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The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorkerwww.wnycstudios.org
Profiles, storytelling and insightful conversations, hosted by David Remnick.

Episodes

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the Confounding Politics of Junk Food. Plus, Kelefa Sanneh on the Long Influence of Kraftwerk

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 Presid...

May 02, 202532 min

A Historical Epic of the Chinese in America

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 pre...

Apr 29, 202520 min

Cory Booker: “America Needs Moral Leadership, and Not Political Leadership”

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...

Apr 25, 202530 min

Nikki Glaser at the Top of Her Game

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,...

Apr 22, 202527 min

How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE

This episode explores Elon Musk's ideology and vision, particularly his interest in space travel and his role in slashing federal programs through DOGE. Jill Lepore discusses the influence of science fiction on Musk, his relationship with Trump, and the potential consequences of his actions. The episode also features an organizer from Tesla Takedown, who speaks about the grassroots movement protesting Musk's policies and their impact on Tesla's sales and public perception.

Apr 18, 202528 min

Ryan Coogler on “Sinners”

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 ...

Apr 15, 202522 min

Will the Supreme Court Yield to Donald Trump?

Ruth Marcus discusses the Trump administration's legal battles and the Supreme Court's potential role in checking or enabling presidential power. She analyzes specific cases, including those related to immigration and birthright citizenship, highlighting instances where lower courts have rebuked the administration. Marcus also addresses the administration's attacks on private law firms and the possibility of Trump defying a Supreme Court order, considering the implications for the Constitution.

Apr 11, 202528 min

The Writer Katie Kitamura on Autonomy, Interpretation, and “Audition”

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 charac...

Apr 08, 202518 min

Why the Tech Giant Nvidia May Own the Future. Plus, Joshua Rothman on Taking A.I Seriously

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 r...

Apr 04, 202532 min

Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus

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 bo...

Apr 01, 202526 min

Senator Chris Murphy: “This Is How Democracy Dies—Everybody Just Gets Scared”

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 Pres...

Mar 28, 202524 min

A West Bank Family on the Verge of Annexation

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 S...

Mar 25, 202522 min

Kaitlan Collins Is Not “Nasty”; She’s Just Doing Her Job

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...

Mar 21, 202529 min

We the Builders: Federal Employees Stand Up to DOGE; Plus, Celebrating 100 Years: Michael Cunningham on “Brokeback Mountain”

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 ...

Mar 18, 202524 min

Atul Gawande on Elon Musk’s “Surgery with a Chainsaw”

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 ...

Mar 14, 202527 min

How Bob Menendez Came By His Gold Bars

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...

Mar 10, 202524 min

What Trump Has Got Wrong—and Right—About the War in Ukraine

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 K...

Mar 07, 202538 min

Alan Cumming on “The Traitors” and His Brush with Reality Television

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...

Mar 04, 202516 min

Does Tim Walz Have Any Regrets?

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 o...

Feb 28, 202535 min

Richard Brody Presents the 2025 Brody Awards

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 trad...

Feb 25, 202516 min

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

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

Feb 21, 202535 min

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

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

Feb 18, 202516 min

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

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

Feb 14, 202534 min

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

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

Feb 11, 202524 min

Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.

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

Feb 07, 202527 min

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

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

Feb 04, 202518 min

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

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

Jan 31, 202533 min

Returning to a Home Consumed by the Wildfires

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

Jan 28, 202512 min

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

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

Jan 24, 202538 min

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

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

Jan 21, 202536 min