Can a checklist save a life? Dr. Atul Gawande thinks so. He talks with us about his new book, “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right,” and about how the simple act of checking items off a well-designed list can transform healthcare, workplaces, and our response to life’s disasters. 

When it comes to health care, do you get what you pay for? Dr. Atul Gawande wanted to examine costs -- and quality. In the latest issue of The New Yorker he compares McAllen, Texas, one of the most expensive health care markets in the country, to the Mayo Clinic, one of the country’s most effective, low-cost health systems. Dr. Gawande is a surgeon and writer; his most recent book is Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance

For more, read Dr. Atul Gawande's article The Cost Conundrum in The New Yorker.

The United States holds at least 25,000 prisoners in long-term solitary confinement prisons across the country. They're called "Supermax" prisons, where prisoners are confined without human contact for at least 23 hours every day. Should these isolation cells be considered torture?

The Takeaway is joined by Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon and author of a piece in this week's New Yorker called "Annals of Human Rights". Dr. Gawande writes that we know how monkeys respond when scientists have placed them under solitary confinement: the monkeys become severely disturbed and withdrawn. It's, of course, not ethical to do similar experiments on adult human beings, but Dr. Gawande argues that is exactly what we are doing to tens of thousands of prisoners in Supermax prisons in the United States.