Next time you hear details of the horrific wars in Ukraine and Gaza, think about how you're learning them: journalists are risking their lives to report from the front lines. Lewis Simons won the Pulitzer Prize during decades of reporting on the Vietnam war and other conflicts across Asia. He lived by a motto: "Whatever the threat or danger, I had to be there."

Now Trump and the Republican party are following their autocratic playbooks, whether by design or by instinct: pack courts and agencies with their cronies, slander and intimidate the media, and denigrate their opponents as "evil" and vermin. Harvard professor Steven Levitsky, co-author of How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority, tells us why it could take many years to rescue America's democracy - even if Trump loses the next election.

When you learned about the American explorers who claimed to discover the North Pole, the answer seems to be, "Yes." In fact, the fabled drama of Robert E. Peary and Frederick Cook was an early example of how powerful newspapers - in this case The New York Times and New York Herald - spread fake news (although critics still debate whether the newspaper owners knew it was fake or didn't bother to corroborate the explorers' stories). Journalist Darrell Hartman tells us life and death tales from his recent book, Battle of Ink and Ice, that shed light on the perils of vanity and competition for fame and profit.