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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—so you don’t have to.
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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, and what the indictment of a sitting U.S. president would look like.
In the Spiel, what mothers of sons have to say about Kavanaugh.
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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 explore this in their new book The Coddling of the American Mind. Lukianoff joins us on the Gist to discuss.
In the Spiel, are the new models of protest a useful continuation of the civil rights movement?
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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 Butler, join us to discuss the fresh importance of the play, what sort of impact the Constitution has on women, and what can be drawn from a theatrical analysis of the Kavanaugh hearing. What the Constitution Means to Me is running at the New York Theatre Workshop through Oct. 28.
In the Spiel, Butler considers the nature of conspiracy theories in America and what Kavanaugh has made us forget.
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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 views, and embraced by a few despite them. Saslow’s book is Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist.
In the Spiel, more on the Kavanaugh hearing, and Trump’s continuing belief that 52 percent of women voted for him.
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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 Habits is now on Netflix.
In the Spiel, Kavanaugh’s three accusers tell different stories, but many Republican senators are somehow dismissing them all.
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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 case.
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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 way to move on to blocking other plastics from the world’s waste stream.
In the Spiel, the air is thick with terrible arguments both for and against Brett Kavanaugh.
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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 crossroads of the Middle East lends it looser norms. In Scandinavia, we’ve got the opposite. Gelfand’s book is Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World.
In the Spiel, you wrote in, and Mike read up: It’s time for the Lobstar of the Antentwig.
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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 new special on Netflix is Secret Time.
In the Spiel, Jeopardy finally notices podcasts.
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