The New Yorker Radio Hour

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Profiles, storytelling and insightful conversations, hosted by David Remnick.

John Fetterman on Trump’s “Raw Sewage,” and What the Democrats Get Wrong

John Fetterman on Trump’s “Raw Sewage,” and What the Democrats Get Wrong

Since the election, Senator John Fetterman—once a great hope of progressives—has conspicuously blamed Democrats for the electoral loss. Fetterman tells David Remnick that the Democratic Party discouraged male voters, particularly white men. He has pursued a lonely course of bipartisanship by meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago before his Inauguration, joining Truth Social, and voting to confirm Pam Bondi as Attorney General—the only Democrat to do so. But, despite Trump’s relatively high approval r

Feb 21, • 34:35

Celebrating 100 Years: Jia Tolentino and Roz Chast Pick Favorites from the Archive

Celebrating 100 Years: Jia Tolentino and Roz Chast Pick Favorites from the Archive

Staff writers and contributors are celebrating The New Yorker’s centennial by revisiting notable works from the magazine’s archive, in a series called Takes. The writer Jia Tolentino and the cartoonist Roz Chast join the Radio Hour to present their selections. Tolentino discusses an essay by a genius observer of American life, the late Joan Didion, about Martha Stewart. Didion’s profile, “everywoman.com,” was published in 2000, and Tolentino finds in it a defense of perfectionism and a certain k

Feb 18, • 16:15

The A.C.L.U. v. Trump 2.0

The A.C.L.U. v. Trump 2.0

In Donald Trump’s first term in office, the American Civil Liberties Union filed four hundred and thirty-four lawsuits against the Administration. Since Trump’s second Inauguration, the A.C.L.U. has filed cases to block executive orders ending birthright citizenship, defunding gender-affirming health care, and more. If the Administration defies a judge’s order to fully reinstate government funds frozen by executive order, Anthony Romero, the A.C.L.U.’s executive director, says, we will have arri

Feb 14, • 33:44

“No Other Land”: The Collective Behind the Oscar-Nominated Documentary

“No Other Land”: The Collective Behind the Oscar-Nominated Documentary

The film “No Other Land” has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. It was directed by four Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers, and to unpack the film’s message David Remnick speaks with two of the directors, Basel Adra, who lives in the West Bank, and Yuval Abraham, who lives in Jerusalem. The documentary takes a particular focus on the demolitions of Palestinian homes overseen by the Israeli military which often involve a lack of building permits. “You very quickly r

Feb 11, • 23:41

Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.

Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.

Many of the most draconian measures implemented in the first couple weeks of the new Trump Administration have been justified as emergency actions to root out D.E.I.—diversity, equity, and inclusion—including the freeze (currently rescinded) of trillions of dollars in federal grants. The tragic plane crash in Washington, the President baselessly suggested, might also be the result of D.E.I. Typically, D.E.I. describes policies at large companies or institutions to encourage more diverse workplac

Feb 7, • 26:32

The New Yorker Celebrates a Hundred Years as a Poetry and Fiction Tastemaker

The New Yorker Celebrates a Hundred Years as a Poetry and Fiction Tastemaker

David Remnick talks with The New Yorker’s literary guiding lights: the fiction editor Deborah Treisman and the poetry editor Kevin Young. Treisman edited “A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker,” and Young edited “A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker,” both of which were published this month.  “When you asked me to do this,” Young remarks to David Remnick, “I think my first response was, I’ve only wanted to do this since I was fifteen. . . . It was kind of a dream come true.” Treisman talks abo

Feb 4, • 18:19

Bill Gates on His New Memoir and Dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago

Bill Gates on His New Memoir and Dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago

In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, Bill Gates was the best known of a new breed: the tech mogul—a coder who had figured out how to run a business, and who then seemed to be running the world. Gates was ranked the richest person in the world for many years. In a new memoir, “Source Code,” he explains how he got there. The book focusses on Gates’s early life, and just through the founding of Microsoft. Since stepping away from the company, Gates has devoted himself to his foundation, which is

Jan 31, • 32:31

Returning to a Home Consumed by the Wildfires

Returning to a Home Consumed by the Wildfires

The staff writer Dana Goodyear has reported on California extensively: the entertainment industry; a deadly crime spree in Malibu; Kamala Harris’s rise in politics; and the ever more fragile environment. She covered the destructive Woolsey Fire, in Los Angeles, in 2018. Recently, Goodyear found her own life very much in the center of the story. Living in Pacific Palisades, she had to evacuate early this month, and she documented her return days later to a scene of devastation in this audio story

Jan 28, • 12:17

How “Saturday Night Live” Reinvented Television, Fifty Years Ago

How “Saturday Night Live” Reinvented Television, Fifty Years Ago

“Saturday Night Live” turns fifty this year. Profiling its executive producer, Lorne Michaels, the New Yorker editor Susan Morrison sheds light on one of the most important people in show business. Morrison spent years talking to Michaels for her new book, “Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live,” and she includes recordings of those interviews in a conversation with David Remnick. “Lorne was a real student of what I call sort of the hinges between eras,” Morrison says. To keep the show

Jan 24, • 37:50

The Political Scene: Big Money and Trump’s New Cabinet

The Political Scene: Big Money and Trump’s New Cabinet

The Washington Roundtable—with the staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos—discusses this week’s confirmation hearings for Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense and Pam Bondi as Attorney General, and the potential for a “shock and awe” campaign in the first days of Donald Trump’s second term. Plus, as billionaires from many industries gather around the dais on Inauguration Day, what should we make of President Biden’s warning, in the waning days of his Administration, about “an

Jan 21, • 36:27

Antony Blinken’s Exit Interview

Antony Blinken’s Exit Interview

As President Biden took office in 2021, he aimed to rebuild alliances that Donald Trump had threatened during his first term. That effort was challenged by an onslaught of international crises, from Ukraine to Gaza. The person tasked with trying to restore the old order was Secretary of State Antony Blinken. He spoke with David Remnick days before leaving the White House, and shortly before the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas was announced this week. “I’ve been laboring to try to ge

Jan 17, • 49:38

One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining

One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining

Donald Trump loves mining, and he would like to expand that effort in the U.S. At least one environmentalist agrees with him, to some extent: the journalist Vince Beiser. Beiser’s recent book is called “Power Metal,” and it’s about the rare-earth metals that power almost every electronic device and sustainable technology we use today. “A lot of people really hate it when I say this, a lot of environmentally minded folks, but I do believe we should be open to allowing more mining to happen in the

Jan 14, • 17:31

Representative Ro Khanna on Elon Musk and the Tech Oligarchy

Representative Ro Khanna on Elon Musk and the Tech Oligarchy

Representative Ro Khanna of California is in the Democrats’ Congressional Progressive Caucus. And although his district is in the heart of Silicon Valley—and he once worked as a lawyer for tech companies—Khanna is focussed on how Democrats can regain the trust of working-class voters. He knows tech moguls, he talks with them regularly, and he thinks that they are forming a dangerous oligarchy, to the detriment of everyone else. “This is more dangerous than petty corruption. This is more dangerou

Jan 10, • 32:45

Sara Bareilles Talks with Rachel Syme

Sara Bareilles Talks with Rachel Syme

Sara Bareilles broke out as a pop-music star in the late two-thousands. But she’s gone on to have a very different kind of career, writing music for Broadway and eventually performing as an actor on stage and on television.  At the New Yorker Festival, in 2024, she played her early hit “Gravity,” and spoke with staff writer Rachel Syme about the pressures of fame, aging, and why she prefers working in theatre. “There’s so much competition in the music industry. I’m not a competitive person; I do

Jan 7, • 18:45

Rachel Aviv on Alice Munro’s Family Secrets

Rachel Aviv on Alice Munro’s Family Secrets

Rachel Aviv reports on the terrible conundrum of Alice Munro for The New Yorker. Munro was a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and perhaps the most acclaimed writer of short stories of our time, but her legacy darkened after her death when her youngest daughter, Andrea Skinner, revealed that Munro’s partner had sexually abused her beginning when she was nine years old. The crime was known in the family, but even after a criminal conviction of Gerald Fremlin, Munro stood by him, at the expe

Jan 3, • 31:41

Julianne Moore Explains What She Needs in a Film Director

Julianne Moore Explains What She Needs in a Film Director

Introducing Julianne Moore at the New Yorker Festival, in October, the staff writer Michael Schulman recited “only a partial list” of the directors Moore has worked with, including Robert Altman, Louis Malle, Todd Haynes, Paul Thomas Anderson, Lisa Cholodenko, Steven Spielberg, the Coen brothers, and many more legends. It seems almost obvious that Moore co-stars (alongside Tilda Swinton) in Pedro Almodóvar’s first feature in English, “The Room Next Door,” which comes out in December. Moore has a

Dec 31, 2024 • 24:07

The Art of Cooking with Ina Garten

The Art of Cooking with Ina Garten

With the Food Network program “Barefoot Contessa,” Ina Garten became a beloved household name. An essential element of her success is her confiding, authentic warmth—her encouragement for even the most novice home cook. Garten is “the real deal,” in the opinion of David Remnick, who has known her and her husband for many years. Although she is a gregarious teacher and presence on television, Garten prefers to do her actual cooking alone. “Cooking’s hard for me. I mean, I do it a lot, but it’s re

Dec 27, 2024 • 27:05

Christmas in Tehran During the 1979 Iran Hostage Crisis

Christmas in Tehran During the 1979 Iran Hostage Crisis

In 1979, as Christmas approached, the United States Embassy in Tehran held more than fifty American hostages, who had been seized when revolutionaries stormed the embassy. No one from the U.S. had been able to have contact with them. The Reverend M. William Howard, Jr., was the president of the National Council of Churches at the time, and when he received a telegram from the Revolutionary Council, inviting him to perform Christmas services for the hostages, he jumped at the opportunity. In Amer

Dec 24, 2024 • 29:37

Willem Dafoe on “Nosferatu”

Willem Dafoe on “Nosferatu”

Willem Dafoe has one of the most distinctive faces and most distinctive voices in movies, deployed to great effect in blockbuster genre movies as well as smaller indie darlings; he’s played everyone from Jesus Christ to the Green Goblin. His most recent project is the highly anticipated “Nosferatu,” which opens Christmas Day. Robert Eggers’s film is a remake, more than a century later, of one of the oldest existing vampire movies, and Dafoe plays a vampire-hunting professor.  After “Twilight” an

Dec 20, 2024 • 20:58

From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar

From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar

James Taylor’s songs are so familiar that they seem to have always existed. Onstage at the New Yorker Festival, in 2010, Taylor peeled back some of his influences—the Beatles, Bach, show tunes, and Antônio Carlos Jobim—and played a few of his hits, even giving the staff writer Adam Gopnik a quick lesson.This segment originally aired on July 7, 2017.

Dec 18, 2024 • 32:36

From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction

From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction

Annie Clark, known as St. Vincent, launched her career as a guitar virtuoso—a real shredder—in indie rock, playing alongside artists like Sufjan Stevens. As a bandleader, she’s moved away from the explosive solos, telling David Remnick, “There’s a certain amount of guitar playing that is about pride, that isn’t about the song. . . . I’m not that interested in guitar being a means of poorly covered-up pride.” Her songs are dense, challenging, and not always easy, but catchy and seductive. Remnick

Dec 18, 2024 • 26:41

From the Archive: Elvis Costello Talks with David Remnick

From the Archive: Elvis Costello Talks with David Remnick

Elvis Costello’s thirty-first studio album, “Hey Clockface,” will be released this month. Recorded largely before the pandemic, it features an unusual combination of winds, cello, piano, and drums. David Remnick talks with Costello about the influence of his father’s career in jazz and about what it’s like to look back on his own early years.  They also discuss “Fifty Songs for Fifty Days,” a new project leading up to the Presidential election—though Costello disputes that the songs are politica

Dec 18, 2024 • 18:02

From Critics at Large: After “Wicked,” What Do We Want from the Musical?

From Critics at Large: After “Wicked,” What Do We Want from the Musical?

The American musical is in a state of flux. Today’s Broadway offerings are mostly jukebox musicals and blatant I.P. grabs; original ideas are few and far between. Meanwhile, one of the biggest films of the season is Jon M. Chu’s earnest (and lengthy) adaptation of “Wicked,” the origin story of the Wicked Witch of the West that first premièred on the Great White Way nearly twenty years ago—and has been a smash hit ever since. On this episode, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz d

Dec 17, 2024 • 48:00

Rashid Khalidi on the Palestinian Cause in a Volatile Middle East, and the Meaning of Settler Colonialism

Rashid Khalidi on the Palestinian Cause in a Volatile Middle East, and the Meaning of Settler Colonialism

Power dynamics in the Middle East shifted dramatically this year. In Lebanon, Israel dealt a severe blow toHezbollah, and another crucial ally of Iran—Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria—was toppled by insurgents. But the historian Rashid Khalidi is skeptical that these changes will set back the Palestinian cause, as it relates to Israel. “This idea that the Palestinians are bereft of allies assumes that they had people who were doing things for their interest,” Khalidi tells David Remnick, “which

Dec 13, 2024 • 49:09

Audra McDonald on Stephen Sondheim, “Gypsy,” and Being Black on Broadway

Audra McDonald on Stephen Sondheim, “Gypsy,” and Being Black on Broadway

“Gypsy,” a work by Stephen Sondheim, Jule Styne, and Arthur Laurents, is often called the greatest of American musicals; a new production on Broadway is a noteworthy event, especially when a star like Audra McDonald is cast in the lead role of Rose. McDonald has won six Tonys for her acting, in both plays and musicals. In the repertoire of musicals, race in casting is still very much an issue, and one columnist criticized her portrayal of Rose because of her race. “I have dealt with this my enti

Dec 9, 2024 • 20:36

Inside Donald Trump’s Mass-Deportation Plans

Inside Donald Trump’s Mass-Deportation Plans

Immigration has been the cornerstone of Donald Trump’s political career, and in his second successful Presidential campaign he promised to execute the largest deportation in history. Stephen Miller, Trump’s key advisor on hard-line immigration policy, said that the incoming Administration would “unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” possibly involving the use of the military. “I do think they’re going to strain the outer limits of the

Dec 6, 2024 • 28:43

Pick 3: Justin Chang’s Downer Movies for the Holiday Season

Pick 3: Justin Chang’s Downer Movies for the Holiday Season

If “Wicked, Part I” and “Gladiator II” are not getting you into the theatre this weekend, Justin Chang, The New Yorker’s film critic, offers three other films coming out this holiday season which are “among the most thrilling that I've seen this year.” He recommends “Nickel Boys,” based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead and directed by RaMell Ross; “The Brutalist,” starring Adrian Brody; and “Hard Truths,” directed by Mike Leigh. These are heavy subjects—not traditional hol

Dec 3, 2024 • 9:21

A Lakota Playwright’s Take on Thanksgiving; Plus, Ayelet Waldman on Quilting to Stay Sane

A Lakota Playwright’s Take on Thanksgiving; Plus, Ayelet Waldman on Quilting to Stay Sane

“The Thanksgiving Play” is a play about the making of a play. Four performers struggle to devise a Thanksgiving performance that’s respectful of Native peoples, historically accurate (while not too grim for white audiences), and also inclusive to the actors themselves. A train wreck ensues. “First it’s fun. . . . You get to have a good time in the theatre. I would say that’s the sugar, and then there’s the medicine,” the playwright Larissa FastHorse tells the staff writer Vinson Cunningham. “The

Nov 29, 2024 • 24:45

Sarah McBride Wasn’t Looking for a Fight on Trans Rights

Sarah McBride Wasn’t Looking for a Fight on Trans Rights

Sarah McBride just became the first transgender person elected to the United States Congress. A Democrat, she worked for the Human Rights Campaign before serving in the Delaware State Senate.  McBride will be sworn in in January, but opponents of trans rights in Congress have already mobilized against her: Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina introduced a bathroom bill that would require McBride to use the men’s bathroom, and Speaker Mike Johnson made a statement denying trans identity al

Nov 26, 2024 • 40:35

Ketanji Brown Jackson on Ethics, Trust, and Keeping It Collegial at the Supreme Court

Ketanji Brown Jackson on Ethics, Trust, and Keeping It Collegial at the Supreme Court

Since the founding of the nation, just 116 people have served as Supreme Court Justices; the 116th is Ketanji Brown Jackson, appointed by President Biden in 2022. Jackson joined a Court with six conservative Justices setting a new era of jurisprudence. She took her seat just days after the Dobbs decision, when Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion overturned Roe v. Wade. She wrote a blistering dissent to the Harvard decision, which ended affirmative action in college admissions, in which she

Nov 22, 2024 • 25:05

Danielle Deadwyler on August Wilson and Denzel Washington

Danielle Deadwyler on August Wilson and Denzel Washington

Danielle Deadwyler, who first grabbed the spotlight for her performance as Emmett Till’s mother in the film “Till,” stars in a new film called “The Piano Lesson”—one of August Wilson’s Century Cycle plays about Black life in Pittsburgh. Denzel Washington has committed to adapting and producing all ten of Wilson’s Century Cycle plays; “The Piano Lesson” is directed by his son Malcolm, and his other son John David co-stars. Deadwyler plays Berniece, a widow who has kept the family piano after her

Nov 19, 2024 • 18:10

The Authors of “How Democracies Die” on the New Democratic Minority

The Authors of “How Democracies Die” on the New Democratic Minority

American voters have elected a President with broadly, overtly authoritarian aims. It’s hardly the first time that the democratic process has brought an anti-democratic leader to power. The political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, who both teach at Harvard, assert that we shouldn’t be shocked by the Presidential result. “It's not up to voters to defend a democracy,” Levitsky says. “That’s asking far, far too much of voters, to cast their ballot on the basis of some set of abstrac

Nov 15, 2024 • 31:58

Sam Gold’s “Romeo + Juliet” Is Shakespeare for the Youth

Sam Gold’s “Romeo + Juliet” Is Shakespeare for the Youth

Sam Gold has directed five Shakespeare tragedies, but his latest, “Romeo + Juliet,” is something different—a loud, clubby production designed to attract audiences the age of its protagonists. “It’s as if the teens from ‘Euphoria’ decided that they had to do Shakespeare,” Vinson Cunningham said, “and this is what they came up with.” The production stars Rachel Zegler, who starred in Steven Spielberg’s remake of “West Side Story,” and Kit Connor, of the Gen Z Netflix hit “Heartstopper,” and featur

Nov 12, 2024 • 21:55

Donald Trump’s Reëlection, and America’s Future

Donald Trump’s Reëlection, and America’s Future

In the end, Donald Trump’s rhetoric of another stolen election, and his opponents’ warnings that he would once again attempt to subvert a loss, were moot. Trump, a convicted felon and sexual abuser, won not only the Electoral College, but the popular vote—the first time for a Republican President since 2004. Democrats lost almost every swing state, even as abortion-rights ballot measures found favor in some conservative states. David Remnick joins The Political Scene’s weekly Washington roundtab

Nov 8, 2024 • 49:08

Rachel Maddow on the Fascist Threat in America, Then and Now

Rachel Maddow on the Fascist Threat in America, Then and Now

It made news when the retired general John Kelly, Donald Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, said that the former President fit the definition of a fascist. The MSNBC host Rachel Maddow could hardly be blamed if she said, I told you so. Maddow’s podcast “Ultra” and her book “Prequel” detail the history of Nazi and far-right movements in America in the twentieth century—and the people who fought them. “When we talk about making America great again and we talk about the threat of an authoritar

Nov 4, 2024 • 22:08

Liz Cheney on Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Jeff Bezos

Liz Cheney on Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, and Jeff Bezos

In recent weeks and months, dozens of prominent security and military officials and Republican politicians have come out against Donald Trump, declaring him a security threat, unfit for office, and, in some cases, a fascist. Way out in front of this movement was Liz Cheney. Up until 2021, she was the third-ranking Republican in Congress, but after the January 6th insurrection she voted to impeach Trump. She then served as vice-chair of the House Select Committee on the January 6th attack. She mu

Nov 1, 2024 • 28:10

How Alpha Kappa Alpha Shaped Kamala Harris; Plus, Bill T. Jones

How Alpha Kappa Alpha Shaped Kamala Harris; Plus, Bill T. Jones

One aspect of the Vice-President’s background that’s relatively overlooked, and yet critical to understanding her, is her membership in the sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha. “In one of the bylaws,” the writer Jazmine Hughes tells David Remnick, “it says that the mission of the organization, among many, is to uplift the social status of the Negro.” Far from a Greek party club, A.K.A. "is an identity” to its members. When Donald Trump insinuated that Kamala Harris had “turned Black,” in his words, for p

Oct 29, 2024 • 35:30

Charlamagne tha God Has Some Advice for Kamala Harris and the Democrats

Charlamagne tha God Has Some Advice for Kamala Harris and the Democrats

In these final days of the Presidential campaign, Vice-President Kamala Harris has been getting in front of voters as much as she can. Given the polls showing shaky support among Black men, one man she absolutely had to talk to was Lenard McKelvey, much better known as Charlamagne tha God.  As a co-host of the syndicated “Breakfast Club” morning radio show, Charlamagne has interviewed Presidential candidates such as Harris, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden, as well as New York City’s embattled May

Oct 25, 2024 • 36:03

The Stakes for Abortion Rights, from the Head of Planned Parenthood

The Stakes for Abortion Rights, from the Head of Planned Parenthood

If Vice-President Kamala Harris wins in November, it will likely be on the strength of the pro-choice vote, which has been turning out strongly in recent elections. Her statements and choices on the campaign trail couldn’t stand in starker relief against those of Donald Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, who recently called for defunding Planned Parenthood. Meanwhile, Harris “is the first sitting Vice-President or President to come to a Planned Parenthood health center, to come to an abort

Oct 22, 2024 • 21:27

With “The Warriors,” Lin-Manuel Miranda Takes on Another New York Story

With “The Warriors,” Lin-Manuel Miranda Takes on Another New York Story

Since the blockbuster success of his musical “Hamilton,” Lin-Manuel Miranda has been busy: acting, directing, and composing for Disney projects, including the upcoming movie “Mufasa: The Lion King.”  But his new project is more personal, and a throwback in the best sense. Working with the playwright Eisa Davis, he has reimagined a movie from his childhood as a concept album.  “The Warriors” is a cult classic released in 1979. “The Warriors are a gang from Coney Island, and they have to fight the

Oct 18, 2024 • 28:56

Bon Iver on “SABLE,” His First New Record in Five Years

Bon Iver on “SABLE,” His First New Record in Five Years

Bon Iver is the alias of Justin Vernon, who holds an unusual place in music as both a singer-songwriter in an acoustic idiom and a collaborator with the biggest stars in pop, including Taylor Swift, Charli XCX, and Kanye West. Bon Iver’s new three-song EP, titled “SABLE,” is his first record of his own songs in more than five years. Vernon rarely gives interviews, so this is an extended version of his conversation with the staff writer Amanda Petrusich. They touched on the meaning of “sable,” a

Oct 16, 2024 • 46:23

The Astonishing Rise—and Uncertain Odds—of Kamala Harris’s Presidential Campaign

The Astonishing Rise—and Uncertain Odds—of Kamala Harris’s Presidential Campaign

Since July 21st, when Joe Biden endorsed her in the Presidential race, all eyes have been on Vice-President Kamala Harris. The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos has been reporting on Harris for months, speaking with dozens of people close to her from her childhood to her days as a California prosecutor, right up to this lightning-round campaign for the Presidency. “What’s interesting is that some of those people . . . were asking her, ‘Do you think there should be a process? Some town halls or conventions

Oct 11, 2024 • 26:58

Brian Jordan Alvarez on “English Teacher”

Brian Jordan Alvarez on “English Teacher”

Between book bans, the movement for parental rights, the fight over cellphones, and budgets being slashed, life in a public school is stressful—and a fertile ground for comedy. Brian Jordan Alvarez created and stars in “English Teacher,” débuting this season on FX. Alvarez has been an actor for many years, with a role on the reboot of “Will & Grace,” among many others, but he burst into viral fame on TikTok with a goofy song about the virtues of sitting, sung in a strange accent. Suddenly everyb

Oct 8, 2024 • 18:45

Newt Gingrich on What Trump Could Accomplish in a Second Term

Newt Gingrich on What Trump Could Accomplish in a Second Term

Long before Donald Trump got serious about politics, Newt Gingrich saw himself as the revolutionary in Washington, introducing a combative style of party politics that helped his party become a dominating force in Congress. Setting the template for Trump, Gingrich described Democrats not as an opposing team with whom to make alliances but as an alien force—a “cultural élite”—out to destroy America. Gingrich has written no less than five admiring books about Trump, and he was involved with pushin

Oct 4, 2024 • 31:29

Could the War in Gaza Cost Kamala Harris the Election?

Could the War in Gaza Cost Kamala Harris the Election?

In Michigan, many voters—particularly Arab American and Muslim voters—remain deeply upset by the Biden Administration’s support for the Israeli military, in the face of the enormous death toll in Gaza. In her Presidential campaign, Kamala Harris has not articulated any major shift in policy. Earlier in the year, during the primary elections, activists urged Democrats to check the box for “Uncommitted,” as a rebuke to Biden. But now, just weeks away from the general election, these disaffected De

Oct 1, 2024 • 18:53

Young Donald Trump, Roy Cohn, and the Dark Arts of Power

Young Donald Trump, Roy Cohn, and the Dark Arts of Power

Actors and comedians have usually played Donald Trump as larger than life, almost as a cartoon. In the new film “The Apprentice,” Sebastian Stan doesn’t play for laughs. He stars as a very young Trump falling under the sway of Roy Cohn (played by Jeremy Strong)— the notorious, amoral lawyer and fixer.  “Cohn took Donald Trump under his wing when Donald was a nobody from the outer boroughs,” the film’s writer and executive producer Gabriel Sherman tells David Remnick. He “taught him the dark arts

Sep 27, 2024 • 31:41

Timothy Snyder on Why Ukraine Can Still Win the War

Timothy Snyder on Why Ukraine Can Still Win the War

Since the war in Ukraine began, the historian Timothy Snyder has made several trips to Ukraine, and it was there that he wrote parts of his newest book, “On Freedom.” The author of “Bloodlands” and “On Tyranny,” Snyder spoke in Ukrainian with soldiers, farmers, journalists, and politicians, including President Volodymyr Zelensky.  He talks with David Remnick about the Ukrainian conviction that they can win the war, and the historical trends that support that conviction.  But the thrust of Snyder

Sep 24, 2024 • 21:10

Can Trump Voters Still Change Their Minds?

Can Trump Voters Still Change Their Minds?

The political strategist Sarah Longwell has dedicated the last seven years to understanding why so many Republicans find Donald Trump irresistible, and how they might be persuaded to vote for someone else. Longwell is a lifelong Republican who became a leader of the Never Trump wing of the G.O.P., and her communications firm, Longwell Partners, has been running weekly focus groups including swing-state voters, undecided voters, and discontented Trump supporters. These are the people who might de

Sep 20, 2024 • 29:04

Lake Street Dive Performs in the Studio

Lake Street Dive Performs in the Studio

Lake Street Dive recorded their first album with money that their bassist won in a songwriting contest. They built a following the old-fashioned way, touring small venues for years and building a loyal following of fans—including David Remnick—who thought of them as an under-the-radar secret. Almost twenty years later, the band finds themselves onstage at Madison Square Garden. “My main inspiration for playing M.S.G. is Billy Joel,” the bassist Bridget Kearney said. “It feels like the club when

Sep 17, 2024 • 27:05

Josh Shapiro on How Kamala Harris Can Win Pennsylvania

Josh Shapiro on How Kamala Harris Can Win Pennsylvania

In 2024, all eyes are on Pennsylvania: its nineteen electoral votes make it the largest swing state, and it’s considered a critical battleground for either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris to win the White House. For many years, Pennsylvania trended slightly blue, but the state has become deeply purple—with a divided state House and a series of razor-thin margins in general elections. One notable exception to this was the 2022 Pennsylvania governor’s race. The Democrat Josh Shapiro won by almost fi

Sep 13, 2024 • 23:24

A Legend on Broadway, Patti LuPone Makes Her Début in the Marvel Cinematic Universe

A Legend on Broadway, Patti LuPone Makes Her Début in the Marvel Cinematic Universe

Patti LuPone has been a mainstay on Broadway for half a century. She’s appeared in some 30 Broadway productions and has won three Tony Awards for her roles in “Evita,” “Gypsy,” and “Company.” And somehow, LuPone’s career seems to be picking up steam in its sixth decade. Now LuPone is returning to Broadway in “The Roommate,” a play she’s starring in alongside Mia Farrow.  At the same time, she is débuting in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, playing a witch in the miniseries “Agatha All Along.”  The

Sep 10, 2024 • 26:05

Preparing For Trump’s Next “Big Lie,” with the Election Lawyer Marc Elias

Preparing For Trump’s Next “Big Lie,” with the Election Lawyer Marc Elias

Of the sixty-five lawsuits that Donald Trump’s team filed in the 2020 election, Democrats won sixty-four—with the attorney Marc Elias spearheading the majority.  Elias was so successful that Steve Bannon speaks of him with admiration.  Now Marc Elias is working for Vice-President Kamala Harris’s campaign, and, despite his past victories, Elias says that 2024 is keeping him up at night.  The bizarre antics and conspiracy theories of Rudy Giuliani are a thing of the past, Elias tells David Remnick

Sep 6, 2024 • 24:15

Ian Frazier’s Tour of “Paradise Bronx”

Ian Frazier’s Tour of “Paradise Bronx”

“I like to look at places that people aren’t seeing,” says Ian Frazier, the author of “Great Plains” and “Travels in Siberia,” and the new “Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York’s Greatest Borough.” “Not only do people not know about” the Bronx, “but what they know about it is wrong.”  The book, which was excerpted recently in The New Yorker, came out of fifteen years’ worth of long walks through the city streets, and on a hot morning recently, he invited a colleague, Zach Helfand, to j

Sep 3, 2024 • 24:31

The Writer Danzy Senna on Kamala Harris and the Complexity of Biracial Identity in America

The Writer Danzy Senna on Kamala Harris and the Complexity of Biracial Identity in America

In fiction and nonfiction, the author Danzy Senna focusses on the experience of being biracial in a nation long obsessed with color lines. Now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic candidate for President, some of Senna’s concerns have come to the fore in political life. Donald Trump attacked Harris as a kind of race manipulator, implying that she had been Indian American before becoming Black for strategic purposes.  The claim was bizarre and false, but Senna feels that it reflected a mind-set i

Aug 30, 2024 • 25:57

A Pulitzer Prize Winning Take on Finance

A Pulitzer Prize Winning Take on Finance

In honor of what is for many people the final days of summer, the New Yorker Radio Hour team presents a conversation that may inspire your end-of-summer reading list: David Remnick talks to Hernan Diaz about his book, Trust, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2023. The novel’s plot focuses on the daughter of eccentric aristocrats after she marries a Wall Street tycoon of dubious ethics during the Roaring Twenties. The novel is told by four people in four different formats, which offer conflicting acc

Aug 27, 2024 • 19:36

From In the Dark: What Happened That Day in Haditha?

From In the Dark: What Happened That Day in Haditha?

This program is drawn from a new season of the award-winning investigative podcast In the Dark. On a November day in 2005, in the city of Haditha, Iraq, something terrible happened. “Depending on whose story you believed, the killings were a war crime, a murder,” the lead reporter Madeleine Baran says. “Or they were a legitimate combat action and the victims were collateral damage. Or the killings were a tragic mistake, unintentional—sad, but not criminal. Basically, the only thing that everyone

Aug 23, 2024 • 43:30

For Republicans, the End of Abortion Rights Was a Dangerous Victory

For Republicans, the End of Abortion Rights Was a Dangerous Victory

At the Republican National Convention in July, a platform plank in place for decades that called for a national abortion ban was removed—right at the moment that such a ban has actually become legally possible, after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from hard-line pro-life positions, saying that abortion rights sitting with the states “is something that everybody wanted.” The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent Susan B. Glasser explores the tension

Aug 20, 2024 • 19:13

Why Are More Latino Voters Supporting Trump?

Why Are More Latino Voters Supporting Trump?

Despite a surge of enthusiasm for Vice-President Kamala Harris’s campaign, the 2024 race remains extremely competitive. And one factor very much in Donald Trump’s favor is an increased share of support from Latino voters. Anti-immigrant messaging from Trump and the Republican Party has not turned off Latino voters; he won a higher percentage of Latino voters in 2020 than in 2016, and he was roughly tied with President Biden at the time Biden stepped out of the race in July. Geraldo Cadava, the a

Aug 16, 2024 • 31:30

R.F.K., Jr., and the Central Park Bear, with Clare Malone

R.F.K., Jr., and the Central Park Bear, with Clare Malone

The New Yorker staff writer Clare Malone’s Profile, What Does Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Actually Want? sheds light on Kennedy’s position in this Presidential race—and it also solves a ten-year-old mystery about a dead bear cub found in Central Park. On Sunday, Kennedy tried to get ahead of the publication of Malone’s story by relating the bizarre scheme (involving roadkill, falconry, dangerous bike lanes, and more) in a video that he released on social media. David Remnick talks with Malone about

Aug 13, 2024 • 13:07

Nancy Pelosi, the Power Broker

Nancy Pelosi, the Power Broker

Nancy Pelosi, who represents California’s Eleventh Congressional District, led the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives for so long, and so effectively, that one forgets she was also the first woman to hold the job. Her stewardship of consequential legislation—including the Affordable Care Act and the Inflation Reduction Act—during her eight years as Speaker is legendary. And Pelosi has wielded tremendous influence this election cycle: she seems to have been instrumental in persuadin

Aug 8, 2024 • 37:22

Israel’s Other Intractable Conflict (Part 2)

Israel’s Other Intractable Conflict (Part 2)

Israel has occupied the West Bank of the Jordan River since 1967, after the third Arab-Israeli war, and ever since Israelis have settled on more and more of this contested land. Violence by armed settlers against their Palestinian neighbors has increased dramatically in recent years, as a far-right government came to dominate Israeli politics. Unless things change, the American journalist Nathan Thrall tells David Remnick, the future for Palestinians is “not unlike that of the Native Americans.”

Aug 6, 2024 • 24:08

Israel’s Other Intractable Conflict (Part 1)

Israel’s Other Intractable Conflict (Part 1)

Israel has occupied the West Bank of the Jordan River since 1967, after the third Arab-Israeli war, and ever since Israelis have settled on more and more of this contested land. Violence by armed settlers against their Palestinian neighbors has increased dramatically in recent years, as a far-right government came to dominate Israeli politics. Unless things change, the American journalist Nathan Thrall tells David Remnick, the future for Palestinians is “not unlike that of the Native Americans.”

Aug 2, 2024 • 26:35

Kamala Harris, Race, and the Presidency; Plus, Louisa Thomas on the Paris Olympics

Kamala Harris, Race, and the Presidency; Plus, Louisa Thomas on the Paris Olympics

One of the big questions about Vice-President Harris’s candidacy is undoubtedly race. She would not be the first Black President. “I think that most times when people bring Kamala Harris and Barack Obama into the same conversation, they are kind of mistaken—it’s just this kind of wish-casting,” Vinson Cunningham says. But “what they do have in common is a Black father who is not from America. And this brings all kinds of strange things into being . . . in creating a Black American identity.” Cun

Jul 29, 2024 • 23:22

What Kamala Harris Needs to Win the Presidency, from a Veteran of Hillary Clinton’s Campaign

What Kamala Harris Needs to Win the Presidency, from a Veteran of Hillary Clinton’s Campaign

Kamala Harris will face barriers as a woman running for the Presidency. “Women constantly have to credential themselves,” Jennifer Palmieri, a veteran of Democratic politics who served in the Clinton Administration, says. She was also the director of communications for the Obama White House, and then for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential campaign. Harris will “need to remind people of what she has done in her career and what she’s done as Vice-President, because people assume that women haven’

Jul 26, 2024 • 32:22

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio on “Catalina,” the Tale of an Undocumented Student at Harvard

Karla Cornejo Villavicencio on “Catalina,” the Tale of an Undocumented Student at Harvard

Catalina Ituralde is the protagonist of the novel that bears her name, “Catalina.” In the summer before her senior year of college, she’s working as an intern at a prestigious literary magazine, and come fall she’ll be back at Harvard to plot her future. But, contrary to a life of comfort that this scenario suggests, Catalina’s situation is complicated and uncertain: she’s an undocumented immigrant, raised in Queens by her grandparents, and after graduation she might not have the privilege of ch

Jul 23, 2024 • 17:38

The Presidential Race Is in Uncharted Territory, but It’s Clear Who’s Winning

The Presidential Race Is in Uncharted Territory, but It’s Clear Who’s Winning

The movement to persuade President Biden—long after the primaries—to drop out of the Presidential race is unprecedented. So is the candidacy of a convicted felon. But this election season went from startling to shocking with the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and the death of a bystander. Despite the unknowns, the contours of the race are becoming clear, the CNN data journalist Harry Enten tells Clare Malone. President Biden’s support in national polls following his disastrous performance

Jul 19, 2024 • 33:33

Jane Mayer, David Grann, and Patrick Radden Keefe on the Importance of a Good Villain.

Jane Mayer, David Grann, and Patrick Radden Keefe on the Importance of a Good Villain.

During the 2023 New Yorker Festival, three legendary staff writers got together to discuss the craft of investigative journalism: digging for information like detectives, and then presenting it in a way to rival the best thrillers. For each of these writers, the “bad guy” —whose actions usually set the story in motion – needs to be presented in three dimensions; trusting the reader to grapple with that person’s perspective is key to an engrossing story. “I look at these big, boring issues often,

Jul 16, 2024 • 22:14

Julián Castro on the Biden Problem, and What the Democratic Party Got Wrong

Julián Castro on the Biden Problem, and What the Democratic Party Got Wrong

The panic that gripped Democrats during and after President Biden’s performance in the June debate against Donald Trump didn’t come out of nowhere. In January of last year, the Radio Hour produced an episode about President Biden’s age, and the concerns that voters were already expressing. But no nationally prominent Democratic politician was willing to challenge Biden in the primaries. After the debate, Julián Castro was one of the first prominent Democrats to say that Biden should withdraw fro

Jul 12, 2024 • 28:36

Florence Welch Talks About Life on the Road

Florence Welch Talks About Life on the Road

Across five studio albums, Florence and the Machine has explored genres from pop to punk and soul. Florence Welch, the group’s singer and main songwriter, is by turns introspective and theatrical, poetic and confessional. She sat down with John Seabrook at The New Yorker Festival in 2019 to reflect on her band’s rapid rise to stardom. She also spoke about her turn toward sobriety after years of heavy drinking. “The first year that I stopped, I felt like I’d really lost a big part of who I was an

Jul 9, 2024 • 20:15

Robert Caro on the Making of “The Power Broker”

Robert Caro on the Making of “The Power Broker”

Fifty years ago, in July, 1974, The New Yorker began publishing a lengthy excerpt of Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker.” When the book appeared, it ran more than twelve hundred pages and won a Pulitzer Prize. In vivid, astonishing detail, it shows how a city planner named Robert Moses gained power over New York City that dwarfed that of any mayor or governor, and radically changed the city. “The Power Broker” became a landmark of political reporting and biography, and made Caro one of the most cel

Jul 5, 2024 • 30:49

The New Yorker’s Political Writers Answer Your Election Questions

The New Yorker’s Political Writers Answer Your Election Questions

At the beginning of 2021, it seemed like America might be turning a new page; instead, the election of 2024 feels like a strange dream that we can’t wake up from. Recently, David Remnick asked listeners what’s still confounding and confusing about this Presidential election. Dozens of listeners wrote in from all over the country, and a crack team of political writers at The New Yorker came together to shed some light on those questions: Susan B. Glasser, Jill Lepore, Clare Malone, Andrew Marantz

Jul 2, 2024 • 31:12

John Fetterman’s Move to the Right on Israel

John Fetterman’s Move to the Right on Israel

Many Democrats saw John Fetterman as a progressive beacon: a Rust Belt Bernie Sanders who – with his shaved head, his hoodie, and the zip code of Braddock, Pennsylvania – could rally working-class white voters to the Democratic Party. But at least on one issue, Fetterman is veering away from the left of his party, and even from centrists like Majority Leader Chuck Schumer: Israel’s war in Gaza. Fetterman has taken a line that is not just sympathetic to Israel after the October 7th attack by Hama

Jun 28, 2024 • 19:47

Emily Nussbaum on the Beginnings of Reality TV

Emily Nussbaum on the Beginnings of Reality TV

Reality television has generally got a bad rap, but Emily Nussbaum—who received a Pulitzer Prize, in 2016, for her work as The New Yorker’s TV critic—sees that the genre has its own history and craft. Nussbaum’s new book “Cue the Sun!” is a history of reality TV, and roughly half the book covers the era before “Survivor,” which is often considered the starting point of the genre. She picks three formative examples from the Before Time to discuss with David Remnick: “Candid Camera,” “An American

Jun 25, 2024 • 16:30

Kevin Costner on “Yellowstone,” “Horizon,” and Why the Western Endures

Kevin Costner on “Yellowstone,” “Horizon,” and Why the Western Endures

Kevin Costner has been a leading man for more than forty years and has starred in all different genres of movies, but a constant in his filmography is the Western. One of his first big roles was in “Silverado,” alongside Kevin Kline and Danny Glover; he directed “Dances with Wolves,” which won seven Oscars, including Best Director and Best Picture; more recently, Costner starred as the rancher John Dutton in the enormously successful “Yellowstone.” Perhaps no actor since Clint Eastwood is more a

Jun 21, 2024 • 32:35

Paul Scheer Picks the Very Best of the Very Worst Movies

Paul Scheer Picks the Very Best of the Very Worst Movies

Paul Scheer is a noted actor and comedian, and the author of the new memoir “Joyful Recollections of Trauma.” Off the screen, his true obsession is bad movies—even terrible movies. With his wife, the actor and comedian June Diane Raphael, and their friend Jason Mantzoukas, he presents the podcast “How Did This Get Made?,” picking apart all manner of bombs. David Remnick met Scheer at the Brooklyn Brewery and asked him for his top five of the very worst movies, and why they deserve recognition. S

Jun 18, 2024 • 14:42

Is Being a Politician the Worst Job in the World?

Is Being a Politician the Worst Job in the World?

On July 4th—while the U.S. celebrates its break from Britain—voters in the United Kingdom will go to the polls and, according to all predictions, oust the current government. The Conservative Party has been in power for fourteen years, presiding over serious economic decline and widespread discontent. The narrow, contentious referendum to break away from the European Union, sixty per cent of Britons now think, was a mistake. Yet the Labour Party shows no inclination to reverse or even mitigate B

Jun 14, 2024 • 36:24

After Serving Decades in Prison for Murder, Two Men Fought to Clear Their Names

After Serving Decades in Prison for Murder, Two Men Fought to Clear Their Names

For years, the staff writer Jennifer Gonnerman has reported on the case of Eric Smokes and David Warren. When they were teen-agers in Brooklyn, in 1987, Smokes and Warren were convicted of second-degree murder during the mugging of a tourist; the papers called them “the Times Square Two.” It was the testimony of another teen-ager, who received a reduced sentence in a separate case for his coöperation, that sent them to prison. Ever since, Warren and Smokes have protested their innocence, and Wal

Jun 11, 2024 • 28:01

Senator Raphael Warnock on America’s “Moral and Spiritual Battle”

Senator Raphael Warnock on America’s “Moral and Spiritual Battle”

When Raphael Warnock was elected to the Senate from Georgia in the 2020 election, he made history a couple of times over. He became the first Black Democrat elected to the Senate from the Deep South. At the same time, that victory—alongside Jon Ossoff’s—flipped both of Georgia’s Senate seats from Republican to Democrat. Once thought of as solidly red, Georgia has become a closely watched swing state that President Biden can’t afford to lose in November, and Warnock is a key ally. He dismisses po

Jun 7, 2024 • 22:38

The Trans Athletes Who Changed the Olympics—in 1936

The Trans Athletes Who Changed the Olympics—in 1936

In “The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports,” the journalist Michael Waters tells the story of Zdeněk Koubek, one of the most famous sprinters in European women’s sports. Koubek shocked the sporting world in 1935 by announcing that he was transitioning, and now living as a man. The initial press coverage of Koubek and another prominent track star who transitioned, Mark Weston, was largely positive, but Waters tells the New Yorker sports columnist Louisa Thomas th

Jun 4, 2024 • 19:47

Cécile McLorin Salvant Finds “the Gems That Haven’t Been Sung and Sung”

Cécile McLorin Salvant Finds “the Gems That Haven’t Been Sung and Sung”

When the jazz singer Cécile McLorin Salvant was profiled in The New Yorker, Wynton Marsalis described her as the kind of talent who comes along only “once in a generation or two.” Salvant’s work is rooted in jazz—in the tradition of Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan and Abbey Lincoln—and she has won three Grammy Awards for Best Jazz Vocal Album. But her interests and her repertoire reach across eras and continents. She studied Baroque music and jazz at conservatory, and performs songs in French,

May 31, 2024 • 31:07

Ilana Glazer on Motherhood and Friendship, On- and Off-Screen

Ilana Glazer on Motherhood and Friendship, On- and Off-Screen

In their breakout comedy series, “Broad City,” Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson played raucous and raunchy best friends who were the glue in each other’s lives. In “Babes,” the new movie co-written by Glazer and directed by Pamela Adlon (fresh off her own series, “Better Things”), friendship is, again, a life force. Glazer plays Eden, a yoga teacher who gets pregnant unexpectedly and becomes a single mom. This time Glazer plays opposite Michelle Buteau, whom Glazer calls a “muse” for the film. Eve

May 28, 2024 • 23:14

Love Is Blind, and Allegedly Toxic

Love Is Blind, and Allegedly Toxic

On the reality-TV dating show  “Love Is Blind,” the most watched original series in Netflix history, contestants are alone in windowless, octagonal pods with no access to their phones or the Internet. They talk to each other through the walls. There’s intrigue, romance, heartbreak, and, in some cases, sight-unseen engagements. According to several lawsuits, there’s also lack of sleep, lack of food and water, twenty-hour work days, and alleged physical and emotional abuse. New Yorker staff writer

May 24, 2024 • 27:22

Miranda July’s New Novel Takes on Marriage, Desire, and Perimenopause

Miranda July’s New Novel Takes on Marriage, Desire, and Perimenopause

Some time in her forties, something shifted in Miranda July. She started having “this new, grim feeling about the future, which was weird, because I’m, like, a very excited, hopeful person,” she tells New Yorker staff writer Alexandra Schwartz, who recently profiled July for the magazine. July attributes some of that “feeling” to the disparity between all the information there was about her reproductive years, and how little there was about middle age and perimenopause. “If it’s stories that we

May 21, 2024 • 20:36

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Isn’t Going Away

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Isn’t Going Away

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has never held elected office but is related to many people who have, is emerging as a potential threat to Democrats and Republicans in the 2024 Presidential race. “There’s nothing in the United States Constitution that says that you have to go to Congress first and, then, Senate second, or be a governor before you’re elected to the Presidency,”  he told David Remnick, in July, when he was running as a Democrat. Now, as a third-party Presidential candidate, his number

May 17, 2024 • 29:58

How a Tech Executive Lobbied Lawmakers for the TikTok Ban

How a Tech Executive Lobbied Lawmakers for the TikTok Ban

David Remnick talks with a proponent of the TikTok ban that just passed in Washington. Jacob Helberg, an executive with the data giant Palantir who serves in a government agency called the United States–China Economic and Security Review Commission, was all over Capitol Hill in the run-up to the vote on TikTok, convincing legislators that it was an urgent matter of national security. The bill will remove TikTok from distribution in U.S. app stores unless its owner, ByteDance, sells it to some ot

May 14, 2024 • 17:34

Wired’s Katie Drummond: The TikTok Ban Is “Rooted in Hypocrisy”; Plus, Hannah Goldfield on Culinary TikTok

Wired’s Katie Drummond: The TikTok Ban Is “Rooted in Hypocrisy”; Plus, Hannah Goldfield on Culinary TikTok

David Remnick talks with Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired magazine, about the TikTok ban that just passed with bipartisan support in Washington. The app will be removed from distribution in U.S. app stores unless ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, sells it to an approved buyer. TikTok is suing to block that law. Is this a battle among tech giants for dominance, or a real issue of national security? Drummond sees the ban as a corporate crusade by Silicon Valley

May 10, 2024 • 33:04

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Could Swing the Election. Who Should Be More Worried—Biden or Trump?

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Could Swing the Election. Who Should Be More Worried—Biden or Trump?

When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., appeared on this show back in July, it was early in his run for President, and he was considered a fringe candidate. He had the name recognition, obviously, and not much else. Now the question seems to be not whether Kennedy is going to be a spoiler in the election but which side he’s more likely to spoil. On The Political Scene, the New Yorker podcast, Washington correspondents Jane Mayer, Evan Osnos, and Susan B. Glasser gather to talk about Kennedy’s candidacy and

May 7, 2024 • 29:03

Israel, Gaza, and the Turmoil at One American University

Israel, Gaza, and the Turmoil at One American University

From Cambridge to Los Angeles and at dozens of schools in between, campuses are roiled by protest against American financial and military support for Israel’s war in Gaza—and by university actions, including mass arrests, to suppress the protesters. There hasn’t been a college protest movement as widespread since the Vietnam War. Apart from the violence in the Middle East, the protests also engage crucial issues of speech and academic freedom in the context of America’s culture war. David Remnic

May 3, 2024 • 49:40

Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger, Who Refused to “Find” Votes for Donald Trump, Prepares for Another Election

Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger, Who Refused to “Find” Votes for Donald Trump, Prepares for Another Election

Brad Raffensperger, who holds the usually low-profile office of secretary of state in Georgia, became famous after he recorded a phone call with Donald Trump. Shortly after the 2020 election, Trump demanded that Georgia officials “find 11,780 votes” so that he could win the state. The recorded phone conversation is a linchpin in the Fulton County racketeering case against Trump. Refusing that demand, Raffensperger—a lifelong Republican—received death threats from enraged Trumpists, and the state

Apr 30, 2024 • 15:18

Jerry Seinfeld on Making a Life in Comedy (and Also, Pop-Tarts)

Jerry Seinfeld on Making a Life in Comedy (and Also, Pop-Tarts)

Jerry Seinfeld used to have a comedy bit about the invention of the Pop-Tart, but when his friend Spike Feresten—who wrote the famous “Soup Nazi” episode of “Seinfeld”—suggested it as a topic for a movie, even Seinfeld said “There’s no movie here.” But they workshopped the story, turning the invention of the Pop-Tart into a nutty postwar epic. Seinfeld has written films before, including “Bee Movie,” but this time he’s making his début as a director with “Unfrosted.” (The production did not, he

Apr 26, 2024 • 35:30

Judi Dench on Bond and Shakespeare

Judi Dench on Bond and Shakespeare

Probably far more people have now seen Judi Dench as M—the intelligence chief who’s the boss of James Bond—than anything she’s done in Shakespeare.  With that unmistakably rich voice, she played royalty in “Mrs. Brown” and in “Shakespeare in Love.”  But it is in Shakespeare’s plays, onstage, that Dench made her home as an actor, performing nearly all the major female roles in a stage career of some 60 years.  It’s not just that the language is beautiful, she thinks; Shakespeare “understood about

Apr 23, 2024 • 21:01

Jonathan Haidt on the Plague of Anxiety Affecting Young People

Jonathan Haidt on the Plague of Anxiety Affecting Young People

Both anecdotally and in research, anxiety and depression among young people—often associated with self-harm—have risen sharply over the last decade.  There seems little doubt that Gen Z is suffering in real ways.  But there is not a consensus on the cause or causes, nor how to address them.  The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt believes that enough evidence has accumulated to convict a suspect.  Smartphones and social media, Haidt says, have caused a “great rewiring” in those born after 1995.

Apr 19, 2024 • 30:03

Maya Hawke on the Fear of “Missing Out,” and Jen Silverman on “There’s Going to Be Trouble”

Maya Hawke on the Fear of “Missing Out,” and Jen Silverman on “There’s Going to Be Trouble”

At a band rehearsal in Brooklyn, Rachel Syme talks to Maya Hawke about switching gears between acting and music. In “Stranger Things,” Hawke plays Robin Buckley, a band geek who cracks a Russian code in her spare time; she also recently appeared in films including “Asteroid City” and “Maestro.” “When I’m acting, I inhabit the character that I’m playing,” Hawke says, whereas when fronting a band, “I feel like I’m me… But sometimes I have to screw my courage to the sticking place, and that’s a bit

Apr 16, 2024 • 31:36

How a Republican and a Democrat Carved out Exemptions to Texas’s Abortion Ban

How a Republican and a Democrat Carved out Exemptions to Texas’s Abortion Ban

Texas has multiple abortion laws, with both criminal and civil penalties for providers. They contain language that may allow for exceptions to save the life or “major bodily function” of a pregnant patient, but many doctors have been reluctant to even try interpreting these laws; at least one pregnant woman has been denied cancer treatment. The reporter Stephania Taladrid tells David Remnick about how two lawmakers worked together in a rare bipartisan effort to clarify the limited medical circum

Apr 12, 2024 • 19:08

The Film Critic Justin Chang on What to See in 2024

The Film Critic Justin Chang on What to See in 2024

The New Yorker’s newest staff member, Justin Chang, shares three films that he’s excited to see released in 2024: “Janet Planet,” the début feature film directed by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker; “Blitz,” a wartime drama by Steve McQueen, the director of “12 Years a Slave”; and “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” the widely anticipated new entry in George Miller’s Mad Max series—which, at forty-five years years old, predates Justin Chang.

Apr 8, 2024 • 13:42

The Attack on Black History, with Nikole Hannah-Jones and Jelani Cobb

The Attack on Black History, with Nikole Hannah-Jones and Jelani Cobb

Across much of the country, Republican officials are reaching into K-12 classrooms and universities alike to exert control over what can be taught. In Florida, Texas, and many other states, laws now restrict teaching historical facts about race and racism. Book challenges and bans are surging. Public universities are seeing political meddling in the tenure process. Advocates of these measures say, in effect, that education must emphasize only the positive aspects of American history. Nikole Hann

Apr 5, 2024 • 36:35

Rhiannon Giddens, Americana’s Queen, on Cultivating the Black Roots of Country Music

Rhiannon Giddens, Americana’s Queen, on Cultivating the Black Roots of Country Music

By the standards of any musician, Rhiannon Giddens has taken a twisting and complex path. She was trained as an operatic soprano at the prestigious Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and then fell almost by chance into the study of American folk music and took up the banjo. With like-minded musicians, she founded the influential Carolina Chocolate Drops, which focussed on reviving the repertoire of Black Southern string bands. Giddens plays on Beyoncé’s new country album, which boldly asserts the Bl

Apr 2, 2024 • 15:31

Alicia Keys Returns to Her Roots with Her New Musical, “Hell’s Kitchen”

Alicia Keys Returns to Her Roots with Her New Musical, “Hell’s Kitchen”

Alicia Keys’ new musical is opening on Broadway about a ten-minute walk from where she grew up in Hell’s Kitchen. She describes the New York City neighborhood in the eighties as a “place where anyone who didn’t belong anywhere accumulated.” She tells David Remnick, “There was this unique balance between that grime and the potential of Broadway” just steps away. “Hell’s Kitchen” is the name of the musical that incorporates her songs to tell a story about a teen-ager named Ali who is growing up an

Mar 29, 2024 • 34:29

Percival Everett and the Reinvention of Mark Twain’s Jim

Percival Everett and the Reinvention of Mark Twain’s Jim

In a new novel, Percival Everett offers a radically different perspective on the classic story “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”  Everett tells the story of Jim, who is escaping slavery; he calls his book “James.”  “My Jim—he’s not simple,” Everett tells Julian Lucas. “The Jim that’s represented in Huck Finn is simple.”  Everett, whose 2001 novel “Erasure” was adapted as the Oscar-winning film “American Fiction,” restores Jim’s inner life as a father surviving enslavement, and forced to play

Mar 26, 2024 • 19:55

Trump’s Authoritarian Pronouncements Recall a Dark History

Trump’s Authoritarian Pronouncements Recall a Dark History

In 2016, before most people imagined that Donald Trump would become a serious contender for the Presidency, the New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik wrote about what he later called the “F-word”: fascism.  He saw Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric not as a new force in America but as a throwback to a specific historical precedent in nineteen-thirties Europe.  In the years since, Trump has called for “terminating” articles of the Constitution, has celebrated the January 6th insurrectionists as politic

Mar 22, 2024 • 29:49

March Madness 2024: College Basketball at a Crossroads

March Madness 2024: College Basketball at a Crossroads

As this year’s annual March Madness tournament kicks off, there’s a sense of malaise around men’s college basketball. The advent of the transfer portal is partly to blame, and the trend of top talents departing for the N.B.A. after just one year of college play. “There hasn’t been that kind of charismatic superstar like Zion Williamson at Duke,” Louisa Thomas tells David Remnick, “the big school and the big player, which is the perfect match.” But women’s college basketball is another story. Las

Mar 19, 2024 • 15:28

Judith Butler Can’t “Take Credit or Blame” for Gender Furor

Judith Butler Can’t “Take Credit or Blame” for Gender Furor

A legal assault on trans rights by conservative groups and the Republican Party is escalating, the journalist Erin Reed reports, with nearly five hundred bills introduced across the country  so far this year. Reed spoke with the Radio Hour about the tactics being employed. But long before gender theory became a principal target of the right, it existed principally in academic circles. And one of the leading thinkers in the field was the philosopher Judith Butler. In “Gender Trouble” (from 1990)

Mar 15, 2024 • 34:53

In “Great Expectations,” Vinson Cunningham Watches Barack Obama’s Rise Up Close

In “Great Expectations,” Vinson Cunningham Watches Barack Obama’s Rise Up Close

Like most Americans, Vinson Cunningham first became aware of Barack Obama in 2004, when he gave a breakout speech at the Democratic National Convention. “Very good posture, that guy,” Cunningham noted. “We hang our faith on objects, on people, based on the signs that they put out,” Cunningham tells David Remnick. “And that’s certainly been a factor in my own life. The rapid and urgent search for patterns.” Although Cunningham aspired to be a writer, he got swept up in this historic campaign, wor

Mar 12, 2024 • 19:35

Bradley Cooper Contends for Best Actor in “Maestro”

Bradley Cooper Contends for Best Actor in “Maestro”

“Maestro,” about the legendary conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, is nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, as well as Best Actor for Bradley Cooper—who is not only the film’s star but its director and co-writer.  Cooper’s movie focusses less on Bernstein’s musical triumphs, as a dominant figure in classical music for decades, than on his extremely complicated personal life.  Bernstein was married to the actress Felicia Montealegre, played in the film by Carey Mulliga

Mar 8, 2024 • 30:33

What Biden Is Thinking About the 2024 Election

What Biden Is Thinking About the 2024 Election

Despite hand-wringing among Democrats about Joe Biden’s age and his discouraging poll numbers, the President’s campaign for reëlection displays an “ostentatious level of serenity,” Evan Osnos says about the election. “This is a matter of great personal importance to Joe Biden. He feels almost, viscerally, this contempt for Trump and for what Trump did to the country,” Osnos tells David Remnick, after a rare private interview at the White House. “And let’s remember, he didn’t just try to steal th

Mar 2, 2024 • 22:26

Kara Swisher on Tech Billionaires: “I Don’t Think They Like People”

Kara Swisher on Tech Billionaires: “I Don’t Think They Like People”

Kara Swisher landed on the tech beat as a young reporter at the Washington Post decades ago. She would stare at the teletype machine at the entrance and wonder why this antique sat there when it could already be supplanted by a computer. She eventually foretold the threat that posed to her own business—print journalism—by the rise of free online media; today, she is still raising alarms about how A.I. companies make use of the entire contents of the Internet. “Pay me for my stuff!” she says. “Yo

Mar 1, 2024 • 27:35

Lily Gladstone on Holding the Door Open for More Native Actors in Hollywood. Plus, the Brody Awards

Lily Gladstone on Holding the Door Open for More Native Actors in Hollywood. Plus, the Brody Awards

Lily Gladstone had been in several films, but unknown to most moviegoers, when she got a call for Martin Scorsese’s period drama “Killers of a Flower Moon.” The role was challenging. She plays the historical Mollie Burkhart, an Osage woman married to a white man, Ernest (played in the film by Leonardo DiCaprio), who perpetrates a series of murders of Osage people in a scheme to secure lucrative oil rights. Ernest may be poisoning her with a cocktail that includes morphine, and some of the dialog

Feb 27, 2024 • 34:46

Ty Cobb on Trump, Putin, and the Death of Alexey Navalny

Ty Cobb on Trump, Putin, and the Death of Alexey Navalny

Ty Cobb represented the Trump White House during the height of the Mueller-Russia probe, so he has a unique insight into the former President’s admiration for all things Putin, and his refusal to condemn the dissident Alexey Navalny’s death in prison. Trump’s response, bizarrely, was to compare his own legal troubles to Navalny’s political persecution and likely murder.  Yet Cobb still feels certain that Russia has nothing concrete on Trump, which was the question of the Mueller investigation. R

Feb 23, 2024 • 14:46

For Brontez Purnell, “Memoir Is Fiction—I Don’t Care What Anyone Says”

For Brontez Purnell, “Memoir Is Fiction—I Don’t Care What Anyone Says”

Brontez Purnell is a Renaissance man. He’s a musician, a dancer, a filmmaker, and the author of a number of books. His latest is “Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt,” a departure from the traditional memoir form. It's written in verse and playfully embellishes the truth throughout. “Memoir is fiction—I don’t care what anyone says,” Purnell tells The New Yorker Radio Hour’s Jeffrey Masters. “You [or] I could both write down our lives as true as we know it. But the second our mom reads it, or one of our sibli

Feb 20, 2024 • 18:25

“Pod Save America” ’s Jon Lovett on Trump: “The Threat of Jail Time Sharpens the Mind”

“Pod Save America” ’s Jon Lovett on Trump: “The Threat of Jail Time Sharpens the Mind”

Jon Lovett had been deep inside politics, as a speechwriter in the Obama Administration, before he joined his colleagues Tommy Vietor and Jon Favreau to launch Crooked Media, a liberal answer to the burgeoning ecosystem of right-wing news platforms. “There was too much media that treated people like cynical observers,” Lovett tells David Remnick, “and not enough that treated them like frustrated participants.” Crooked Media has gathered millions of politically engaged listeners—“nerds,” Lovett c

Feb 16, 2024 • 31:28

Jacqueline Novak Is Giving Audiences “Everything She’s Got”

Jacqueline Novak Is Giving Audiences “Everything She’s Got”

The comedian Jacqueline Novak wasn’t well known before her Netflix début “Get on Your Knees.” The show was a big swing in her career, an ambitious attempt to establish her singular voice, and it worked. A fast-paced and raucous examination of her personal journey with oral sex, Novak tosses out so many tangents—philosophical, psychological, anatomical, linguistic—that you’re liable to miss many of her allusions. Novak knows that her hectic delivery is an acquired taste. “We’ve got to get through

Feb 13, 2024 • 19:54

Can Memes Swing the 2024 Election? Plus, Michelle Zauner on “Crying in H Mart”

Can Memes Swing the 2024 Election? Plus, Michelle Zauner on “Crying in H Mart”

In a Presidential race with two leading candidates who are broadly unpopular, any small perceived edge can make a tremendous difference. According to Clare Malone, more and more people will have their judgments formed by memes—visual jokes about the candidates floating on social media. Republican memes capitalize on widespread discomfort with President Biden’s age, by highlighting his stumbles, verbal or otherwise. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is a master of turning bad press to his advantage: he pro

Feb 9, 2024 • 30:05

Sheila Heti Talks with Parul Sehgal About “Alphabetical Diaries”

Sheila Heti Talks with Parul Sehgal About “Alphabetical Diaries”

The writer Sheila Heti is known for unusual approaches, but her latest work is decidedly experimental. Heti “is one of the most interesting novelists working today,” according to The New Yorker critic Parul Sehgal. “She is ruthlessly contemporary. By which I mean, she’s not interested in writing a novel as a nostalgic exercise. She’s constantly trying to figure out  new places fiction can go. New ways that we’re using language, new ways that our minds are evolving.” To write her new book, “Alpha

Feb 6, 2024 • 15:29

Jonathan Blitzer on the Battle over Immigration; and Olivia Rodrigo Talks with David Remnick

Jonathan Blitzer on the Battle over Immigration; and Olivia Rodrigo Talks with David Remnick

In the shadow of another election year, Democrats and Republicans are at a bitter crossroads over immigration, as the system becomes increasingly unmanageable. With as many as twelve thousand migrants arriving at the border per day, and resistance to asylum seekers growing—even among Democrats—the Biden Administration is in a political bind. “You have a global moment of mass migration converging on the border at a time when resources are down. Congress is refusing to give the president the money

Feb 2, 2024 • 55:17

From In the Dark: The Runaway Princesses

From In the Dark: The Runaway Princesses

The wives and daughters of Dubai’s ruler live in unbelievable luxury. So why do the women in Sheikh Mohammed’s family keep trying to run away? The New Yorker staff writer Heidi Blake joins In the Dark’s Madeleine Baran to tell the story of the royal women who risked everything to flee the brutality of one of the world’s most powerful men. In four episodes, drawing on thousands of pages of secret correspondence and never-before-heard audio recordings, “The Runaway Princesses” takes listeners behi

Jan 31, 2024 • 14:18

For Journalists, “Gaza Is Unprecedented,” and Deadly

For Journalists, “Gaza Is Unprecedented,” and Deadly

Journalism has often been a dangerous business, and many reporters have lost their lives reporting the news from conflict zones.  But the rules that have, at least to a degree, protected the safety and freedom of journalists are being violated around the world, nowhere more so than in Gaza.  “Gaza is unprecedented,” Jodie Ginsberg, the president of the Committee to Protect Journalists, says.  “It is unprecedented for the intensity of the killings, the number of journalists killed in such a short

Jan 29, 2024 • 23:28

The Oscar Nominee Cord Jefferson on Why Race Is so “Fertile” for Comedy

The Oscar Nominee Cord Jefferson on Why Race Is so “Fertile” for Comedy

The writer and director Cord Jefferson has struck gold with his first feature film, “American Fiction.” Nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay for Jefferson, the film is winning praise for portraying a broader spectrum of the Black experience than most Hollywood movies. It’s based on the 2001 novel “Erasure,” by Percival Everett, a satire of the literary world.  And Jefferson, who began his career as a journalist before branching out into entertainm

Jan 26, 2024 • 26:36

Pramila Jayapal: Biden’s “Coalition Has Fractured”

Pramila Jayapal: Biden’s “Coalition Has Fractured”

Pramila Jayapal, a Democratic representative and leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, has been sounding the alarm about President Joe Biden’s reëlection prospects.  She fears that the fragile coalition that won him the White House in 2020 – which included suburban swing voters, people of color, and younger, progressive-leaning constituents – is “fractured” over issues like immigration, and his support for Israel’s war in Gaza. Gaza in particular “is just a very difficult issue because

Jan 23, 2024 • 30:21

E. Jean Carroll on Trump Defamation Cases: “Money Is Precious to Him”

E. Jean Carroll on Trump Defamation Cases: “Money Is Precious to Him”

After winning the Iowa caucuses by a historic margin, Donald Trump made his way to a courtroom in New York, where a jury was selected in a second defamation trial involving E. Jean Carroll. In May, 2023, after a jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse, David Remnick spoke with Carroll and her attorney Roberta Kaplan. Trump continues to attack Carroll on social media, even during the ongoing court proceedings to determine damages. “I don’t think he can help himself, honestly,” Kaplan tells Remic

Jan 19, 2024 • 20:13

Danielle Brooks Comes Full Circle in “The Color Purple”

Danielle Brooks Comes Full Circle in “The Color Purple”

“I think of ‘The Color Purple’ as the epic of our time,” Doreen St. Félix said in a conversation with the actress Danielle Brooks.  While St. Félix admits, “I wasn’t convinced that we needed necessarily to have a new envisioning of the story—which has been a novel, which has been a film, which has been a musical twice over”—she finds that Blitz Bazawule’s film, which opened at the end of 2023, is different from its stage and screen predecessors in significant ways, reflecting the concerns of its

Jan 16, 2024 • 28:21

How Donald Trump Broke the Iowa Caucuses and Owns the G.O.P.

How Donald Trump Broke the Iowa Caucuses and Owns the G.O.P.

This time last year, Republicans were reeling from a poorer-than-expected performance in the 2022 midterm elections; many questioned, again, whether it was time to move on from their two-time Presidential standard-bearer. But Donald Trump is so far ahead in the polls that it would be shocking if he did not clinch the Iowa caucuses.  The New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells and Robert Samuels have seen on the ground how much staying power the former President has despite some opposition from relig

Jan 12, 2024 • 21:34

From “Talk Easy”: Sam Fragoso Interviews David Remnick

From “Talk Easy”: Sam Fragoso Interviews David Remnick

As host of The New Yorker Radio Hour, David Remnick asks a lot of questions, and recently he had to answer quite a few himself, sitting for a long interview with Sam Fragoso, who hosts the podcast “Talk Easy.”  They spoke in December about David’s reporting from Israel at the start of the current war in Gaza; his recent collection of writing about musicians, “Holding the Note”; and more.  We’re sharing this episode of “Talk Easy” as a bonus for New Yorker Radio Hour listeners.

Jan 10, 2024 • 1:15:04

Ava DuVernay Wants Her Film “Origin” to Influence the 2024 Election

Ava DuVernay Wants Her Film “Origin” to Influence the 2024 Election

The filmmaker Ava DuVernay has a reputation for tackling challenging material about America’s troubled past. She depicted the bloody fight to achieve equal voting rights for African Americans in her 2014 film “Selma”; examined the prison-industrial complex in her 2016 Peabody Award-winning documentary “13th”; and portrayed the wrongful conviction of five teen-age boys of color in the miniseries “When They See Us.” But “Origin,” her first narrative feature film in five years, may be her most ambi

Jan 8, 2024 • 33:45

How the Journalist John Nichols Became Another January 6th Conspiracy-Theory Target

How the Journalist John Nichols Became Another January 6th Conspiracy-Theory Target

The veteran political reporter John Nichols was taking his daughter to the orthodontist on January 6, 2021, the fateful day when the transfer of Presidential power was temporarily derailed by a mob at the Capitol. On March 4th of this year, the former President Donald Trump is scheduled to stand trial for his actions on and around that day, and, in a court filing last November, his attorneys implied that the government is withholding information about whether Nichols, and others,  had a role to

Jan 5, 2024 • 16:58

The Poet John Lee Clark’s “How to Communicate” Brings DeafBlind Experience to the Page

The Poet John Lee Clark’s “How to Communicate” Brings DeafBlind Experience to the Page

Although many hearing and sighted people imagine DeafBlind life in tragic terms, as an experience of isolation and darkness, the poet John Lee Clark’s writing is full of joy. It’s funny and surprising, mapping the contours of a regular life marked by common pleasures and frustrations. Clark, who was born Deaf and lost his sight at a young age, has established himself not just as a writer and translator but as a scholar of Deaf and DeafBlind literature. His recent collection, “How to Communicate,

Jan 2, 2024 • 26:47

Dexter Filkins Reports on the Border Crisis

Dexter Filkins Reports on the Border Crisis

Dexter Filkins has reported on conflict situations around the world, and recently spent months reporting on the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border. In a piece published earlier this year, Filkins tries to untangle how conditions around the globe, an abrupt change in executive direction from Trump to Biden, and an antiquated immigration system have created a chaotic situation. “It’s difficult to appreciate the scale and the magnitude of what’s happening there unless you see it,” Filkins tells Da

Dec 29, 2023 • 24:10

From Critics at Large: The Year of the Doll

From Critics at Large: The Year of the Doll

This bonus episode comes from The New Yorker’s Critics at Large podcast.In the highest-grossing movie of 2023, Barbie, a literal doll, leaves the comforts of Barbieland and ventures into real-world Los Angeles, where she discovers the myriad difficulties of modern womanhood. This arc from cosseted naïveté to feminist awakening is a narrative through line that connects some of the biggest cultural products of the year. In this episode, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra

Dec 26, 2023 • 44:11

Bruce Springsteen Has a Gift He Keeps on Giving

Bruce Springsteen Has a Gift He Keeps on Giving

At seventy-four, Bruce Springsteen has been cementing his status as a rock-and-roll legend for almost fifty years: he released his widely heralded, but not initially widely heard, début, “Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.” in 1973. But, true to form, the artist who became known to his fans as the Boss hasn’t rested on his laurels. After weathering a spate of health troubles this past year, which led him to cancel much of his tour, the rock icon plans to hit the road again in the new year, all ove

Dec 22, 2023 • 49:48

Christmas in Tehran: Bringing the Holidays to Hostages

Christmas in Tehran: Bringing the Holidays to Hostages

In 1979, as Christmas approached, the United States Embassy in Tehran held more than fifty American hostages, who had been seized when revolutionaries stormed the embassy. No one from the U.S. had been able to have contact with them. The Reverend M. William Howard, Jr., was the president of the National Council of Churches at the time, and when he received a telegram from the Revolutionary Council, inviting him to perform Christmas services for the hostages, he jumped at the opportunity. In Amer

Dec 19, 2023 • 28:55

A Harrowing Detention in Gaza

A Harrowing Detention in Gaza

Growing up in Gaza, Mosab Abu Toha wasn’t used to seeing Israeli soldiers in person. “You are bombed from the sky. You are bombed by tanks. You do not see the people, the soldiers who are killing you and your family,” he tells David Remnick. Abu Toha is a poet educated in the United States, who has contributed to The New Yorker from Gaza since Israel launched its bombardment after the October 7th Hamas attack. As Abu Toha and his family tried to flee Gaza, he was stopped by Israeli forces, and a

Dec 15, 2023 • 21:33

Brandy Clark: Grammy-Nominated Album Is “Authentically Me”

Brandy Clark: Grammy-Nominated Album Is “Authentically Me”

As an aspiring artist, Brandy Clark found herself in love with the craft of songwriting, as some of her peers were working on their image and presentation. She became a top songwriter in Nashville, contributing songs to performers like Kacey Musgraves and LeAnn Rimes. Being a lesbian also complicated any desire to be on the public stage in a conservative industry. But she eventually emerged as a solo artist, partly under the tutelage of Brandi Carlile, who acted as producer. Carlile has ushered

Dec 12, 2023 • 27:33

Liz Cheney: Donald Trump Should Go to Jail if Convicted

Liz Cheney: Donald Trump Should Go to Jail if Convicted

Liz Cheney has been Republican royalty, and a conservative stalwart in Washington—a daughter of former Vice-President Dick Cheney and culture warrior Lynne Cheney. But after protesting Donald Trump’s election lies, and voting for his impeachment after January 6th, she found herself in exile from the G.O.P. Cheney is contemplating a Presidential campaign on a third-party line.  As she promotes her new book, “Oath and Honor,” she is raising the alarm that Americans across the political spectrum ha

Dec 8, 2023 • 24:33

How Did Our Democracy Get so Fragile?

How Did Our Democracy Get so Fragile?

We’re in the midst of another election season, and yet again American democracy hangs in the balance, with a leading Presidential candidate who has threatened to suspend parts of the Constitution. How did the foundations of our political system become so shaky?  Jelani Cobb, the dean of the journalism school at Columbia University; Evan Osnos, a Washington correspondent for The New Yorker; and the best-selling author and historian Jill Lepore joined The New Yorker’s Michael Luo for a discussion

Dec 5, 2023 • 26:35

Dolly Parton “Busted a Gut” Reaching for the High Notes on “Rockstar”

Dolly Parton “Busted a Gut” Reaching for the High Notes on “Rockstar”

After six decades as an icon in country music, it’s hard to imagine Dolly Parton had anything to prove.  But when she was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, in 2022, she admitted to feeling uneasy.  A result of that feeling is “Rockstar,” the 77-year-old’s first foray into rock music.  “I wanted the rock people to be proud of me, let’s put it that way,” Parton tells the contributor Emily Lordi. “I wanted them to say, ‘Did you hear Dolly’s rock album? Man, she killed it.’ ” For this albu

Dec 1, 2023 • 24:27

“Maestro” is the “Scariest Thing I’ve Ever Done”

“Maestro” is the “Scariest Thing I’ve Ever Done”

As a child, Bradley Cooper would mime conducting an orchestra, and he asked for a baton from Santa. Decades later, as a filmmaker, he fulfilled his childhood dreams in the acclaimed new film “Maestro.” Cooper co-wrote and directed the movie, and co-stars as Leonard Bernstein, perhaps the greatest American conductor ever. In a pivotal scene, Cooper conducts the famous London Symphony Orchestra with a full chorus, in real time, through a performance of Mahler, which Cooper calls the “scariest thin

Nov 24, 2023 • 49:20

Geoffrey Hinton: “It’s Far Too Late” to Stop Artificial Intelligence

Geoffrey Hinton: “It’s Far Too Late” to Stop Artificial Intelligence

The American public’s increasing fascination with artificial intelligence—its rapid advancement and ability to reshape the future—has put the computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton in an awkward position. He is known as the godfather of A.I. because of his groundbreaking work in neural networks, a branch of computer science that most researchers had given up on, while Hinton’s advances eventually led to a revolution.  But he is now fearful of what it could unleash. “There’s a whole bunch of risks th

Nov 21, 2023 • 32:49

A Rise in Antisemitism, at Home and Abroad

A Rise in Antisemitism, at Home and Abroad

Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt is a noted historian of antisemitism, and serves the State Department as Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism. Violence and threats against Jews have been surging for years.  “We’ve been seeing [antisemitism] coming from all ends of the political spectrum, and in between,” Lipstadt tells David Remnick. “We see it coming from Christians, we see it coming from Muslims, we see it coming from atheists.  We see it coming from Jews.”  In the aftermath of Israel’

Nov 17, 2023 • 17:06

Emerald Fennell’s Anatomy of Desire

Emerald Fennell’s Anatomy of Desire

For the follow-up to her acclaimed and controversial début feature film, “Promising Young Woman,” the writer and director Emerald Fennell (also well known as an actor on “The Crown”) has made a dark satire of not just aristocracy but our collective preoccupation with it.  “Saltburn” follows a college student who joins a wealthy classmate at his family’s mysterious old country estate, which the director shot as “a sex object.” Fennell is very familiar with this world—albeit from a distance. Her f

Nov 14, 2023 • 29:05

Will the Government Put the Reins on Amazon?

Will the Government Put the Reins on Amazon?

In a relatively short period of time, Amazon has exerted an enormous amount of influence over a broad spectrum of American life. From the groceries we buy to the movies and television shows we watch, Amazon has been setting the prices and driving potential competition out of business. Its prices may seem low, but “Amazon has actually quietly been hiking prices for consumers in ways that are not always clearly visible,” the Federal Trade Commission chair, Lina Khan, tells David Remnick, but “can

Nov 10, 2023 • 21:30

From “On the Media”: David Remnick Talks with Brooke Gladstone About Reporting in Israel

From “On the Media”: David Remnick Talks with Brooke Gladstone About Reporting in Israel

As Israel marks one month since the deadliest terrorist attack in its history, David Remnick sits down with Brooke Gladstone, the host of the podcast “On the Media,” to talk about reporting on the conflict. He spent a week in Israel as people were reeling from the horrors of October 7th and as the Israeli government was launching an unprecedented campaign against Hamas in Gaza. Remnick details the process behind “The Cities of Killing,” his ten-thousand-word piece for The New Yorker’s magazine.

Nov 8, 2023 • 21:14

Is a “Win-Win” Still Possible in Policing?

Is a “Win-Win” Still Possible in Policing?

As the Black Lives Matter movement brought sustained national attention to police shootings of unarmed Black people, there have been many efforts made around the country to reform policing. The movement also became associated with police abolition and the controversial call for defunding. Kai Wright, the host of WNYC’s “Notes from America,” convenes a panel to look at the effects of the movement on policing, talking to the policy analyst Samuel Sinyangwe, of Mapping Police Violence; the attorney

Nov 7, 2023 • 36:52

Sybrina Fulton: “Trayvon Martin Could Have Been Anybody’s Son”

Sybrina Fulton: “Trayvon Martin Could Have Been Anybody’s Son”

Sybrina Fulton was thrust into the national spotlight just over a decade ago for the worst possible reason: her son, Trayvon Martin – an unarmed teenage boy returning from the store – was shot.  Her son’s body was tested for drugs and alcohol, but not the self-appointed neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, who claimed self-defense and was acquitted.  “Trayvon Martin could have been anybody’s son at seventeen,” Fulton tells David Remnick. He was an affectionate "mama’s boy” who wound up inspir

Nov 3, 2023 • 24:39

From On the Media: We Don’t Talk About Leonard Leo

From On the Media: We Don’t Talk About Leonard Leo

In a new miniseries from “On the Media,” “We Don’t Talk About Leonard,” the ProPublica reporters Andrea Bernstein, Andy Kroll, and Ilya Marritz investigate the background of the man who has played a critical role in the conservative takeover of America’s courts via the Federalist Society: Leonard Leo. It traces Leo’s path from humble roots in middle-class New Jersey (he was nicknamed Moneybags Kid) to a mansion in Maine where, last year, he hosted a fabulous party on the eve of the Supreme Court

Oct 31, 2023 • 50:11

Is there a Path Forward for Gaza and Israel?

Is there a Path Forward for Gaza and Israel?

After returning from a week of reporting in Israel, David Remnick has two important conversations about the conflict between Israelis and Arabs both in and outside of Gaza. First, he speaks with Yonit Levi, a veteran news anchor on Israeli television, about how her country is both reeling from the October 7th terrorist attacks perpetrated by Hamas, and grappling with how to strike at Hamas as the country prepares for an invasion that would be catastrophic for Palestinians. Meanwhile, the Palesti

Oct 27, 2023 • 50:13

”Fellow Travelers”: A Showtime Series Explores a Forgotten Witch Hunt

”Fellow Travelers”: A Showtime Series Explores a Forgotten Witch Hunt

Much of the peril and persecution of the McCarthy era is well-trodden territory in historical dramas, but the burden that the Red Scare placed on the L.G.B.T. community is another story. The historian and writer Thomas Mallon published a novel called “Fellow Travelers,” drawing from real-life events, about a gay couple living under the shadow of the McCarthy witch hunts; it has now been adapted into a Showtime miniseries. “The government was really on a tear when it came to dismissing gays from

Oct 24, 2023 • 18:31

Spike Lee on His “Dream Project,” a Joe Louis Bio-Pic

Spike Lee on His “Dream Project,” a Joe Louis Bio-Pic

The director Spike Lee looked back at the length and breadth of his career so far during a sit-down with David Remnick at the New Yorker Festival. Although Lee’s storied filmography may be familiar to movie buffs, few are likely to know as much about his humble beginnings as the scion of a celebrated, but often unemployed, musician—the late Bill Lee. The young Spike Lee bore some resentment toward his father, an upright-bass player who eschewed countless gigs because he refused to play an electr

Oct 20, 2023 • 31:35

Rodrigo Duterte’s Deadly Promise

Rodrigo Duterte’s Deadly Promise

When Rodrigo Duterte ran for the presidency of the Philippines and won, in 2016, the Western press noted the similarities between this unconventional candidate and Donald Trump—who also liked to casually espouse violence on the campaign trail and beyond.  Duterte used provocative and obscene language to tap into the country’s fears about a real, albeit overstated, drug problem. “Every drug addict was a schizophrenic, hallucinatory, will rape your mother and butcher your father,” as reporter Patr

Oct 17, 2023 • 23:45

Rodrigo Duterte’s Deadly Promise

Rodrigo Duterte’s Deadly Promise

When Rodrigo Duterte ran for the presidency of the Philippines and won, in 2016, the Western press noted the similarities between this unconventional candidate and Donald Trump—who also liked to casually espouse violence on the campaign trail and beyond.  Duterte used provocative and obscene language to tap into the country’s fears about a real, albeit overstated, drug problem. “Every drug addict was a schizophrenic, hallucinatory, will rape your mother and butcher your father,” as reporter Patr

Oct 17, 2023 • 23:45

Werner Herzog Defends His “Ecstatic” Approach to the Truth

Werner Herzog Defends His “Ecstatic” Approach to the Truth

The renowned German filmmaker Werner Herzog has become known for many things: his notoriously ambitious film productions like “Fitzcarraldo” and “Aguirre, The Wrath of God”; his expansive documentaries; and his mellifluous voice, which he has used to great effect lately as an actor in productions like “Jack Reacher'' and “The Mandalorian.” But, according to Herzog himself, his fabulist work as his own biographer deserves just as much praise. “That’s my approach, that is beyond outside of facts,”

Oct 13, 2023 • 26:41

Werner Herzog Defends His “Ecstatic” Approach to the Truth

Werner Herzog Defends His “Ecstatic” Approach to the Truth

The renowned German filmmaker Werner Herzog has become known for many things: his notoriously ambitious film productions like “Fitzcarraldo” and “Aguirre, The Wrath of God”; his expansive documentaries; and his mellifluous voice, which he has used to great effect lately as an actor in productions like “Jack Reacher'' and “The Mandalorian.” But, according to Herzog himself, his fabulist work as his own biographer deserves just as much praise. “That’s my approach, that is beyond outside of facts,”

Oct 13, 2023 • 26:41

Rubén Blades Wasn’t Supposed to Be a Salsa Star

Rubén Blades Wasn’t Supposed to Be a Salsa Star

For roughly half a century, the singer Rubén Blades has been spreading the gospel of salsa music to every corner of the globe, but his status as an music icon was anything but assured. Despite having an interest in music at an early age, the Panamanian-born Blades was pursuing a law career. But when the tumultuous political climate in Panama forced his family into exile in the United States, Blades found his way back into the music industry—through a record-company mailroom. “My diploma was not

Oct 10, 2023 • 28:53

Rubén Blades Wasn’t Supposed to Be a Salsa Star

Rubén Blades Wasn’t Supposed to Be a Salsa Star

For roughly half a century, the singer Rubén Blades has been spreading the gospel of salsa music to every corner of the globe, but his status as an music icon was anything but assured. Despite having an interest in music at an early age, the Panamanian-born Blades was pursuing a law career. But when the tumultuous political climate in Panama forced his family into exile in the United States, Blades found his way back into the music industry—through a record-company mailroom. “My diploma was not

Oct 10, 2023 • 28:53

Al Gore on the Climate Crisis: “We Have a Switch We Can Flip”

Al Gore on the Climate Crisis: “We Have a Switch We Can Flip”

Despite months of discouraging news about extreme weather conditions, the former vice-president Al Gore still believes that there is a solution to the climate crisis clearly in sight. “We have a switch we can flip,” he tells David Remnick. The problem, as Gore sees it, is that a powerful legacy network of political and financial spheres of influence are stubbornly standing in the way. “When ExxonMobil or Chevron put their ads on the air, the purpose is not for a husband and wife to say, ‘Oh, let

Oct 6, 2023 • 21:56

Al Gore on the Climate Crisis: “We Have a Switch We Can Flip”

Al Gore on the Climate Crisis: “We Have a Switch We Can Flip”

Despite months of discouraging news about extreme weather conditions, the former vice-president Al Gore still believes that there is a solution to the climate crisis clearly in sight. “We have a switch we can flip,” he tells David Remnick. The problem, as Gore sees it, is that a powerful legacy network of political and financial spheres of influence are stubbornly standing in the way. “When ExxonMobil or Chevron put their ads on the air, the purpose is not for a husband and wife to say, ‘Oh, let

Oct 6, 2023 • 21:56

Introducing Critics at Large: The Myth-Making of Elon Musk

Introducing Critics at Large: The Myth-Making of Elon Musk

In this bonus episode, the hosts of Critics at Large dissect Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk, asking how it reflects ideas about power, money, cults of personality—from “Batman” to “The Social Network.” The critics examine how, in recent years, the idea of the unimpeachable Silicon Valley founder has lost its sheen. Narratives, such as the 2022 series “WeCrashed,” tell the story of startup founders who make lofty promises, only to watch their empires crumble when those promises are

Oct 4, 2023 • 12:33

Introducing Critics at Large: The Myth-Making of Elon Musk

Introducing Critics at Large: The Myth-Making of Elon Musk

In this bonus episode, the hosts of Critics at Large dissect Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk, asking how it reflects ideas about power, money, cults of personality—from “Batman” to “The Social Network.” The critics examine how, in recent years, the idea of the unimpeachable Silicon Valley founder has lost its sheen. Narratives, such as the 2022 series “WeCrashed,” tell the story of startup founders who make lofty promises, only to watch their empires crumble when those promises are

Oct 4, 2023 • 12:35

Should Biden Push for Regime Change in Russia?

Should Biden Push for Regime Change in Russia?

Throughout the Russian invasion of Ukraine, David Remnick has talked with Stephen Kotkin, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution who is deeply informed on U.S.-Russia relations, and a biographer of Stalin. With the Ukrainian counter-offensive proceeding very slowly, Kotkin says that Ukraine is unlikely to “win the peace” on the battlefield; an armistice on Zelensky’s terms—although they may be morally correct—would require the defeat of Russia itself. Realistically, he thinks, Ukraine must co

Oct 3, 2023 • 23:48

Olivia Rodrigo Talks with David Remnick

Olivia Rodrigo Talks with David Remnick

Being called the voice of a generation might seem a little off to someone born after the millennium. But Olivia Rodrigo’s songs clearly hit home for Gen Z. She turned twenty this year, and has already been one of the biggest stars since 2021, when “Drivers License” became the No. 1 song on the planet. She won three Grammy Awards that year, including Best New Artist. One of her first public performances was on “Saturday Night Live.” Rodrigo’s second album, “Guts,” came out this month, and she rem

Sep 29, 2023 • 27:59

Hernan Diaz’s “Trust,” a Novel of High Finance

Hernan Diaz’s “Trust,” a Novel of High Finance

The daughter of eccentric aristocrats marries a Wall Street tycoon of dubious ethics during the Roaring Twenties. That sounds like a plot that F. Scott Fitzgerald might have written, or Edith Wharton. But “Trust,” by the writer Hernan Diaz, is very much of our time. The novel is told by four people in four different formats, which offer conflicting accounts of the couple’s life, the tycoon Andrew Bevel’s misdeeds, and his role in the crash of 1929. And though a book like “The Great Gatsby” tends

Sep 26, 2023 • 20:53

Kelly Clarkson on Writing About Divorce

Kelly Clarkson on Writing About Divorce

Twenty years after her breakout on “American Idol,” Kelly Clarkson released an album called “Chemistry” that deals with the long arc of a relationship and her recent divorce. She sat down to talk with Hanif Abdurraqib, a music writer passionate about the craft of songwriting. “This literally was written in real time,” Clarkson reflects. “That was me being indecisive. Man, I have kids. Do I want to do this? Can I try again?” But writing about divorce as one of the best-known celebrities in Americ

Sep 22, 2023 • 30:28

Naomi Klein Speaks with Jia Tolentino about “Doppelganger”

Naomi Klein Speaks with Jia Tolentino about “Doppelganger”

For twenty-some years, Naomi Klein has been a leading thinker on the left. She’s especially known for the idea of disaster capitalism: an analysis that the forces of big business will exploit any severe disruption to take over more space in our lives. She was often confused with another prominent political writer, Naomi Wolf—once a feminist on the left who has, in recent years, embraced conspiracy theories on the right and is now on good terms with Steve Bannon. Klein’s new book, “Doppelganger,”

Sep 19, 2023 • 20:49

A Solution For the Chronically Homeless, and Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison

A Solution For the Chronically Homeless, and Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison

About 1.2 million people in the United States experience homelessness in a given year—you could nearly fill the city of Dallas with the unhoused. But there are proven solutions. For the chronically homeless, a key strategy is supportive housing—providing not only a stable apartment, but also services like psychiatric and medical care on-site. The New Yorker contributor Jennifer Egan spent the past year following several individuals as they transitioned into a new supportive-housing building in B

Sep 15, 2023 • 29:37

Richard Brody Makes the Case for Keeping Your DVDs

Richard Brody Makes the Case for Keeping Your DVDs

At the end of this month, after more than two decades, Netflix is phasing out its DVD-rental business. While that may not come as a surprise given the predominance of streaming platforms, it’s a great loss to cinephiles, according to the New Yorker’s Richard Brody. Streaming services routinely drop titles from circulation, and amazing films may be lost to moviegoers. “Physical media is what protects us from being at the mercy of streaming services for our movies and our music,” Brody says. “It’s

Sep 12, 2023 • 13:21

A Master Class with David Grann

A Master Class with David Grann

David Grann is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of two nonfiction books that topped the best-seller list this summer: “The Wager” and “Killers of the Flower Moon,” from 2017, which Martin Scorsese has adapted into a film opening in October. Grann is among the most lauded nonfiction writers at The New Yorker; David Remnick says that “his urge to find unique stories and tell them with rigor and style is rare to the vanishing point.” Grann talks with Remnick about his beginnings as

Sep 8, 2023 • 34:00

Alone and on Foot in Antarctica

Alone and on Foot in Antarctica

Henry Worsley was a husband, father, and an officer of an élite British commando unit; also a tapestry weaver, amateur boxer, photographer, and collector of rare books, maps, and fossils. But his true obsession was exploration. Worsley revered the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton and he had led a 2009 expedition to the South Pole. But Worsley planned an even greater challenge. At fifty-five, he set out to trek alone to ski from one side of the Antarctic continent to the other, hauling more t

Sep 5, 2023 • 25:00

No More Souters

No More Souters

David Souter is one of the most private, low-profile Justices ever to have served on the Supreme Court. He rarely gave interviews or speeches. Yet his tenure was anything but low profile. Deemed a “home run” nominee by the George H. W. Bush Administration, Souter refused to answer questions during his confirmation hearing about pressing issues—most critically, about abortion rights and Roe v. Wade, which Republicans were seeking to overturn. He was confirmed overwhelmingly. Then, in Planned Pare

Sep 1, 2023 • 49:42

How Does Extreme Heat Affect the Body?

How Does Extreme Heat Affect the Body?

The Korey Stringer Institute at the University of Connecticut was named after an N.F.L. player who died of exertional heatstroke. The lab’s main research subjects have been athletes, members of the military, and laborers. But, with climate change, even mild exertion under extreme heat will affect more and more of us; in many parts of the United States, a heat wave and power outage could cause a substantial number of fatalities. Dhruv Khullar, a New Yorker contributor and practicing physician, vi

Aug 29, 2023 • 16:56

The Origins of “Braiding Sweetgrass”

The Origins of “Braiding Sweetgrass”

Robin Wall Kimmerer is an unlikely literary star. A botanist by training—a specialist in moss—she spent much of her career at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry. But, when she was well established in her academic work, having “done the things you need to do to get tenure,” she launched into a different kind of writing; her new style sought to bridge the divide between Western science and Indigenous teachings she had learned, as a member of the Citize

Aug 25, 2023 • 27:14

Tessa Hadley on What Decades of Failure Taught Her About Writing

Tessa Hadley on What Decades of Failure Taught Her About Writing

The New Yorker first published a short story by Tessa Hadley in 2002. Titled “Lost and Found,” it described a friendship between two women who had been close since childhood.  Hadley’s fiction is often consumed with relationships at this scale: tight dramas close to home. She captures, within these relationships, an extraordinary depth and complexity of emotion. The New Yorker recently published its thirtieth story from Hadley—a higher count than any other fiction writer in recent times. That fi

Aug 22, 2023 • 19:09

Talking to Conservatives about Climate Change

Talking to Conservatives about Climate Change

Even in a summer of record-breaking heat and disasters, Republican Presidential candidates have ignored or mocked climate change. But some conservative legislators in Congress recognize that action is necessary. David Remnick talks with a leader of the Conservative Climate Caucus about her party’s stance on climate change, her belief that fossil fuels cannot be rapidly phased out, and the problems she sees with the Inflation Reduction Act. Then, the authoritative climate reporter Elizabeth Kolbe

Aug 18, 2023 • 31:13

The Novelist Esmeralda Santiago on Learning to Write After a Stroke

The Novelist Esmeralda Santiago on Learning to Write After a Stroke

The author Esmeralda Santiago has been writing about Puerto Rico and questions of immigration and identity since the early nineties. But, in 2008, she suffered a stroke that left her unable to decipher words on a page. In the months that followed, she relied on some of the same strategies she’d used to teach herself English after moving to the United States as a young teen-ager—checking out children’s books from the library, for example, to learn basic vocabulary. Santiago’s latest book, “Las Ma

Aug 15, 2023 • 19:31

Will the End of Affirmative Action Lead to the End of Legacy Admissions?

Will the End of Affirmative Action Lead to the End of Legacy Admissions?

The practice of legacy admissions—preferential consideration of the children of alumni—has emerged as a national flash point since the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in June. Even some prominent Republicans are joining the Biden Administration in calling for its end. David Remnick speaks with the U.S. Education Secretary, Miguel Cardona, about the politics behind college admissions. Cardona sees legacy preference as part of a pattern that discourages many students from applying to selec

Aug 11, 2023 • 30:58

James McBride on His New Novel, “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store”

James McBride on His New Novel, “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store”

James McBride’s new novel, “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store,” centers on the discovery of a skeleton at the bottom of a well in a small town in Pennsylvania. What unfolds is the story of a young Black boy raised by a Jewish woman decades earlier, a story that has been closely held secret among the communities that call the area home. McBride has been writing at the intersection of race, Blackness, whiteness, and Judaism in America since his 1995 memoir “The Color of Water,” a tribute to his own

Aug 8, 2023 • 14:01

Emily Nussbaum on the Culture Wars in Country Music

Emily Nussbaum on the Culture Wars in Country Music

Last month, the country singer Jason Aldean released a music video for “Try That in a Small Town,” a song that initially received little attention. But the video cast the song’s lyrics in a new light. While Aldean sings, “Try that in a small town / See how far ya make it down the road / ’Round here, we take care of our own,” images of protests against police brutality are interspersed with Aldean singing outside a county courthouse where a lynching once took place. Aldean’s defenders—and there a

Aug 4, 2023 • 36:52

A Trip to the Boundary Waters

A Trip to the Boundary Waters

Alex Kotlowitz is known as a chronicler of Chicago, and of lives marred by urban poverty and violence. His books set in the city include “An American Summer,” “There Are No Children Here,” and “Never a City So Real.” Nevertheless, for some 40 years he has returned to a remote stretch of woods, summer after summer. At a young age, he found himself navigating a canoe through a series of lakes, deep in the woods along Minnesota’s border with Canada. This stretch of country is known as the Boundary

Aug 1, 2023 • 17:08

Regina Spektor on “Home, Before and After”

Regina Spektor on “Home, Before and After”

Twenty years ago, Regina Spektor was yet another aspiring musician in New York, lugging around a backpack full of self-produced CDs and playing at little clubs in the East Village—anywhere that had a piano, basically. But anonymity didn’t last long. She toured with the Strokes in 2003, and, once she had a record deal, her ambitions grew beyond indie music: she began writing pop-inflected anthems about love and heartbreak, loneliness and death, belief and doubt. Her 2006 album “Begin to Hope” wen

Jul 28, 2023 • 43:17

Colson Whitehead on “Crook Manifesto”

Colson Whitehead on “Crook Manifesto”

Colson Whitehead is one of the most lauded writers working today. His 2016 novel “The Underground Railroad” won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction; he won the Pulitzer again for his next novel, “The Nickel Boys,” in 2020.  His career is notable for hopping from genre to genre. As an artist, he tells David Remnick, “it seemed like, if you knew how to do something, why do it again?” Whitehead is again trying something new: a sequel. He’s following up “Harlem Shuffle,” his 2

Jul 25, 2023 • 23:22

Adapting Robert Oppenheimer’s Story to Film, Plus Greta Gerwig on Becoming a Director

Adapting Robert Oppenheimer’s Story to Film, Plus Greta Gerwig on Becoming a Director

In making “Oppenheimer,” which opens in theatres this weekend, the director Christopher Nolan relied on a Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography of the father of the atomic bomb, “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin. Bird is credited as a writer of Nolan’s movie, and he spoke with David Remnick about the ambivalence that the scientist expressed publicly about the use of the bomb, which led to a McCarthyist show trial t

Jul 21, 2023 • 27:22

Donovan Ramsey on “When Crack Was King”

Donovan Ramsey on “When Crack Was King”

“When people think of the crack epidemic, they think of crime,” the journalist Donovan X. Ramsey tells David Remnick. “But they don’t necessarily know the ways that it impacted the most vulnerable—the ways that it changed the lives of people who sold it, who were addicted to it, who loved people who sold it or were addicted to it.” Ramsey’s new book, “When Crack Was King: A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era,” weaves the stories of four people who survived the epidemic into a historical ana

Jul 18, 2023 • 23:41

A Mysterious Third Party Enters the Presidential Race

A Mysterious Third Party Enters the Presidential Race

No Labels, which pitches itself as a centrist movement to appeal to disaffected voters, has secured a considerable amount of funding and is working behind the scenes to get on Presidential ballots across the country. The group has yet to announce a candidate, but “most likely we’ll have both a Republican and Democrat on the ticket,” Pat McCrory, the former governor of North Carolina and one of the leaders of No Labels, tells David Remnick. Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are reportedly u

Jul 14, 2023 • 27:27

How to Buy Forgiveness from Medical Debt

How to Buy Forgiveness from Medical Debt

Nearly one in ten Americans owe significant medical debt, a burden that can become crippling as living costs and interest rates rise. Over the past decade, a nonprofit called RIP Medical Debt has designed a novel approach to chip away at this problem. The organization solicits donations to purchase portfolios of medical debt on the debt market, where the debt trades at steeply discounted prices. Then, instead of attempting to collect on it as a normal buyer would, they forgive the debt. The staf

Jul 11, 2023 • 14:31

The Conspiracies of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

The Conspiracies of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the son of a former Attorney General and the nephew of President John F. Kennedy, has announced that he’s running for the Democratic Presidential nomination. He is nearly seventy years old, and has never held public office. “There’s nothing in the United States Constitution that says that you have to go to Congress first and then Senate second,or be a governor before you’re elected to the Presidency,” he tells David Remnick. With no prominent elected Democrat challenging

Jul 7, 2023 • 32:53

Beyoncé Takes the Stage

Beyoncé Takes the Stage

This summer, the most anticipated tour (in close contest with Taylor Swift) is Beyoncé’s tour for her seventh studio album, “Renaissance,” which came out in 2022. Her previous record “was about the turbulence of [her] marriage and was in some ways a monument to marriage as an institution,” The New Yorker’s music critic Carrie Battan tells David Remnick. “Renaissance”—a homage to club music and queer culture—“is about breaking free of all of those chains. It’s about going to the club, and quittin

Jul 4, 2023 • 9:27

Russia’s No-Good, Very Failed Coup, and Jill Lepore on Amending the Constitution

Russia’s No-Good, Very Failed Coup, and Jill Lepore on Amending the Constitution

Yevgeny Prigozhin’s march on Moscow last weekend, which killed more than a dozen Russian soldiers, fizzled as quickly as it began, but its repercussions are just beginning. The Wagner Group commander issued a video from Belarus claiming that he did not attempt a coup against Putin but a protest against the Defense Ministry.  David Remnick talks with Masha Gessen and the contributor Joshua Yaffa, who has written on the Wagner Group, about what lies ahead in Russia. Both feel that by revealing the

Jun 30, 2023 • 41:18

Jonathan Mitchell, a Prominent Anti-Abortion Lawyer, on Restraining the Power of the Supreme Court

Jonathan Mitchell, a Prominent Anti-Abortion Lawyer, on Restraining the Power of the Supreme Court

In recent years, the attorney Jonathan Mitchell has become a crucial figure in the anti-abortion movement. Advising a Texas state senator, Mitchell developed Texas’s S.B. 8 legislation, which allows for civil lawsuits against individuals who have helped facilitate an abortion—acts like driving a patient to an appointment. The law was crafted to evade review by the Supreme Court in the period before Dobbs ended the precedent of Roe v. Wade. Opponents of the law have called it state-sponsored vigi

Jun 27, 2023 • 17:04

A Year of Change for a North Dakota Abortion Clinic, and the Composer John Williams

A Year of Change for a North Dakota Abortion Clinic, and the Composer John Williams

A year ago, the staff writer Emily Witt visited Fargo, North Dakota, to report on the Red River Women’s Clinic—the only abortion provider in the state. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision had just come down, and the clinic was scrambling to move across state lines, to the adjacent city of Moorhead, Minnesota. This spring, Witt returned to talk with Tammi Kromenaker, the clinic’s director. Kromenaker says the clinic’s new home has had some notable upsides—a parking lot that shields patients from p

Jun 23, 2023 • 31:58

Singer-songwriter Joy Oladokun, Plus Bryan Washington

Singer-songwriter Joy Oladokun, Plus Bryan Washington

The singer-songwriter Joy Oladokun recently released her fourth album, called “Proof of Life.” Raised near Phoenix, Oladokun had aspirations of becoming a preacher before turning to music in earnest. Like many of the great songwriters, she has a way of staring down the hardest parts of life with an offbeat sort of wit. The New Yorker’s Hanif Abdurraqib calls her a “writer’s writer,” someone “interested in the lyric as an opportunity to build narrative worlds.” Oladokun talked with him about seei

Jun 20, 2023 • 26:39

Dexter Filkins on the Dilemma at the Border

Dexter Filkins on the Dilemma at the Border

Dexter Filkins has reported on conflict situations around the world, and recently spent months reporting on the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border. In a recent piece, Filkins tries to untangle how conditions around the globe, an abrupt change in executive direction from Trump to Biden, and an antiquated immigration system have created a chaotic situation. “It’s difficult to appreciate the scale and the magnitude of what’s happening there unless you see it,” Filkins tells David Remnick. Last yea

Jun 16, 2023 • 23:40

From “On the Media”: Seditious Conspiracy

From “On the Media”: Seditious Conspiracy

On January 6th, 2021, “On the Media” reporter Micah Loewinger recorded the secret communications of the Oath Keepers on a walkie-talkie app called Zello. After reporting on the findings, Loewinger received a subpoena calling on him to testify in the first Oath Keepers criminal trial last year. In conversations with “On the Media” host Brooke Gladstone, “Death, Sex & Money” host Anna Sale, and Roger Parloff, a senior editor at Lawfare, Loewinger grapples with the consequences of his reporting, an

Jun 13, 2023 • 35:45

The New York Times’ Publisher on the Future of Journalism, and the Poet Paul Tran

The New York Times’ Publisher on the Future of Journalism, and the Poet Paul Tran

Over the past several years, as more democratic institutions and norms have come under attack, many journalists have raised the question of whether it is ethical to adhere to journalism’s traditional principles of non-bias, objectivity, and political neutrality. In May, A. G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, staked out his position in the traditionalist camp in an essay for the Columbia Journalism Review. “The traditionalists in the ranks have long believed that their long-standi

Jun 9, 2023 • 50:06

A Gay Russian, Exiled in Ireland

A Gay Russian, Exiled in Ireland

Evgeny Shtorn and Alexander Kondakov were living together in St. Petersburg when Vladimir Putin began his crackdown on the L.G.B.T.Q. movement in Russia, passing laws that prevented gay “propaganda.” Kondakov is a scholar of the movement, and Shtorn has studied the sociology of hate crimes against gay men. The couple also worked for an N.G.O. that received foreign funding, which made them appear particularly suspicious to Russian authorities. After Shtorn’s citizenship was rescinded, he became v

Jun 6, 2023 • 18:47

Should We, and Can We, Put the Brakes on Artificial Intelligence?

Should We, and Can We, Put the Brakes on Artificial Intelligence?

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, which created ChatGPT, says that AI is a powerful tool that will streamline human work and quicken the pace of scientific advancement  But ChatGPT has both enthralled and terrified us, and even some of AI’s pioneers are freaked out by it – by how quickly the technology has advanced.  David Remnick talks with Altman, and with computer scientist Yoshua Bengio, who won the prestigious Turing Award for his work in 2018, but recently signed an open letter calling for a mora

Jun 2, 2023 • 32:39

The Director Rob Marshall on Halle Bailey as “The Little Mermaid”

The Director Rob Marshall on Halle Bailey as “The Little Mermaid”

The live-action remake of Disney’s classic “The Little Mermaid” is out this weekend. The performance of Halle Bailey as Princess Ariel has been widely praised, but some on the right lambasted the casting of a Black actress in the role as an example of—of course—wokeness on the part of Disney. The film’s director, Rob Marshall, dismisses the notion as quickly as he can. “It was never: ‘Let’s do a woke version of ‘Little Mermaid,’ ” he tells Naomi Fry. “It was: ‘Let’s just do the best version.’ ”

May 30, 2023 • 16:10

E. Jean Carroll and Roberta Kaplan on Defamatory Trump, and Dexter Filkins on Ron DeSantis

E. Jean Carroll and Roberta Kaplan on Defamatory Trump, and Dexter Filkins on Ron DeSantis

Earlier this month, E Jean Carroll won an unprecedented legal victory: in a civil suit, Donald Trump was found liable for sexual abuse against her in the mid-nineteen-nineties, and for defamation in later accusing her of a hoax. But no sooner was that decision announced than Trump reiterated his defamatory insults against her in a controversial CNN interview. Carroll has now filed an amended complaint, in a separate suit, based on Trump’s continued barrage. But can anything make him stop? “The o

May 26, 2023 • 33:55

Jill Lepore on the Joy of Gardening

Jill Lepore on the Joy of Gardening

It’s the time of year when many people feel an overpowering urge to dig—to plant their back yard or vegetable garden, or even the flowerpots on the fire escape. “I just love the whole process. I love the muck of it,” Jill Lepore tells David Remnick. “You’re kind of entrapped in a completely different rhythm, and it’s all so entirely out of your control. … It’s a never-ending process of education.” Lepore, a professor of history as well as a staff writer, wrote recently on her passion for seed ca

May 23, 2023 • 10:33

Behind the Scenes with Tom Hanks

Behind the Scenes with Tom Hanks

Tom Hanks has been a constant presence on the American movie screen for forty years. He has played a mermaid’s boyfriend, an astronaut, a soldier on D Day, an F.B.I. agent, an AIDS patient, a castaway, and a strange, innocent character running across America—among dozens of other roles. Hanks won the Academy Award for Best Actor two years in a row. Now in his sixties, Hanks has added another line to his résumé: novelist. “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece”—an overstuffed, of

May 19, 2023 • 37:48

How Climate Change Is Impacting Our Mental Health

How Climate Change Is Impacting Our Mental Health

In June, a first-of-its-kind lawsuit will go to trial in Montana. The case, Held v. Montana, centers on the climate crisis. Sixteen young plaintiffs allege their state government has failed in its obligation, spelled out in the state constitution, to provide residents with a healthful environment. The psychiatrist Dr. Lise Van Susteren is serving as an expert witness and intends to detail the emotional distress that can result from watching the environmental destruction unfolding year after year

May 16, 2023 • 16:58

Michael Schulman on the Writers’ Strike, and Samantha Irby with Doreen St. Félix

Michael Schulman on the Writers’ Strike, and Samantha Irby with Doreen St. Félix

The last time the Writers Guild of America hit the picket line was fifteen years ago, with a strike that lasted a hundred days and cost the city of Los Angeles hundreds of millions of dollars. This year’s strike has the potential to drag on even longer. At the core of the dispute is the question of who deserves to profit from the revenue generated by streaming services. “[Studios] tell us that they can’t afford the cost of us,” Laura Jacqmin, a veteran TV writer and a W.G.A. strike captain tells

May 12, 2023 • 33:50

Germany’s Traumatized Kriegskinder Speak Out

Germany’s Traumatized Kriegskinder Speak Out

A troubling question looms over the Kriegskinder, Germans who were children during the Second World War: Was my father a mass murderer? These innocent Germans carried the guilt of their nation while their families often remained silent. The New Yorker’s Burkhard Bilger, whose grandfather was a Nazi, speaks with Sabine Bode, a journalist who encourages the now-elderly Kriegskinder to speak about their unacknowledged trauma. Bilger’s new book, “Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family S

May 9, 2023 • 20:21

Have State Legislatures Gone Rogue? And Joshua Yaffa on Evan Gershkovich

Have State Legislatures Gone Rogue? And Joshua Yaffa on Evan Gershkovich

Just a month ago, the story of two lawmakers expelled from the Tennessee legislature captured headlines across the country. Their offense wasn’t corruption or criminal activity— instead, they had joined a protest at the statehouse in favor of gun control, shortly after the Nashville shooting at a Christian school. Earlier this week, Representative Zooey Zephyr, of Montana, was barred from the House chamber after making a speech against a trans health-care ban. In the past few years, in Arizona,

May 5, 2023 • 31:09

King Charles III Takes the Throne

King Charles III Takes the Throne

On May 6th, King Charles will become the oldest person to ascend the throne of the United Kingdom. He is a bit of an odd duck to be the king, Rebecca Mead thinks. Charles has “long made clear that he considers his birthright a burden,” she writes. In fact, many things are a burden: during the ceremonies following the death of Queen Elizabeth, the new king “got into not one but two altercations with malfunctioning pens. . . . As his biographer Catherine Mayer puts it, ‘The world is against him—ev

May 2, 2023 • 10:21

Harry Belafonte, the Pioneering Artist-Activist

Harry Belafonte, the Pioneering Artist-Activist

We take it for granted that entertainers can—and probably should—advocate for the causes they believe in, political and otherwise. That wasn’t always the case: at one time, entertainers were supposed to entertain, and little else. Harry Belafonte, who died on April 25th at the age of ninety-six, pioneered the artist-activist approach. One of the most celebrated singers of his era, he had a string of huge hits—“The Banana Boat Song,” “Mama Look a Boo Boo,” “Jamaica Farewell”—while appearing as th

Apr 30, 2023 • 13:28

The Fall of Tucker Carlson, and the Making of Candace Owens

The Fall of Tucker Carlson, and the Making of Candace Owens

Once a Beltway neoconservative, Tucker Carlson came to embody the angry, forgotten white man—railing at “the élites” and propagating racist conspiracy theories and the lie of the stolen election. “Unlike a lot of his colleagues at Fox News, he made news, he set the agenda,” Kelefa Sanneh, who wrote about Carlson in 2017, says. “People were wondering, What is Tucker going to be saying tonight?” Sanneh joins Andrew Marantz and David Remnick to discuss Carlson’s demise, and what comes next. And Cla

Apr 28, 2023 • 39:28

The Bipartisan Effort to Rein in Presidential Military Power

The Bipartisan Effort to Rein in Presidential Military Power

Just three days after 9/11, Congress authorized a major expansion of executive power: the President could now wage war against terrorism without prior approval. The resolution was called the Authorization for Use of Military Force, and it passed almost unanimously. Its reauthorization, in 2002, brought our country to war with Iraq, and has been used to deploy American forces all over the world. More than twenty years later, the mood in the country has changed dramatically, and lawmakers in both

Apr 25, 2023 • 23:13

Jane Mayer on Justice Clarence Thomas, and the Music Critic Hanif Abdurraqib on Concert Merch

Jane Mayer on Justice Clarence Thomas, and the Music Critic Hanif Abdurraqib on Concert Merch

The cascade of revelations published by ProPublica concerning Justice Clarence Thomas—the island-hopping yachting adventures underwritten by a right-wing billionaire patron, the undisclosed real estate transactions—raises questions about his proximity to power and money. “I think it stretches common sense,” Jane Mayer tells David Remnick, “to think that a judge could be independent when he takes that much money from one person.” Mayer notes that other Justices, including the late Ruth Bader Gins

Apr 21, 2023 • 27:54

The Playwright Larissa FastHorse on “The Thanksgiving Play,” Broadway’s New Comedy of White Wokeness

The Playwright Larissa FastHorse on “The Thanksgiving Play,” Broadway’s New Comedy of White Wokeness

“The Thanksgiving Play” is a play about the making of a play. Four performers struggle to devise a Thanksgiving performance that’s respectful of Native peoples, historically accurate (while not too grim for white audiences), and also inclusive to the actors themselves. A train wreck ensues. “First it’s fun. . . . You get to have a good time in the theatre. I would say that’s the sugar, and then there’s the medicine,” the playwright Larissa FastHorse tells the staff writer Vinson Cunningham. “The

Apr 18, 2023 • 17:08

What’s Behind the Bipartisan Attack on TikTok?

What’s Behind the Bipartisan Attack on TikTok?

A ban of the Chinese social-media app TikTok, first floated by the Trump Administration, is now gaining real traction in Washington. Lawmakers of both parties fear the app could be manipulated by Chinese authorities to gain insight into American users and become an effective tool for propaganda against the United States. “Tiktok arrived in Americans’ lives in about 2018 . . . and in some ways it coincided with the same period of collapse in the U.S.-China relationship,” the staff writer Evan Osn

Apr 14, 2023 • 33:04

The Country Singer Margo Price Talks with Emily Nussbaum

The Country Singer Margo Price Talks with Emily Nussbaum

Margo Price moved to Nashville from rural Illinois at the age of nineteen. After struggling for years to break through in the country-music scene, she found success with her 2016 release “Midwest Farmer’s Daughter,” widely considered one of the best albums of the year. Since then, she’s established herself as one of music’s new stars, an artist in the outlaw-country lineage—and a free spirit not afraid to speak frankly. Price talks with the staff writer Emily Nussbaum, who is well known as a tel

Apr 11, 2023 • 18:12

Israel on the Brink: Understanding the Judicial Overhaul, and the Protests Against It

Israel on the Brink: Understanding the Judicial Overhaul, and the Protests Against It

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed law changing the judiciary is described as a reform. To opponents, it’s a move to gut the independence of the Supreme Court as a check on executive power—and a move from the playbook of autocrats like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. The protests that followed are the largest in the country’s history, and are now stretching into their third month. Ruth Margalit, who is based in Tel Aviv, covered the protests for The New Yorker, and she tells David Remnick that

Apr 7, 2023 • 32:25

Brooke Shields on the Sexualization of Girls in Hollywood

Brooke Shields on the Sexualization of Girls in Hollywood

In the late nineteen-seventies and into the eighties, Brooke Shields was one of the most famous and most controversial people in America. At age eleven, she appeared in the film “Pretty Baby,” playing a child prostitute; by fifteen she was in the heavy-breathing desert-island love story “Blue Lagoon.” She was the face of a series of ads for Calvin Klein jeans featuring notoriously smutty innuendo. Yet Shields herself—rather than the filmmakers and ad men who developed her roles—became the object

Apr 4, 2023 • 20:53

Jon Meacham on How the Trump Fever Breaks

Jon Meacham on How the Trump Fever Breaks

In 2018, at the midpoint of the Trump Presidency, the journalist and historian Jon Meacham wrote a book called “The Soul of America,” warning of the gravity of Trump’s threat to democracy. This was hardly a unique point of view, but Meacham’s particular way of putting things, steeped in a critical reverence for American history, hit home with one reader in particular: Joe Biden. In the years since, Meacham became an informal adviser to Biden, helping him recently with the State of the Union addr

Mar 31, 2023 • 30:43

Who Was H. G. Carrillo? D. T. Max on a Novelist Whose Fictions Went Too Far

Who Was H. G. Carrillo? D. T. Max on a Novelist Whose Fictions Went Too Far

H. G. Carrillo was a writer’s writer—not a household name, but esteemed in literary circles. He began writing later in life, and was in his mid-forties when his first novel, “Loosing My Espanish,” was published. The book, which describes a Cuban-immigrant experience, was hailed as a triumph of Latino fiction; Junot Díaz praised the author’s “formidable” talent, calling his “lyricism pitch-perfect and his compassion limitless.” Carrillo went on to literary positions in and outside of the academy.

Mar 28, 2023 • 32:55

Jia Tolentino on the Ozempic Weight-Loss Craze

Jia Tolentino on the Ozempic Weight-Loss Craze

The prescription drug Ozempic was designed to help people with Type 2 diabetes manage their disease, and, under the name Wegovy, to treat obesity. But it has been embraced recently as a tool for weight loss, and many celebrities are rumored to use it in order to shed pounds. Known generically as semaglutide, the drug gives users the feeling of satiation—even to the point of uncomfortable fullness. “One doctor I spoke to compared it to a turkey dinner in a pen,” the staff writer Jia Tolentino tel

Mar 24, 2023 • 17:23

How the Culture Wars Came to the Catholic Church

How the Culture Wars Came to the Catholic Church

The pontificate of Pope Francis, which just reached its tenth year, has brought a greater willingness to engage with modern issues. Francis has addressed Catholics on the climate emergency, arguing a religious position against consumerism and irresponsible development. Without changing the Church’s doctrines, he struck a very different tone than his predecessors Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI on the inclusion of gay people and the involvement of women in Church leadership. The traditionalis

Mar 21, 2023 • 21:58

What if the Supreme Court Ends Affirmative Action?

What if the Supreme Court Ends Affirmative Action?

In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority appears likely to strike down affirmative action, in a decision expected by this summer. The practice of considering race as a tool to counteract discrimination has been in place at many colleges and universities, and in some workplaces, since the civil-rights era. But a long-running legal campaign has threatened the practice for decades. David Remnick talks with two academics who have had a front-row seat in t

Mar 17, 2023 • 28:22

Trans Activist Janet Mock Finds Her Voice

Trans Activist Janet Mock Finds Her Voice

Janet Mock first heard the word “māhū,” a Native Hawaiian word for people who exist outside the male-female binary, when she was twelve. She had just moved back to Oahu, where she was born, from Texas, and, by that point, Mock knew that the gender she presented as didn’t feel right. “I don’t like to say the word ‘trapped,’ ” Mock tells The New Yorker’s Hilton Als. “But I was feeling very, very tightly contained in my body.”  Eventually, Mock left Hawaii for New York, where she worked as an edito

Mar 14, 2023 • 25:12

Masha Gessen on the Battle Over Trans Rights

Masha Gessen on the Battle Over Trans Rights

Many culture-war politicians are attacking the rights of trans people, and making a regressive view of gender as biology the key to their platforms. In this episode, David Remnick talks to two people who’ve found themselves at the center of the battle over transgender rights. In Nebraska, a state senator has committed to filibustering every piece of legislation to ward off a vote on a Republican-sponsored bill that would ban gender-affirming care for trans people under age nineteen. Then Masha G

Mar 10, 2023 • 49:23

Introducing: “In The Dark”

Introducing: “In The Dark”

“In The Dark,” the acclaimed investigative podcast from American Public Media, is joining The New Yorker and Condé Nast Entertainment. In its first two seasons, “In The Dark,” hosted by the reporter Madeleine Baran, has taken a close look at the criminal-justice system in America. The first season examined the abduction and murder, in 1989, of eleven-year-old Jacob Wetterling, and exposed devastating failures on the part of law enforcement. The second season focussed on Curtis Flowers, a Black m

Mar 9, 2023 • 18:48

Chloe Bailey on Working Solo; and the Lost New Jersey Photos of Cartier-Bresson

Chloe Bailey on Working Solo; and the Lost New Jersey Photos of Cartier-Bresson

When they were just thirteen and eleven years old, sisters Chloe and Halle Bailey started posting videos of themselves singing on YouTube and quickly built a following. Their covers often went viral—their version of Beyoncé’s “Pretty Hurts” even caught the attention of Beyoncé, who brought them on tour as her opening act.  Now, with two albums and five Grammy nominations behind them, the sisters are for the first time working on separate projects: Halle is starring as Ariel in an upcoming remake

Mar 7, 2023 • 24:44

The Russian Activist Maria Pevchikh on the Fate of Alexey Navalny, and the Future of Russia

The Russian Activist Maria Pevchikh on the Fate of Alexey Navalny, and the Future of Russia

Well before launching the horrifying campaign against Ukraine a year ago, Vladimir Putin had been undermining Russia as well: normalizing corruption on a massive scale, and suppressing dissent and democracy.  One of the darkest moments on that trajectory was the poisoning of the opposition leader Alexey Navalny with the nerve agent novichok.  Navalny and a team of investigators had illustrated the corruption of Putin and his circle in startling detail, and Navalny began travelling the country to

Mar 3, 2023 • 26:12

Stephanie Hsu on “Everything Everywhere All at Once”; and the 2023 Brody Awards

Stephanie Hsu on “Everything Everywhere All at Once”; and the 2023 Brody Awards

“Everything Everywhere All at Once” is in a genre all its own, and is an extremely unlikely favorite for the Academy Award for Best Picture. It’s a loopy sci-fi quest that becomes a martial arts revenge battle, superimposed on a sentimental family drama. Stephanie Hsu plays both Joy, a depressed young woman struggling with her immigrant mother (played by Michelle Yeoh), and Jobu Tupaki, an interdimensional supervillain bent on sowing chaos, and possibly the end of the world.  “The relationship b

Feb 28, 2023 • 31:55

The Pandemic at Three: Who Got it Right?

The Pandemic at Three: Who Got it Right?

As the COVID-19 pandemic approaches its fourth year, we can begin to gain some clarity on which countries, and which U.S. states, had the best outcomes over time. In a conversation with David Remnick, Dhruv Khullar, a contributing writer and a practicing physician in New York, explains some of the key factors. Robust testing was key for public-health authorities to make good decisions, unsurprisingly. What also seems clear from a distance, Khullar says, is that social cohesion was a decisive und

Feb 24, 2023 • 19:05

Angela Bassett on Playing Tina Turner and Queen Ramonda of Wakanda

Angela Bassett on Playing Tina Turner and Queen Ramonda of Wakanda

It’s been almost three decades since Angela Bassett emerged in Hollywood as a “totem of empowered Black womanhood,” as Michael Schulman puts it—known for groundbreaking roles in films like “What’s Love Got to Do with It” and “How Stella Got Her Groove Back.” Now, at sixty-four, Bassett is nominated for an Oscar for her performance in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” As the fierce, grieving Queen Ramonda, she is the first actor nominated for any Marvel movie. Bassett speaks with Schulman about h

Feb 21, 2023 • 20:26

A Year of the War in Ukraine

A Year of the War in Ukraine

In the year since Russia’s invasion, Ukrainians have shown incredible fortitude on the battlefield. Yet an end to the conflict seems nowhere in sight. “Putin’s strategy could be defined as ‘I can’t have it—nobody can have it.’ And, sadly, that’s where the tragedy is right now,” Stephen Kotkin, a fellow at the Hoover Institution and a scholar of Russian history, tells David Remnick. “Ukraine is winning in the sense that [it] didn’t allow Russia to take that whole country. But it’s losing in the s

Feb 17, 2023 • 30:21

Martin McDonagh Talks with Patrick Radden Keefe

Martin McDonagh Talks with Patrick Radden Keefe

Martin McDonagh burst onto the London theatre scene as a young playwright in the nineteen-nineties. At one point, he had four plays running simultaneously on stages across London. But McDonagh also aspired to work in movies, and he eventually shifted his focus to directing films such as “In Bruges” and “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.” “When you sit down to write something, how do you know if it’s a movie or a play?” the staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe asked McDonagh at The New York

Feb 14, 2023 • 14:50

Chuck D on How Hip-Hop Changed the World

Chuck D on How Hip-Hop Changed the World

Forty years ago, Chuck D showed listeners how exciting, radical, and unpredictable hip-hop could be. His song “Fight the Power” became a protest anthem for a generation, and a Greek chorus in Spike Lee’s film “Do the Right Thing.” The Public Enemy front man talks with the staff writer Kelefa Sanneh about his life in music. “I wanted to curate, present, navigate, teach, and lead the hip-hop art, making it something that people would revere,” he says. Now, at sixty-two, Chuck D is an elder statesm

Feb 10, 2023 • 29:13

Salman Rushdie on Surviving the Fatwa

Salman Rushdie on Surviving the Fatwa

Thirty-four years ago, the Ayatollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, issued a fatwa calling for the assassination of the novelist Salman Rushdie, whose book “The Satanic Verses” Khomeini declared blasphemous. It caused a worldwide uproar. Rushdie lived in hiding in London for a decade before moving to New York, where he began to let his guard down. “I had come to feel that it was a very long time ago and, and that the world moves on,” he tells David Remnick. “That’s what I had agreed with

Feb 6, 2023 • 50:26

Bonnie Raitt Talks with David Remnick

Bonnie Raitt Talks with David Remnick

You couldn’t write a history of American music without a solid chapter on Bonnie Raitt. From her roots as a blues guitarist, she’s created a gorgeous melange of rock, R. & B., blues, folk, and country—helping to establish a new category now known as Americana. But she’s far from resting on her laurels; her latest album, “Just Like That . . . ,” is nominated for four Grammy Awards this year, including Song of the Year—a category in which her competition includes Beyoncé and Adele, stars a generat

Feb 3, 2023 • 21:40

The Custody Battles Awaiting Mothers of Children Conceived in Rape

The Custody Battles Awaiting Mothers of Children Conceived in Rape

Exceptions in the case of rape used to be considered a necessity in abortion legislation, even within the pro-life movement. But today ten states have no rape exception in their abortion laws, and more will likely consider moving in that direction this year. “I think few people understand how common this scenario actually is,” the contributing writer Eren Orbey, who has reported on the issue, says; according to C.D.C. statistics, nearly three million women have become pregnant as a result of rap

Jan 31, 2023 • 21:20

What Exactly Does “Woke” Mean, and How Did It Become so Powerful?

What Exactly Does “Woke” Mean, and How Did It Become so Powerful?

Many on the right blame “wokeness” for all of America’s ills—everything from deadly mass shootings to lower military recruitment. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, recently signed a so-called Stop WOKE Act into law, and made the issue the center of his midterm victory speech. In Washington, there has been talk in the House of forming an “anti-woke caucus.” “I think ‘woke’ is a very interesting term right now, because I think it’s an unusable word—although it is used all the time—because it doesn

Jan 27, 2023 • 29:25

Michael Schulman on Oscars History, and a Visit with “Annie” Composer Charles Strouse

Michael Schulman on Oscars History, and a Visit with “Annie” Composer Charles Strouse

Despite years of controversy, the Academy Awards and the other awards shows remain must-watch television for many Americans. The awards may be “unreliable as a pure measure of cinematic worth,” Schulman tells David Remnick. “But I would argue that the Oscars are sort of a decoder ring for cultural conflict and where the industry is headed,” Schulman says. “They are a way to understand where pop culture is.” With theatre attendance in continuing decline, the Academy is looking for solutions, Schu

Jan 24, 2023 • 27:55

A Local Paper First Sounded the Alarm on George Santos. Nobody Listened.

A Local Paper First Sounded the Alarm on George Santos. Nobody Listened.

George Santos is hardly the first scammer elected to office—but his lies, David Remnick says, are “extra.” Most Americans learned of Santos’s extraordinary fabrications from a New York Times report published after the midterm election, but a local newspaper called the North Shore Leader was sounding the alarm months before. The New Yorker staff writer Clare Malone took a trip to Long Island to speak with the Leader’s publisher, Grant Lally, and its managing editor, Maureen Daly, to find out how

Jan 20, 2023 • 23:18

Deepti Kapoor Discusses “Age of Vice” with Parul Sehgal

Deepti Kapoor Discusses “Age of Vice” with Parul Sehgal

Deepti Kapoor describes New Delhi, the setting of her novel “Age of Vice” as “extremely beautiful, but also violent. . . . It’s a place where you think you’re gonna get cheated and robbed until someone does something incredibly kind and breaks your heart.” The highly anticipated book, published simultaneously in twenty countries this month, is part crime thriller, part family saga centered on a reckless playboy who wants to break away from his mob family; a young man working as a servant to him;

Jan 17, 2023 • 16:30

In Politics, How Old Is Too Old?

In Politics, How Old Is Too Old?

It wasn’t so long ago that Ronald Reagan was considered over the hill, too old to govern. Now a sitting President has turned eighty in office, and a Presidential contest between Joe Biden and Donald Trump would put two near-eighty-year-olds against each other. (Trump—while denying President Biden’s fitness—commented, “Life begins at eighty.”) Yet the question of age has not disappeared; even some of Biden’s ardent supporters have expressed concerns about him starting a second term. David Remnick

Jan 13, 2023 • 34:01

The Photographer Who Documented a Long-Forgotten Pan-African Festival

The Photographer Who Documented a Long-Forgotten Pan-African Festival

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Jan 10, 2023 • 17:42

Bob Woodward on His Trump Tapes

Bob Woodward on His Trump Tapes

Bob Woodward is not one to editorialize. But, during his interviews with Donald Trump at the time of the COVID-19 crisis, Woodward found himself shouting at the President—explaining how to make a decision and trying to browbeat him into listening to public-health experts. Woodward has released audio recordings of some of their interviews in a new audiobook called “The Trump Tapes,” which documents details of Trump’s state of mind, and also of Woodward’s process and craft. “I could call him anyti

Jan 6, 2023 • 32:59

“Giselle,” and What to Do with the Problematic Past – Part II

“Giselle,” and What to Do with the Problematic Past – Part II

When the renowned choreographer Akram Khan was commissioned to update the classic “Giselle” for the English National Ballet, he couldn’t simply put new steps to a Romantic-era plot. Beautiful as it is, “Giselle” has a view of ideal womanhood that is insupportable in our century—and it didn’t reflect the women he knew.  In Khan’s 2016 “Giselle,” the title character doesn’t chastely expire from a broken heart; she is a strong woman victimized by more powerful men.  The story still culminates in an

Jan 3, 2023 • 16:41

What to Do with the Problematic Past, Part I

What to Do with the Problematic Past, Part I

We draw meaning and comfort from traditions, but when the world changes, traditions can stop reflecting our values and cause us pain. This episode features three people struggling against traditions that have become problematic.  The producer Ngofeen Mputubwele talks with Jeanna Kadlec, the author of “Heretic,” a memoir of leaving the evangelical church; and the actor Britton Smith, a leader of Broadway Advocacy Coalition, which seeks to make Broadway an equitable workplace for performers of col

Dec 30, 2022 • 33:49

As Poet Laureate, Tracy K. Smith Hit the Road

As Poet Laureate, Tracy K. Smith Hit the Road

Tracy K. Smith was named Poet Laureate in 2017, at the beginning of the fierce partisan divide of the Trump era. She quickly turned to her craft to address the deep political divisions the election laid bare, putting together a collection called “American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time.” Then she hit the road, visiting community centers, senior centers, prisons, and colleges, and reading poems written by herself and others for groups small and large. “It was exhausting, and exhilarating, and

Dec 27, 2022 • 22:26

Kirk Douglas, the Guitarist for the Roots, Revamps the Holiday Classics

Kirk Douglas, the Guitarist for the Roots, Revamps the Holiday Classics

As the guitarist for the Roots, the band for “The Tonight Show,” Kirk Douglas plays anything and everything. So David Remnick put him to the test on some holiday classics. And two longtime New Yorker staffers, Patricia Marx and Roz Chast, divulge their celebrated history playing together in a ukulele band. As the Daily Pukuleles, they claim, they influenced some of the biggest names in music in the sixties and beyond. But they were always a little too far ahead of the curve for the mainstream.

Dec 23, 2022 • 30:53

An Audiobook Master on the Secrets of Her Craft

An Audiobook Master on the Secrets of Her Craft

You’ve probably never heard of Robin Miles, but you may well have heard her—possibly at some length. Miles is an actor who’s cultivated a particular specialty in recording audiobooks, a booming segment of the publishing industry. She has lent her voice to more than 400 titles in all sorts of genres—from the classic “Charlotte’s Web” to Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste,” a deep analysis of race in America. “Telling a story, fully, all of it—from all the aspects of it—and creating the kind of intimacy be

Dec 20, 2022 • 23:09

Ina Garten: Cooking Is Hard; Plus an Essay from Susan Orlean

Ina Garten: Cooking Is Hard; Plus an Essay from Susan Orlean

With the Food Network program “Barefoot Contessa,” Ina Garten became a beloved household name. Although she is a gregarious teacher and presence on television, Garten prefers to do her actual cooking alone. “Cooking’s hard for me. I mean, I do it a lot, but it’s really hard and I just love having the space to concentrate on what I’'m doing, so I make sure it comes out well.” Garten joins David Remnick to reflect on her early days in the kitchen, and to answer listener questions about holiday mea

Dec 16, 2022 • 27:24

The poet John Lee Clark Translates the DeafBlind Experience to the Page

The poet John Lee Clark Translates the DeafBlind Experience to the Page

Although many hearing and sighted people imagine DeafBlind life in tragic terms, as an experience of isolation and darkness, the poet John Lee Clark’s writing is full of joy. It’s funny and surprising, mapping the contours of a regular life marked by common pleasures and frustrations. Clark, who was born Deaf and lost his sight at a young age, has established himself not just as a writer and translator but as a scholar of Deaf and DeafBlind literature. His new collection, “How to Communicate,” i

Dec 13, 2022 • 25:58

Politico’s Mathias Döpfner, and Sam Knight Reports from Qatar

Politico’s Mathias Döpfner, and Sam Knight Reports from Qatar

The staff writer Sam Knight was in Qatar recently, reporting on the World Cup, where, despite years of controversy, a familiar rhythm of upsets, triumphs, and defeats has taken hold. But he finds that the geographical shift toward an Arab nation may benefit the sport. Plus, David Remnick talks with Mathias Döpfner, the C.E.O. of the German news publisher Axel Springer, which acquired Politico for a billion dollars last year. Döpfner relishes taking provocative stances, but has been a vocal criti

Dec 9, 2022 • 25:03

Is Our Democracy Safe?

Is Our Democracy Safe?

This year’s midterm elections were widely seen as a victory for democracy in the United States. Election deniers were defeated in many closely watched races and voting proceeded smoothly, even in areas where the Big Lie has taken a firm hold. But the threat of authoritarianism remains strong. David Remnick talks with Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of the best-seller “How Democracies Die” about recent political trends. “You can’t really live in a functioning democracy if you feel lik

Dec 6, 2022 • 30:37

The Supreme Court Case That Could Upend Elections

The Supreme Court Case That Could Upend Elections

J. Michael Luttig is a retired judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals and a prominent legal mind in conservative circles, close with figures including Clarence Thomas and William Barr. On January 5, 2020, he got a call from Vice-President Mike Pence’s then-lawyer asking Luttig to publicly back Pence’s decision not to attempt to overturn the election the next day. Luttig tweeted that the Vice-President had no constitutional authority to stop the election, and suddenly the judge was thrust into the ce

Dec 2, 2022 • 20:13

Why Christine Baranski Fought the Good Fight

Why Christine Baranski Fought the Good Fight

The veteran stage and screen actress Christine Baranski first became a household name thanks to her Emmy-winning turn on the nineties sitcom “Cybill,” and her Tony-award winning work on Broadway. But “The Good Fight” took her to another level. As Diane Lockhart, a Chicago attorney and diehard liberal, Baranski captured the tensions of the political moment of Donald Trump, and the show ended its run this month. Emily Nussbaum could barely contain her excitement when sat down with Baranski at The

Nov 29, 2022 • 18:17

Quinta Brunson, a “Child of the Internet,” Revives the Sitcom

Quinta Brunson, a “Child of the Internet,” Revives the Sitcom

Quinta Brunson made a name for herself as a master of meme comedy and is a self-described “child of the Internet,” yet her ABC mockumentary series “Abbott Elementary” is an unabashed throwback to the sitcoms of her youth. Doreen St. Félix talked with Brunson at the 2022 New Yorker Festival about her influences and the everyday comedy of the workplace. St. Félix believes that Brunson has found “freedom in formula” when it comes to “Abbott,” which documents the lives of the beleaguered staff at a

Nov 25, 2022 • 32:00

Unpacking the Latino Vote, and Susan Orlean on the Queen of Tigers

Unpacking the Latino Vote, and Susan Orlean on the Queen of Tigers

In the lead-up to this year’s midterm elections, many pundits expected Republicans to make significant gains among Latino voters, further eroding a base of support that Democrats have arguably taken for granted for decades. “What happened instead, as you know, is a more complicated story,” the contributing writer Stephania Taladrid says, one that both parties will be examining closely as 2024 approaches. Taladrid speaks with two political consultants, Chuck Rocha and Mike Madrid, to unpack the r

Nov 22, 2022 • 28:28

The Stories of #MeToo

The Stories of #MeToo

Five years ago, reporting on the film producer Harvey Weinstein’s history of assault and misconduct opened the floodgates of the national reckoning with gender and power known as #MeToo. Three New Yorker critics—Alexandra Schwartz, Naomi Fry, and Vinson Cunningham—recently gathered to assess #MeToo’s impact on the culture more broadly. They discussed works like the new film “Tár,” the movie “The Assistant,” the fiction pieces “This Is Pleasure” and “Cat Person,” and more. Schwartz notes that #Me

Nov 21, 2022 • 39:25

How Qatar Took the World Cup

How Qatar Took the World Cup

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Nov 18, 2022 • 21:58

Safia Elhillo on Vulnerability and Anger in “Girls That Never Die”

Safia Elhillo on Vulnerability and Anger in “Girls That Never Die”

The poet Safia Elhillo first found her voice onstage, performing in youth poetry slams in Washington, D.C., where she grew up, the child of Sudanese immigrants. She published her first collection in 2017, and in 2021 her novel in verse, “Home Is Not a Country,” was long-listed for the National Book Award. She’s now out with a new collection, “Girls That Never Die,” which she characterizes as her most personal and vulnerable work yet. It responds to some of the backlash she received online after

Nov 15, 2022 • 0:00

The Man Who Escaped from Auschwitz to Warn the World

The Man Who Escaped from Auschwitz to Warn the World

Rudolf Vrba was sent to Auschwitz at the age of seventeen, and, because he was young and in good health, he was not killed immediately but put to labor in the camp. Vrba (originally named Walter Rosenberg) quickly discovered that the scale of the killing was greater than anyone on the outside knew or could imagine, and Jewish communities were being deported without understanding their fate. Jonathan Freedland chronicles Vrba’s story in his new book, “The Escape Artist.” The young Vrba had a “cru

Nov 11, 2022 • 34:56

Mike White on the New Season of “The White Lotus” in Sicily

Mike White on the New Season of “The White Lotus” in Sicily

The first season of “The White Lotus” won ten Emmy Awards and was a critics’ favorite. A dark satire of the privileged, the show chronicled the visit to a luxurious Hawaiian resort of a tech mogul and her family, a pair of newlyweds, and a single woman—all having the worst time of their lives—while the hotel manager goes off the wagon in a way both hilarious and harrowing. In Season 2, creator Mike White has moved the action to Sicily, and is focussing on gender roles and masculinity. White spea

Nov 8, 2022 • 18:57

Russell Moore on Christian Nationalism

Russell Moore on Christian Nationalism

Russell Moore, a prominent figure in the Southern Baptist Convention, resigned over the church’s response to racism—which Moore considers a sin—and documented sexual abuse allegations. The theologian sits down with David Remnick to reflect on the intersection of Christianity and American politics. “Jesus always refused to have his gospel used as a means to an end,” Moore says. “People who settle for Christianity or any other religion as politics are really making a pitiful deal.” Plus, the contr

Nov 4, 2022 • 30:52

Mayor Francis Suarez’s View from Miami

Mayor Francis Suarez’s View from Miami

Francis Suarez, the Republican mayor of Miami, is popular in the city he governs, and increasingly prominent beyond it. Conservative voices as disparate as Kanye West and George Will have floated him as a 2024 Presidential candidate. Suarez is a proudly dissident Republican: he loves tech companies, welcomes migrants, and thinks his party can lead the fight against climate change. He’s no culture warrior, and, though he shares a state with Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, he has kept both at arm’s

Nov 1, 2022 • 18:09

U2’s Bono Talks with David Remnick—Live

U2’s Bono Talks with David Remnick—Live

Last month, The New Yorker published a Personal History about growing up in Ireland during the nineteen-sixties and seventies. It covers the interfaith marriage of the author’s parents, which was unusual in Dublin; his mother’s early death; and finding his calling in music. The author was Bono, for more than forty years the lyricist and lead singer of one of the biggest rock bands on the planet. As U2 sold out arenas and stadiums, Bono held forth on a range of social causes; he became “the defin

Oct 28, 2022 • 31:54

The Playwrights Suzan-Lori Parks and Martin McDonagh, Live at The New Yorker Festival

The Playwrights Suzan-Lori Parks and Martin McDonagh, Live at The New Yorker Festival

This year’s New Yorker Festival featured two conversations with renowned playwrights: Suzan-Lori Parks and Martin McDonagh. Parks, the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for drama, sat down with the staff writer Vinson Cunningham. “The marketplace is telling us that Black joy is what sells,” she said. “I’m very suspicious about what the marketplace wants me to create because I know in my experience where real Black joy resides—and sometimes that’s in the place where there

Oct 25, 2022 • 32:57

The Vulnerabilities of our Voting Machines, and How to Secure Them

The Vulnerabilities of our Voting Machines, and How to Secure Them

The security of voting has become a huge topic of concern. That’s especially true after 2020, when it became an article of faith for Trump supporters that the election was somehow stolen by President Joe Biden. Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science and engineering at University of Michigan, has been studying voting machines and software for more than a decade. “We made a number of discoveries, including that [voting machines] had vulnerabilities that basically anyone could exploit to i

Oct 21, 2022 • 17:18

In Defense of the Comic Novel: Andrew Sean Greer Talks “Less is Lost”

In Defense of the Comic Novel: Andrew Sean Greer Talks “Less is Lost”

Arthur Less is a novelist—a “minor American novelist,” to be precise. He’s a man whose biggest talent seems to be taking a problem and making it five times worse. And he’s the hero of Andrew Sean Greer’s novel “Less,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, an especially rare feat for a comic novel.   Andrew Sean Greer is now out with a sequel, “Less Is Lost,” which takes Arthur on a road trip across the U.S. He talks with the staff writer Parul Sehgal.  Plus, for thirty years, the poet Ellen

Oct 14, 2022 • 24:39

Tom Stoppard on “Leopoldstadt,” and Geena Davis talks with Michael Schulman

Tom Stoppard on “Leopoldstadt,” and Geena Davis talks with Michael Schulman

Tom Stoppard has been a fixture on Broadway since his famous early play, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” travelled there in 1967. Stoppard is eighty-five years old, and has largely resisted the autobiographical element in his work. But now, in “Leopoldstadt,” a play that has just opened on Broadway, he draws on his family’s tragic losses in the Second World War. Stoppard talks with the contributor Andrew Dickson about his latest work.  And the Oscar- and Emmy Award-winning actor Geena D

Oct 12, 2022 • 30:59

The New Abortion Underground

The New Abortion Underground

Since the reversal of Roe v. Wade, the contributor Stephania Taladrid has been following a network of women who are secretly distributing abortion pills across the United States. The network has its roots in Mexico, where some medications used for at-home abortion are available at a lower cost over the counter. Volunteers—they call themselves “pill fairies”—are sourcing the pills at Mexican pharmacies and bringing them over the border. The work is increasingly perilous: in states like Texas, abe

Oct 10, 2022 • 25:29

Major Decisions Ahead for the Supreme Court

Major Decisions Ahead for the Supreme Court

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Oct 7, 2022 • 19:09

Joshua Yaffa on What’s Next for Ukraine

Joshua Yaffa on What’s Next for Ukraine

The contributor Joshua Yaffa, who was based in Moscow for years and has been reporting from Ukraine since the start of the war, speaks to David Remnick from Kyiv. There, Yaffa says, the latest news from Russia—including threats of nuclear attack and reports of political upheaval—has been treated with near-indifference. “Ukraine has been in the fight for its survival since the end of February, fully aware that Russia is ready to throw any and all resources at the attempted subjugation of the Ukra

Oct 3, 2022 • 14:17

Billy Eichner on “Bros” and Joyce Carol Oates on “Blonde”

Billy Eichner on “Bros” and Joyce Carol Oates on “Blonde”

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Sep 30, 2022 • 30:52

Why Play Music: A Conversation with Questlove and Maggie Rogers

Why Play Music: A Conversation with Questlove and Maggie Rogers

Earlier this month, two acclaimed musicians—Questlove and Maggie Rogers—joined The New Yorker’s Kelefa Sanneh live onstage for a conversation that probed at an essential question for musicians and music lovers alike: How can music provide a spiritual experience, and how do we sustain that feeling in our lives? Questlove—the co-founder of the Roots and the musical director of the “Tonight Show”—was one of Rogers’s professors while she was an undergraduate at New York University, and the two have

Sep 27, 2022 • 39:50

Roger Federer on Retirement and His Evolution in Tennis

Roger Federer on Retirement and His Evolution in Tennis

Roger Federer is playing the last professional tennis match of his career this week. It’s the end of an incredible run. Over two decades, he has demonstrated an unmatchable court intelligence and temperament, winning twenty Grand Slam titles and spending three hundred and ten weeks as the top-ranked men’s player. In 2019, on the eve of playing in his nineteenth U.S. Open, Federer spoke with David Remnick about how he got over an early hot temper and predilection for throwing racquets on the cour

Sep 23, 2022 • 10:06

Will Voter Suppression Become the Law?

Will Voter Suppression Become the Law?

Now seven weeks away, the midterms are often cast as a referendum on the President and his party. But, this year, some see democracy itself on the ballot. One of those people is the attorney Mark Elias, who has made the fight for voting rights his mission. The Supreme Court will hear two of his cases in its upcoming term, which starts next month. Earlier this year, the staff writer Sue Halpern profiled Elias for The New Yorker, and she spoke with him again recently about the legal fight ahead. “

Sep 20, 2022 • 20:40

Andy Borowitz, and the Hunt for Invasive Lionfish

Andy Borowitz, and the Hunt for Invasive Lionfish

Not only are we living in a time where people are proud of their ignorance, argues the writer and comedian Andy Borowitz, but some of our most educated politicians are now playing down their intelligence as a strategy to get elected. Borowitz, the author of the long-running satirical column The Borowitz Report, examines this phenomenon in his new book, “Profiles of Ignorance: How America’s Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber.” “When Trump was elected, a lot of us supposedly knowledgeable people were

Sep 16, 2022 • 29:26

How Sheryl Lee Ralph Is Reshaping Hollywood

How Sheryl Lee Ralph Is Reshaping Hollywood

Sheryl Lee Ralph has been a staple of Black entertainment for decades. She played Deena Jones in the original Broadway production of “Dreamgirls,” and was in “Sister Act 2” alongside Lauryn Hill and Whoopi Goldberg. She’s currently starring in the new ABC sitcom “Abbott Elementary,” for which she just won her first Emmy Award. Her decades-long career gives her a unique perspective on how the industry has changed since she started—and how it hasn’t. “I think that, sometimes in order for instituti

Sep 13, 2022 • 27:20

Keeping Score: A Year Inside a Divided Brooklyn High School

Keeping Score: A Year Inside a Divided Brooklyn High School

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Sep 9, 2022 • 49:21

Aimee Mann Live, with Atul Gawande

Aimee Mann Live, with Atul Gawande

Aimee Mann, the celebrated Los Angeles singer and songwriter, recently released an album called “Queens of the Summer Hotel.” It was inspired in part by Susanna Kaysen’s best-selling memoir “Girl, Interrupted,” about Kaysen’s time in a psychiatric hospital. Mann sat down with Atul Gawande at The New Yorker Festival to talk about the new album, the lessons of living through a pandemic, and how liberated she felt when she broke her ties with major record labels. “When you’re at a record label and

Sep 6, 2022 • 23:31

Dave Grohl’s Tales of Life and Music

Dave Grohl’s Tales of Life and Music

At The New Yorker Festival, Dave Grohl talked with Kelefa Sanneh about Grohl’s recent book, “The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music.” Grohl, who was the drummer for Nirvana before becoming the front man of the Foo Fighters, recalled one of his earliest experiences of taking music seriously: harmonizing with his mom to Carly Simon on the car radio. He also talked about what it was like to collaborate with Kurt Cobain, who was known for his capricious genius, and about stepping out from behind t

Sep 2, 2022 • 26:39

A New Civil War in America?

A New Civil War in America?

Since the F.B.I. raid on former President Donald Trump’s home, Mar-A-Lago, the phrases “civil war” and “lock and load” have trended on right-wing social media. The F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security are taking the threats seriously, and issued an internal warning that detailed specific calls for assassinating the judge and the agents involved in authorizing and carrying out the search. Where could this all be headed? David Remnick talks with Barbara F. Walter, the author of the new b

Aug 30, 2022 • 32:17

The Actor Jenifer Lewis: Mother, Activist, Hurricane

The Actor Jenifer Lewis: Mother, Activist, Hurricane

Jenifer Lewis is known as the “Mother of Black Hollywood” for good reason; her screen progeny have included Whitney Houston, Angela Bassett, and Tupac Shakur. In her latest turn, she’s playing the alpha boss of a home-shopping network on the Showtime series “I Love That For You.” It’s no surprise that Lewis keeps getting cast as formidable ladies—the roles come naturally to her, as you’ll hear in her conversation with the New Yorker contributor Michael Schulman. Lewis’s new memoir is called “Wal

Aug 26, 2022 • 17:34

What’s Driving Black Candidates to the Republican Party?

What’s Driving Black Candidates to the Republican Party?

The Republican Party has recently attracted an almost unprecedented number of Black candidates to its fold—more than at any time since the Reconstruction era. “In a moment where the Party . . . has really wholeheartedly embraced white-grievance politics,” Leah Wright Rigueur tells David Remnick, “they are endorsing more Black candidates than they have in the past twenty-five years.” Rigueur is a historian at Johns Hopkins University and the author of “The Loneliness of the Black Republican.” The

Aug 23, 2022 • 30:07

Neil Gaiman on the Power of Fantasy in our Lives

Neil Gaiman on the Power of Fantasy in our Lives

Neil Gaiman, one of the great fantasy writers of our time, first started writing his comic series “The Sandman” in the nineteen-eightiess. Decades later, a TV adaptation is a huge hit on Netflix, topping the platform’s charts in countries across the globe. Gaiman talks with the producer Ngofeen Mputubwele about the powerful role that fantasy can play in helping audiences process real experiences in their lives. “You’re making things that aren’t true,” he says, “and you’re giving them to people i

Aug 19, 2022 • 18:45

Designing a Soundscape for the Cars of the Future

Designing a Soundscape for the Cars of the Future

Electric cars, compared to cars with internal-combustion engines, are nearly silent, which can present a danger to cyclists and pedestrians. So car companies are turning to sound engineers to craft artificial soundtracks for things like backing up, or starting the engine. John Seabrook, who writes often about music, reported on the composers and designers who are building a new soundscape for the streets and highways of America. Plus, a visit with Ada Limón, who was recently named the twenty-fou

Aug 16, 2022 • 22:43

Elizabeth Kolbert on a Historic Climate Bill, Plus a Lesson from Kansas

Elizabeth Kolbert on a Historic Climate Bill, Plus a Lesson from Kansas

The Inflation Reduction Act now before Congress is being celebrated as the most important piece of climate legislation in the history of this country—which is “a pretty low bar,” the staff writer and Pulitzer Prize-winner Elizabeth Kolbert tells David Remnick, “because they’ve never really passed a piece of legislation on climate change.” The Inflation Reduction Act is a huge political victory for Democrats; will it help save the planet? And we look at how pro-choice messaging in Kansas delivere

Aug 12, 2022 • 27:42

A Trip to the Boundary Waters

A Trip to the Boundary Waters

Alex Kotlowitz is known as a chronicler of the city of Chicago, and of lives marred by urban poverty and violence. His books set in Chicago include “An American Summer,” “There Are No Children Here,” and “Never a City So Real.” But for some 40 years, he has returned to a remote stretch of woods summer after summer. At a young age, he found himself navigating a canoe through a series of lakes, deep in the woods along Minnesota’s border with Canada. The stretch of wilderness is known as the Bounda

Aug 9, 2022 • 24:59

Jane Mayer on Ohio’s Lurch to the Right

Jane Mayer on Ohio’s Lurch to the Right

Last month, the story of a 10-year-old rape victim captured national headlines. The young girl was forced to travel out of state because of Ohio’s draconian abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest, which would have been nearly unthinkable until very recently. Jane Mayer took a deep dive into statehouse politics to learn how a longtime swing state—Ohio voted twice for President Barack Obama—ended up legislating like a radically conservative one. Its laws, she says, are increasingly out

Aug 6, 2022 • 25:09

Notes from a Warming World

Notes from a Warming World

Much of the globe has seen record-breaking temperatures in recent heat waves that seem increasingly routine. Dhruv Khullar, a contributor and a practicing physician, looks at the effects of extreme heat in India, where the capital, New Delhi, recorded a temperature this year of 122 degrees. “People are amazingly resilient,” he notes. “But I think we’re approaching that point where even the most resilient people, the type of lives that they have to live—because of climate change—are not going to

Aug 2, 2022 • 32:03

Jamie Raskin on the Facts of January 6th, and the Danger Ahead

Jamie Raskin on the Facts of January 6th, and the Danger Ahead

Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, serves on Congress’s Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the Capitol. He spoke with David Remnick about the effort to demonstrate Donald Trump’s culpability in the insurrection in a way that would resonate with voters, and about Trump’s political future. Trump is “guilty as sin, and everybody can see it,” Raskin says, and he is running low on patience for the Department of Justice to act. “As a citizen, I would hope and expect to see

Jul 29, 2022 • 17:54

Jason Isbell on Songwriting While Sober

Jason Isbell on Songwriting While Sober

Jason Isbell got into the music business early; he had a publishing deal when he was twenty-one. But he really came into his own as a songwriter around ten years ago, as he was getting sober from years of alcohol and drug use. His record “Southeastern,” which comes in the tradition of musicians like Guy Clark, swept the Americana Music Awards in 2014. Isbell spoke with John Seabrook at The New Yorker Festival in 2016, shortly after his record “Something More than Free” was released, and he playe

Jul 26, 2022 • 36:03

New Mexico Is a “Safe Haven” for Abortion Between Texas and Arizona

New Mexico Is a “Safe Haven” for Abortion Between Texas and Arizona

In New Mexico, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham has declared the state a “reproductive safe haven” between Arizona to the west, and Texas to the east. Already, she says, New Mexico’s few abortion clinics are seeing an influx of patients from outside its borders. “When you are a safe-haven state,” she says, “you put real stress on [the] current provider system.” Lujan Grisham speaks with David Remnick about her executive order—issued days after the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs—to prevent the ex

Jul 22, 2022 • 13:59

The Nerdwriter Conquers the Internet, Plus Kelefa Sanneh on Country Radio

The Nerdwriter Conquers the Internet, Plus Kelefa Sanneh on Country Radio

Evan Puschak, known on YouTube as the Nerdwriter, posts videos dissecting topics from Shakespeare and Tarkovsky to Superman; from Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump. The videos are complex; he may spend weeks editing image, sound, and written narration. He spoke with the Radio Hour’s Ngofeen Mputubwele about what drew him to the essay form, and how he’s found success online. “The essay is not a treatise. It’s not a term paper. It’s not something systematically covering e

Jul 19, 2022 • 27:59

The Writer Dmitry Bykov on Putin’s Russia, the Land of the “Most Free Slaves”

The Writer Dmitry Bykov on Putin’s Russia, the Land of the “Most Free Slaves”

Until very recently, Dmitry Bykov was a huge presence on the Russian literary scene. He is a novelist, a poet, a biographer, and a critic. He was a frequent presence on Echo of Moscow, the liberal radio station that was closed after the invasion of Ukraine, and his blunt political commentary made him an enemy of the regime. Bykov was teaching in the United States, at the Institute for European Studies at Cornell University, when the invasion of Ukraine began, and because of his forthright opposi

Jul 15, 2022 • 22:11

The Comedian Hannah Gadsby Renounces Comedy, and Patricia Marx Tries to Relax

The Comedian Hannah Gadsby Renounces Comedy, and Patricia Marx Tries to Relax

The comedian Hannah Gadsby has been touring this summer with a show called “Body of Work.” She came to wide attention in 2018, with the Netflix special “Nanette.” It was a full-length comedy show, and, at the same time, a carefully structured critique of standup comedy which argued that comedians have to distort personal experience for the sake of a joke, inflicting a kind of violence on themselves and their audiences. Gadsby recently published a memoir about her breakout moment called “Ten Step

Jul 12, 2022 • 26:57

What Precedents Would Clarence Thomas Overturn Next?

What Precedents Would Clarence Thomas Overturn Next?

Justice Clarence Thomas once was an outlier for his legal views. But Thomas is now the heart of the Court’s conservative bloc, and his concurring opinion in the recent abortion ruling calls out some other precedents the Court might overturn. Jeannie Suk Gersen teaches constitutional law at Harvard Law School and clerked for former Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court; she has been covering the end of Roe v. Wade for The New Yorker, and she spoke with David Remnick about Thomas’s concurrence

Jul 8, 2022 • 23:51

Astrid Holleeder’s Crime Family

Astrid Holleeder’s Crime Family

All her life, Astrid Holleeder knew that her older brother Willem was involved in crime. But she was stunned when, in 1983, Willem and his best friend, Cornelius van Hout, were revealed to be the masterminds behind the audacious kidnapping of the beer magnate Alfred Heineken. It was the beginning of a successful career for Willem, known as Wim. After a stay in prison, he became a celebrity criminal; he had a newspaper column, appeared on talk shows, and took selfies with admirers in Amsterdam. H

Jul 5, 2022 • 31:06

Jia Tolentino and Stephania Taladrid on the End of Roe v. Wade

Jia Tolentino and Stephania Taladrid on the End of Roe v. Wade

The Supreme Court’s ruling in the Dobbs case was not a surprise; given the draft opinion that was leaked in May, its decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey was nearly a certainty. But the effects of the ruling have been rapid and chaotic. In some states, abortions stopped overnight; in others, there’s profound confusion over what qualifies as a legally acceptable reason for having an abortion. Far from settling the legal issue of abortion—by sending it back to the state

Jul 1, 2022 • 19:08

Why Do Conservatives Love Hungary’s Viktor Orbán?

Why Do Conservatives Love Hungary’s Viktor Orbán?

When the New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz first heard that the Conservative Political Action Conference, the flagship event of the American conservative movement, was holding a meeting in Hungary, he thought it might be a joke. “A lot of people have worried for a few years now that the Republican Party is becoming more ambivalent about certain bedrock norms of American democracy,” Marantz told David Remnick. “To openly state, ‘We’re going to this semi-authoritarian country’ . . .  I though

Jun 27, 2022 • 20:43

Alan Alda, Podcaster

Alan Alda, Podcaster

Alan Alda spent his early years in the burlesque theatres where his father, the actor Robert Alda, would perform. Those early years opened his eyes in more ways than one: “I was very aware of the naked women,” he told The New Yorker’s Michael Schulman, “but I was also aware of the comics.” Watching from the wings, Alda grew an appreciation for being funny, being creative, and being present. He put those skills to use for eleven years on “M*A*S*H” and in dozens of other performances on stage and

Jun 24, 2022 • 28:57

Forget Dating Apps—the “Marriage Pact” Goes for the Long Haul

Forget Dating Apps—the “Marriage Pact” Goes for the Long Haul

A survey that started as a student project at Stanford University has become a popular dating and relationship tool on campuses across the country. Its goal is to delve deeper than the superficial information found on a typical dating-app profile, connecting people based on deeply held values rather than looks or sports teams.  Most apps, says Liam MacGregor, who created the Marriage Pact with a fellow-student, “were designed to solve really specific problems … if you want a short-term relations

Jun 21, 2022 • 30:13

Dexter Filkins on the Rise of Ron DeSantis

Dexter Filkins on the Rise of Ron DeSantis

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has shown himself uniquely skilled at attracting attention beyond the borders of his home state.  Just this month, DeSantis blocked state funds for the Tampa Bay Rays stadium after players voiced support for gun control in the wake of the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas.  He’s also continuing a fight to punish the Disney Corporation for criticizing Florida’s so-called Don’t Say Gay law.  An Ivy League-educated anti-élitist firebrand, he is willing to pick a fight wit

Jun 17, 2022 • 20:03

Michael R. Jackson on “A Strange Loop,” His Black, Queer Coming-of-Age Musical

Michael R. Jackson on “A Strange Loop,” His Black, Queer Coming-of-Age Musical

Michael R. Jackson’s Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical “A Strange Loop” features a Black queer writer named Usher, who works as an usher, struggling to write a musical about a Black queer writer. Jackson’s work tackles the terror of the blank page alongside the terrors of the dating scene, and it speaks in frank and heartbreaking terms about Usher’s attempt to navigate gay life among Black and white partners. Hilton Als talked with Jackson about how he found inspiration in his own experien

Jun 15, 2022 • 17:19

The Adrenaline Rush of Racing Drones

The Adrenaline Rush of Racing Drones

Ian Frazier, who has chronicled American life for The New Yorker for more than forty years, travelled to a house in Fort Collins, Colorado, where three roommates build, fly, and race drones. Jordan Temkin, Zachry Thayer, and Travis McIntyre were among the early professional drone racers in the sport, piloting the tiny devices through complex courses at upward of eighty miles an hour. Drones have had an enormous impact on military strategy, and the commercial applications seem limitless, but to t

Jun 14, 2022 • 16:29

Regina Spektor on Her New Album, “Home, Before and After”

Regina Spektor on Her New Album, “Home, Before and After”

Twenty years ago, Regina Spektor was yet another aspiring musician in New York, lugging around a backpack full of self-produced CDs, and playing at little clubs in the East Village—anywhere that had a piano. But anonymity in Spektor’s case didn’t last long.  She toured with the Strokes in 2003, and once she had a record deal, her ambitions grew outside indie music.  She moved into a pop vein, writing anthems about love and heartbreak, loneliness and death, belief and doubt.  Her 2006 album “Begi

Jun 10, 2022 • 43:21

Masha Gessen on the Quiet in Kyiv

Masha Gessen on the Quiet in Kyiv

Masha Gessen is reporting for The New Yorker on the war in Ukraine, which is now in its fourth month. They checked in with David Remnick from Kyiv, which seems almost normal, with “hipsters in cafés” and people riding electric scooters. But the scooters, Gessen noted, are popular because prices have skyrocketed and gasoline is unaffordable. All the talk, meanwhile, is of war crimes—of murder, rape, torture, and kidnapping. (The Russian government has denied involvement in any war crimes.) And ou

Jun 7, 2022 • 20:39

“The Book of Queer,” and “Bob’s Burgers” Hits the Big Screen

“The Book of Queer,” and “Bob’s Burgers” Hits the Big Screen

While working on his Ph.D., the historian Eric Cervini (whose book “The Deviant’s War” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) noticed the lack of popular histories on L.G.B.T.Q. issues. Researchers were publishing plenty of papers, but they were mostly in peer-reviewed journals and other academic outlets. His attempts to change that—first with his Instagram videos, and now with a series on Discovery+—bring to life key moments and figures in queer history, including the pharaoh Akhenaten and Pres

Jun 3, 2022 • 29:44

Remembering Roger Angell, and Fishing with Karen Chee

Remembering Roger Angell, and Fishing with Karen Chee

Roger Angell, who died last week, at the age of 101, was inducted in 2014 into the Baseball Hall of Fame in recognition of his extraordinary accomplishment as a baseball writer. But in a career at The New Yorker that goes back to the Second World War, he wrote on practically every subject under the sun; he also served as fiction editor, taking the post once held by his mother, Katharine White.  Angell “did as much to distinguish The New Yorker as anyone in the magazine’s nearly century-long hist

May 31, 2022 • 23:49

What Makes a Mass Shooter?

What Makes a Mass Shooter?

In America, unthinkable violence has become routine.  In the wake of the Buffalo and Uvalde mass shootings, David Remnick speaks with the researchers Jillian Peterson and James Densley, whose book “The Violence Project” is the most in-depth study of mass shooters. Pro-gun politicians may continue to block any measures to reduce violence, but we can understand better a different side of the equation: what motivates these crimes. David Remnick speaks with two criminal-justice researchers who have

May 27, 2022 • 26:47

Florence and the Machine, Live at The New Yorker Festival

Florence and the Machine, Live at The New Yorker Festival

Across five studio albums, Florence and the Machine has explored genres from pop to punk and soul; the band’s most recent record, “Dance Fever,” just came out. Florence Welch, the group’s singer and main songwriter, is by turns introspective and theatrical, poetic and confessional. She sat down with John Seabrook at The New Yorker Festival in 2019 to reflect on her band’s rapid rise to stardom. She also spoke about her turn toward sobriety after years of heavy drinking. “The first year that I st

May 24, 2022 • 21:29

The Attack on Gender-Affirming Medical Care

The Attack on Gender-Affirming Medical Care

Across the United States, conservative politicians are leading a backlash against L.G.B.T.Q. identity, framing legal restrictions as protection of children. Several states have introduced laws to ban medical treatments known as gender-affirming care—including hormones and puberty blockers—prescribed to adolescents. Major medical organizations have approved the treatments, but Rachel Monroe, who has been following efforts to ban gender-affirming care in Texas, found that doctors wouldn’t speak ou

May 20, 2022 • 29:07

The Comedian Megan Stalter on Finding Inspiration in American Absurdity

The Comedian Megan Stalter on Finding Inspiration in American Absurdity

Before the pandemic, Megan Stalter was an unknown comedian, trying to catch a lucky break at clubs in New York City. But with the arrival of COVID-19, social media became her only outlet, and she quickly found an audience with her short-form, D.I.Y. character videos,  portraying the “breadth of American idiocy,” as Michael Schulman puts it, with such accuracy and heart that it’s hard to turn away. After her rise to Internet fame—she was dubbed the “queen of quarantine”—Stalter was offered the pa

May 17, 2022 • 28:18

The Battle After Roe v. Wade

The Battle After Roe v. Wade

Assuming that Justice Samuel Alito’s final opinion in the Mississippi abortion case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization gets majority support, there will be profound social, political, and health-care implications across the United States.   Margaret Talbot, Peter Slevin and Jia Tolentino assess the world after Roe.  Opponents will surely not stop by leaving abortion at the state level but will try to ban it under federal law.  Tolentino discusses fetal personhood, the legal concept tha

May 13, 2022 • 20:51

Stephanie Hsu on “Everything Everywhere All at Once”

Stephanie Hsu on “Everything Everywhere All at Once”

“Everything Everywhere All At Once” is in a genre all its own—you could call it sci-fi-martial-arts-family-drama.  Stephanie Hsu plays both Joy, an angsty teen-ager struggling with her immigrant mother, and Jobu, an omnipotent, interdimensional supervillain.  “The relationship between Evelyn and Joy in its simplest terms is very fraught,” Hsu tells Jia Tolentino.  “It’s the story of a relationship of a daughter who’s a lesbian who is deeply longing for her mother’s acceptance … but they keep cha

May 10, 2022 • 20:54

The Last Abortion Clinic in Mississippi; and a Look at White Empathy

The Last Abortion Clinic in Mississippi; and a Look at White Empathy

Last week, a draft opinion was leaked which suggests that a majority of Supreme Court Justices are ready to overturn the precedents of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey—the decisions that have guaranteed a right to abortion at the federal level.  The case in question is Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which Mississippi officials seek to close the state’s last remaining abortion clinic under a law that bans performing an abortion after the fifteenth week of pregnancy—a

May 6, 2022 • 28:58

Stephanie Hsu on “Everything Everywhere All at Once”

Stephanie Hsu on “Everything Everywhere All at Once”

Stephanie Hsu is a veteran of stage and television, but “Everything Everywhere All at Once” is her first feature film, and she débuts with a bang: the actress plays both an angsty teen struggling with her immigrant mother, and an interdimensional supervillain bent on destruction.  Hsu talks with the staff writer Jia Tolentino.  Alexis Okeowo, who has covered conflict and human-rights issues around the world, talks with the producer Ngofeen Mputubwele about the crisis in Ukraine and the warm rece

May 6, 2022 • 49:04

Rickie Lee Jones’s Life on the Road

Rickie Lee Jones’s Life on the Road

Rickie Lee Jones emerged into the pop world fully formed; her début album was nominated for five Grammys, in 1980, and she won for Best New Artist. One of the songs on that record was “The Last Chance Texaco,” and Jones has made that the title of her recent memoir. The song evokes a service station on a long stretch of highway, and Jones’s book reflects on her almost obsessive need to travel and uproot herself at almost any cost. “All I wanted to do was leave” from a very young age, she says. “W

May 3, 2022 • 21:56

A Ukrainian Diplomat on the Future of Russian Aggression

A Ukrainian Diplomat on the Future of Russian Aggression

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine enters a third month, prospects of ending the conflict are still nowhere in sight, and there seems to be no end to the destruction that Vladimir Putin is willing to inflict. Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, tells David Remnick that he expects Russia to continue escalating its attack leading up to May 9th, a day of military celebration in Russia commemorating the German surrender in the Second World War. “They will esca

Apr 29, 2022 • 26:16

Viola Davis on Playing Michelle Obama, and Finding Her Voice as an Actor

Viola Davis on Playing Michelle Obama, and Finding Her Voice as an Actor

The Oscar-winning actor Viola Davis traces her career in Hollywood back to a single moment of inspiration from her childhood: watching Cicely Tyson star in the 1974 movie “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.” “I saw excellence and craft, and I saw transformation,” Davis tells David Remnick. “And more importantly, what it planted in me is that seed of—literally—I am not defined by the boundaries of my life.” In a new memoir, “Finding Me,” Davis writes of a difficult upbringing in Rhode Island

Apr 25, 2022 • 30:23

Ronan Farrow on the Threat of Modern Spyware

Ronan Farrow on the Threat of Modern Spyware

Ronan Farrow has published an investigation into a software called Pegasus and its maker, NSO Group. Pegasus is one of the most invasive spywares known; it allows users—including law-enforcement officials or government authorities—to hack into a target’s smartphone, gaining access to photos, messages, and the feeds from a camera or microphone. NSO markets Pegasus as a tool to catch terrorists and other violent criminals, but once a surveillance tool is on the market it can be very difficult to c

Apr 22, 2022 • 19:24

“We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” and a Short History of Movies about the Internet

“We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” and a Short History of Movies about the Internet

The Internet can be a scary place in real life, and far more so in Jane Schoenbrun’s film “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,” which premièred at the Sundance Film Festival last year and is being released in theatres and streaming. It’s a horror movie centered on a lonely and bored teen-age girl named Casey, who spends most of her time being online and trying to figure out who she is. She undertakes a ritual that she’s read about—the so-called World’s Fair Challenge—which is said to cause unkn

Apr 19, 2022 • 17:39

Jennifer Egan on the Literary Pleasures of the Concept Album

Jennifer Egan on the Literary Pleasures of the Concept Album

Jennifer Egan’s new novel, “The Candy House,” one of the most anticipated books of the year, has just been published. It is related—not a sequel exactly, but something like a sibling—to her Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” from 2010. That earlier book was largely about the music business, and Egan, a passionate music fan, has described its unusual structure as having been inspired by the concept albums of her youth. “The very nature of a concept album is that it tells one bi

Apr 12, 2022 • 32:01

Anita Hill and Jane Mayer on Ketanji Brown Jackson, and the State of the Supreme Court

Anita Hill and Jane Mayer on Ketanji Brown Jackson, and the State of the Supreme Court

Ketanji Brown Jackson has been voted in as a Supreme Court Justice—the first Black woman to serve in that role. But, to reach this milestone, Jackson has faced enormous hurdles at every turn, including confirmation hearings that featured blatant political grandstanding and barely disguised race-baiting. Nominations have become so partisan that, on both the left and the right, the Court itself is commonly viewed as merely a tool of the party that picked its members, and several polls report a dec

Apr 8, 2022 • 18:05

The Missing Boater

The Missing Boater

Dick Conant spent years of his life crisscrossing America by canoe, like a Mark Twain character. On land, he worked a variety of jobs and was often homeless, but paddling on a river, he was king. By chance, on a voyage which began near the Canadian border, on his way to Florida, Conant met Ben McGrath, a New Yorker staff writer, outside McGrath’s home on the Hudson River. McGrath’s piece about Conant appeared in the December 14, 2015, issue of The New Yorker this week; here, he tells the story o

Apr 5, 2022 • 20:19

Investigating January 6th

Investigating January 6th

With a judge declaring that Donald Trump “more likely than not” committed a felony in his attempt to overturn the Presidential election, the congressional committee investigating January 6th is racing to finish its work before the looming midterm elections. Amy Davidson Sorkin and the legal scholar Jeannie Suk Gersen talk with David Remnick about the law and the politics of holding Trump accountable. And the music writer Sheldon Pearce shares three artists that didn’t get their due in the Grammy

Apr 1, 2022 • 28:44

Connor Ratliff Talks with Sarah Larson, Plus Chef Bryant Terry

Connor Ratliff Talks with Sarah Larson, Plus Chef Bryant Terry

An aspiring actor named Connor Ratliff thought he had it made when he got a small part on the 2001 miniseries “Band of Brothers,” in an episode directed by Hollywood legend Tom Hanks. The day before shooting his scene, Ratliff was unceremoniously fired by Hanks, who said the rookie had “dead eyes.” It was a life-altering disappointment for Ratliff. He told Sarah Larson how he came to launch the podcast “Dead Eyes,” which explores failure as a universal part of life—in show business and beyond. W

Mar 29, 2022 • 29:06

Jill Lepore on Parents’ Rights and the Culture War

Jill Lepore on Parents’ Rights and the Culture War

A wave of book bannings sweeping the country, along with conservative fury over titles like “Antiracist Baby,” seems like a backlash against the heightened racial consciousness of the post-George Floyd era. The historian and staff writer Jill Lepore sees these conflicts as the continuation of an old dynamic. She relates today’s “anti-anti-racism” movement to the anti-evolution campaign of the nineteen-twenties, which included the prosecution of a Tennessee teacher for teaching Darwin’s theory in

Mar 25, 2022 • 18:21

Returning to the Office . . . While Black

Returning to the Office . . . While Black

“Coming back to work is partially about surveillance and micromanagement,” Keisha, a podcasting executive, says. “Everybody feels it, but people of color feel it in a different way.” For workers who have been remote for the better part of two years, returning to the office is undeniably complicated. For some Black workers who didn’t feel at ease in majority-white offices to begin with, the complications are even greater. Racial microaggressions abound, and, for some, the stress of excessive visi

Mar 22, 2022 • 19:49

Radio Ukraine

Radio Ukraine

Kraina FM is a radio station that broadcasts in Kyiv and more than twenty other cities, playing Ukrainian-language rock and pop. When Russia invaded Ukraine, it took on the mantle of “the station of national resistance,” airing news bulletins and logistical information like requests for supplies. The radio hosts began adding jokes about the invading Russians, and advice from a psychologist about talking to children about the war; a writer told fairy tales on air to occupy those kids during the s

Mar 18, 2022 • 30:45

Jane Campion on “The Power of the Dog”

Jane Campion on “The Power of the Dog”

Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog” opens like a classic Western: cattle are herded across the sweeping plains of Montana, with imposing mountains in the distance. But the plot of the film, based on a 1967 novel by Thomas Savage, isn’t exactly a Western. It’s a family drama about two brothers who share in the ranching business but couldn’t be more different, and what happens when one of them brings his new wife and her teen-age son to live on the ranch. “The Power of the Dog” is nominated for

Mar 15, 2022 • 30:32

Stephen Kotkin: Don’t Blame the West for Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

Stephen Kotkin: Don’t Blame the West for Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

It’s impossible to understand the destruction and death that Vladimir Putin is unleashing in Ukraine without understanding his most basic conviction: that the breakup of the Soviet empire was a catastrophe from which Russia has yet to recover. Some experts, including John Mearsheimer, have blamed NATO expansion for the invasion of Ukraine, arguing that it has provoked Vladimir Putin to defend his sphere of influence. Stephen Kotkin, a professor of history and international affairs at Princeton U

Mar 11, 2022 • 19:58

Stephen Kotkin: Don’t Blame the West for Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

Stephen Kotkin: Don’t Blame the West for Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

It’s impossible to understand the destruction and death that Vladimir Putin is unleashing in Ukraine without understanding his most basic conviction: that the breakup of the Soviet empire was a catastrophe from which Russia has yet to recover. Some experts, including John Mearsheimer, have blamed NATO expansion for the invasion of Ukraine, arguing that it has provoked Vladimir Putin to defend his sphere of influence. Stephen Kotkin, a professor of history and international affairs at Princeton U

Mar 11, 2022 • 18:52

Pauline Kael on “The Godfather”

Pauline Kael on “The Godfather”

As The New Yorker’s film critic from 1968 to around 1991, the influential Pauline Kael gave voice to her visceral reactions: she wrote as a moviegoer, not a cineaste. Fifty years ago, in the March 10, 1972, issue, she wrote about a new film by the hot-shot young director Francis Ford Coppola. “If ever there was a great example of how the best popular movies come out of a merger of commerce and art,” Kael wrote, “ ‘The Godfather’ is it.” She noted that Coppola took Mario Puzo’s potboiler of a nov

Mar 8, 2022 • 7:28

Masha Gessen and Joshua Yaffa on the Escalation of Violence in Ukraine

Masha Gessen and Joshua Yaffa on the Escalation of Violence in Ukraine

Joshua Yaffa is a Moscow correspondent for The New Yorker, but he has been travelling throughout the war zone in Ukraine for weeks, reporting on the Russian invasion. Masha Gessen, who has lived in and reported from Russia in the past, returned to Moscow to write about the Russian people’s response to the invasion. Yaffa and Gessen spoke with David Remnick on March 3rd about the week’s escalation of violence, and what Putin’s goal might be. Plus, David Remnick speaks with Igor Novikov, an Inter

Mar 4, 2022 • 41:57

Sheryl Lee Ralph on Confronting Hollywood

Sheryl Lee Ralph on Confronting Hollywood

Sheryl Lee Ralph has been a staple of Black entertainment for decades. She played Deena Jones in the original Broadway production of “Dreamgirls,” and was in “Sister Act 2” alongside Lauryn Hill and Whoopi Goldberg. She’s currently starring in the new ABC sitcom “Abbott Elementary.” Her decades-long career gives her a unique perspective on how the industry has changed since she started—and how it hasn’t. “I think that, sometimes in order for institutions like Broadway to truly make room for othe

Mar 1, 2022 • 26:10

How Black Creators Are Changing Hollywood

How Black Creators Are Changing Hollywood

In the past few years, it seems a floodgate has opened, releasing a deluge of tremendously successful media that centers the Black experience. “Get Out,” “Black Panther,” and HBO’s “Watchmen” are just some of the big-budget prestige projects that have drawn huge audiences and dominated the cultural conversation. The New Yorker Radio Hour looks at this moment in Black entertainment and investigates the industry forces behind it in a special episode, produced by Ngofeen Mputubwele. A film scholar

Feb 25, 2022 • 28:54

How Should President Biden Respond to Putin’s War on Ukraine?

How Should President Biden Respond to Putin’s War on Ukraine?

Since last summer, Russian troops have been amassing on the Ukrainian border, and, in recent weeks, President Vladimir Putin warned that he intended a military takeover of Ukraine. This week, Russia began the war, with widespread attacks, including in the capital, Kyiv, aimed at crippling the Ukrainian military. The Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, has called on civilians to enlist in the military to fight the invaders. The U.S. and nato are levying heavy sanctions against the Russians,

Feb 24, 2022 • 26:40

Peter Dinklage on “Cyrano”

Peter Dinklage on “Cyrano”

Joe Wright’s film “Cyrano,” nominated for an Academy Award for Best Costume Design, was based on Erica Schmidt’s 2018 stage musical of the same name. Peter Dinklage starred in both, as the unattractive but lovestruck swashbuckler of the 1897 play “Cyrano de Bergerac.” Dinklage spoke with Michael Schulman in 2019, and said that Cyrano’s predicament is not really about his famously giant schnoz; it is about “everyone’s capacity to not feel worthy of love.” Dinklage also spoke about the ending of “

Feb 22, 2022 • 16:43

Nicholas Britell on the Art of the Film Score

Nicholas Britell on the Art of the Film Score

Nicholas Britell has emerged as one of the most in-demand film composers working today, creating original music for projects that hew to no style or model. He wrote the infuriatingly catchy theme of HBO’s “Succession”; he is nominated for an Academy Award for the score of Adam McKay’s manic apocalypse comedy “Don’t Look Up”; he was previously nominated for his score for Barry Jenkins’s “Moonlight.” In 2017, Britell spoke with the New Yorker editor Henry Finder on the occasion of the release of “

Feb 18, 2022 • 18:07

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the Path Forward for the Left

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the Path Forward for the Left

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is one of the most prominent progressives in Washington. Her political ascent began with her shocking 2018 defeat of a longtime incumbent in a New York district that includes parts of Queens and the Bronx. She is a strong advocate of the Green New Deal and Medicare for All. With her party’s razor-thin majorities now in peril, many of her priorities seem out of reach. Can the agenda she was elected to advance survive?  Ocasio-Cortez reflects on her time in Washington with

Feb 14, 2022 • 48:24

On Cancel Culture and the State of Free Speech

On Cancel Culture and the State of Free Speech

Every few weeks, it seems, another example of so-called cancel culture is dominating the headlines and trending on social-media platforms. The refrain “you can’t say anything these days” has become a slogan of cultural politics, particularly on the right. And yet there’s a wide gulf of opinion on what the term “cancelling” means—and whether the phenomenon even exists. In this special episode, we examine the issue with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the YouTube video creator Lindsay Ell

Feb 11, 2022 • 49:22

David Remnick Talks with Lee Child, the Creator of Jack Reacher

David Remnick Talks with Lee Child, the Creator of Jack Reacher

Lee Child didn’t start writing novels until he lost a prestigious job producing TV in England during a shakeup that he attributes to Rupert Murdoch. He tried his hand at writing a thriller, and found that the new career suited him: with a hundred million copies of his books in print in forty languages, Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels make up one of the most successful series in print. Every September 1st, he sits down to write a new one. He tells his longtime fan David Remnick that his all-Ameri

Feb 8, 2022 • 30:14

Black Thought Takes the Stage

Black Thought Takes the Stage

Tariq Trotter, best known in music as Black Thought, the emcee of the Roots, is regarded by many hip-hop fans as one of the best freestyle rappers ever. His work changed shape when the Roots became the house band for Jimmy Fallon’s late-night show, and again when he began performing standup comedy. “I’ve spent most of my career with my sunglasses and my hat pulled down low, very many layers of defense,” he tells Jelani Cobb. “You’re up there as a comedian, it’s just you and your ideas and a micr

Feb 4, 2022 • 19:43

Guillermo del Toro and Bradley Cooper on the Enduring Appeal of Noir

Guillermo del Toro and Bradley Cooper on the Enduring Appeal of Noir

Guillermo del Toro has been called the leading fantasy filmmaker of this century. His movies include “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “Hellboy,” and “The Shape of Water,” which won four Academy Awards in 2018, including Best Picture and Best Director. He joined David Remnick to talk about his new film, “Nightmare Alley,” along with Bradley Cooper, who plays Stanton Carlisle, a grifter who seems to want to do the right thing but is unable to resist the pull of the con. Based on a 1946 novel by William Lindsay

Feb 1, 2022 • 19:29

Russia’s Intentions in Ukraine—and America

Russia’s Intentions in Ukraine—and America

“They push buttons,” says Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale. “What button of ours are they pushing here? What are they trying to get us to do?” Vladimir Putin is posturing toward a costly invasion of Ukraine, on the false pretext of protecting Russian-language speakers in the country. Why? In a wide-ranging conversation, Snyder talks with David Remnick about how to understand Russia’s aggression, the idea advanced by Putin that Ukraine historically and rightfully belongs to Russia,

Jan 28, 2022 • 30:48

The Trials of a Whistle-blower

The Trials of a Whistle-blower

As a nurse at the Irwin County Detention Center—a Georgia facility run by LaSalle Corrections, a private company operating an immigration-detention contract with ICE—Dawn Wooten became aware of some frightening violations, including numerous hysterectomies and other medical procedures performed without patient consent. When she asked questions, she was demoted and eventually pushed out. Wooten supplied critical information for two complaints about I.C.D.C., which were submitted to the Office of

Jan 25, 2022 • 27:09

The Olympic Games Return to China, in a Changed World

The Olympic Games Return to China, in a Changed World

Much has changed since China last hosted the Olympics, during the 2008 Summer Games. Those Games were widely seen as greatly improving China’s international reputation. But the 2022 Winter Games have put a spotlight instead on its human-rights abuses, most notably the genocide taking place against Uyghurs and Kazakhs. Peter Hessler, for many years The New Yorker’s China correspondent, asks David Remnick, “When an athlete says something about the internment camps in Xinjiang, and the oppression o

Jan 21, 2022 • 22:11

Hilton Als and Emma Cline on the Late Joan Didion

Hilton Als and Emma Cline on the Late Joan Didion

Joan Didion tried and failed, she said, “to think”; that is, to write about abstractions and symbols, and make grand arguments in the manner of the New York intellectuals of her time. Instead, the California native—who died in December, at the age of eighty-seven—built her work around close observation of American life as she saw it, withholding judgment. And while many of her intellectual contemporaries belong now to a bygone era, “for my generation,” Emma Cline notes, “her influence is so mass

Jan 18, 2022 • 18:03

The Biden Presidency, Year One

The Biden Presidency, Year One

President Biden took the oath of office in a moment of deep crisis—the pandemic in full swing and just weeks after an unprecedented attempt to overturn the election by violence. Merely a return to normalcy would have been a tall order. But Biden was promising something more: a transformational agenda that would realign American economics and life on a scale rivalling Franklin Roosevelt’s long Presidency. Yet Biden never commanded Roosevelt’s indomitable popularity and electoral advantages. A yea

Jan 14, 2022 • 31:51

Nnedi Okorafor on Sci-Fi Through an African Lens

Nnedi Okorafor on Sci-Fi Through an African Lens

Nnedi Okorafor, a recipient of the prestigious Hugo Award, is a prolific writer of science-fiction and fantasy novels for adults and young adults. She spoke with Vinson Cunningham about how her Nigerian American heritage influenced her interest in fantastical worlds. “It’s part of the culture—this mysticism,” she says. “I wanted to write about those mystical things that people talked about but didn’t talk about because they were mysterious and interesting, and sometimes forbidden.” Her novel “Ak

Jan 11, 2022 • 23:32

A New Civil War in America?

A New Civil War in America?

When rioters, encouraged by the President, stormed the Capitol, one year ago, to overturn the results of the election, the idea that such a thing could play out in America was stunning. But the attack may have been just the beginning of an ongoing insurrection, not a failed attempt at a coup. David Remnick talks with Barbara F. Walter, the author of the new book “How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them.” Walter is a political scientist and a professor at the University of California, San Dieg

Jan 7, 2022 • 26:45

The Power of Police Unions

The Power of Police Unions

The repeal of Section 50-A of the New York State Civil Rights Law was no technical change. Passed in the wake of the George Floyd protests, it was a big victory for police-reform activists. 50-A shielded the disciplinary records of police officers, meaning that, in an officer-involved killing, for example, neither lawyers, journalists, nor the victim’s family could determine if the officer had a history of disciplinary incidents. Laws like 50-A—and there are similar laws in many states—have play

Jan 4, 2022 • 24:16

Amanda Gorman on Life After Inauguration

Amanda Gorman on Life After Inauguration

One year ago, Amanda Gorman delivered the inaugural poem on the day that Joe Biden became President. Gorman was just twenty-two years old, and it was just two weeks after Trump supporters had assaulted the Capitol in an effort to stop Congress from certifying the election. At the ceremony, Gorman herself seemed to cast light on a dark situation. Her poem “The Hill We Climb” reads, “When day comes, we ask ourselves: / Where can we find light / In this never-ending shade? / The loss we carry, a se

Dec 31, 2021 • 25:38

For a French Burglar, Stealing Masterpieces Is Easier Than Selling Them

For a French Burglar, Stealing Masterpieces Is Easier Than Selling Them

Vjeran Tomic has been stealing since he was a small child, when he used a ladder to break into a library in his home town, in Bosnia. After moving to Paris, he graduated to lucrative apartment burglaries, living off the jewels he took and often doing time in prison. He became known in the French press as Spider-Man, and he began to steal art. Tomic has a grand sense of his calling as a burglar; he considers it his destiny and has described his robberies as acts of imagination. He eventually carr

Dec 28, 2021 • 21:23

Rhiannon Giddens, Americana’s Queen, Goes Global

Rhiannon Giddens, Americana’s Queen, Goes Global

By the standards of any musician, Rhiannon Giddens has taken a twisting and complex path. Trained as an operatic soprano at the prestigious Oberlin Conservatory, Giddens fell almost by chance into the study of American folk music. Alongside two like-minded musicians, she formed the Carolina Chocolate Drops, in which she plays banjo and sings. The group is focussed on reviving the nearly forgotten repertoire of Black Southern string bands, but the audience for acoustic music remains largely white

Dec 24, 2021 • 29:52

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