, Darnielle has made pop poetry about lonely outsiders and cultural marginalia. Now, in his second novel, Universal Harvester , he explores the lives of desperate people in a small Iowa town. He also talks about a song title so good that no singer could ever do it justice. In the Spiel, how compe...

David Frum has emerged as a leader of the Republican resistance in the months since President Donald Trump's election. On The Gist, he shares his dismay that the disparate forces opposing the Trump administration can't seem to get over old squabbles. He also explains the narrow political portfolio he's settled on and why Never Trumpers should focus their activism. Frum is a senior editor at the At...

On The Gist, guest host Julia Ioffe of the Atlantic talks about the similarities and surprising differences between President Trump and Russia's Vladimir Putin with Miriam Elder , world editor at BuzzFeed . Elder shares her idea of how the two leaders fit into a global story unfolding right now. Plus, Ioffe and Elder explain "whataboutism" and other vocabulary lessons from their time reporting in...

Elvis Costello is one of the most accomplished songwriters of his generation. In his memoir, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink , he details his songwriting process, his encounters with everyone from Paul McCartney to Joe Strummer, and his place in a rapidly changing music industry. Costello is up for a Grammy this week for the audiobook version of Unfaithful . For the Spiel, a fairly pointless h...

With elections coming up in France and Germany, Facebook is working with media organizations across Europe to avoid the fake news pox that struck the United States last year. Slate 's senior technology writer Will Ormeus joins us to discuss the strides being made against political hoaxes online. Also, we answer the question: Does office coffee make us more productive? What does it accomplish as a...

Before she was the governor of Kansas, Kathleen Sebelius ran the state's high-risk health care pool, where citizens with serious health problems could get coverage despite their pre-existing conditions. High-risk pools are a favorite idea of the GOP, including many in Congress trying to cook up a replacement for Obamacare. Sebelius says the high-risk plan doesn't work: "Every day we heard stories...

After intense protest toward companies such as Uber, CEOs across America are finding it more and more difficult to stay neutral when it comes to the Trump administration. Adi Ignatius is the editor of the Harvard Business Review , whose most recent issue looks at how business leaders are approaching the Trump White House. He says more CEOs are likely to follow the lead of Disney chief Bob Iger , w...