The U.S.A. - so much for the "greatest country on earth." Recent research shows that if Americans died at the same rate as people do in average European countries, at least half a million Americans who die each year would likely have lived. And the biggest difference is among people younger than 65. Our guests - epidemiologist Jacob Bor at Boston University and Katherine Newman, executive vice president of the University of California - say that the U.S. is way behind not just because it has a worse health care system: The nation already has far worse housing, education, unemployment benefits and other social supports for middle- and low-income people than many other developed countries do. So what might happen to death rates under the Trump regime?

America's prisons house a "staggering number" of convicts who didn't commit the crime but said under duress that they did - so says our guest, lawyer Alan Hirsch, who testifies in trials across the country as one of the leading expert witnesses on false confessions. He took the stand not long ago in the chilling case of teenager Brooke Skylar Richardson, who was pressured by police to say that she'd murdered her baby, who was actually stillborn, and then burned the body; the jury acquitted her after forensic studies showed that the baby had never been burned at all. Alan says one problem is that police learn to lie about evidence and use clever interrogation methods that break down suspects' defenses, whether they're actually guilty or not. Some states are requiring police to film their whole interrogations - a step forward but not a panacea.

When you learned ​in school about the fabled drama of Robert E. Peary and Frederick Cook​ - how they raced each other to reach the North Pole first - did your teachers explain that this was an early example where public figures lied to gain glory? Plus, both The New York Times and New York Herald enabled them, by spreading the explorers' fake news - although critics still debate whether the publishers knew the stories were fake or didn't bother to corroborate the explorers' stories. Journalist Darrell Hartman tells us life and death tales from his fascinating book, Battle of Ink and Ice, that shed light on the perils of vanity and competition for fame and profit.