Category: 3-SometimeCommentary

On Start the Week Andrew Marr discusses the future of politics with David Goodhart and Oliver Letwin MP. In his latest book Goodhart looks at the fractious state of the west and the rise of populism, while Oliver Letwin asks what the government can do to reach those who feel marginalised.

The playwright Richard Bean reaches back to another time of internal conflict, the beginning of the English Civil War, and finds humour in the desperate attempts of one man to retain power.

Machiavelli is always associated with unscrupulous scheming, but his latest biographer Erica Benner argues that he was a man devoted to political and human freedom.

Producer: Katy Hickman

IMAGE: Rowan Polonski as Prince Rupert and Martin Barrass as Mayor Barnard in The Hypocrite by Richard Bean, a Hull Truck, Hull 2017 and RSC co-production. Photograph by Duncan Lomax (c) RSC.

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:

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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 Konnikova has today’s Spiel on the theory of trickle-down hate-speech.

Today’s sponsor:

Green Mountain Coffee. Green Mountain Coffee is passionate about making a smoother tasting cup. Try it today with code TRYGMC.

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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 it has any chance of passing through Congress.

For the Spiel, how your smart TV became a sleeper agent for the intelligence community.

Today’s sponsors:

Green Mountain Coffee is passionate about making a smoother tasting cup. Try it today with $4 off, when you buy two boxes of most Green Mountain Coffee K-Cup pods at keurig.com with code TRYGMC.

And Stamps.com. Buy and print official U.S. postage using your own computer and printer. Sign up for Stamps.com and get a four-week trial, plus postage and a digital scale, when you use promo code THEGIST.

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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 artist formerly known as the Affordable Care Act. 

Today’s sponsors:

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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, you might want to learn to spell “wiretap” because you accuse someone of ordering a wiretap.

Today’s sponsors:

Stamps.com. Buy and print official U.S. postage using your own computer and printer. Sign up for Stamps.com and get a four-week trial, plus postage and a digital scale, when you use promo code THEGIST.

And The Great Courses Plus, a video learning service that offers lectures on all kinds of topics. Get a free trial when you sign up by going toTheGreatCoursesPlus.com/gist.

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Andrew Marr talks to Paul Auster about his latest work, 4 3 2 1, which weaves together four versions of his hero's life alongside the monumental events of mid-twentieth century America.

The turbulence of the last six decades in US history, from JFK's assassination to Vietnam, to the AIDS crisis, racism and gender politics, is also presented through artists' prints in a new exhibition at the British Museum, co-curated by Catherine Daunt.

In the 1960s and 70s, Robert Evans became one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood only to fall spectacularly from grace a decade later. In The Kid Stays in the Picture, the theatre director Simon McBurney brings his rise and fall to the stage.

Producer: Katy Hickman

IMAGE: Jasper Johns (b. 1930), Flags I. Colour screenprint, 1973. Gift of Johanna and Leslie Garfield, on loan from the American Friends of the British Museum. (c) Jasper Johns/VAGA, New York/DACS, London 2016. (c) Tom Powel Imaging.

Andrew Marr talks to Paul Auster about his latest work, 4 3 2 1, which weaves together four versions of his hero's life alongside the monumental events of mid-twentieth century America.

The turbulence of the last six decades in US history, from JFK's assassination to Vietnam, to the AIDS crisis, racism and gender politics, is also presented through artists' prints in a new exhibition at the British Museum, co-curated by Catherine Daunt.

In the 1960s and 70s, Robert Evans became one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood only to fall spectacularly from grace a decade later. In The Kid Stays in the Picture, the theatre director Simon McBurney brings his rise and fall to the stage.

Producer: Katy Hickman

IMAGE: Jasper Johns (b. 1930), Flags I. Colour screenprint, 1973. Gift of Johanna and Leslie Garfield, on loan from the American Friends of the British Museum. (c) Jasper Johns/VAGA, New York/DACS, London 2016. (c) Tom Powel Imaging.