The staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe has reported on “The Apprentice” and its impact on Donald Trump—on how America saw Trump, and how Trump saw himself. Keefe spoke with Jonathon Braun, who was a supervising producer on “The Apprentice,” about how the show’s team reshaped Trump’s image, and how the news media are doing that same work for him now that he is President. Dan Kaufman, the author of “The Fall of Wisconsin,” explains how a deal to bring manufacturing jobs to an industrial town in Wisconsin became a boondoggle of national proportions. And Terrance Hayes, the author of “American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin,” reads a poem for the New Year.

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.