The New Yorker Radio Hour

Anna Wintour graces the cover of Vogue’s May issue alongside her theatrical double: Meryl Streep in the role of Miranda Priestly, from “The Devil Wears Prada,” whose much-anticipated sequel comes out on May 1st. Wintour and David Remnick spoke last fall on the day that a sea change took place at Vogue: it was announced that Chloe Malle would take over the editorial direction of the American edition of the publication. They discussed her storied career; her decision to wear Prada to the premiére of “The Devil Wears Prada”; and how Remnick might up his fashion game: “Forgive me, David, but how boring would it be if everybody was just wearing a dark suit and a white shirt all the time?” This segment originally aired on September 5, 2025.   New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

At the end of February, OpenAI’s C.E.O., Sam Altman, made headlines by swiftly cutting a deal with the Pentagon for his company to replace Anthropic, which had balked at the Trump Administration’s bid to use its A.I. technology to power autonomous weapons and aid in mass surveillance. Days earlier, Altman had publicly supported Anthropic’s position in the dispute. Altman’s rise to power and his founding of OpenAI were predicated on placing safety above other concerns in developing artificial general intelligence. Why did he change his stance on such a fundamental issue? The New Yorker writers Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz spoke with Altman multiple times and interviewed more than a hundred people for their investigation into the leader of one of the most powerful companies in the world, comparing Altman to J. Robert Oppenheimer. Although there is no smoking gun in Altman’s hand, the writers find that persistent allegations about his conduct underscore the danger of entrusting him to wield such vast power over the future.    Further reading: "Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?,” by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz “The Dangerous Paradox of A.I. Abundance,” by John Cassidy “The A.I. Bubble Is Coming for Your Browser,” by Kyle Chayka   New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

The New Yorker staff writer Louisa Thomas, who writes the Sporting Scene column, talks with David Remnick about the biggest basketball stories this season: how LeBron James embraced a new late-career persona as a great supporting player for the Los Angeles Lakers; the coaching genius of the Celtics’ Joe Mazzulla; and the ongoing scandal over teams deliberately tanking games to secure better prospects in the N.B.A. draft.  Further reading:  “How Much Is a Home Team Worth?,” by Louisa Thomas “LeBron James Is Making His Last Great Adjustment,” by Louisa Thomas   New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

In 2021, when Olga Rudenko and other journalists launched the English-language news outlet the Kyiv Independent, they were committed to making a publication that wouldn’t face political pressure from an owner. A few months later, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the Independent began reporting breaking news from the front lines, and conducting investigations of the Ukrainian government. David Remnick talks with Rudenko, the Independent’s editor-in-chief, about the challenges of reporting in wartime; President Volodymyr Zelensky’s pushback on independent journalism; how Iran and Russia have been providing military aid to one another; and why Ukraine cannot accept the peace deal with Russia that Donald Trump is insisting that it take. Further reading:  “The Assault on Ukraine’s Power Grid,” by Michael Holtz “What Are Putin’s Ultimate Demands for Peace in Ukraine?,” by Joshua Yaffa “Ukraine Has ‘Irrefutable Evidence’ of Russia Providing Intelligence to Iran, Zelensky Says,” by Asami Terajima, of the Kyiv Independent “China, Iran Help Russia Prop Up Economy in Occupied Ukrainian Territories, Report Says,” by Yuliia Taradiuk, of the Kyiv Independent “Ukraine Heads to US with Drone Proposal Trump Dismissed Before War with Iran,” by Tim Zadorozhnyy, of the Kyiv Independent “We Interviewed Iran’s Envoy to Ukraine and It Was Absolutely Wild,” by Polina Moroziuk, of the Kyiv Independent   New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

Thousands of federal prosecutors have been fired or have resigned from their roles since Pam Bondi took over as Attorney General. She has made no secret of weaponizing the Justice Department to pursue Donald Trump’s vendettas. One of those prosecutors is Troy Edwards, who quit a senior national-security position in the Eastern District of Virginia. As an assistant U.S. attorney in DC, Edwardshad won convictions against members of the Oath Keepers for January 6th-related offenses. Edwards is also the son-in-law of the former F.B.I. director James Comey, and, when the Justice Department indicted Comey on grounds widely seen as flimsy, Edwards knew he had reached his red line. (The charges were quickly dismissed, though without prejudice.) The New Yorker’s legal correspondent Ruth Marcus talks with Edwards about his decision to leave, how he broke it to his family, and why he thinks other prosecutors should not follow his lead.  Further reading:  “Pam Bondi’s Contempt for Congress,” by Ruth Marcus “The Flimsy, Dangerous Indictment of James Comey,” by Ruth Marcus “Pam Bondi’s Power Play,” by Ruth Marcus   New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

The new play “Giant,” on Broadway, dramatizes the scandal around Roald Dahl, the beloved children’s-book author who, in the nineteen-eighties, began making antisemitic statements and invoking stereotypes about Jewish influence. John Lithgow portrays Dahl as he faces off against his American publisher, who presses him to retract his statements. The events that the show focusses on took place more than forty years ago, but they couldn’t be more relevant today, as antisemitism surges during a war in the Middle East. Lithgow joins David Remnick to discuss the question of whether to separate the art from the artist—and about his own hesitation regarding his role as the wizard Dumbledore in HBO’s new “Harry Potter” series, because of J. K. Rowling’s history of anti-trans statements.    Further reading:  “‘Giant’ Takes on Roald Dahl and his Antisemitism,” by John Lahr   New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

Julio Torres got his big break as a writer on “Saturday Night Live,” and went on to make the cult favorites “Los Espookys” and “Fantasmas” for HBO. He also wrote and directed the film “Problemista,” about a toy designer facing deportation. There’s a particular kind of surrealism to Torres’s humor; “I just don’t think his mind works quite like anyone else’s,” the staff writer Michael Schulman says, comparing Torres to “a guest lecturer at an art school . . . laying out his very particular way of seeing the world.” They met in New York to discuss the unique, synesthetic ideas about color which Torres describes in a new HBO special, “Color Theories,” and to check out a few hues at a nearby dollar store.   Thanks to Home in Heven and Third Avenue Dollar and More.     Further reading: “The Otherworldly Comedy of Julio Torres,” by Michael Shulman   New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

The staff writer Jon Lee Anderson has reported from Cuba for many years, and recently wrote about the deteriorating economic conditions on the island. His newest piece for the magazine dives into the potential outcomes of Donald Trump’s desire to pursue regime change. Anderson explores the economic impact of the United States blocking Venezuelan oil from reaching Cuba, which could be a death knell for the Communist government. Anderson and David Remnick discuss the current negotiations between the two countries, Marco Rubio’s strategy, and what cards the Cuban government might still hold. “They’re going to go into this,” Anderson suggests, “like maybe a canny poker player.” Plus, the historian Ada Ferrer won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2022 book, “Cuba: An American History,” and she has one of the clearest views of the long and vexed relationship between the island and its giant neighbor. Ferrer left Cuba as an infant, coming to the United States with her mother in 1963 when Fidel Castro’s regime was arguably at its peak. David Remnick talks with Ferrer about the impact of U.S. sanctions, the economic collapse of Cuba, and what Donald Trump’s threat of a “takeover” means to the Cuban people and to Cuban Americans in the U.S.    Further reading:  “Have Cubans Fled One Authoritarian State for Another?,” by Jon Lee Anderson “What’s Behind Trump’s New World Disorder?,” by Daniel Immerwahr   New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

Chloé Zhao became only the second woman to win an Oscar for Best Director, for 2020’s “Nomadland,” and she is nominated once again for “Hamnet,” starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley. Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s novel of the same name, the film follows a young William Shakespeare and his wife, and their grief at the loss of their only son. “Hamnet” is also nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress, and five other awards.  Speaking with Michael Schulman, Zhao talked about the origins of “Hamnet,” the centrality of nature imagery in her work, and how the I.P. in a Marvel film is not so different from adapting a literary novel.   This segment originally aired on December 5, 2025. Further reading: “Chloé Zhao Has Looked into the Void,” by Michael Schulman New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

In the book “The Anxious Generation,” Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University, argues that social-media platforms are detrimental to youths’ well-being, and that society needs to treat them as literally addictive. It has spent nearly a hundred weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, and has helped galvanize a movement seeking limits to social media in legislatures, in school districts, and in the courts. David Remnick speaks with Haidt about an Australian law to verify the age of social-media users, the first of its kind in the world, and about lawsuits in California that are aiming to pin liability for harms on social-media companies themselves.  Further reading:  “World Happiness Report 2026,” featuring a contribution from Jonathan Haidt and other researchers  “Mountains of Evidence,” by Jonathan Haidt New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

When the Oscar nominations were announced this year, Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” set a record. It received sixteen nominations, the most for any film ever. The fact that it’s, in part, a vampire movie, made by a director who’s not yet forty, makes that feat all the more remarkable. Coogler—who previously directed “Creed” and “Black Panther”—sat down with the New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb to discuss the recurrent themes of history, faith, and race in his work, and how he refracted them through the lens of horror in “Sinners.” This segment originally aired on April 11, 2025.   Further reading:  “Ryan Coogler’s Road to ‘Sinners,’ ” by Jelani Cobb   New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

As Iran’s retaliation hit American allies throughout the Middle East this week, David Remnick was joined by two New Yorker writers with decades of experience reporting from the region. Robin Wright has reported from Iran extensively, and she met with Ali Khamenei before he became the Supreme Leader of Iran; Dexter Filkins covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he has been reporting on the Pentagon and military readiness. Filkins and Wright discuss the possibilities for future leadership in Iran; the Administration’s chaotic statements in regard to its goals and time frame; and the economic impact of the war, which is already being felt around the globe.    Further reading: “What Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Meant to Iran, and What Comes Next,” by Robin Wright "How Marco Rubio Went from “Little Marco” to Trump’s Foreign-Policy Enabler,” by Dexter Filkins “The Forever War,” by Dexter Filkins   New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

David Remnick sits down with Mickey Down and Konrad Kay, the creators of a show he loves, “Industry,” which is currently airing its fourth season. The show is centered on the financial and personal dramas of junior employees at a fictional London investment bank. Down and Kay are old friends who both did unsuccessful stints in banking. “Before we could formulate our own identities, we allowed the institution to make them for us,” Down tells Remnick. But, having left finance for television, he says, “I still feel like I want to make money. . . .  I’m never content with my career. The reason our show feels like it’s constantly changing and vibrating with electricity is because me and Konrad are, in terms of our careers. And, you know, we want to be successful. We were finance bros in the first instance.” New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

As Donald Trump and his Administration threaten to attack Iran, their motivations remain unclear. Does the President want to force Iran to make a nuclear deal, to replace the one that he scrapped in his first term, or is he really seeking regime change? To understand how this all might play out, David Remnick speaks with Karim Sadjadpour, a policy analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who writes about the Middle East for Foreign Affairs and other publications. Citing the disastrous precedents in Afghanistan and Iraq, Sadjadpour notes, “the last two decades has proven that we don’t have the ability to dictate . . . who comes to power the day after a military attack.” Plus, After protests over the economy erupted across Iran late last year, reports emerged that the regime was killing protesters. Donald Trump threatened to intervene, but did not. Estimates vary widely, but some note that thirty thousand people or more may have been killed. Now, as the U.S. sends a huge military force to the Gulf, Iranians are waiting for war—and many in the country are in the shocking position of hoping for conflict, if it will end the Ayatollah’s government. The reporter Cora Engelbrecht has been recording her conversations with sources on the ground about what that could mean. Their voices were altered or overdubbed for our story, to protect them from reprisal. New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs have had a major impact in their short time on the market—currently, one in eight Americans say that they have been on GLP-1 drugs. As tens of millions of people take these medications, anecdotal evidence has emerged that they have a positive effect on alcohol abuse and drug addiction. Researchers are starting to run trials of the drugs for these purposes, and some speculate that GLP-1 drugs could even affect addiction behaviors such as gambling and online shopping. The physician and New Yorker medical correspondent Dhruv Khullar spoke with scientists and patients. “Over the course of my reporting,” he tells David Remnick, “I became more and more bullish on the idea that these are actually going to be really important molecules for the treatment of addiction.” Dhruv Khullar’s “Can Ozempic Cure Addiction?” was published on February 9th. New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

Hosting the Academy Awards ceremony is a notoriously tricky gig, but Conan O’Brien nailed it in 2025, and he will return for this year’s event. Since leaving late-night television, in 2021, O’Brien has been busy: his hit podcast “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” commands perhaps a larger audience than he had on late night; he launched the travel series “Conan O’Brien Must Go”; and he’s played a therapist in the 2025 film “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.” O’Brien talks with David Remnick about the things that have gone wrong at the Oscars; why he won’t get too “sentimental” about the gradual collapse of late night; and his shock at the deaths of Rob and Michele Reiner, who had been at O’Brien’s house on the night they were killed.  New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

Every year, ahead of Oscar night, the film critic Richard Brody joins the New Yorker Radio Hour to discuss his picks for the year’s best films. David Remnick sits down with Brody and the staff writer Alexandra Schwartz to discuss the movies that didn’t get enough credit, the ones that got too much, and the lesser-known gems among the year’s releases. New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

In January, the Justice Department released over three million documents, including many redacted e-mails, related to Jeffrey Epstein. “Should we share the Julie Brown text with Alan [Dershowitz],” Epstein wrote in one note to a lawyer. “She is going to start trouble. Asking for victims etc.” Brown’s reporting on Epstein for the Miami Herald, and her revelations about the federal plea deal he received, had an enormous impact on public perception of Epstein and his ties to Trump. Brown joins David Remnick to discuss the latest tranche of redacted e-mails, which show, as she reported, that Trump knew about his friend’s crimes far earlier than he has admitted. Brown and Remnick also talk about Epstein’s relationship with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and why she does not believe that Epstein died by suicide.  New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

Jenin Younes rose to prominence on the right by defending medical professionals like Jay Bhattacharya who claimed that they were being censored over opposition to vaccination and masking mandates. Younes worked for the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a group described as libertarian, and appeared at events with the Federalist Society. As the political winds have shifted, she says that the Trump Administration’s attacks on free speech are worse than anything that she saw during the Biden Administration. Younes is currently the national legal director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. David Remnick speaks with her about her unlikely trajectory and about how her commitment to free speech—regardless of which side of the aisle the issue arises from—has left her in a uniquely lonely political position.  New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

Ben Shapiro, the host of his eponymous podcast and the co-founder of the conservative website the Daily Wire, has lambasted the left and the Democratic Party for decades. Recently, though, Shapiro has taken to criticizing some of the loudest voices in the MAGA universe, including Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly. The rift is over the acceptance and promulgation of conspiracy theories and, in particular, the normalization of antisemitism. Shapiro discusses the Epstein files and what they show—and do not show—about the powerful people connected to Jeffrey Epstein. The belief in conspiracies of the élite reflects “people’s desire to abdicate control over their own lives,” Shapiro tells David Remnick. They discuss Shapiro’s adherence to the conservative value of personal responsibility, and how he squares that with MAGA and its champions. New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

The staff writers Emily Witt and Ruby Cramer discuss the situation in Minneapolis, a city effectively under siege by militaristic federal agents. “This is a city where there’s a police force of about six hundred officers [compared] to three thousand federal agents,” Witt points out. Cramer shares her interview with Mayor Jacob Frey, who talks about how Minneapolis was just beginning to recover from the trauma of George Floyd’s murder and its aftermath, and with the police chief Brian O’Hara, who critiques the lack of discipline he sees from immigration-enforcement officers. Witt shares her interviews with two U.S. citizens who were detained after following an ICE vehicle; one describes an interrogation in which he was encouraged to identify protest organizers and undocumented people, in exchange for favors from immigration authorities.  Ruby Cramer’s “The Mayor of an Occupied City” was published on January 23rd. Emily Witt’s “The Battle for Minneapolis” was published on January 25th.  New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

Last October, Bari Weiss—best-known as a contrarian opinion writer who launched the right-leaning Free Press—was appointed the new editor-in-chief of CBS News. Donald Trump has called her new regime “the greatest thing that’s happened in a long time to a free and open and good press.” The New Yorker staff writer Clare Malone wrote about Weiss’s hostile takeover of CBS for the January 26, 2026, issue of the magazine. In a conversation with David Remnick, Malone discusses her reporting on Weiss: how resigning from the New York Times launched Weiss to prominence as a crusader against what she has characterized as woke groupthink; how Weiss gained the support of Silicon Valley titans who had their own political grievances; and the headlines about Weiss’s rocky beginning as head of a news network, including the on-air travails of her new anchor, Tony Dokoupil. New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

Tucker Carlson has long been a standard-bearer for far-right views, such as the racist conspiracy theory known as the “great replacement.” He recently did a chatty interview with the white supremacist Nick Fuentes, an admirer of Hitler. And yet, Carlson started out as a respected, well-connected, albeit contrarian, political journalist. Jason Zengerle, who recently joined The New Yorker as a staff writer, talks with David Remnick about his new book, “Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind.” They trace how Carlson’s sense of personal resentment toward the establishment grew; how launching his own website radicalized his politics in the years before MAGA; and his political ambitions as a potential heir to Donald Trump. “I think, if Tucker Carlson concludes that J. D. Vance can’t get elected President, maybe he has to do it himself,” Zengerle says. “So much of politics now is just being a media figure and being an entertainer. And Tucker does those things very well. . . . I think our politics are at a place where that really doesn’t seem as outrageous as it would have even just a couple years ago.”  New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

Danny Funt has been reporting on the gambling boom for The New Yorker, which has generated startling recent headlines, including the arrest of a former N.B.A. coach and the indictment of two M.L.B. pitchers—not to mention the Polymarket user who won four hundred thousand dollars wagering on the seizure of Nicolás Maduro. The legalization of sports gambling, combined with the accessibility of betting apps, has made gambling so pervasive that children in elementary school are routinely placing bets, Funt tells David Remnick. Funt’s new book is “Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling.” 

Before becoming a podcaster, Jennifer Welch had a successful career as an interior designer and co-starred in a reality show on Bravo. But, since 2022, she and Angie Sullivan, her co-host on the podcast “I’ve Had It,” have gained millions of fans as a sounding board for left-leaning political frustrations. These aren’t only concerns about MAGA but also about the Democratic establishment that she views as captive to a corporate agenda. Welch talks with David Remnick about her contentious interviews with Cory Booker and Rahm Emanuel, her belief in “dark woke,” and how a white Oklahoma woman in her fifties emerged as one of the most provocative voices on today’s left.  

Prenups have gone from a tool of the ultra-wealthy, carrying a whiff of scandal, to a more widespread request for aspirational young couples with few assets. Wilson spoke with celebrity divorce attorney Laura Wasser, and found that generations who grew up in the era of universal no-fault divorce “just don’t trust marriage” as their elders did; “they want it in writing,” and they have developed apps that make it easy. Clauses calling for nondisparagement on social media are a common feature. But the boom in prenups, Wilson tells David Remnick, has led to couples trying to negotiate even intimate issues such as frequency of sex and body-mass index.  Jennifer Wilson’s “Why Millennials Love Prenups” appeared in the December 29, 2025 & January 5, 2026 issue of The New Yorker.

U.S. intervention in other countries, whether overt or covert, is by no means new, and Daniel Immerwahr notes that the open embrace of expansionism by the President and associates such as Stephen Miller goes back to the nineteenth century. Immerwahr is a professor at Northwestern University and the author of the 2019 best-seller “How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States.” He discusses Trump’s disdain for international law; tensions between the U.S. and Russia and China; and the historical link between imperialism and appeals to masculine pride.

Since she reëmerged as a star in the 2024 film “The Substance,” Demi Moore has been very busy. She has a major role in the current season of Taylor Sheridan’s “Landman” series, and she has two highly anticipated films coming out this year: a science-fiction film directed by Boots Riley, and “Strange Arrivals,” alongside Colman Domingo, about a couple who claimed to have been abducted by aliens. She sat down at The New Yorker Festival in the fall with the staff writer Jia Tolentino to discuss her varied career and how she has dealt with the pressures of the industry. This episode was recorded live at The New Yorker Festival, on October 25, 2025.  New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

For roughly half a century, the singer Rubén Blades has been spreading the gospel of salsa music to every corner of the globe. “You could say that Blades did for salsa what Bob Marley did for reggae,” says The New Yorker’s Graciela Mochkofsky. “He brought it into the global consciousness.” This year, Blades’s record “Fotografías” is up for a Grammy Award; should he win, it would be his thirteenth. Blades once ran for President of Panama and later served in the country’s cabinet; he’s also notable for bringing social commentary to the dance floor, from his earliest work to the recent “Inmigrantes,” a song about the impact of the climate crisis on refugees. And yet, he tells Mochkovsky, songwriters should beware of political messages. “Political songs are propaganda by definition. If you start singing about political ideology, you’re not an artist—you’re doing propaganda, basically. I try to be as close to a newspaper [reporter] as I can.” This segment originally aired on October 6, 2023. New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

Thirty years ago, David Remnick published “The Devil Problem,” a Profile of the religion scholar Elaine Pagels—a scholar of early Christianity who had also, improbably, become a best-selling author with “The Gnostic Gospels,” from 1979. Pagels’s latest book, “Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus,” is a summation of her lifetime of research on Christianity, as it takes on some of the central historical controversies of Christianity, including the stories of immaculate conception and the resurrection. She tells Remnick how she found and lost faith in the evangelical movement, but retained a lifelong interest in religion. “I have a sense that what we think of as the invisible world,” she feels, “has deep realities to it that are quite unfathomable.” This segment originally aired on March 28, 2025. New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

Across the country, data centers that run A.I. programs are being constructed at a record pace. A large percentage of them use chips built by the tech colossus Nvidia. The company has nearly cornered the market on the hardware that runs much of A.I., and has been named the most valuable company in the world, by market capitalization. But Nvidia’s is not just a business story; it’s a story about the geopolitical and technological competition between the United States and China, about what the future will look like. In April, David Remnick spoke with Stephen Witt, who writes about technology for The New Yorker, about how Nvidia came to dominate the market, and about its co-founder and C.E.O., Jensen Huang.  Witt’s book “The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip” came out this year.    This segment originally aired on April 4, 2025. New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

The Republican Susan Collins has held one of Maine’s Senate seats for nearly thirty years, and Democrats, in trying to take it away from her, have a lot at stake. Graham Platner, a combat veteran, political activist, and small-business owner who has never served in office, seemed to check many boxes for a progressive upstart. Platner, who says he and his wife earn sixty thousand dollars a year, has spoken passionately about affordability, and has called universal health care a  “moral imperative.” He seemed like a rising star, but then some of his past comments online directed against police, L.G.B.T.Q. people, sexual-assault survivors, Black people, and rural whites surfaced. A photo was published of a tattoo that he got in the Marines, which resembles a Nazi symbol, though Platner says he didn’t realize it. He apologized, but will Democrats embrace him, despite ugly views in his past? “As uncomfortable as it is, and personally unenjoyable, to have to talk about stupid things I said on the internet,” he told David Remnick, “it also allows me to publicly model something I think is really important. . . . You can change your language, change the way you think about stuff.” In fact, he frames his candidacy in a way that might appeal to disappointed Trump voters: “You should be able to be proud of the fact that you can turn into a different kind of person. You can think about the world in a different way.” New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s most recent collection, “The New Economy,” was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry this year, and one of their poems was included in “A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker,” an anthology volume published this year on the occasion of the publication’s hundredth anniversary. The magazine’s poetry editor, Kevin Young, spoke with Calvocoressi about their creative process, how poetry can help with grief, and the inspirations behind their work.  This segment mentions suicide and suicidal thoughts. If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 or chat at 988Lifeline.org.

In the course of his long career, Leon Panetta was a lieutenant in the Army, a congressman from California, Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff, Barack Obama’s director of the C.I.A., and later, his Secretary of Defense. David Remnick talks with Panetta about the current Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, the legality of the ongoing Navy strikes targeting civilian boats off the coast of Venezuela, and the problem with using the military as “the President’s personal toy.” New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

This year marked a hundred years since the birth of The New Yorker, and a documentary about the magazine’s past and present, “The New Yorker at 100,” is now streaming on Netflix. The director is the Academy Award winner Marshall Curry, and Judd Apatow served as an executive producer. They sat down to talk about the process behind the film with Jelani Cobb, a longtime staff writer for the magazine and the dean of the Columbia Journalism School. The trio discussed how they approached depicting a century of journalism history on film, their own relationships to The New Yorker, and what makes David Remnick so hard to interview.  This interview took place at the 2025 New Yorker Festival.  

Chloé Zhao was the second woman to ever win an Oscar for Best Director, for her 2020 film “Nomadland.” After taking a wide turn to create the Marvel supernatural epic “Eternals,” Zhao has taken another intriguing change of direction with “Hamnet,” based on Maggie O’Farrell’s novel about how William Shakespeare coped with the death of his only son. In conversation with the New Yorker staff writer Michael Schulman, Zhao discusses the role that nature plays in her filmmaking, from the American West to the forests of Britain; the process of adapting manga to film; and how neurodivergence informs her creative process. New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

As a California congressman, Adam Schiff was the lead manager during the first impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump. He later served on the January 6th committee. Trump has castigated him as “Shifty Schiff” and demanded that the Justice Department investigate him. In a conversation with David Remnick, Schiff discusses the current inquiry into his mortgage by federal authorities; the Supreme Court’s primary role in enabling this Administration; and why he thinks the rule of law in America is “hanging by a thread.” Unlike some Democrats, Schiff is not sanguine that the release of the Epstein files will damage Trump politically. “If there are ruinous things in the files . . . Bondi and company will make sure they never reach the public eye,” Schiff says. But also, “I think he’s almost impervious to dirt.” New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

The filmmaker Noah Baumbach can recall when he may have fallen out of love with his craft. He was shooting “White Noise,” based on Don DeLillo’s novel, “on a deserted highway in Ohio at 4 A.M. with a rain machine.”  “Oh, God, I don’t know that I like doing this,” he recalls thinking. “Am I doing this”—making movies—“only because I do it?” He channelled that angst into his new film “Jay Kelly,” a Hollywood comedy of manners starring George Clooney as a very famous movie star who suddenly wonders whether it was all worth it, and why people keep offering him cheesecake. In October, Baumbach spoke with The New Yorker’s articles editor, Susan Morrison, at The New Yorker Festival about working with his wife, Greta Gerwig, on “Barbie,” and why the first lines of his movies can tell you everything.    New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

In his latest novel, Ian McEwan imagines a future world after a century’s worth of disasters. The good news in “What We Can Know” is that humanity still exists, which McEwan calls “nuanced optimism.” He and David Remnick discuss the tradition of the big-themed social novel, which has gone out of literary fashion—“rather too many novels,” McEwan theorizes, hide “their poor prose behind a character.” But is the realist novel, Remnick wonders, “up to the job” of describing today’s digital life? It remains “our best instrument of understanding who we are, of representing the flow of thought and feeling, and of representing the fine print of what happens between individuals,” McEwan responds. “We have not yet found a compelling replacement.” And yet he does not care to moralize: “the pursuit has also got to be of pleasure.”  McEwan spoke with David Remnick at a public event organized by the 92nd Street Y in New York.    New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

Only thirty per cent of the American public identifies with the MAGA movement, according to a recent NBC poll, but that coalition remains intensely loyal to Donald Trump in the face of scandals and authoritarian measures. Defections seem rare and come with the risk of reprisal, even from the President himself. Rich Logis is trying to make them less rare with his advocacy organization, Leaving MAGA. The nonprofit’s  website features testimonials from former adherents, and offers advice for how friends and family can reconnect after ruptures over politics. Logis himself had been a true believer: he worked on Trump’s campaign, wrote articles, released a podcast, and called Democrats “the most dangerous group in the history of our Republic, foreign or domestic—more than Islamic supremacists, more than the Nazis.” He didn’t view MAGA as reactionary, but “very progressive and forward facing.” But somewhere along the way, Logis hung up his red hat. “Even today, talking about my past, the feelings are conjured—those feelings of being welcomed and feeling like you’re part of something, and the exhilaration that comes from that,” he tells the New Yorker Radio Hour’s Adam Howard. Logis emphasizes that leaving MAGA is difficult because, as much as it’s a political ideology, it’s also an identity that meets emotional needs. “I think that there’s a lot of trauma within the MAGA base, whether it’s political or economic. . . . I’m not qualified to make any kind of diagnosis. I’m not a therapist or a clinician, but there’s a lot of pain within MAGA. And I think that a better question [instead] of asking ‘What’s wrong with you?’ is ‘What happened to you?’ ”   New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

Both major parties are experiencing a crisis of leadership in Washington. President Trump’s flip-flopping on the Epstein files acknowledges that, on this issue, at least, he has lost control of MAGA. For the Democrats, the collapse of their consensus on the government shutdown deepens a sense that the current leadership is ineffective. For all the talk of unity, the Party is profoundly divided on what message to convey to voters. “Some people argue that we should just—no matter what Donald Trump does or says—just always come back to the economy and prices,” Senator Chris Van Hollen, of Maryland, tells David Remnick. “And, of course, we should be very focussed on the economy and prices and rising health-care costs, as we have been. But to suggest that we should look the other way in the face of all these other outrages is, I think, a mistake, because I think the American people are tiring of Donald Trump. I think the polls indicate that.” Van Hollen is trying to pave a path between his party’s left and the establishment. He’s used the word “spineless” to describe colleagues in Congress who refused to endorse Zohran Mamdani in his mayoral campaign, but he has not called for Chuck Schumer to step down from leadership, as others have. Van Hollen wants “to be very much part of the debate as to where the Democratic Party goes.” Would that extend, Remnick wonders, to running for President? “My goal at this moment really is to stiffen the spine of the Democratic Party. But that means not just resistance to Trump. It also means taking on very powerful special interests that I think have had too much sway in both the Republican Party for sure, but also in the Democratic Party.” Remnick replies, “I’ve heard firmer nos in my time.”    New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

The curator Thelma Golden is a major presence in New York City’s cultural life, having mounted era-defining exhibitions such as “Black Male” and “Freestyle” early on in her career. Golden is the Ford Foundation director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, an institution, founded in 1968, that is dedicated to contemporary artists of the African diaspora. But, for a significant portion of her tenure, this singular institution has been closed to the public. Golden led the initiative to create a new, purpose-built home—requiring the demolition of an old building and reconstruction on the same site. To mark its reopening, David Remnick tours the new space with Golden, discussing some key works and the museum’s mission. He notes that this triumphant moment for the Studio Museum comes during a time of broad attacks on cultural institutions, particularly on expressions of identity politics. “I take a lot of inspiration from our founders, who opened up in a complicated moment,” Golden reflects. “My own career began in the midst of the culture wars of [the nineteen-nineties]. Understanding museums as a place that should be, can be, must be where we engage deeply in ideas. In this moment, that has to offer some hope as we consider a future.” New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

When President Donald Trump began his tariff rollout, the business world predicted that his unprecedented attempt to reshape the economy would lead to a major recession, if Trump went through with it all. But the markets stabilized and, in recent months, have continued to surge. That has some people worried about an even bigger threat: that overinvestment in artificial intelligence is creating a bubble. Andrew Ross Sorkin, one of today’s preëminent financial journalists, is well versed in what’s happening; his début book, “Too Big to Fail,” was an account of the 2008 financial crash, and this year he released “1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History—and How It Shattered a Nation.” He tells David Remnick that the concern lies in the massive borrowing to build the infrastructure for a future A.I. economy, without the sufficient revenue, currently, to pay off the loans. “If I learned anything from covering 1929, [and] covering 2008, it is leverage,” Sorkin says, “people borrowing to make all of this happen. And right now we are beginning to see a remarkable period of borrowing to make the economics of A.I. work.” Sorkin is the co-anchor of “Squawk Box” on CNBC, and he also founded the New York Times’ business section, DealBook. New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

Patti Smith’s album “Horses” came out fifty years ago, on November 10, 1975, launching her to stardom almost overnight. An anniversary reissue came out this year, to rapturous reviews. Yet being a rock star was never Smith’s intention: she was a published poet before “Horses” came out, and had also written a play with Sam Shepard. Music was an afterthought, as she tells it, a way to make her poetry readings pop. “I didn’t want to be boring,” she tells David Remnick. In recent years, it may finally be that more people know Smith as a writer than as a musician. Her memoir “Just Kids,” about her friendship with the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, won a National Book Award. “M Train” reflected on her withdrawal from music as she raised a family. In her newest memoir, “Bread of Angels,” Smith writes intimately about the loss of her husband, her brother, and close friends; she also shares a startling revelation about her family and past. It’s a book that was challenging for her and took her years to write. “I write profusely—fiction, fairy tales, all kinds of things that aren’t even published—without a care,” she says. “Writing a memoir, bringing other people into it, one has to really be prudent, and search themselves and make sure that they’re presenting the right picture.”  New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians

Few Democratic officials have been more outspoken in opposition to the Trump Administration than J. B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois. He seems almost to relish antagonizing Trump, who has suggested Pritzker should be in jail. Meanwhile, ICE and Border Patrol have targeted Chicago, and elsewhere in Illinois, with immigration sweeps more aggressive than what Los Angeles experienced earlier this year; they refused to pause the raids even on Halloween. The President has called Chicago a “hell hole,” but, in Pritzker’s view, immigration sweeps do nothing to reduce crime. “He’s literally taking F.B.I., D.E.A., and A.T.F.—which we work with all the time—he’s taking them out of their departments and moving them over to ICE, and they’re not . . .  helping us catch bad guys,” Pritzker says in an interview with the reporter Peter Slevin. “He’s creating mayhem on the ground because you know what he wants? He wants troops on the ground in American cities, and the only way he can get that done is by proving that there’s some sort of insurrection or revolution or rebellion.” And yet, as Slevin tells David Remnick, a governor’s power to resist the federal government depends largely on the courts. Thus far, “the district courts have acted quite favorably toward the plaintiffs in various lawsuits against these actions by the federal government.” New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

The New Yorker contributing writer Heidi Blake has been investigating a new story for the Pulitzer Prize-winning podcast In the Dark. This season is about one of the most notorious crimes in modern British history: the Whitehouse Farm murders, in which five members of a family were killed at a rural estate in England in the mid-nineteen-eighties. Jeremy Bamber—brother, uncle, and son to the victims—was convicted of the crimes. Decades later, Blake got a tip that led her to interview key figures in the case and scour hundreds of thousands of evidence files. What she found brings the official story of the case into question, and challenges the very foundations of the U.K.’s legal system.  This is Episode 1 of Blood Relatives. You can hear more episodes and subscribe to In the Dark here.    New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

Jon Stewart has been a leading figure in political comedy since before the turn of the millennium. But compared to his early years on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show”—when Stewart was merciless in his attacks on George W. Bush’s Administration—these are much more challenging times for late-night comedians. Jimmy Kimmel nearly lost his job over a remark about MAGA supporters of Charlie Kirk, after the head of the F.C.C. threatened ABC. CBS recently announced the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s program. And Stewart now finds himself very near the hot seat: Comedy Central is controlled by David Ellison, the Trump-friendly C.E.O. of the recently merged Paramount Skydance. Stewart’s contract comes up in December. “You’re going to sign another one?” David Remnick asked him, in a live interview at The New Yorker Festival. “We’re working on staying,” Stewart said. “You don’t compromise on what you do. You do it till they tell you to leave. That’s all you can do.”  Stewart, moreover, doesn’t blame solely Donald Trump for recent attacks on the independence of the media, universities, and other institutions. “This is the hardest truth for us to get at, is that [these] institutions . . . have problems. They do. And, if we don’t address those problems in a forthright way, then those institutions become vulnerable to this kind of assault. Credibility is not something that was just taken. It was also lost.” In fact, Stewart also directs his ire at “the Democratic Party, [which] thinks it’s O.K. for their Senate to be an assisted-living facility.” “In the general-populace mind, government no longer serves the interests of the people it purports to represent. That’s a broad-based, deep feeling. And that helps when someone comes along and goes, ‘The system is rigged,’ and people go, ‘Yeah, it is rigged.’ Now, he’s a good diagnostician. I don’t particularly care for his remedy.” This episode was recorded live at The New Yorker Festival, on October 26, 2025.    New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

“Sometimes a term is so apt, its meaning so clear and so relevant to our circumstances, that it becomes more than just a useful buzzword and grows to define an entire moment,” the columnist Kyle Chayka writes, in a review of Cory Doctorow’s book “Enshittification.” Doctorow, a prolific tech writer, is a co-founder of the tech blog Boing Boing, and an activist for online civil liberties with the Electronic Frontier Foundation—so he knows whereof he speaks. He argues that the phenomenon of tech platforms seemingly getting worse for users is not a matter of perception but a business strategy. For example, “the Google-D.O.J. antitrust trial last year surfaced all these memos about a fight about making Google Search worse,” Doctorow explains, in a conversation with Chayka. A Google executive had suggested that, instead of displaying perfectly prioritized results on the first search attempt, “what if we make it so that you got to search two or three times, and then, every time, we got to show you ads?” But, Doctorow argues, there is hope for a better future, if we can resist complacency; big internet platforms all depend on forms of “surveillance” of their users. “The coalition [against this] is so big, and it crosses so many political lines,” Doctorow says, “that if we could just make it illegal to spy on people, we could solve so many problems.” New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

Since Zadie Smith published her début novel, “White Teeth,” twenty-five years ago, she has been a bold and original voice in literature. But those who aren’t familiar with Smith’s work outside of fiction are missing out. As an essayist, in The New Yorker and other publications, Smith writes with great nuance about culture, technology, gentrification, politics; “There’s really not a topic that wouldn’t benefit from her insight,” David Remnick says. He spoke with Smith about her new collection of essays, “Dead and Alive.” “The one thing about talking about essays,” she notes, ruefully, “is you find yourself saying the same thing, but worse—without the commas.” One of the concerns in the book is the role of our devices, and social media in particular, in shaping our thoughts and our political discourse. “Everybody has a different emphasis on [Donald] Trump and what’s going on. My emphasis has been on, to put it baldly, mind control. I think what’s been interesting about the manipulations of a digital age is that it is absolutely natural and normal for people to be offended at the idea that they are being manipulated. None of us like to feel that way. And I think we wasted about—whatever it’s been since the invention of the Iphone—trying to bat away that idea, calling it a moral panic, blaming each other, [and] talking about it as if it were an individual act of will.” In fact, she notes, “we are all being manipulated. Me, too. . . . Once we can all admit that, on the left and the right, then we can direct our attention to who’s been doing this and to what advantage.” New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

Richard Linklater is one of the most admired directors working today, and yet moviegoers may admire him for very different things. There are early comedies such as “Slacker” and “Dazed and Confused”; there’s the romance trilogy that started with “Before Sunrise,” starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy; and the crowd-pleasers like “School of Rock” and “Hit Man.” Linklater’s “Boyhood,” a coming-of-age story shot in the course of twelve years as its protagonist grew from child to young adult, is almost without precedent. This month, Linklater has two new movies releasing almost simultaneously, both dramatizing historical moments in the lives of creative geniuses. In “Blue Moon,” Hawke plays the Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart at the moment his career is being eclipsed by a rival, Oscar Hammerstein II. “My tagline for this movie, that they’re not going to use on any posters, but it’s my tagline: ‘Forgotten, but not gone,’ ” Linklater tells our film critic Justin Chang. “It’s so heartbreaking . . . to do a film about the end of someone’s career.” In “Nouvelle Vague,” which is almost entirely in French, Linklater depicts the unconventional filming of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless,” his triumphant 1959 début. “The most important film,” Linklater says, “is the one you make in your head.”  Justin Chang’s article about Richard Linklater was published on September 27, 2025.

The swiftness and severity with which the Trump Administration has tried to impose its will on higher education came as a shock to many, not least university presidents and faculties from Harvard to U.C.L.A. But for conservatives this arena of cultural conflict has been a long time coming. The staff writer Emma Green has been speaking with influential figures in the current Administration as well as in the larger conservative movement about how they mapped out this battle for Donald Trump’s return to power. “There’s a recognition among the people that I interviewed,” Green tells David Remnick, “that the Administration cannot come in and script to universities: this is what you will teach and this is the degrees that you will offer, and just script it from top to bottom. First of all, that would be not legally possible. And it also, I think in some ways, violates core instincts that conservatives have around academic freedom, because a lot of these people have been on élite campuses and had the experience of being told that their views weren’t acceptable.” Green also speaks with James Kvaal, an education official who served in both the Biden and Obama Administrations, and May Mailman, a conservative education-policy activist who worked in the Trump White House and coördinated its attacks against universities. “When you have federal grants, you do not need to be funding racism and racial hierarchies and violence and harassment,” Mailman told Green. “I think that line is: do what you wanna do, but we don’t want to have to fund it.”  Emma Green’s “Inside the Trump Administration’s Assault on Higher Education” was published on October 13, 2025.

The filmmaker John Carpenter has a whole shelf of cult classics: “They Live,” “The Thing,” “Escape from New York,” “Halloween,” and so many more. And while he hasn’t directed a new movie in more than a decade, Carpenter has continued working in the film industry, composing scores for other directors (Bong Joon Ho recently approached him about a horror movie). He has also released albums of cinematic music—no film required—often working with his son, Cody Carpenter, and the musician Daniel Davies, his godson. The New Yorker Radio Hour producer Adam Howard talks with Carpenter ahead of the launch of his new small tour, just in time for Halloween, and they discuss the unusual shift he made from directing to composing. “It’s a transition from pain to joy. Directing movies is very, very stressful,” Carpenter explains. “Playing music in front of a live audience—it’s joy. It’s just joy.” Carpenter suggests three inspirational scores from film history: Bebe and Louis Barron’s electronic music for “Forbidden Planet”; Bernard Herrmann work on Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”; and Hans Zimmer’s music for “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.”

Next month, New York City may elect as its next mayor a man who was pretty much unknown to the broader public a year ago. Zohran Mamdan, who is currently thirty-three years old and a member of the State Assembly, is a democratic socialist who won a primary upset against the current mayor, Eric Adams, and the former governor Andrew Cuomo, who was trying to stage a political comeback. Mamdani now leads the race by around twenty percentage points in most polls. His run for mayor is a remarkable story, but it has not been an easy one. His campaign message of affordability—his ads widely tout a rent freeze in the city—resonates with voters, but his call for further taxing the top one per cent of earners has concerned the state’s governor, Kathy Hochul.  In Congress, Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have yet to even endorse him. “There are many people who will say housing is a human right, and yet it oftentimes seems as if it is relegated simply to the use of it as a slogan,” Mamdani tells David Remnick at his campaign headquarters, in midtown Manhattan. “It often comes back to whether you’re willing to fight for these ideals that you hold.” Donald Trump, for his part, dubs Mamdani a Communist, and has threatened to withhold federal funds from New York if he’s elected, calling such a vote “a rebellion.” An attack by the President “will be an inevitability,” Mamdani says, noting that the city’s legal department is understaffed for what may be an epic battle to come. “This is an Administration that looks at the flourishing of city life wherever it may be across this country as a threat to their entire political agenda. And New York City looms large in their imagination.”  Zohran Mamdani’s campaign was chronicled by Eric Lach, a staff writer covering New York politics and life for The New Yorker.

Lionel Richie has been making music for fifty years. He has sold more than a hundred million albums, his hits too numerous to list, and he has endeared himself to younger generations as a judge on “American Idol.” He’s now the author of a memoir, “Truly.” Although the book has a lot of triumphs to cover, Richie doesn’t shy away from his failed marriages and the mistakes that led to the breakup of the Commodores, the band that launched him to stardom. “When I started out this book, I had some great stories I was gonna tell, keep it real surfacy—you know, no big deal,” Richie tells Hanif Abdurraqib. “I didn’t realize that it was going to take me on a journey of, It’s not this mountaintop and this mountaintop and this mountaintop. It was this mountaintop and then the valley. The book is about the valley. And . . . each time I went down in the valley it was painful because there were things in this book that I wanted to forget in life but what created the real substance of me was I had to face my insecurities.”

Robert P. George is not a passive observer of the proverbial culture wars; he’s been a very active participant. As a Catholic legal scholar and philosopher at Princeton University, he was an influential opponent of Roe v. Wade and same-sex marriage, receiving a Presidential medal from President George W. Bush. George decries the “decadence” of secular culture, and, in 2016, he co-wrote an op-ed declaring Donald Trump “manifestly unfit” to serve as President. Although George disagrees with the Administration’s tactics to change universities’ policies by punishment, he agrees with its contention that campuses have become hotbeds of leftism that stifle debate. He regards this not as a particular evil of the left but as “human nature”: “If conservatives had the kind of monopoly that liberals had,” George tells David Remnick, “I suspect we’d have the same situation, but just in reverse.” His recent book, “Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth: Law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment,” tries to chart a course back toward civil, functioning debate in a polarized society. “I encourage my students to take courses from people who disagree with me, like Cornel West and Peter Singer,” the latter of whom is a controversial philosopher of ethics. “Cornel and I teach together for this same reason. Peter invites his students to take my courses. That’s the way it should be.”

The Political Scene’s Washington Roundtable—the staff writers Jane Mayer, Susan Glasser, and Evan Osnos—discuss how, in the wake of the reinstatement of Jimmy Kimmel’s show, public resistance has a chance to turn the tide against autocratic impulses in today’s politics. They are joined by Hardy Merriman, an expert on the history and practice of civil resistance, to discuss what kinds of coördinated actions—protests, boycotts, “buycotts,” strikes, and other nonviolent approaches—are most effective in a fight against democratic backsliding. “Acts of non-coöperation are very powerful,” Merriman, the former president of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, says. “Non-coöperation is very much about numbers. You don’t necessarily need people doing things that are high-risk. You just need large numbers of people doing them.” This segment originally aired on The Political Scene on September 26, 2025.

The author and podcaster Ezra Klein may be only forty-one years old, but he’s been part of the political-culture conversation for a long time. He was a blogger, then a Washington Post columnist and editor, a co-founder of Vox, and is now a writer and podcast host for the New York Times. He’s also the co-author of the recent best-selling book “Abundance”.  Most recently, Klein has drawn the ire of progressives for a column he wrote about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, in which he praised the late conservative activist for practicing politics “the right way.” He’s also been making a case for how the Democrats can reëmerge from the political wilderness. But some of his other ideas have also invited their share of detractors.  Klein tells David Remnick, “I try to take seriously questions that I don’t love. I don’t try to insist the world works the way I want it to work. I try to be honest with myself about the way it’s working.” In response to criticism that his recent work has indicated a rightward shift in his thinking, Klein says, “One thing I’ve been saying about the big tent of the Democratic Party is the theory of having a big tent doesn’t just mean moving to the right; it also means accepting in the left.”

Liana Finck is a cartoonist and an illustrator who has contributed to The New Yorker since 2015. She is the author of several books, including the graphic memoir “Passing for Human.” Like many of her forebears at the magazine, Finck has also published works for children, and her recent book, “Mixed Feelings,” explores the ways that emotions are often confusing—a truth for readers of any age. “Kids’ books were my first experience of art. They’re really why I do what I do,” she tells David Remnick. Finck discusses her time interning for Maira Kalman, and she shares three “deep cuts” from writers associated with The New Yorker: Kalman’s own “What Pete Ate from A to Z”; William Steig’s “C D B!”; and “Tell Me a Mitzi,” by Lore Segal, with illustrations by Harriet Pincus. 

“The Constitution gives the states the power to set the time, place, and manner of elections,” the election lawyer Marc Elias points out. “It gives the President no [such] power.” Yet, almost one year before the midterms, Donald Trump has called for a nationwide prohibition on mail-in voting, an option favored by Democrats, as well as restrictions on voting machines. The Justice Department has demanded sensitive voter information from at least thirty-four states so far, with little explanation as to how the information will be used. Will we have free and fair congressional elections in 2026? “I am very worried that we could have elections that do not reflect the desires and the voting preferences of everyone who wishes they could vote and have their vote tabulated accurately,” Elias tells David Remnick. “That may sound very lawyerly and very technical, but I think it would be a historic rollback.” Elias’s firm fought and ultimately won almost every case that Trump and Republican allies brought against the 2020 election, and Elias continues to fight the latest round of incursions in court. And while he rues what he calls “re-gerrymandering” in Texas—designed to squeeze Texas’s Democratic representatives out of Congress—Elias thinks states run by Democrats have no choice but to copy the tactic. “Before Gavin Newsom announced what he was doing, I came out publicly and said Democrats should gerrymander nine seats out of California, which would mean there’d be no Republicans left in the delegation. . . . At the end of the day, if there’s no disincentive structure for Republicans to jump off this path, [then] it just continues.” 

Kevin Young is the poetry editor for The New Yorker, and the author of many books of his own poetry. His newest work, “Night Watch,” focusses on death, while also drawing upon his wide view of history, from the end of slavery in the U.S. to Dante’s seven-hundred-year-old poem “The Divine Comedy.” Young tells David Remnick that Dante actually played an outsized role in bringing “Night Watch” to life: “This is a book that, I think, without him, I would have kept in a drawer because the subjects were kind of dark that I was trying to contend with, and [Dante] gave a framework for me,” Young explains. “How do you write about [hell] and frame it as a journey rather than a morass?” 

For decades, the United States backed efforts to achieve a two-state solution—in which Israel would exist side by side with the Palestinian state, with both states recognizing each other’s claim to contested territory. The veteran negotiators Hussein Agha, representing Palestine, and Robert Malley, an American diplomat, played instrumental roles in that long effort, including the critical Camp David summit of 2000. But, in their new book, “Tomorrow Is Yesterday,” they conclude that they were part of a charade. There was never any way that a two-state solution could satisfy either of the parties, Agha and Malley tell David Remnick in an interview. “A waste of time is almost a charitable way to look at it,” Malley notes bitterly. “At the end of that thirty-year-or-so period, the Israelis and Palestinians are in a worse situation than before the U.S. got so heavily invested.” The process, appealing to Western leaders and liberals in Israel, was geared to “find the kind of solutions that have a technical outcome, that are measurable, and that can be portrayed by lines on maps,” Agha says. “It completely discarded the issue of emotions and history. You can’t be emotional. You have to be rational. You have to be cool. But rational and cool has nothing to do with the conflict.”  “What Killed the Two-State Solution?,” an excerpt from Agha and Malley’s new book, was published in The New Yorker.

Jeff Tweedy is best known as the front man of Wilco, the rock band he formed in Chicago in 1994. In recent years, he’s been working more often as a solo artist, putting out records under his own name as well as a memoir and essays on songwriting. Amanda Petrusich sat down with the singer-songwriter to talk about “Twilight Override,” which comes out later this month. Recorded with Tweedy’s two sons and a number of his fellow Chicago-based musicians, “Twilight Override” is a triple album of songs centered on themes of time, aging, fear, and “making peace with something ending.” “If we're looking at the word override, what am I overriding?” Tweedy says. “I mean, twilight's beautiful . . . but you need to override your fear of it.”  Tweedy performs acoustic versions of “Love Is for Love,” “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter,” and “Forever Never Ends.” 

Speculation, analysis, and commentary circulated all summer, after the announcement, in June, that Anna Wintour would step back from her role as the editor-in-chief of American Vogue. This changing of the guard is uniquely fraught, because Wintour’s name has become nearly inextricable from the magazine, to a degree almost unknown today. And, as New York Fashion Week was set to begin, Wintour spoke with David Remnick about choosing her successor, the Vogue.com editor Chloe Malle. “It felt like this was the right time,” she says. With an unusual number of new creative directors in positions at major fashion houses, “It seemed like a good moment to bring in someone with a different perspective and a different generation who could look at things in a new way.” Wintour was appointed editor-in-chief in 1988, and generations of designers have come up under her famously acute and decisive judgments. She comes from a publishing family; her brother is a well-known journalist, and her father was the editor of the London Evening Standard. She credits him with steering her into a career in fashion, even suggesting that the teen-age Anna write down “editor of Vogue” as her career aspiration on a school form. “Working my first jobs in London, there [was] no money, there’s no staff, there’s no teams, so that you have to learn how to do everything,” Wintour says. “So, when I came to the States and there was a shoe editor and an underwear editor and a fabric editor, it was all so siloed. I felt very confident because I sort of knew how to do everything.” Wintour is also known for bringing politics to Vogue; she’s a noted Democratic supporter and donor. “I’ve been impressed by Governor Newsom, I think he’s certainly making a stand, and obviously I’m sure there’ll be many other candidates that will emerge, hopefully soon.” But, in this political environment, Remnick asks, “How do you make a case that fashion is important?” Fashion, she replies, “is always important. It’s a question of self-expression and a statement about yourself. . . . And, forgive me, David, but how boring would it be if everybody was just wearing a dark suit and a white shirt all the time?”

The comedian Fred Armisen has a thing for sound. He’s a former punk musician and a master of accents, and he is now releasing a new album of sound effects. “I was lamenting that there aren’t sound-effects albums in our lives as much,” he tells Michael Schulman. “I feel like they just used to exist more or they were more present. . . . And instead of just, you know, taking out my phone and just recording stuff, I wanted to treat it properly. Like, let me go to a recording studio and really do it. Let me try to mimic some things that I’ve heard before.” The result, “100 Sound Effects,” comes out this month on the venerable indie label Drag City. The track titles are themselves punch lines: “Guitar Tuned but Still Somehow Out of Tune,” “Supportive Booing at a Speech,” “Obligatory Applause at a Speech,” and “Terrified Audience at an Authoritarian Nation Official Event.” Talking about the importance of paying attention to the auditory world, Armisen and Schulman went out to record some classic sounds of New York City—and what they couldn’t find they faked. This segment was produced with assistance from John DeLore. 

The term “culture wars” is most often associated with issues of sexuality, race, religion, and gender. But, as recent months have made plain, when Donald Trump refers to the culture wars, he also means the arts. He fired the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which Republicans want to rename for him. His Administration fired the national archivist and the Librarian of Congress, and pressured the director of the National Portrait Gallery to resign; it is reviewing the entire Smithsonian Institution, looking for what the President calls “improper ideology.” Some view these moves as low-hanging fruit for Trump, and a distraction from bad press about Jeffrey Epstein, the Putin meeting, and tariffs. But Adam Gopnik believes that interpretation is a misreading. The loyalty purge at institutions such as the National Portrait Gallery is a key part of his agenda. “Pluralism is the key principle of a democratic culture,” Gopnik tells David Remnick. Could we be following the path of Stalinist Russia, where a head of state dictated reviews of concerts, Remnick asks? “I pray and believe that we are not. But that is certainly the direction in which one inevitably heads when the political boss takes over key cultural institutions, and dictates who’s acceptable and who is not.” Gopnik recalls saying after the election that “Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert would be next.” “You would see them disappear,” he added. “Each time, we find a rationale for it or a rationale is offered. And it’s much easier for us to swallow the rationale than to face the reality.”

The Korey Stringer Institute, at the University of Connecticut, is 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 the extreme heat wrought by climate change, even mild exertion will put more and more of us in harm’s way; in many parts of the United States, a combined heat wave and power outage could cause staggering fatalities. Dhruv Khullar, a New Yorker contributor, practicing physician, and professor of health policy, visited the Stringer Institute to undergo a heat test—walking uphill, for ninety minutes, in a hundred-and-four-degree heat—to better understand what’s happening. “I just feel extremely puffy everywhere,” Khullar sighed. “You’d have to cut my finger off just to get my wedding ring off.” By the end of the test, he spoke of experiencing cramps, dizziness, and a headache. Khullar discussed the dangers of heatstroke with Douglas Casa, the lab’s head, who nearly died of the condition as a young athlete. “Climate change has taken this into the everyday world for the everyday American citizen. You don’t have to be a laborer working for twelve hours; you don’t have to be a soldier in training,” Casa tells him. “This is making it affect so many people, even just during daily living.” Although the treatment for heat-related illness is straightforward, Casa says that implementation of simple preventive measures remains challenging—and that there is much we need to do to better prepare for the global rise in temperatures.   This segment originally aired on August 25, 2023.

Donald Trump is the most tech-friendly President in American history. He enlisted social media to win office; he became a promoter—and beneficiary—of cryptocurrency, breaking long-standing norms around conflicts of interest; and, in his second term, he brought Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest tech baron, to the White House, to disrupt the federal government in the manner of a Silicon Valley startup. While Musk was eventually ousted— or “flamed out,” as Katie Drummond puts it, for being “loud”—the influence of DOGE continues to reshape our lives in ways we have barely begun to understand.  Drummond is the global editorial director of Wired, and in this episode she talks with the New Yorker Washington correspondent Evan Osnos about the unique intersection of technology and politics, which Wired has tracked assiduously. Tech companies and A.I., Osnos notes, are driving the agenda in the Trump Administration. “If they’ve learned anything from what Elon Musk was able to accomplish,” Drummond says, “it’s that this is open season.” Drummond also sounds a cautionary note about some of the doomsday framing of the A.I. revolution. Corporate leaders “want this technology to sound as big and daunting and powerful and impressive and scary as they possibly can,” she explains. In some cases, “that hyperbole masks the fact that these individuals have a stake in exactly the scenarios that they are outlining.”   This segment originally aired on The Political Scene on July 26, 2025.

Mohammed R. Mhawish was living in Gaza City during Israel’s invasion, in the immediate aftermath of the October 7th attack. He witnessed the invasion for months and reported on its devastating consequences for Al Jazeera, The Nation, and other outlets. After his home was targeted in an Israeli strike, which nearly killed him, he fled Gaza. In The New Yorker, [he’s written](https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/treating-gazas-collective-trauma) about mental-health workers who are trying to treat a deeply traumatized population, while themselves suffering from starvation, the loss of loved ones, their own injuries—and the constant, remorseless death toll around them. “They were telling me, ‘We cannot wait for the war to stop to start healing—or for ourselves to heal—to start healing others,’” Mhawish relates to David Remnick. “I understood they were trying to heal by helping others heal.”  

Spike Lee and Denzel Washington first worked together on “Mo’ Better Blues,” released in 1990. Washington starred as a trumpet player trying to make a living in jazz clubs; Lee, who directed the film, also played the musician’s hapless manager. They later worked together on “Malcolm X” and other films, but it has been nearly twenty years since their last collaboration, the hugely successful “Inside Man.” So the new film “Highest 2 Lowest” is something of a reunion. “I’ve become a better director, working with Mr. Denzel Washington,” Lee tells David Remnick. “It’s not about just what’s on the script.  It has to be deeper than that.” “Highest 2 Lowest” is an adaptation of a 1963 movie by Akira Kurosawa, who has been a major influence on Lee. “The script came to me first,” Washington explains. “I hoped that Spike would be interested in it, so I called him up. He said, ‘Send it to me.’ He read it. He said, ‘Let’s make it,’ and here we are.” Washington plays a music mogul targeted in a ransom plot; the feature is a crime drama with a message. “This film is about morals, and what someone will do and won’t do,” Lee says. The audience “will ask themselves, ‘If you’re in this situation, would you pay the ransom?’ ”  

With seven decades in film and television, Clint Eastwood is undeniably a Hollywood institution. Emerging first as a star in Westerns, then as the embattled cop in the Dirty Harry films, the ninety-five-year-old filmmaker has directed forty features and appeared in more than sixty. The film critic Richard Brody just reviewed a new biography of Eastwood. “What fascinated me above all are the origins of Clint Eastwood-ness—the way he had an aura that preceded him before his career in movies.”  Brody joins David Remnick to pick three of the films that set Eastwood apart as an artist: “Play Misty for Me,” his 1971 directorial début; “Bird,” his bio-pic about Charlie Parker; and “Sully,” starring Tom Hanks as the heroic pilot Chesley Sullenberger.

From the attempt to end birthright citizenship to the gutting of congressionally authorized agencies, the Trump Administration has created an enormous number of legal controversies. The Radio Hour asked for listeners’ questions about President Trump and the courts. To answer them, David Remnick speaks with two regular contributors: Ruth Marcus, who writes about legal issues and the Supreme Court, and Jeannie Suk Gersen, who teaches constitutional law at Harvard Law School. While the writers disagree on some significant questions—such as the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Trump v. CASA, which struck down the use of nationwide injunctions—both acknowledge the unprecedented nature of some of the questions from listeners. “They never taught you these things in law school, because he’s pushing on areas of the law that are not normally pushed on,” Marcus tells Remnick.

Jamaica Kincaid began writing for The New Yorker in 1974, reporting about life in the magazine’s home city. She was a young immigrant from Antigua, then a British colony; she had been sent to New York—against her wishes—to work as a nanny. Soon began a love affair with New York’s literary scene. “I had to change my name,” she tells David Remnick, “because Elaine Potter Richardson could not write about Elaine Potter Richardson. But Jamaica Kincaid could write about Elaine Potter Richardson.” Kincaid went on to write books about her family; about the dissolution of a marriage; about Antigua, and what colonialism feels like to people on a small island; and later gardening, which she took up with a passion after moving to Vermont. She once said, “Everything I write is autobiographical, but none of it is true in the sense of a court of law. You know, a lie is just a lie. The truth, on the other hand, is complicated.” Kincaid’s new book, “Putting Myself Together,” is a collection of pieces that span almost half a century in print, and includes her first published piece in The New Yorker—an account of the West Indian-American Day Parade of 1974. 

In Donald Trump’s first term, he was furious that people were investigating his connections to Russia—“Russia, Russia, Russia,” he complained. Now, as Trump fulfills a campaign promise of retribution, his Administration has put the Russia “hoax” back into the headlines. They claim to have opened investigations into the former F.B.I. director James Comey and the former C.I.A. director John Brennan. A career C.IA. officer, Brennan served nearly thirty years, holding senior positions under Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama; his tenure included the controversial drone program, as well as the infamous Steele dossier on Trump during the 2016 election. David Remnick speaks with Brennan about why Trump officials are re-investigating old business. Are there real issues, or is this an attempt to direct the news cycle away from Jeffrey Epstein? “I've seen reports in the press that I’m under investigation,” Brennan points out. “But I’ve not heard anything from the Department of Justice, or the F.B.I., or the C.I.A., or the Office of Director of National Intelligence. No one has contacted me about anything.”

Since the end of the Cold War, most Americans have taken U.S. military supremacy for granted. We can no longer afford to do so, according to reporting by the staff writer Dexter Filkins. China has developed advanced weapons that rival or surpass America’s; and at the same time, drone warfare has fundamentally changed calculations of the battlefield. Ukraine’s ability to hold off the massive Russian Army depends largely on a startup industry that has provided millions of drones—small, highly accurate, and as cheap as five hundred dollars each—to inflict enormous casualties on invading forces. In some other conflict, could the U.S. be in the position of Russia? “The nightmare scenario” at the Pentagon, Filkins tells David Remnick, is, “we’ve got an eighteen-billion-dollar aircraft carrier steaming its way toward the western Pacific, and [an enemy could] fire drones at these things, and they’re highly, highly accurate, and they move at incredible speeds. . . . To give [Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth credit, and the people around him . . . they say, ‘O.K., we get it. We’re going to change the Pentagon procurement process,’ ” spending less on aircraft carriers and more on small technology like drones. But “the Pentagon is so slow, and people have been talking about these things for years. . . . Nobody has been able to do it.” Read Dexter Filkins’s “Is the U.S. Ready for the Next War?”

The city of Los Angeles has declared itself a sanctuary city, where local authorities do not share information with federal immigration enforcement. But L.A.—where nearly forty per cent of residents are foreign-born—became ground zero for controversial arrests and deportations by ICE. The Trump Administration deployed marines and the National Guard to the city, purportedly to quell protests against the operation, and the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, spoke of the government’s intention to “liberate” Los Angeles from its elected officials. This week, David Remnick talks with the city’s mayor, Karen Bass, a former congressional representative, about the recent withdrawal of some troops, and a lawsuit the city has joined arguing that the Trump Administration’s immigration raids and detentions are unconstitutional. (A federal judge has issued a temporary restraining order against the government.)  “I’ve described L.A. as a petri dish,” Bass says. The Administration “wanted to . . . show that they could come in and do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, and however they wanted. They were putting every other city in America on notice: ‘mess with us will come for you.’ ”

“I’m personally desperate for art that at least attempts to grapple with whatever the hell is going on right now,” the writer-director Ari Aster tells Adam Howard, a senior producer of the Radio Hour. “ ‘Eddington’ is a film about a bunch of people who . . .  know that something’s wrong. They just—nobody can agree on what that thing is.” Many of us would prefer to forget a fearful time like the spring and summer of 2020, but Aster is relentless about putting his characters and his audience in states of anxiety, whether in his horror films “Hereditary” and “Midsommar,” or in the more genre-bending “Beau Is Afraid.” “Eddington,” his latest, is a neo-noir Western featuring a gun-toting, libertarian sheriff, played by Joaquin Phoenix, who confronts COVID, the George Floyd protests, and a mysterious A.I. data center that’s being built in his county.  It’s like a hand grenade tossed into the traditional summer-movie season.  The film is unapologetically political, but its satire doesn’t spare either side of the aisle. “My concern,” Aster admits, “is that I don't know how much of a hunger people have anymore for anything controversial or challenging.”

The sense that the White House is covering something up about Jeffrey Epstein has led to backlash from some of Trump’s most ardent supporters. Even after the financier was convicted for hiring an underage prostitute, for which he served a brief and extraordinarily lenient sentence, Epstein remained a playboy, a top political donor, and a very good friend of the very powerful—“a sybarite,” in the words of the journalist Michael Wolff, “in that old -fashioned sense [that] ‘my identity comes from breaking all norms.’ ”  Wolff got to know Epstein and recorded, he estimates, a hundred hours of interviews with him. After Epstein was arrested again, in 2019, and was later found dead in his jail cell in what was ruled a suicide, it has been an article of faith within MAGA that his death was a conspiracy or a coverup, and the Trump campaign promised a reveal. Attorney General Pam Bondi initially asserted that she had Epstein’s so-called “client list” on her desk and was reviewing it, but now claims that there is nothing to share. Do the Epstein files have something incriminating about the President?  “The central point from which this grew is the [Bill] Clinton relationship with Epstein,” Wolff tells David Remnick. But the MAGA believers “seem to have overlooked the Trump relationship [with Epstein], which was deeper and longer.”  The men were “probably the closest friend either of them ever had,” until they reportedly fell out over real estate in 2004. Now Trump is frantically trying to control the narrative, pretending that he barely knew Epstein. This, Wolff thinks, “may be the beginning of Donald Trump’s lame-duck years.”

For The New Yorker’s series Takes, Carrie Brownstein—the co-creator of Sleater-Kinney and “Portlandia”—writes about an iconic rock-and-roll image. In the summer of 2003, the musician Chan Marshall, better known as Cat Power, was transitioning from an indie darling to a major rock artist, and the staff writer Hilton Als wrote a Profile of her in The New Yorker. Facing his piece was a full-page portrait of Marshall by the celebrated photographer Richard Avedon that puts her in the lineage of rock rebels of generations past. With a long ash dangling from her cigarette, a Bob Dylan T-shirt, and her jeans half unzipped, Cat Power “maybe doesn't give a shit about being in The New Yorker,” Brownstein thinks, “which I can't say is usually the vibe.” Avedon’s image reminds Brownstein “to keep remembering … to keep going back to that place that feels sacred and special and uncynical.”  Carrie Brownstein’s Take on Richard Avedon’s portrait of Cat Power appeared in the April 20, 2025, issue.  Plus, audiences have been bemoaning the death of the romantic comedy for years, but the genre persists—albeit often in a different form from the screwballs of the nineteen-forties or the “chick flicks” of the eighties and nineties. On this episode from the Critics at Large podcast, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss their all-time favorite rom-coms and two new projects marketed as contemporary successors to the greats: Celine Song’s “Materialists” and Lena Dunham’s “Too Much.”

In conservative economics, cuts to social services are often seen as necessary to shrink the expanding deficit. Donald Trump’s budget bill is something altogether different: it cuts Medicaid while slashing tax rates for the wealthiest Americans, adding $6 trillion to the national debt, according to the Cato Institute. Janet Yellen, a former Treasury Secretary and former chair of the Federal Reserve, sees severe impacts in store for average Americans: “What this is going to do is to raise interest rates even more. And so housing will become less affordable, car loans less affordable,” she tells David Remnick. “This bill also contains changes that raise the burdens of anyone who has already taken on student debt. And with higher interest rates, further education—college [and] professional school—becomes less affordable. It may also curtail investment spending, which has a negative impact on growth.” This, she believes, is why the President is desperate to lower interest rates; he has spoken of firing his appointed chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, whom he has called a “numbskull” and a “stupid person,” and installing a more compliant chair. But lowering interest rates to further political goals, Yellen says, “are the words one expects from the head of a banana republic that is about to start printing money to fund fiscal deficits. … And then you get very high inflation or hyperinflation.” Plus, “rarely have so many members of Congress voted for a measure they so actively disliked,” Susan B. Glasser noted in her latest column in The New Yorker, after the passage of a deficit-exploding Republican budget. Millions of people will lose access to Medicaid—a fact that the President lies about directly—and many trillions of dollars will be added to the deficit. Interest payments on the federal debt will skyrocket, and Trump is so desperate for lower interest rates that he seems poised to fire his own chair of the Federal Reserve and install a compliant partisan to head the heretofore independent central bank. “Anybody panicking about that in Washington?” David Remnick asks Glasser. “I think we are the boiled frog,” she replies. “We are almost panic-immune at this point, in the same way that Donald Trump has, I think, inoculated much of America against facts in our political debate. Even inside of Washington, there's so many individual crises at one time it’s very very hard in Trump 2.0 to focus on any one of them.”

Kalief Browder was jailed at Rikers Island at the age of sixteen; he spent three years locked up without ever being convicted of a crime, and much of that time was spent in solitary confinement. In 2014, the New Yorker staff writer Jennifer Gonnerman wrote about Browder and the failings of the criminal-justice system that his case exposed: unconscionable delays in the courts, excessive use of solitary confinement, teen-agers being charged for crimes as adults, brutality on the part of correction officers. Ten years ago, on June 6, 2015, Browder died by suicide. On The New Yorker Radio Hour, Gonnerman shares excerpts from the interviews she recorded with Browder, in which he described the psychological toll of spending years in a twelve-by-seven cell. This segment originally aired on June 3, 2016.

In 2022, 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 definitive rock star of the modern era,” as Kelefa Sanneh puts it. Bono joined David Remnick at the 2022 New Yorker Festival to talk about his new memoir, “Surrender.” “When I sang in U2, something got a hold of me,” Bono said. “And it made sense of me.” They discussed how the band almost ended because of the members’ religious faith, and how they navigated the Troubles as a bunch of young men from Dublin suddenly on the world stage. Bono shared a life lesson from Paul McCartney, and he opened up about the early death of his mother. “This wound in me just turned into this opening where I had to fill the hole with music,” Bono said. In the loss of a loved one, “there’s sometimes a gift. The opening up of music came from my mother.” This segment originally aired on October 28, 2022.

In 2024, Harvard University offered a course on Taylor Swift. It was popular, to say the least. That course was taught by a professor and literary critic named Stephanie Burt. In The New Yorker, Burt has written seriously about comics and science fiction, but she’s also considered great poets such as Seamus Heaney and Mary Oliver. Now, Burt has put together an anthology titled, “Super Gay Poems.” It’s a collection of L.G.B.T.Q. poetry, whose contents begin after the Stonewall uprising, in 1969. When describing the collection, Burt tells the New Yorker Radio Hour producer Jeffrey Masters, “ There are poems where we read it and we say, Wow, that’s me. And there are poems where we read it and we say, Wow, I didn’t know that can happen; that’s not me; that’s new to me; that’s different. And there are poems where we read them and we just say, That’s beautiful. That is elegant. That is funny. That is sexy. That is hot. That is so sad that I don’t know why I like it, but I do. And I like making those experiences available to readers.”

The relationship between Fox News and Donald Trump is not just close; it can be profoundly influential. Trump frequently responds to segments in real time online—even to complain about a poll he doesn’t like. He has tapped the network for nearly two dozen roles within his Administration—including the current Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host. The network is also seen as having an outsized impact on his relationship with his base, and even on his agenda. Most recently, it’s been reported that Fox News’ coverage of the Iran-Israel conflict played a role in Trump’s decision to enter that fight. And while the network’s right-wing commentators—from Sean Hannity to Laura Ingraham to Mark Levin—tend to grab the most headlines and stand as the ideological coloring of the network, “Special Report,” Fox’s 6 P.M. broadcast, anchored by Bret Baier, is essential to the conservative-media complex. Baier draws more than three million viewers a night, at times surpassing legacy brands like “CBS Evening News,” despite being available in half as many homes. Baier insists on his impartiality, but his network’s reputation as an outlet for the right and its connection to President Trump himself can make his job representing the news arm of the network more challenging. And, when it comes to Trump and his relationship to the media, Baier tells David Remnick, “I think it is this cat-and-mouse game. You know, for all of the things he says about the media . . . he’s reaching out and doing interviews with the same people he says are nasty.”

A mega-donor to the Republican Presidential campaign, Elon Musk got something no other titan of industry has ever received: an office in the White House and a government department tailor-made for him, with incalculable influence in shaping the Administration. But even with Musk out of Washington, it remains a fact that the influence of wealth in America has never been greater. As one case in point, Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” is estimated to raise or leave flat the taxes of about 57 million households, while the top five per cent of earners will have their taxes cut by more than $1.5 trillion. From his perch in Washington, Evan Osnos has for years been looking at the politics of hyper-wealth. While the wealthy have always held outsized influence, Osnos explains how tech tycoons, in particular, sought far greater influence under Donald Trump’s second Administration. “These are guys who really believed that they were the greatest example of entrepreneurship,” he tells David Remnick, “and that all of a sudden they found that, no, they were being called monopolists, that they were being accused of invading people's privacy, that in fact they had been blamed for the degradation of democracy, of our children’s emotional health, of our attention spans. They suddenly saw that there was a new President who would not only forgive any of those kinds of mistakes and patterns of abuse but would in fact celebrate them, and would roll back any of the regulation that was in their way.” Osnos’s new book, collected from his reporting in The New Yorker, is “The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich.”

The Ayatollahs who have ruled Iran since 1979 have long promised to destroy the Jewish state, and even set a deadline for it.  While arming proxies to fight Israel—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and more—Iran is believed to have sought to develop nuclear weapons for itself. “The big question about Iran was always how significant is its apocalyptic theology,” Yossi Klein Halevi explains to David Remnick. “How central is that end-times vision to the Iranian regime? And is there a possibility that the regime would see a nuclear weapon as the way of furthering their messianic vision?” Halevi is a journalist and senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, and he co-hosts the podcast “For Heaven’s Sake.” He is a fierce critic of Benjamin Netanyahu, saying “I have no doubt that he is capable of starting a war for his own political needs.” And yet Netanyahu was right to strike Iran, Halevi asserts, no matter the consequences.  “The Israeli perspective is not … the American war in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s our own experience.” 

The New Yorker recently published a report from Sudan, headlined “Escape from Khartoum.” The contributor Nicolas Niarchos journeyed for days through a conflict to reach a refugee camp in the Nuba Mountains, where members of the country’s minority Black ethnic groups are seeking safety, but remain imperilled by hunger. The territory is “very significant to the Nuba people,” Niarchos explains to David Remnick. “They feel safe being there because they have managed to resist genocide before by hiding in these mountains. And then you start seeing the children with their distended bellies, and you start hearing the stories of the people who fled.” The civil war pits the Sudanese Army against a militia group called the Rapid Support Forces. Once allies in ousting Sudan’s former President, the Army and the R.S.F. now occupy different parts of the country, destroying infrastructure in the opposing group’s territory, and committing atrocities against civilians: killing, starvation, and widespread, systematic sexual violence. The warring parties are dominated by Sudan’s Arabic-speaking majority, and “there’s this very, very toxic combination of both supremacist ideology,” Niarchos says, and “giving ‘spoils’ to troops instead of paying them.” One of Niarchos’s sources, a man named Wanis, recalls an R.S.F. soldier telling him, “If you go to the Nuba Mountains, we’ll reach you there. You Nuba, we’re supposed to kill you like dogs.”

Barbra Streisand has been a huge presence in American entertainment—music, film, and stage—for more than sixty years. She was the youngest person ever to achieve the EGOT, winning Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards by the age of twenty-seven. At eighty-three years old, Streisand is releasing a new album, “The Secret of Life: Partners, Volume 2.” It’s a collection of duets featuring Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, and Seal, along with younger artists including Hozier, Sam Smith, and Ariana Grande. Streisand sat down with David Remnick to talk about the record and the history behind it. Bob Dylan, for one, apparently had a crush on the singer from afar. “We were both nineteen years old in Greenwich Village, never met each other,” Streisand says. “I remember him sending me flowers and writing me a card in different color pencils, like a child’s writing, you know. And ‘Would you sing with me?’ And I thought, What would I sing with him?” Streisand talks with Remnick about her complicated childhood with her mother, who was jealous of her talent; her dislike of live performance; and the classy way to rebuff a come-on from Marlon Brando. 

John Seabrook’s new book is about a family business—not a mom-and-pop store, but a huge operation run by a ruthless patriarch. The patriarch is aging, and he cannot stand to lose his hold on power, nor let his children take over the enterprise. This might sound like the plot of HBO’s drama “Succession,” but the story John tells in “The Spinach King” is about a real family: the Seabrooks, of Seabrook, New Jersey. His grandfather C.F. Seabrook built a frozen-food empire in the farmland of South Jersey, which produced one third of the nation’s frozen vegetables at its height. The P.R. was about a hard-working and innovative farm family, but the business, behind the scenes, advanced with political corruption and violence against organized labor. Then C.F. destroyed his business and his family rather than cede control to his sons. John—a staff writer who has covered many subjects for The New Yorker, most notably music—talks with David Remnick about the consequences of inherited wealth, and overcoming a family legacy of suspicion and emotional abuse.

When Donald Trump made an alliance with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., he brought vaccine skepticism and the debunked link between vaccines and autism into the center of the MAGA agenda. Though the scientific establishment has long disproven that link, as many as one in four Americans today believe that vaccines may cause autism. In April, Kennedy, now the Secretary of Health and Human Services, shocked the medical community and families across the country when he said that his agency would uncover the cause of autism—the subject of decades of research—once and for all. That news came even as Kennedy oversees drastic cuts to critical medical research of all kinds. Dr. Alycia Halladay, the chief science officer of the Autism Science Foundation, talks with David Remnick about the initiative, and the problems with focussing on environmental factors such as vaccines or mold. She also discusses why debunked claims and misinformation have such a powerful hold on parents. “You will do anything to help your child, so if it means a bleach enema”—referring to one extremely poisonous and falsely touted treatment—“and you think that’s going to help them, you’ll do it. It’s not because these people don’t love their children. It’s because they’re desperate.”

In the music business, Brian Eno is a name to conjure with. He’s been the producer of tremendous hits by U2, Talking Heads, David Bowie, Grace Jones, Coldplay, and many other top artists. But he’s also a conceptualist, nicknamed Professor Eno in the British music press, and a foundational figure in ambient music—a genre whose very name Eno coined. Amanda Petrusich speaks with Eno about his two new albums that just came out, “Luminal” and “Lateral,” and his new book, “What Art Does.” “One of the realizations I had when I was writing this book is that really the only product of art is feelings,”  Eno says. “Its main point is to make your feelings change—is to give you feelings that you perhaps didn’t have before or did have before and want to have again or want to experiment with. So it seems very simplistic to say, ‘Oh, it’s all about feelings.’ But actually I think it is. Feelings are overlooked by all of those people who think bright children shouldn’t do art.”

Lesley Stahl, a linchpin of CBS News, began at the network in 1971, covering major events such as Watergate, and for many years has been a correspondent on “60 Minutes.” But right now it’s a perilous time for CBS News, which has been sued by Donald Trump for twenty billion dollars over the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris during the 2024 Presidential campaign. Its owner, Paramount, seems likely to settle, and corporate pressure on journalists at CBS has been so intense that Bill Owens, the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” and Wendy McMahon, the head of CBS News, resigned in protest. Owens’s departure was “a punch in the stomach,” Stahl tells David Remnick in a recent interview, “one of those punches where you almost can’t breathe.” And far worse could happen in a settlement with Trump, which would compromise the integrity of the premier investigative program on broadcast news. “I’m already beginning to think about mourning, grieving,” Stahl says. “I know there’s going to be a settlement. . . . And then we will hopefully still be around, turning a new page, and finding out what that new page is going to look like.” Although she describes herself as “Pollyannaish,” Stahl acknowledges that she is “pessimistic about the future for all press today. . . . The public has lost faith in us as an institution. So we’re in very dark times.” 

In honor of The New Yorker’s centennial this year, the magazine’s staff writers are pulling out some classics from the long history of the publication. Louisa Thomas, The New Yorker’s sports correspondent, naturally gravitated to a story about baseball with a title only comprehensible to baseball aficionados: “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.” The essay was by no less a writer than the author John Updike, and the “Kid” of the title was Ted Williams, the Hall of Fame hitter who spent nineteen years on the Boston Red Sox. By happenstance, Updike joined the crowd at Fenway Park for Williams’s last game before his retirement, in 1960. Thomas, looking at subtle word changes that Updike made as he was working on the piece, reflects on the writer’s craft and the ballplayer’s. “Marginal differences really matter,” she says. “And it’s those marginal differences that are the difference between a pop-up, a long fly, and a home run. Updike really understood that, and so did Williams.” Plus, a visit with one of the great modern practitioners of the earworm, Charles Strouse, who wrote music for “Bye Bye Birdie” and “Annie,” and the theme to “All in the Family.” Strouse died this month at ninety-six. In one of his last interviews he gave, in 2023, he spoke with the Radio Hour’s Jeffrey Masters about his rivalry with Stephen Sondheim. “Stephen and I were friendly enemies. He didn’t like me much. I didn’t like him less.” 

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, Occitan, and Haitian Kreyòl. “I think I have the spirit of a kind of a radio d.j. slash curator,” she tells David Remnick. “It’s almost like making a mixtape for someone and only putting deep cuts.” And even when singing the standards, she aims “to find the gems that haven’t been sung and sung and sung over and over again.” During a summer tour, she visited the studio at WNYC to perform “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” made famous by Barbra Streisand; “Can She Excuse My Wrongs,” by John Dowland, the English composer of the Elizabethan era; and “Moon Song,” an original from Salvant’s album “Ghost Song.” This segment originally aired on May 31, 2024.

This special episode comes from “On the Media” ’s Peabody-winning series “The Divided Dial,” reported by Katie Thornton. You know A.M. and F.M. radio. But did you know that there is a whole other world of radio surrounding us at all times? It’s called shortwave—and, thanks to a quirk of science that lets broadcasters bounce radio waves off the ionosphere, it can reach thousands of miles, penetrating rough terrain and geopolitical boundaries. How did this instantaneous, global, mass communication tool—a sort of internet-before-the-internet—go from a utopian experiment in international connection to a hardened tool of information warfare and propaganda? This first episode of Season 2 of  “The Divided Dial” is called “Fishing in the Night.”

Nearly a year ago, a Presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, moderated by Jake Tapper and Dana Bash of CNN, began the end of Biden’s bid for a second term. The President struggled to make points, complete sentences, and remember facts; he spoke in a raspy whisper. This was not the first time voters expressed concern about Biden’s age, but his decline was shocking to many, and suddenly Trump seemed likely to win in a landslide. New reporting by Tapper and Thompson reveals that the debate was no fluke at all. In “How Joe Biden Handed the Presidency to Donald Trump” (an excerpt from their new book “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again”), they lay out a case that the latter half of Biden’s Presidency was carefully stage-managed by his top aides; Biden would often end the workday as early as four-thirty.  “What [aides and] others would say is, ‘His decision-making was always fine.’ The job of the President is not just decision-making. It’s also communication,” Tapper tells David Remnick. “If you are a President . . . and you’re not able to go into a room full of donors and speak extemporaneously for ten minutes, then there’s something wrong. And that was happening in 2023.”

A year ago, Percival Everett published his twenty-fourth novel, “James,” and it became a literary phenomenon. It won the National Book Award, and, just this week, was announced as the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. “James” offers a radically different perspective on the classic Mark Twain novel “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”: Everett centers his story on the character of Jim, who is escaping slavery. The New Yorker staff writer Julian Lucas is a longtime Everett fan, and talked with the novelist just after “James” was released. “My Jim—he’s not simple,” Everett tells Julian Lucas. “The Jim that’s represented in ‘Huck Finn’ is simple.”  This segment originally aired on March 22, 2024.

When Elissa Slotkin narrowly won her Senate seat in Michigan last fall, she was one of only four Democratic senators to claim victory in a state that voted for Donald Trump. It made other Democrats take note: since then, the Party has turned to her as someone who can bridge the red state–blue state divide. In March, Slotkin delivered the Democrats’ rebuttal to Trump’s speech before Congress, and she’s been making headlines for criticizing her own party’s attempts to rein in the President and the Republican Party. She thinks Democrats need to start projecting “alpha energy,” that identity politics “needs to go the way of the dodo,” and that Democrats should drop the word “oligarchy” from their vocabulary entirely. Slotkin prides herself on her bipartisanship, and she believes that Democrats must use old-school collegial collaboration in Congress. And, as different Democratic leaders have appeared on The New Yorker Radio Hour in the past few months, discussing what the next four years might have in store, Slotkin tells David Remnick about a different path forward.

For a long time, Republicans and many Democrats espoused some version of free-trade economics that would have been familiar to Adam Smith. But Donald Trump breaks radically with that tradition, embracing a form of protectionism that resulted in his extremely broad and chaotic tariff proposals, which tanked markets and deepened the fear of a global recession. John Cassidy writes The New Yorker’s The Financial Page column, and he’s been covering economics for the magazine since 1995. His new book, “Capitalism and Its Critics: A History,” takes a long view of these debates, and breaks down some of the arguments that have shaped the U.S.’s current economic reality. “Capitalism itself has put its worst face forward in the last twenty or thirty years through the growth of huge monopolies which seem completely beyond any public control or accountability,” Cassidy tells David Remnick. “And young people—they look at capitalism and the economy through the prism of environmentalism now in a way that they didn’t in our generation.”

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, has been undermining public trust in vaccines and overseeing crippling cuts to research across American science. And yet his “make America healthy again” highlights themes more familiar in liberal circles: toxins in the environment, biodiversity, healthy eating. Kennedy has put junk food at the center of the political conversation, speaking about ultra-processed foods and their established links to chronic disease—despite President Donald Trump’s well-known reverence for fast food of all kinds. Marion Nestle, a leading nutrition researcher and the author of “Food Politics,” has written in depth on how money and politics affect our diet and our health, and about the ways that American science research has been hampered by limited funding. She tells the physician and contributing writer Dhruv Khullar, who’s been reporting on the American diet, that “it would be wonderful if R.F.K., Jr., could make the food supply healthier. I just think that in order to do that, he’s going to have to take on the food industry, and I don’t think Trump has a history of taking on corporations of any kind. . . . I’ll believe it when I see it.”  Kraftwerk—the pioneering electronic music group that débuted more than half a century ago —has been touring the U.S., with stops planned in Europe this year. The staff writer Kelefa Sanneh calls them one of the most influential bands of all time, playing a formative role in hip-hop, techno, EDM, and much of popular music as we know it. Sanneh picks tracks from Kraftswerk’s repertoire and demonstrates how those sounds trickle out through music history, from Afrika Bambaataa to Coldplay. 

In recent years, there’s been a stark uptick in the level of violence and hate crimes that Asian Americans have experienced, but the “precarity of the Asian American experience is not new,” Michael Luo tells David Remnick. Luo is a longtime New Yorker editor, and the author of a new book about the Chinese American experience. He looks at how tensions over labor—with native-born workers often blaming immigrants for their exploitation by business interests—intersected with racial and religious prejudice, culminating in episodes of extraordinary violence and laws that denied immigrants civil rights and excluded new arrivals from Asia. “The way politicians, craven politicians, talk about immigrants today could be just torn from the nineteenth century,” he points out. “I do think that the ‘stranger’ label is still there.” But Luo also uncovers the extraordinary support of Chinese Americans from Frederick Douglass, who argued extensively for the immigrants’ political participation and civil rights. “Asian American history is American history,” Luo says. “I want all the dads who are reading about World War Two, . . . who are interested in Civil War literature, to read about this different racial conflagration.” Luo’s book is “Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America.”

As Donald Trump continues to launch unprecedented and innovative attacks on immigrants, civic institutions, and the rule of law, the Democratic response has been—in the eyes of many observers—tepid and inadequate. One answer to the sense of desperation came from Senator Cory Booker, who, on March 31st, launched a marathon speech on the Senate floor, calling on Americans to resist authoritarianism. Booker beat the record previously held by Senator Strom Thurmond’s twenty-four-hour-long filibuster of the Civil Rights Act, in 1957, and he spoke in detail about Americans who are in desperate straits because of federal job cuts and budget slashing. “We knew . . . if I could last twenty-four hours and eighteen minutes, that we could potentially command some attention from the public,” Booker tells David Remnick. “That’s the key here . . . to deal with the poverty of empathy we have in our nation right now.” Yet Booker bridles as Remnick asks about Democratic strategy to resist the Administration’s attacks. Instead, he emphasized the need for “Republicans of good conscience” to step up. “Playing this as a partisan game cheapens the larger cause of the country,” he argues. “This is the time that America needs moral leadership, and not political leadership.”

In the past few years, the comedian Nikki Glaser has breathed new life into the well-worn comedic form of the roast. Last year, she performed a roast of the football legend Tom Brady for a Netflix special, to much acclaim—with Conan O’Brien opining that “no one is going to do a better roast set than that.” Glaser has been on a hot streak since then, hosting the Golden Globes in January and touring the country with a new show. But rising to the top of the comedy world, Glaser tells David Remnick, hasn’t settled her insecurities, or her impostor syndrome. “It just never goes away— that feeling of not being worthy, or being thought of as less than,” Glaser says. It’s why, as Remnick notes, she insists on leading her set with a joke right out of the gate. “Part of it is I just know that people think women aren’t as funny, so I have to prove it right away . . . and then, ‘Can we all just relax and you can trust me?’ ” New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

Elon Musk, who’s chainsawing the federal government, is not merely a chaos agent, as he is sometimes described. Jill Lepore, the best-selling author of “These Truths” and other books, says that Musk is animated by obsessions and a sense of mission he acquired through reading, and misreading, science fiction. “When he keeps saying, you know, ‘We’re at a fork in the road. The future of human civilization depends on this election,’ he means SpaceX,” she tells David Remnick. “He means . . . ‘I need to take these rockets to colonize Mars and that’s only going to happen through Trump.’ ” The massive-scale reduction in social services he is enacting through DOGE, Lepore thinks, is tied to this objective. “Although there may be billions of [people] suffering here on planet Earth today, those are miniscule compared to the calculation of the needs of the billions of humans that will one day ever live if we can gain escape velocity from planet Earth. . . . That is, in fact, the math that lies behind DOGE.” Lepore’s BBC radio series on the SpaceX C.E.O. is called “X-Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story.” Plus, an organizer of the grassroots anti-Musk effort TeslaTakedown speaks with the Radio Hour about how she got involved, and the risks  involved in doing so. that poses. “It’s a scary place we all find ourselves in,” Patty Hoyt tells the New Yorker Radio Hour producer Adam Howard. “And I won’t stop. But I am afraid.”

Ryan Coogler began his career in film as a realist with “Fruitvale Station,” which tells the story of a true-to-life tragedy about a police killing in the Bay Area. He then directed the class drama of “Creed,” a celebrated “Rocky” sequel. But then he moved to the epic fantasy of Marvel’s hit “Black Panther” movies. In his newest project, “Sinners,” Coogler continues to deal with themes of history, faith, and race, but through the lens of horror. Jelani Cobb sat down with the director to discuss setting the film in the South, the mythology of the blues, and how he made a vampire story his own. 

Ruth Marcus resigned from the Washington Post after its C.E.O. killed an editorial she wrote that was critical of the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos. She ended up publishing the column in The New Yorker, and soon after she published another piece for the magazine asking “Has Trump’s Legal Strategy Backfired?” “Trump’s legal strategy has been backfiring, I think, demonstrably in the lower courts,” she tells David Remnick, on issues such as undoing birthright citizenship and deporting people without due process. Federal judges have rebuked the Administration’s lawyers, and ordered deportees returned to the United States. But “we have this thing called the Supreme Court, which is, in fact, supreme,” Marcus says. “I thought the Supreme Court was going to send a message to the Trump Administration: ‘Back off, guys.’ . . . That’s not what’s happened.” In recent days, that Court has issued a number of rulings that, while narrow, suggest a more deferential approach toward Presidential power. Marcus and Remnick spoke last week about where the Supreme Court—with its six-Justice conservative majority—may yield to Trump’s extraordinary exertions of power, and where it may attempt to check his authority. “When you have a six-Justice conservative majority,” she notes, there is“a justice to spare.”

Katie Kitamura’s fifth novel is “Audition,” and it focusses on a middle-aged actress and her ambiguous relationship with a much younger man. Kitamura tells the critic Jennifer Wilson that she thought for a long time about an actress as protagonist, as a way to highlight the roles women play, and to provoke questions about agency. “I teach creative writing, and in class often ... if there is a character who the group feels doesn't have agency, that is often brought up as a criticism of the character,” she tells Wilson. Other students will say, “ ‘She doesn't have any agency,’ as if a character without agency is implausible or in some way not compelling in narrative terms. But of course, the reality is very few of us have total agency. I think we operate under the illusion or the impression that we have a great deal of agency. But in reality when you look at your life, our choices are quite constricted.”  “Audition” comes out this week.  

The microchip maker Nvidia is a Silicon Valley colossus. After years as a runner-up to Intel and Qualcomm, Nvidia has all but cornered the market on the parallel processors essential for artificial-intelligence programs like ChatGPT. “Nvidia was there at the beginning of A.I.,” the tech journalist Stephen Witt tells David Remnick. “They really kind of made these systems work for the first time. We think of A.I. as a software revolution, something called neural nets, but A.I. is also a hardware revolution.” In The New Yorker, Stephen Witt profiled Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s brilliant and idiosyncratic co-founder and C.E.O. His new book is “The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip.” Until recently, Nvidia was the most valuable company in the world, but its stock price has been volatile, posting the largest single-day loss in history in January. But the company’s story is only partially a business story; it’s also one about global superpowers, and who will decide the future. If China takes military action against Taiwan, as it has indicated it might, the move could wrest control of the manufacturing of Nvidia microchips from a Taiwanese firm, which is now investing in a massive production facility in the U.S. “Maybe what’s happening,” Witt speculates, is that “this kind of labor advantage that Asia had over the United States for a long time, maybe in the age of robots that labor advantage is going to go away. And then it doesn’t matter where we put the factory. The only thing that matters is, you know, is there enough power to supply it?”  Plus, the staff writer Joshua Rothman has long been fascinated with A.I.—he even interviewed its “godfather,” Geoffrey Hinton, for The New Yorker Radio Hour. But Rothman has become increasingly concerned about a lack of public and political debate over A.I.—and about how thoroughly it may transform our lives. “Often, if you talk to people who are really close to the technology, the timelines they quote for really reaching transformative levels of intelligence are, like, shockingly soon,” he tells Remnick. “If we’re worried about the incompetence of government, on whatever side of that you situate yourself, we should worry about automated government. For example, an A.I. decides the length of a sentence in a criminal conviction, or an A.I. decides whether you qualify for Medicaid. Basically, we’ll have less of a say in how things go and computers will have more of a say.” Rothman’s essay “Are We Taking A.I. Seriously Enough?” appears in his weekly column, Open Questions.

Thirty years ago, David Remnick published “The Devil Problem,” a profile of the religion professor Elaine Pagels—a scholar of early Christianity who had also, improbably, become a best-selling author. Pagels’s 1979 book, “The Gnostic Gospels,” was scholarly and rigorous, but also accessible and widely read. She changed how a lot of people thought about the Bible. Pagels went on to write “The Origin of Satan,” as well as works on Adam and Eve and the Book of Revelation. Pagels's upcoming book, “Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus,” is a summation of her lifetime of study, as it takes on some of the central historical controversies of Christianity, including the stories of immaculate conception and the resurrection. The daughter of a scientist, Pagels “was living in a world in which science defines what you can see, and there’s nothing else.” Then, as a teen-ager, she was born again after seeing the evangelist Billy Graham preach. “This was about opening up the imagination,” she tells Remnick. “I did feel like the sky opened up.” Her time in the evangelical community was brief, but her fascination with belief never faded. “I have a sense that what we think of as the invisible world has deep realities to it that are quite unfathomable.”

With congressional Republicans unwilling to put any checks on an Administration breaking norms and issuing illegal orders, the focus has shifted to the Democratic opposition—or the lack thereof.  Democrats like Chris Murphy, the junior senator from Connecticut, have vehemently disagreed with party leaders’ reversion to business as usual. Murphy opposed Senator Chuck Schumer’s negotiation to pass the Republican budget and keep the government running; he advocated for the Democrats to skip the President’s joint address to Congress en masse. Murphy believes that the Democrats have a winning formula if they stick to a populist, anti-big-money agenda. But, he concedes, some of his colleagues are playing normal politics, “where we try to become more popular than Republicans. People like me believe that it won’t matter if we’re more popular than them, because the rules won’t allow us to run a fair election.” By attacking democratic institutions, law firms, and other allies, he thinks, Republicans can insure that their party wins indefinitely, as in failed democracies around the world.  “If you think that democracy is the No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 story,” Murphy tells David Remnick, “then you have to act like it. You need to show that you’re willing to take a political risk.” 

The far right in Israel has long dreamed of settling all of the West Bank, and Gaza, too—annexing the territories to create the land they refer to as Greater Israel. The Trump Administration might not object: Elise Stefanik, Trump’s pick for Ambassador to the United Nations, has agreed that Israel has a “biblical right” to the West Bank. “I think Israel is just more emboldened with Trump in office,” says Hisham Awartani, who lives in Ramallah and is now attending Brown University. The reporter Suzanne Gaber has been covering Awartani and his family since he was left paralyzed by a shooting in Burlington, Vermont. (Two other Palestinian students, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ali Ahmad, were also shot and injured.) Gaber visited the Awartanis recently in Ramallah to find out how people in the West Bank are thinking about annexation. But, rather than a future event that might happen, the Awartanis describe annexation as a process already well underway. “I’m twenty-one years old,” Hisham tells Gaber. “ In the period of time that I’ve been alive, it’s been a slow push.  It’s, like, I’m the frog in the boiling pot.”

Kaitlan Collins was only a couple years out of college when she became a White House correspondent for Tucker Carlson’s the Daily Caller. Collins stayed in the White House when she went over to CNN during Donald Trump’s first term, and she returned for his second. Trump has made his disdain for CNN clear—and he’s not a big fan of Collins, either. At one point during Trump’s first term, she was barred from a press conference; he called her a “nasty person” during a Presidential campaign interview. There’s never been a White House so overtly hostile to the press than the second Trump Administration, penalizing news organizations for not conforming to the President’s wishes. But, as Collins tells the staff writer Clare Malone, she believes that Trump is “someone who seeks the validation of the press as much as he criticizes them publicly. And so, you know, it doesn’t really bother me when he gets upset at my question.”

Across the federal government, the number of federal workers fired under Donald Trump and DOGE currently stands at over a hundred thousand. Some of those workers have turned to a website called We the Builders. It was created by federal workers associated with the U.S. Digital Service as a resource for employees who have lost their jobs, who are afraid of losing their jobs, or who have a whistleblower complaint.  The Radio Hour’s Adam Howard spoke with two of the site’s creators: Kate Green, who recently left the federal government for a job in the private sector, and a web developer who identifies himself as Milo – using a pseudonym, since he is still employed in the government.  “Both the beauty and the tragedy is that the work the government does is largely invisible,” as Milo put it. “You don't always know that it is USDA inspectors who are working in the slaughterhouses, who are making sure that work is being done in a safe and sanitary fashion … But they give a damn about making sure that food is safe. If that goes away, that's not immediately visible to people. And they don't necessarily know that these people have lost their jobs or that food is going to be less safe until people get hurt or worse. And so, we want to make sure that people start to understand what the cuts in these programs actually mean.” Plus, this year, The New Yorker’s centennial, we’re revisiting some classics from the magazine’s past with a series called Takes. The novelist Michael Cunningham was already in his forties when Annie Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain”—about two young men working as shepherds who unexpectedly fall in love—was published. “The New Yorker was not the first big-deal magazine to run a story about gay people. It wasn’t, like, ‘Oh, my God, a story, finally!,’ ” Cunningham recalls. But it made a huge impression nevertheless. “It was a story in The New Yorker about two gay men that was first and foremost a love story. . . . I didn't want to just read it; I wanted to absorb this story in a more lasting way.”   Excerpts of Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” were read by Monica Wyche.

Two weeks after the Inauguration of Donald Trump, Elon Musk tweeted, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into a wood chipper.” Musk was referring to the Agency for International Development, an agency which supports global health and economic development, and which has saved millions of lives around the world. “A viper’s nest of radical-left lunatics,” Musk called it. U.S.A.I.D.’s funding is authorized by Congress, and its work is a crucial element of American soft power. DOGE has decimated the agency with cuts so sudden and precipitous that federal workers stationed in conflict zones were stranded without safe passage home, as their own government publicly maligned them for alleged fraud and corruption.  Courts have blocked aspects of the federal purge of U.S.A.I.D., but it’s not clear if workers can be rehired and contracts restarted, or whether the damage is done.     In January, 2022, Atul Gawande, a surgeon and leading public health expert who has written for The New Yorker since 1998, was sworn in as assistant administrator for global health at U.S.A.I.D. He resigned as the new administration came to power, and is watching in shock as Trump and Musk make U.S.A.I.D. a guinea pig for the government-wide purge now under way. U.S.A.I.D. was, he admits, a soft target for MAGA—helping people in faraway countries. Gawande calls U.S.A.I.D. “America at its best.” But with Trump and Musk, “there’s a different world view at play here,” he says. “Power is what matters, not impact.”

Recently, the former New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez was sentenced to eleven years in prison for accepting bribes in cash and gold worth more than half a million dollars. He is the first person sentenced to prison for crimes committed in the Senate in more than forty years. Menendez did favors for the government of Egypt while he was the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, and intervened in criminal cases against the businessmen who were bribing him. In New York, he broke down in tears before  a federal judge, pleading for leniency. Upon emerging from the courtroom, he made a thinly veiled plea to the man he had once voted to impeach. “President Trump is right,” Menendez declared to news cameras. “This process is political, and it’s corrupted to the core. I hope President Trump cleans up the cesspool and restores the integrity to the system.”   WNYC’s New Jersey reporter Nancy Solomon explores how the son of working-class immigrants from Cuba scaled the heights of American politics, and then fell dramatically. But will he serve the time? Solomon speaks with the constitutional-law professor Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, who says, “It’s hard to know who Trump will pardon next. One of the more recent pardons was for the former governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich. He was a Democrat. . . .  [Trump] seems much more  interested in undermining anti-corruption laws left, right, and center.”

Since emerging on the national political scene a decade ago, Donald Trump has openly admired the dictatorial style of Vladimir Putin. Trump’s lean toward Russia was investigated, it was psychoanalyzed—yet many were still shocked when recently Trump and Vice-President J. D. Vance berated President Volodymyr Zelensky, of Ukraine, in the Oval Office, and seemed to be taking Putin’s side in the conflict. When Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago, one of David Remnick’s first calls was to Stephen Kotkin, a historian of Russia and a fellow at the Hoover Institution. He speaks with Kotkin again, as Trump is pressuring Ukraine to accept a “deal.” Kotkin doesn’t endorse Trump’s position, but notes that it reflects real changes in America’s place in the world and the limits of American power. “You can say that Trump is wrong in his analysis of the world, you can say that Trump’s methods are abominable,” Kotkin says. “But you can’t say that American power is sufficient to meet its current commitments on the trajectory that we’re on.”

When Emily Nussbaum introduced Alan Cumming at the New Yorker Festival, she said, “Plenty of actors light up a room, but Alan Cumming is more of a disco ball—reflecting every possible angle of show business.” Cumming appears in mainstream dramas such as “The Good Wife,” and also more indie projects like his one-man version of “Macbeth”; his performances in musicals such as “Cabaret” are legendary. He also owns a nightclub; his memoir “Not My Father’s Son” was a bestseller, and so on. And Cumming plays the host on the Emmy-winning reality show “The Traitors.” He combines “a dandy Scottish laird—sort of James Bond villain, sort of eccentric, old-fashioned nut who has this big castle.” Spoiler alert: “It’s supposed to be my castle. It’s not.” Nussbaum asks about his perspective on reality TV before he started on “Traitors.” “Zero, really,” Cumming confesses. “I was a bit judgy. … The thing I don't like about a lot of those shows is that they laud and therefore encourage bad behavior and lack of kindness.” Before “The Traitors,” Cumming’s first brush with reality television was on “Who Do You Think You Are?,” a BBC genealogy program that confronted him with shocking secrets about his own family. “It made a good memoir, I suppose,” he jokes. “Just how awful that was. It was awful. But no, I don't regret it.”

Democrats in Washington have seemed almost paralyzed by the onslaught of far-right appointments and draconian executive orders coming from the Trump White House. But some state governors seem more willing to oppose the federal government than congressional Democrats are. In January, Governor Tim Walz, of Minnesota, tweeted, “President Trump just shut off funding for law enforcement, farmers, schools, veterans, and health care. . . . Minnesota needs answers. We’ll see Trump in court.” He’s only one of many Democratic governors challening the federal government. Walz joins David Remnick to offer his analysis of why Democrats lost the 2024 election, why the Party has been losing support from men, and what Democrats need to do now that Donald Trump is back in the White House.

David Remnick is joined by Alexandra Schwartz, the co-host of the podcast Critics at Large, and The New Yorker’s august film critic Richard Brody. They talk about the past year in film and predict the victors of the Academy Awards. Brody dismisses “The Brutalist”—a film that merely uses the Holocaust “as metaphor”—and tells Remnick that “Wicked” might win Best Picture. “I think there’s a huge desire for cinematic comfort food that makes a billion dollars.” Continuing the Radio Hour’s annual tradition, Brody discusses nominees and selects the winners of the coveted award that we call The Brody.

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 ratings, he lambasts the Administration for the “chaos” it is currently sowing in America. Fetterman sympathizes with voters’ widespread disgust with contemporary politicking. “Unlimited money has turned all of us in some way into all OnlyFans models,” he says. “We’re all just online hustling for money.”

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 kind of ruthlessness: she suggests that “most of the lines Didion writes about Stewart, it’s hard not to hear the echoes of people saying that about her.” Chast chose to focus on cartoons by George Booth, who contributed to The New Yorker for at least half of the magazine’s life.  You can read Roz Chast on George Booth, Jia Tolentino on Joan Didion, and many more essays from the Takes series here.  

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 arrived at a constitutional crisis. “We’re at the Rubicon,” Romero says. “Whether we’ve crossed it remains to be seen.” Romero has held the job since 2001—he started just days before September 11, 2001—and has done the job under four Presidents. He tells David Remnick that it’s nothing new for Presidents to chafe at judicial obstacles to implement their agendas; Romero mentions Bill Clinton’s attempts to strip courts of certain powers as notably aggressive. But, “if Trump decides to flagrantly defy a judicial order, then I think . . .  we’ve got to take to the streets in a different way. We’ve got to shut down this country.”

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 realize that it’s a political issue,” Abraham explains. “The Israeli military declines almost ninety-nine per cent of Palestinian requests for building permits. . . . There is a systematic effort to prevent” construction of homes for a growing population.  “We made this movie from a perspective of activism,” Adra tells Remnick, “to try to have political pressure and impact for the community itself.” But, since they began filming, the political situation has deteriorated severely, and “all the reality today is changing . . . to be more miserable.”  “No Other Land” is opening in select major cities this weekend. 

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 workplaces. In the Administration’s rhetoric, D.E.I. is discrimination pure and simple, and the root of much of what ails the nation. “D.E.I. is the boogeyman for anything,” Jelani Cobb tells David Remnick. Cobb is a longtime staff writer, and the dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. “If there’s a terrible tragedy . . . if there is something going wrong in any part of your life, if there are fires happening in California, then you can bet that, somehow, another D.E.I. is there.” Although affirmative-action policies in university admissions were found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, D.E.I. describes a broad array of actions without a specific definition. “It’s that malleability,” Cobb reflects, that makes D.E.I. a useful target, “one source that you can use to blame every single failing or shortcoming or difficulty in life on.”

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 about the way that stories age, and the difficulty of selecting stories. “The thing to remember is that even geniuses don’t always write their best work right right off the bat. People make a lot of noise about rejection letters from The New Yorker that went to famous writers, or later-famous writers. And they were probably justified, those rejections.”

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 one of the largest nonprofits working on public health around the globe. That has made him the target of conspiracy theories by anti-vaxxers, including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has asserted that Gates and Anthony Fauci are together responsible for millions of deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gates views the rise of conspiracy thinking as symptomatic of larger trends in American society exacerbated by technology. “The fact that outrage is rewarded because it’s more engaging, that’s kind of a human weakness,” he tells David Remnick. “And the fact that I thought everybody would be doing deep analysis of facts and seeking out the actual studies on vaccine safety—boy, was that naïve. When the pandemic came, people wanted some evil genius to be behind it. Not some bat biology.”

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. “The house just is an idea of a house, or the aftermath of a house,” she said. “You can walk through the arched door at the front and the back, but there’s just pretty much nothing in between.” 

“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 current, Michaels “paid attention to replenishing the casts in a sort of seamless way, so that it would never seem like an old guy trying to do an entertainment for young people.” Plus, one of the show’s most notable alumni, Tina Fey—rumored to be a possible successor to Michaels, who is now eighty—reads an excerpt from the magazine’s review of the show’s first season, back in 1975. 

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 oligarchy taking shape in America”? This segment was originally published January 17, 2025, in The New Yorker’s Political Scene podcast.

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 get to a better place in Gaza and particularly to get a ceasefire that brings the hostages home, that stops the firing in both directions, that surges humanitarian assistance, that also creates space to get something permanent,” Blinken said. “We are, I hope, finally, belatedly on the brink of getting that.” Blinken expressed cautious optimism that a long-term resolution remains possible. “I’ve had many opportunities to meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu. When the conversation comes to normalization with Saudi Arabia, that’s the point at which he sits up, leans forward, leans in. He knows that for Israel, too, that would be an absolute game changer.” The hope is that normalization might induce Israelis to reconsider the question of Palestinian statehood. But Blinken recognized the limits of American influence on its ally. “Israeli society will have to choose. They’ll have to decide if that’s the path that they’re ready and willing and able to travel in order to get to normalization.”

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 United States,” he tells Elizabeth Kolbert, herself an environmental journalist of great renown. “Mining is inherently destructive, there’s no getting around it, but . . . we have absolutely got to get our hands on more of these metals in order to pull off the energy transition. There’s just no way to build all the E.V.s and solar panels and all the rest of it without some amount of mining.” At least in the U.S. or Canada, Beiser says, there are higher standards of safety than in many other countries. 

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 dangerous than, ‘Hey, they just want to maximize their corporation's wealth,’ ”he tells David Remnick. “This is an ideology amongst some that rejects the role of the state.” Although he’s an ally of Bernie Sanders, such as advocating for Medicare for All and free public college, Khanna is not a democratic socialist. He calls himself a progressive capitalist. Real economic growth, he says, requires “a belief in entrepreneurship and technology and in business leaders being part of the solution.”

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 don’t understand it. It’s not that theatre isn’t competitive, but there’s this feeling—everybody’s so happy to be there. Like, ‘We got a show, guys, and we don’t know how long it’s going to last!’ ” 

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 expense of her relationship with Skinner. In her piece, Aviv explores how, and why, a writer of such astonishing powers of empathy could betray her own child, and discusses the ways that Munro touched on this family trauma in fiction. “Her writing makes you think about art at what expense,” she tells David Remnick. “That’s probably a question that is relevant for many artists, but Alice Munro makes it visible on the page. It felt so literal—like trading your daughter for art.”

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 particular knack with unremarkable characters. “I don't know that I seek out things in the domestic space, but I do think I’m really drawn to ordinary lives,” she tells Schulman. “I’ve never been, like, I’m going to play an astronaut next. . . . A lot of these stories [are] domestic stories—well, that’s the biggest story of our lives, right? How do we live? Who do we love? . . . Those are the things that we all know about.” New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

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 really hard and I just love having the space to concentrate on what I’m doing, so I make sure it comes out well,” she says. Garten joins Remnick to reflect on her early days in the kitchen, and to answer listener questions about holiday meals and more. Her latest book is “Be Ready When the Luck Happens,” a memoir. This segment originally aired on December 16, 2022. Plus, Alex Barasch picks three of the best erotic thrillers after being inspired to study the genre by his recent Profile of the director of the new film, “Babygirl.”

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 America, “we had a public that was quite riled up,” Reverend Howard reminds his son, The New Yorker Radio Hour’s Adam Howard. “Who knows what might have resulted if this issue were not somehow addressed? . . . Might there be an American invasion, an attempt to rescue the hostages in a militaristic way?” Reverend Howard was aware that the gesture had some propaganda value to the Iranian militants, but he saw a chance to lower the tension. Accompanied by another Protestant minister and a Catholic bishop, Howard entered front-page headlines, travelling to Tehran and into the embassy. He gave the captives updates on the N.F.L. playoffs, and they prayed. It was a surreal experience to say the least. “It was in the Iranian hostage crisis that I understood how alone we are, and how powerless we are when other people take control,” Reverend Howard says. “And really it’s in that setting that one can develop faith.” This segment originally aired on December 15, 2023.

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” and hundreds of other vampire stories, “Nosferatu” aims “to make him scary again,” Dafoe told The New Yorker Radio Hour’s Adam Howard. It’s his third collaboration with the director, after “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse.” “When you do a Robert Eggers movie,” he says, “there’s a wealth of detail and it’s rooted in history. … So you enter it and the world works on you. And I love that.”

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.

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 caught up with Clark before the launch of her new album, “MASSEDUCTION.”  They talked about the clarity of purpose she needed in order to “clear a path” to write the “glamorously sad songs” she’s become known for. This segment originally aired on October 13, 2017.

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 political. “I don’t have a manifesto and I don’t have a slogan,” he says. “I try to avoid the simplistic slogan nature of songs. I try to look for the angle that somebody else isn’t covering.” But he notes that “the things that we are so rightly enraged about, [that] we see as unjust . . . it’s all happened before. . . . I didn’t think I’d be talking with my thirteen-year-old son about a lynching. Those are the things I was hearing reported on the news at their age.”   Costello spoke from outside his home in Vancouver, B.C., where a foghorn is audible in the background. This segment originally aired on October 16, 2020.

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 discuss why “Wicked” is resonating with audiences in 2024. They consider it alongside other recent movie musicals, such as “Emilia Pérez,” which centers on the transgender leader of a Mexican cartel, and Todd Phillips’s follow-up to “Joker,” the confounding “Joker: Folie à Deux.” Then they step back to trace the evolution of the musical, from the first shows to marry song and story in the nineteen-twenties to the seventies-era innovations of figures like Stephen Sondheim. Amid the massive commercial, technological, and aesthetic shifts of the last century, how has the form changed, and why has it endured? “People who don’t like musicals will often criticize their artificiality,” Schwartz says. “Some things in life are so heightened . . . yet they’re part of the real. Why not put them to music and have singing be part of it?” This episode originally aired on Critics at Large, December 12, 2024.

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 I don’t think was true.” The limited responses to the war in Gaza by Iran and Hezbollah, Khalidi believes, clearly demonstrate that Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance “was designed by Iran to protect the Iranian regime. . . . It wasn’t designed to protect Palestine.” Khalidi, a professor emeritus at Columbia University, is the author of a number of books on Palestinian history; among them, “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine” has been particularly influential. The book helped bring the term “settler colonialism” into common parlance, at least on the left, to describe Israel’s relationship to historic Palestine. Sometimes invoked as a term of opprobrium, “settler colonialism” is strongly disputed by supporters of Israel. Khalidi asserts that the description is historically specific and accurate. The early Zionists, he says, understood their effort as colonization. “That’s not some antisemitic slur,” he says. “That’s the description they gave themselves.”The concept of settler colonialism has been applied, on the political left, to describe Israel’s founding, and to its settlement of the Palestinian-occupied territories. This usage has been disputed by supporters of Israel and by thinkers including Adam Kirsch, an editor at the Wall Street Journal, who has also written about philosophy for The New Yorker. “Settler colonialism is . . . a zero-sum way of looking at the conflict,” Kirsch tells David Remnick. “In the classic examples, it involves the destruction of one people by another and their replacement over a large territory, really a continent-wide territory. That’s not at all the history of Israel and Palestine.” Kirsch made his case in a recent book, “On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice.”

“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 entire career,” McDonald tells Michael Schulman, recalling that in her breakout performance, in “Carousel,” some audiences “were upset with me that I was playing Carrie, saying, ‘She wouldn’t have been Black.’ There’s a man who comes down from heaven with a star in his hand!” In a wide-ranging interview onstage at The New Yorker Festival, McDonald discusses how when she was a child theatre was initially intended to be a type of therapy for her, and the roles her parents wouldn’t let her take. “Gypsy” is currently in previews on Broadway. 

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 law on that,” the staff writer Jonathan Blitzer tells David Remnick. “We’re entering unprecedented territory.” Blitzer unpacks some of the anti-immigrant rhetoric, and explains measures that the new Administration is likely to take. “I.C.E. has a policy that discourages arrests at schools, hospitals, places of worship, courts,” he says. That policy can change and, he believes, will. “You’re going to see arrest operations in very scary and upsetting places.” The aim, he thinks, will be “to create a sense of terror. That is going to be the modus operandi of the Administration.” Blitzer is the author of “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here,” a definitive account of the immigration crisis.

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 holiday fare—but “I returned to the words of Roger Ebert,” Chang tells David Remnick. “No good movie is depressing. All bad movies are depressing.” 

“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 satire is the medicine, and you have to keep taking it.” FastHorse was born into the Sicangu Lakota Nation, and was adopted as a child into a white family. She is the first Native American woman to have a play produced on Broadway. “When I was younger, it was very painful to be separated from a lot of things that I felt like I couldn’t partake in because I wasn’t raised on the reservation or had been away from my Lakota family so long,” she says. “But now I really recognize it as my superpower that I can take Lakota culture . . . and contemporary Indigenous experiences and translate them for white audiences, which unfortunately are still the majority of audiences in American theatre.” This segment originally aired on April 14, 2023.  Plus, earlier this year, the author and essayist Ayelet Waldman wrote an essay for The New Yorker about taking up a new hobby. Trying to cope with intensely stressful news, Waldman dove head first into teaching herself how to quilt. “I would get up in the morning, I would go to the sewing machine. I would quilt all day and then I’d go to sleep. It wasn’t like I was checking out; I was still very much involved and invested in what was going on,” she told the producer Jeffrey Masters. “But somehow I could tolerate it while I was using my hands, and I decided I want to know how and why.” Waldman talked with neuroscientists about the reason that certain brain activities seem to relax us. And to her surprise, it wasn’t hard to find hours each day, in the life of a busy writer, to pursue a new vocation. “Honestly,” she admits, “I was literally spending that time on the Internet.”

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 altogether. McBride talks with David Remnick about the climate in Congress, how she’s responding to attacks—and what she was actually hoping to accomplish in Congress.

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 accused the majority of a “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness” to the reality of race in America. She also dissented in the landmark Presidential-immunity case. Immunity might “incentivize an office holder to push the envelope, with respect to the exercise of their authority,” she tells David Remnick. “It was certainly a concern, and one that I did not perceive the Constitution to permit.” They also discussed the widely reported ethical questions surrounding the Court, and whether the ethical code it adopted ought to have some method of enforcement. But Jackson stressed that whatever the public perception, the nine Justices maintain old traditions of collegiality (no legal talk at lunch, period), and that she sometimes writes majority opinions as well as vigorous dissents. Jackson’s recent memoir is titled “Lovely One,” about her family, youth, and how she got to the highest position in American law.

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 migration north to Pittsburgh; her brother, who remained in Mississippi, wants to sell it to buy a plot of land. Themes of inheritance and history are central to the siblings’ conflict. “Histories are passed as we keep doing things together . . . through struggle, through joy, through lovemaking, through challenge,” Deadwyler explained to the New Yorker’s Doreen St. Félix. “The Piano Lesson” is playing in select theatres, and will be available on Netflix starting November 22nd.

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 abstract principles or procedures.” He adds, “With the exception of a handful of cases, voters never, ever—in any society, in any culture—prioritize democracy over all else. Individual voters worry about much more mundane things, as is their right. It is up to élites and institutions to protect democracy—not voters.” Levitsky and Ziblatt published “How Democracies Die” during Donald Trump’s first Administration, but they argue that what’s ailing our democracy runs much deeper—and it didn’t start with Trump. “We’re the only advanced, old, rich democracy that has faced the level of democratic backsliding that we’ve experienced…. So we need to kind of step back and say, ‘What has gone wrong here?’ If we don’t ask those kinds of hard questions, we’re going to continue to be in this roiling crisis,” Ziblatt says.

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 features music by Jack Antonoff. Gold, who cut his teeth doing experimental theatre with the venerable downtown company the Wooster Group, bristles at the view that his production is unfaithful to the original. “A lot of people falsely sort of label me as a deconstructionist or something, because they’re wearing street clothes,” he tells Cunningham. “I’m not deconstructing these plays. I’m doing the play. . . . I think it’s a gross misunderstanding of the difference between conventions and authentic engagement in a text.” Gold aspires to excite kids to get off their phones. “We are in a mental-health crisis [of] teen suicide. I’m doing a play about teen suicide, and all those young people are coming. And I think we can help them.”

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 roundtable—staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos—to discuss Kamala Harris’s campaign, Trump’s overtly authoritarian rhetoric, and the American electorate’s rightward trajectory.

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 authoritarian takeover in the United States in the form of Trumpism, it is not something foreign,” Maddow explained to David Remnick last week at The New Yorker Festival. “It is something that’s coming from a fascist place that is a recurring, ebbing, and flowing tide that we’ve faced in multiple generations.”

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 must have expected it would cost her the midterms and her seat in Congress, which ended up being the case when Wyoming voters rejected her in 2022. Since then, Cheney has gone further, campaigning forcefully on behalf of Vice-President Harris. David Remnick spoke with Cheney last week at The New Yorker Festival, shortly after Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, blocked its planned endorsement of Harris. “It absolutely proves the danger of Donald Trump,” Cheney said. “When you have Jeff Bezos apparently afraid to issue an endorsement for the only candidate in the race who’s a stable, responsible adult, because he fears Donald Trump, that tells you why we have to work so hard to make sure that Donald Trump isn’t elected,” Cheney told Remnick. “And I cancelled my subscription to the Washington Post.”

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 political advantage, “a lot of people pointed to her time at Howard, and her membership in A.K.A., [as] a very specific Black American experience that they did not see from someone like Barack Obama.”   Jazmine Hughes’s reporting on “The Tight-Knit World of Kamala Harris’s Sorority” was published in the October 21, 2024, issue ofThe New Yorker.  Plus, Kai Wright, who hosts WNYC’s “Notes from America,” speaks with the choreographer Bill T. Jones. This week, the Brooklyn Academy of Music is re-mounting Jones’s work “Still/Here,” which caused a stir when it débuted at BAM, thirty years ago: The New Yorker’s own dance critic at the time, Arlene Croce, declared that she wasn’t going to review it. Now “Still/Here” is considered a landmark in contemporary dance, and Jones a towering figure. 

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 Mayor Eric Adams and many more. He tells David Remnick that he received death threats just for speaking with Harris—“legitimate threats, not … somebody talking crazy on social media. That’s just me having a conversation with her about the state of our society.  So imagine what she actually gets.”  Charlamagne believes firmly that the narrative of Harris losing Black support is overstated, or a polling fiction, but he agrees that the Democrats have a messaging problem. The author of a book titled “Get Honest or Die Lying,” Charlamagne says that the Party has shied away from widespread concerns about immigration and the economy, to its detriment.  “I just want to see more honesty from Democrats. Like I always say, Republicans are more sincere about their lies than Democrats are about their truth!”

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 abortion clinic, and really understand the conversations that have been happening on the ground,” Alexis McGill Johnson, Planned Parenthood’s president and C.E.O., told David Remnick. The organization is spending upward of $40 million in this election to try to secure abortion rights in Congress and in the White House. A second Trump term, she speculates, could bring a ban on mifepristone and a “pregnancy czar” overseeing women in a federal Department of Life. “Is that scary enough for you?” Johnson asks. 

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 their way from the Bronx all the way back down to Coney Island in the course of the film,” Miranda tells David Remnick. The film reads as a nineteen-seventies period piece, but Miranda and Davis find a classical dimension to it. “The tale is an old tale. Sol Yurick, who wrote the novel the movie is based on, based it on the Anabasis, which is a soldier’s account of trying to get back home from war” in ancient Greece. “It’s this mythic story. . . . It doesn’t get more clear than that as a plotline.” To tell that story in song and rap, Miranda brought together a cast of legends including Lauryn Hill, Nas, Marc Anthony, members of the Wu-Tang Clan, and more. If releasing a concept album, meant to be listened to straight through, seems like a stretch for 2024 audiences, Miranda is unfazed.  “What’s interesting about “Hamilton” is that no one I talked to thought it was a good idea when I was writing it.  But I could see it. And it was the idea that wouldn’t leave me alone.”

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 word that can refer to mourning and darkness. Vernon is not altogether comfortable with the acclaim he has received. “I’m not, like, famous on the street, People-magazine famous, but . . .  there’s been a lot of accolades,” he tells Petrusich. “I was getting a lot of positive feedback for being heartbroken and having heartache and I’ve wondered . . . [if] maybe I’m pressing the bruise.”

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?,’ ” Osnos tells David Remnick. “And her answer is revealing. . . . ‘I’m happy to join a process like that, but I’m not gonna wait around. I’m not gonna wait around.’ ” But if Harris’s surge in popularity was remarkable, her lead in most polls is razor-thin. “If she wins [the popular vote] and loses the Electoral College, that’ll be the third time since the year 2000 that Democrats have suffered that experience,” he notes. “You can’t underestimate how seismic a shock and a trauma—that’s not an overstatement—it will be, particularly for young Americans who have tried to say, ‘We’re going to put our support behind somebody and see if we can change this country.’ ”

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 everybody was talking about him—including the staff writer Vinson Cunningham, who spoke with Alvarez recently. The new show is a much more conventional kind of social comedy, focussed on a gay Latino English teacher in Texas. “Evan wants to be, and is, in so many ways, essentially an out, proud gay guy,” Alvarez explained to Cunningham. “But how does that feel in this school with all these different forces coming at him?”

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 pushing the lie of the stolen election of 2020. Like many in the Party, he balks at some of Trump’s tactics, but always finds an excuse. “I would probably not have used the language Trump used,” for example in calling Vice-President Kamala Harris “mentally disabled,” Gingrich says. “Partly because I think that it doesn’t further his cause. . . . I would simply say that he is a very intense personality . . . and occasionally he has to explode.” But he sees Trump as seasoned and improved with age, and his potential in a second term far greater. “It’s almost providential: he’s had four years [out of office] to think about what he’s learned . . . and he has a much deeper grasp of what has to be done and how to do it.”

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 Democrats could cost Harris the election. Andrew Marantz, who has reported on the Uncommitted Movement, talks with one of the its founders, Abbas Alawieh, about the difficult moral calculus facing Muslim Democrats, and why the Party spurned overtures from pro-Palestinian groups. The antiwar candidate Jill Stein, of the Green Party, is now polling very well with Muslim voters, and Donald Trump’s campaign is claiming that he can stop the war; however, Uncommitted leaders feel they cannot endorse Harris. In conversation with David Remnick, Marantz recalls that Hillary Clinton lost Michigan by around ten thousand votes; more than one hundred thousand people checked “Uncommitted.”

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 of power brokering … [and] introduced him to New York society.” Sherman, a special correspondent at Vanity Fair, also chronicled Roger Ailes’s rise to power at Fox News in “The Loudest Voice in the Room.” Sherman insists, though, that the film is not anti-Trump—or not exactly. “The movie got cast into this political left-right schema, and it’s not that. It’s a humanist work of drama,” in which the protégé eventually betrays his mentor. It almost goes without saying that Donald Trump has threatened to sue the producers of the film, and the major Hollywood studios wouldn’t touch it.  Sherman talks with Remnick about how the film, which opens October 11th, came to be.  Plus, Jill Lepore is a New Yorker staff writer, a professor of history at Harvard University, and the author of the best-seller “These Truths” as well as many other works of history. While her professional life is absorbed in the uniqueness of the American experience, she finds her relaxation across the pond, watching police procedurals from Britain. “There’s not a lot of gun action,” she notes, “not the same kind of swagger.” She talks with David Remnick about three favorites: “Annika” and “The Magpie Murders,” on PBS Masterpiece; and “Karen Pirie,” on BritBox. And Remnick can’t resist a digression to bring up their shared reverence for “Slow Horses,” a spy series on Apple TV+ that’s based on books by Mick Herron, whom Lepore profiled for The New Yorker.

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’s new book is to apply what he learned from them to larger principles that apply to our own country.  In areas taken back from Russian control, Ukrainians would tell Snyder they were “de-occupied,” rather than liberated; “freedom,” he writes, “is not just an absence of evil but a presence of good.” “If you think that freedom is just negative,” Snyder told David Remnick, “if you think that freedom is just an absence of [evil] things, I think you then argue yourself into a position where given the absence, stuff is going to work out. … The market is going to deliver you freedom, or the founding fathers … something else is going to deliver you freedom. And that of course is wrong. It’s an essentially authoritarian conviction. Because if anyone’s going to deliver you freedom, it’s going to be you, in some way.” 

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 determine the winner of the 2024 election. “I think that Donald Trump has done more damage to himself with a lot of these people who held their nose and voted for him the second time; [after] January 6th, a lot of them are going to leave it blank,” Longwell told David Remnick. “At the end of the day, what this election will come down to is the Republicans who get there on Kamala Harris, and the ones who just refuse to get there on Trump.” Longwell publishes the political news site the Bulwark, and was also the first female national board chair of the Log Cabin Republicans, which represents L.G.B.T.Q. conservatives.

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 he’s playing there, because he’s so comfortable there. . . . Like, ‘Welcome to my monthly gig, here again at Madison Square Garden.’ It won’t be quite like that for us . . . but I’d love it if we could in some ways make it feel intimate, make it feel like it’s a gigantic dive bar.” They joined David Remnick in the studio at WNYC to perform “Good Together”and “Set Sail (Prometheus & Eros),” from their new album, and “Shame, Shame, Shame,” an older song about a Donald Trump-like “big man” who doesn’t “know how to be a good man.”

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 fifteen points against a Trump-aligned Republican, and his approval ratings in the state remain high. “To win in Pennsylvania, you’re not winning with only Democrats,” Shapiro told David Remnick. “You’ve got to get like-minded Independents and Republicans.” Shapiro was on the shortlist of candidates for Harris’s pick for Vice-President—which may be the cause of attacks from Donald Trump, including one calling him an “overrated Jewish governor.” He spoke with Remnick to talk about Harris’s choice of Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, as her running mate, and what it takes for a Democrat to win Pennsylvania. “We’re a big state, but we’re still a retail state,” Shapiro said, “meaning you got to show up!”

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 staff writer Michael Schulman first wrote about LuPone (in one strange, forgotten dead end of her career) in 2019, and recently spoke with LuPone at her home.  Is it true, he wanted to know, that LuPone recently had Aubrey Plaza—her castmate on “Agatha”—for a short-term roommate?  Plaza had been offered her first role in a play, as LuPone relates it, and “she'd never been onstage. I know from years of experience how it can shock you, what is required of you to be a stage actor.” LuPone, the veteran, “was concerned for her. I said, Why don't you just stay with me and let me walk you through this as you come home like a deer caught in the headlights. … I did do her laundry, and I did make her soup.” 

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: “We should all expect that they are more competent than they were before. And also Donald Trump is more desperate than he was before. … He faces the prospect of four criminal indictments, two of which are in federal court.” Election-denying officials are now in power in many swing states; Trump has publicly praised his allies on state election boards.  Elias fears the assault on the democratic process could be much more effective this time.  Still, some things don’t change. “I believe Donald Trump is going to say after Election Day in 2024 that he won all fifty states—that there’s no state he didn’t win,” Elias says. “That is just the pathology that is Donald Trump.”

“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 join him on foot. They admired the majestic Romanesque-style stonework of the High Bridge, where Edgar Allan Poe would walk while mourning his wife, in the eighteen-forties; the impressively tangled connections of the interstate highway system that engineers once called “chicken guts”; and walked east to the Cedar Playground, which has a strong claim to being the birthplace of hip-hop.   Note: The segment misstates the year Edgar Allan Poe moved to the Bronx. Poe moved to New York City in 1844, and to the Bronx in 1846. 

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 in white America. “Mixed-race people are sort of up for debate and speculation, and there’s a real return to the idea that your appearance is what matters, not what your background is or your identity,” she tells Julian Lucas, who wrote about Senna’s work in The New Yorker.  “And if your appearance is unclear to us, then we’re going to debate you and we’re going to discount you and we’re going to accuse you of being an impostor.”  Senna talks about why she describes people like herself and Lucas using the old word “mulatto,” despite its racist etymology. “The word ‘biracial’ or ‘multiracial’ to me is completely meaningless,” she says, “because I don’t know which races were mixing.  And those things matter when we’re talking about identity.”  Senna’s newest novel, “Colored Television,” follows a literary writer somewhat like herself, trying to find a new career in the more lucrative world of TV.

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 accounts of the couple’s life, the tycoon’s misdeeds, and his role in the crash of 1929. “What I was interested in, and this is why I chose finance capital, I wanted a realm of pure abstraction,” he tells David Remnick. Diaz’s first book, In The Distance, will be released in hardback for the first time in October.

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 could agree on was that twenty-four people had died, and it was marines who’d killed them.” Season 3 of In the Dark looks at what happened that day in Haditha, and why no one was held accountable for the killings. Baran and her team travelled to twenty-one states and three continents over the course of four years to report on a story that the world had largely forgotten. Episode 1 airs this week on The New Yorker Radio Hour, and you can listen to the rest of the series wherever you get your podcasts.

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 within the Republican Party and speaks with David Remnick about her reporting, including an interview with Representative Matt Rosendale, of Montana. A hard-liner dismissive of pragmatic compromise, Rosendale believes that life begins at conception, and he is challenging his House Republican colleagues to vote their convictions and ban in-vitro fertilization.

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 author of “The Hispanic Republican,” wrote about the Republicans’ strategy for The New Yorker. He spoke with prominent Latino Trump supporters about why the message is resonating, and how they feel about all the signs reading “Mass Deportation Now.” Plus, it’s time for one of those annual rituals that keeps the world turning: picking the song of the summer. “One way of thinking about it is a song that you hear involuntarily,” Kelefa Sanneh opines. “This isn’t the song that you play the most. It’s the song you hear everyone else listening to.” He joins fellow staff writer Amanda Petrusich to propose four candidates for song of the summer: Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso”; Charli XCX’s “360,” from the much-buzzed “BRAT” album; Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)”; and Karol G’s “Si Antes Te Hubiera Conocido.” David Remnick weighs in to break the tie.

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 Kennedy’s highly unusual candidacy, and why he’s staying in the race.

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 persuading President Biden to withdraw from the campaign in place of a new Democratic candidate.  After years of friendship with Biden, it wasn’t easy, she tells David Remnick, who asks, “You think your relationship will be there?” “I hope so,” Pelosi admits. “I pray so. I cry so. I lose sleep on it.” After stepping away from Democratic leadership herself, in 2023, she wrote a book with a short and apt title: “The Art of Power.”  Pelosi speaks to Remnick about the importance of having a strong mission undergirding the skills of political gamesmanship. “This is not for the faint of heart,” she says. “This is tough. If you know your ‘why,’ the slings and arrows are worth it. If you don’t know your ‘why,’ don’t even do this. . . . You’ve got to be proud of your wounds.”

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.” Thrall won a Pulitzer Prize for his book “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama,” which uses one isolated incident—a road accident in the West Bank—to illustrate the ways in which life under occupation has become nearly unlivable for Palestinians. On July 19th, the United Nations’ International Court of Justice issued an advisory ruling that the occupation violates international law. While the world’s attention is focussed on the devastating war in Gaza, and the escalating conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, the occupation of the West Bank remains a fundamental challenge for any peaceful resolution.  Remnick also speaks with Palestinian lawyer and author Raja Shehadeh, a longtime advocate for peace with Israel who lives in Ramallah. Palestinians “are, in a sense, living under a different law than the law of the settlements. And so the settlers are going to be part of Israel, and the laws of Israel apply to them—and that's annexation—but not to us. There will be two communities living side by side, each subject to different laws, and that's entirely apartheid.” Shehadeh’s new book is titled, “What Does Israel Fear from Palestine?” He argues that, as much as a concern for their security, many Israelis refuse to contemplate a two-state solution because recognizing Palestinians’ claims to nationhood challenges Israel’s national story.   Although Thrall believes that any false hope about an end to the conflict is damaging, he acknowledges that U.S. sanctions on violent settlers is a meaningful step, and Shehadeh sees the I.C.J.’s ruling as a new degree of global pressure. “That could bring about the end of the era of impunity of Israel,” Shehadeh believes. “And that can make a big difference.”  Plus, for the fiftieth anniversary of Philippe Petit’s famous high-wire walk between the Twin Towers of the old World Trade Center—a quarter mile up in the air—The New Yorker’s Parul Sehgal reads an excerpt from Gwen Kinkead’s Profile of Petit titled “Alone and in Control.”  

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.” Thrall won a Pulitzer Prize for his book “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama,” which uses one isolated incident—a road accident in the West Bank—to illustrate the ways in which life under occupation has become nearly unlivable for Palestinians. On July 19th, the United Nations’ International Court of Justice issued an advisory ruling that the occupation violates international law. While the world’s attention is focussed on the devastating war in Gaza, and the escalating conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, the occupation of the West Bank remains a fundamental challenge for any peaceful resolution.  Remnick also speaks with the Palestinian lawyer and author Raja Shehadeh, a longtime advocate for peace with Israel who lives in Ramallah. Palestinians “are, in a sense, living under a different law than the law of the settlements. And so the settlers are going to be part of Israel, and the laws of Israel apply to them—and that's annexation—but not to us. There will be two communities living side by side, each subject to different laws, and that’s entirely apartheid.” Shehadeh’s new book is titled “What Does Israel Fear from Palestine?” He argues that, as much as a concern for their security, many Israelis refuse to contemplate a two-state solution because recognizing Palestinians’ claims to nationhood challenges Israel’s national story.   Although Thrall believes that any false hope about an end to the conflict is damaging, he acknowledges that U.S. sanctions on violent settlers is a meaningful step, and Shehadeh sees the I.C.J.’s ruling as a new degree of global pressure. “That could bring about the end of the era of impunity of Israel,” Shehadeh believes. “And that can make a big difference.”

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.” Cunningham and fellow staff writer Doreen St. Félix discuss Harris’s complicated identity as the child of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, and more.   (This segment is an excerpt from a longer conversation on The Political Scene.)  Plus, the New Yorker sports correspondent Louisa Thomas talks with David Remnick about some of the unusual venues of the Paris Olympics—from the Place de la Concorde and the supposedly cleaned-up Seine to a small reef village in Tahiti.

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’t accomplished anything.” But Harris also has notable strengths as a candidate, and, having avoided a bruising primary campaign—and having been handed a torch from the incumbent—she has advantages that no other woman running for office has had. For a woman candidate, the world has changed since 2016, Palmieri believes. She shares insights into how Joe Biden was finally persuaded to step out of the race, and explains what she meant by advising women to “nod less and cry more.”

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 choosing what job she takes. “Catalina” is the second book by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, who first gained attention with the essay “I’m an Illegal Immigrant at Harvard,” published anonymously in the Daily Beast; her first book, “The Undocumented Americans,” was a finalist for the National Book Award. Though Villavicencio has since become an American citizen, “There’s this Latin American paranoia that comes from my parents, [who] grew up under a dictatorship,” she tells David Remnick. “I’ve heard all of these stories . . . and then there’s also being undocumented here, where the idea that I could disappear at any time, my parents could disappear at any time – I don’t think that I’m necessarily capable of feeling that kind of permanence.”

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 in the June debate slipped just slightly. But in key swing states, Biden’s support has ebbed to a point that has terrified Democrats. Malone spoke with Enten while he was covering the Republican National Convention, in Milwaukee. She asked Enten about how the attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life affected his favorability. Malone also spoke with the highly regarded pollster Ann Selzer, who runs polling for the Des Moines Register. Selzer explains how the polls know what they know—even when so many people don’t pick up their phones. 

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, like economic inequality or corruption in politics,” Jane Mayer says. “You take a subject like campaign finance – the Citizens United decision and how it’s corrupted politics. If you can find somebody like [Charles or David] Koch and explain there actually was a billionaire behind so much of this, and he has a story, and he has a family, and there are always screwed-up fathers and sons involved in these families. . . . It means that you’re able to explain the ethical choices people make.” Mayer is best known for her book “Dark Money,” about the Koch brothers; David Grann wrote “Killers of the Flower Moon” and “The Wager,” both best-sellers; and Patrick Radden Keefe covered the Sackler family’s opioid dynasty in “Empire of Pain,” and a murder during the Troubles in Northern Ireland in “Say Nothing.”  They were joined by their editor, The New Yorker’s Daniel Zalewski.  

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 from the race, and he went on to tell MSNBC’s Alex Wagner that potential Democratic rivals and even staffers “got the message” that their careers would be “blackballed” if they challenged him. Castro—who came up as the mayor of San Antonio, and then served as President Obama’s Secretary for Housing and Urban Development—ran against Biden in the Presidential primary for the 2020 election. He talks with David Remnick about how we got here, and what the Democratic Party should have done differently.

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 and how I understood myself,” she says. “What I understood is that that was rock and roll, and, if you couldn’t go the hardest, you were letting rock and roll down.” But eventually getting sober let her connect more deeply with fans and with the music. “To be conscious and to be present and to really feel what’s going on—even though it’s painful, it feels like much more a truly reborn spirit of rock and roll,” she says.  Welch wrote the music and the lyrics for “Gatsby: An American Myth,” which opened in June at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This segment originally aired on May 24, 2022. 

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 celebrated writers in America. David Remnick sat down with Caro at the McCarter Theatre, in Princeton, New Jersey, in 2019, when “Working”—a collection of short pieces about Caro’s methods—had been published. Their discussion encompassed Caro’s early years as a newspaper reporter, his interviewing techniques, and his determination to tackle huge projects, including his chronicle of the life of Lyndon B. Johnson, four volumes of which have been published to date. This segment originally aired on June 18, 2019. 

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, Evan Osnos, Kelefa Sanneh, and Benjamin Wallace-Wells. Some years ago, the poet Ada Limón moved from New York City to Lexington, Kentucky. In a book called “Bright Dead Things,” she writes about adjusting to a new home, and the constant talk of thoroughbreds. “People always asking, ‘You have so many horses in your poems—what are they a metaphor for?’ ” she told the Radio Hour. “I think they’re not really a metaphor. Out here, they’re just horses.” Limón, who’s the current Poet Laureate of the United States, took us on a tour of Keeneland racecourse, in Lexington, and read her poem “How to Triumph Like a Girl.”This segment originally aired on April 13, 2018. 

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 Hamas; he seems to justify the civilian death toll Israel has inflicted on Gaza.  “When you have that kind of an evil, or that kind of a movement that came out of a society,” he told Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “whether it was Nazi Germany or imperial Japan or the Confederacy here in the South, that kind of movement has to be destroyed. . . . that’s why Atlanta had to burn.” Wallace-Wells shares excerpts from his interviews with Fetterman in a conversation with David Remnick, and they discuss how Fetterman’s support for Israel is driving a wedge among Pennsylvania voters, who will be critical to the outcome of the Presidential election.  John Fetterman’s War was published in the June 24, 2024, issue.

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 Family,” and “Cops.” She’s not trying to get you to like reality TV, but rather, she says, “I'm trying to get you to understand it.”

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 associated with the genre. Throughout his career, Costner has also been working on a project called “Horizon: An American Saga.” Too lengthy and expensive for studios (Costner put up tens of millions of dollars to fund it), “Horizon” evolved over decades into a series of four films about the founding of a town in the West. Part 1, which involves the destruction wrought on Native communities by white settlement, comes out next week. While the politics of the genre have evolved, “there were certain dilemmas that [Westerns] established,” he tells David Remnick, that were timeless. “They talked to me about character and just as important, lack of character.”

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. Scheer discusses “The Room,” “Miami Connection,” “Samurai Cop,” “Jonathan Livingston Seagull,” and “The Apple.” “When I hear a director go ‘passion project,’ I’m in,” he says.   Plus, Francis Ford Coppola invested much of his personal fortune in a passion project, “Megalopolis.” It was mocked as a colossal failure before it even premièred. But the New Yorker film critic Justin Chang was at that première, and he thinks the chatter is wildly off base. 

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 Brexit. If the Conservatives have destroyed their reputation, why won’t Labour move boldly to change the direction of the U.K.? Is the U.K. hopeless? David Remnick is joined by Rory Stewart, who spent nine years as a Conservative Member of Parliament, and now co-hosts the podcast “The Rest Is Politics.” He left the government prior to Brexit and wrote his best-selling memoir, “How Not to Be a Politician,” which pulls no punches in describing the soul-crushing sham of serving in office. “It’s not impostor syndrome,” Stewart tells Remnick. “You are literally an impostor, and you’re literally on television all the time claiming to understand things you don’t understand and claiming to control things you don’t control.”

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 Walker later acknowledged that he had lied. But in requesting parole, after years in prison, the two men had to take responsibility for their crime, and four years ago, a judge denied their appeal. Gonnerman tells the story of their long fight for justice, and how it finally came to pass. 

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 polls that show younger Black voters are leaning toward Trump in higher numbers than older voters; Biden’s record as President, he thinks—including a reported sixty per cent increase in Black wealth since the pandemic—will motivate strong turnout. Warnock returns to Atlanta every Sunday to preach at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he remains senior pastor, and he thinks of the election as a “moral and spiritual battle.” “Are we a nation that can send from the South a Black man and a Jewish man to the Senate?” he asks. “Or are we that nation that rises up in violence as we witness the demographic changes in our country and the struggle for a more inclusive Republic?” 

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 that eventually a backlash led to the 1936 Berlin Olympics instituting a sex-testing policy for women athletes. Any female athlete’s sex could be challenged, and cisgender women who didn’t conform to historical gender standards were targeted as a result. These policies slowly evolved to include chromosome testing and, later, the hormone testing that we see today. “And so as we talk about sex testing today,” Waters says, “we often are forgetting where these policies come from in the first place.”

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, Occitan, and Haitian Kreyòl.  “I think I have the spirit of a kind of a radio D.J. slash curator,” she tells David Remnick. “It’s almost like making a mixtape for someone and only putting deep cuts.” And even when singing the standards, she aims “to find the gems that haven’t been sung and sung and sung over and over again.” During a summer tour, she visited the studio at WNYC to perform “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” made famous by Barbra Streisand; “Can She Excuse My Wrongs,” by John Dowland, the English composer of the Elizabethan era; and “Moon Song,” an original from Salvant’s album “Ghost Song.”

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. Even though it didn’t take long to get the script green-lit, Glazer says some of the more graphic realities of pregnancy and having children were taken as somewhat “blue.” That assessment, she tells The New Yorker’s Naomi Fry, makes her wonder, “Perhaps we’ve been so disembodied from our own life force, from our own origin stories, that we find it disgusting. But it’s not disgusting. It’s hilarious, it’s beautiful, it’s also ugly, it’s sweet and soft, it’s hard and intense, but the way women talk still really rubs people the wrong way.” Glazer also talks with Fry about what Jacobson taught her about being an artist, going to therapy three times a week, and being wild about her daughter.

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 Emily Nussbaum has been reporting on what these lawsuits reveal about the culture on the set of “Love Is Blind,” and a push for a new union to give reality-TV stars employee protections and rights. “The people who are on reality shows are a vulnerable class of people who are mistreated by the industry in ways that are made invisible to people, including to fans who love the shows,” Nussbaum tells David Remnick. Nussbaum’s forthcoming book is “Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV.”