The Gist

Tax Cut Conundrum

For a guy obsessed with budgets, Paul Ryan sure had a thing for cutting taxes.

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan announces his retirement during a press conference on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.

Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Listen to Episode 969 of Slate’s The Gist:

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On The Gist, Paul Ryan cared about just one thing: cutting taxes.

Word choice is not always the most stimulating place to start an interview with an author, but it works when you’re talking to Sloane Crosley. The essayist defends metaphors like “Holocaust bunk bed” and the related analogy, “as if the Brady Bunch were filmed in Nazi Germany.” Crosley’s latest book—a collection of essays—is Look Alive Out There.

In the Spiel, Congress failed to pin Mark Zuckerberg down.

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