Both anecdotally and in research, anxiety and depression among young people—often associated with self-harm—have risen sharply over the last decade. There seems little doubt that Gen Z is suffering in real ways. But there is not a consensus on the cause or causes, nor how to address them. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt believes that enough evidence has accumulated to convict a suspect. Smartphones and social media, Haidt says, have caused a “great rewiring” in those born after 1995. The ...
Apr 22, 2024•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos talk with the NPR reporter Andrea Bernstein about what has happened inside the courthouse during Donald Trump’s first week on trial. Plus, how the historic trial may factor into the 2024 race and whether President Biden should be talking about it on the campaign trail. “This idea of the old ‘Teflon Don’ is just finished,” Evan Osnos says. “The guy is now a creature of the court.” This week’s reading: “ Donald Trump’s Trial o...
Apr 20, 2024•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ronan Farrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and contributing writer to The New Yorker , joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the impact of rulings made this week by Judge Juan Merchan in Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York, where he faces thirty-four felony counts for falsifying business records related to hush-money payments made to adult-film star Stormy Daniels around the time of the 2016 election. Farrow explains why two other hush-money payments, made to former Trump Tower...
Apr 17, 2024•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Texas has multiple abortion laws, with both criminal and civil penalties for providers. They contain language that may allow for exceptions to save the life or “major bodily function” of a pregnant patient, but many doctors have been reluctant to even try interpreting these laws; at least one pregnant woman has been denied cancer treatment. The reporter Stephania Taladrid tells David Remnick about how two lawmakers worked together in a rare bipartisan effort to clarify the limited medical circum...
Apr 15, 2024•18 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss the revival of Arizona’s hundred-and-sixty-year-old abortion ban, what role the issue of reproductive freedom will play in the November election, and how the position of reproductive health care in politics has evolved over the decades. This week’s reading: “ Donald Trump Did This ,” by Susan B. Glasser “ The Fight to Restore Abortion Rights in Texas ,” by Stephania Taladrid To discover more podcasts from The New Yor...
Apr 13, 2024•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Election deniers are mobilizing their supporters and rolling out new tech to disrupt the November election. These groups are already organizing on hyperlocal levels, and learning to monitor polling places, target election officials, and challenge voter rolls. And though their work was once fringe, its become mainstreamed in the Republican Party. Today on WIRED Politics Lab, we focus on what these groups are doing, and what this means for voters and the election workers already facing threats and...
Apr 11, 2024•15 min•Transcript available on Metacast The New Yorker staff writer Eric Lach joins Tyler Foggatt to provide a preview of Donald Trump’s first criminal trial, which begins next week in Manhattan. Trump faces thirty-four felony counts for falsifying business records related to hush-money payments made to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels in 2016. Lach and Foggatt discuss the features of the controversial case and what six straight weeks of court appearances could mean for Trump’s campaign. To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker...
Apr 10, 2024•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Across much of the country, Republican officials are reaching into K-12 classrooms and universities alike to exert control over what can be taught. In Florida, Texas, and many other states, laws now restrict teaching historical facts about race and racism. Book challenges and bans are surging. Public universities are seeing political meddling in the tenure process. Advocates of these measures say, in effect, that education must emphasize only the positive aspects of American history. Nikole Hann...
Apr 08, 2024•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss how the Israeli strike on World Central Kitchen workers in Gaza could factor into a policy shift by the Biden Administration on Israel and the war. President Biden realized that he needed to “catch up to where the country was,” Osnos says. Then the British barrister Philippe Sands, a prominent specialist in international law who represents the state of Palestine in the case against the Israeli occupation before the I...
Apr 05, 2024•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast The New Yorker staff writers Jelani Cobb and Steve Coll joined Tyler Foggatt last May to discuss the ways in which Donald Trump maneuvers around facts and controls narratives when confronted by journalists. At last year’s CNN town hall, for example, Trump answered questions in front of a live and sympathetic audience—a setup that played to his strengths as a performer. For Cobb and Coll, who are Columbia Journalism School faculty members, the town hall raised some questions: Where is the line be...
Apr 03, 2024•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kara Swisher landed on the tech beat as a young reporter at the Washington Post decades ago. She would stare at the teletype machine at the entrance and wonder why this antique sat there when it could already be supplanted by a computer. She eventually foretold the threat that posed to her own business—print journalism—by the rise of free online media; today, she is still raising alarms about how A.I. companies make use of the entire contents of the Internet. “Pay me for my stuff!” she says. “Yo...
Apr 01, 2024•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast The New Yorker staff writer Jay Caspian Kang joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the tension between protecting children from the effects of social media and protecting their right to free speech. Kang considers the ways in which social-media companies have sought to quell fear about misinformation and propaganda since Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election, and why those efforts will ultimately fail. “The structure of the Internet, of all social media,” he tells Foggatt, “is to argue...
Mar 27, 2024•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast In 2016, before most people imagined that Donald Trump would become a serious contender for the Presidency, the New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik wrote about what he later called the “F-word”: fascism. He saw Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric not as a new force in America but as a throwback to a specific historical precedent in nineteen-thirties Europe. In the years since, Trump has called for “terminating” articles of the Constitution, has marked the January 6th insurrectionists as political mar...
Mar 25, 2024•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Washington Roundtable reflects on the books they’ve been reading to understand the 2024 Presidential campaigns and the state of international politics. Susan B. Glasser , Jane Mayer , and Evan Osnos swap recommendations of works about all things political, from the anger of rural voters to the worldwide rise of authoritarian rule, including a fictionalized imagining of a powerful real-life political family. Read with the Roundtable: “America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreig...
Mar 23, 2024•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast The New Yorker contributor Jeannie Suk Gersen joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss her interview with Robert Hur , the special prosecutor who caused a political uproar with his report on his investigation into President Biden’s handling of classified documents. The report, which referred to Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” elicited a furious response from the White House—but, Gersen argues, its meaning and Hur’s motivations may have been misunderstood. Gersen and...
Mar 22, 2024•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast Long before gender theory became a principal target of the right, it existed principally in academic circles. And one of the leading thinkers in the field was the philosopher Judith Butler. In “ Gender Trouble ” (from 1990) and in other works, Butler popularized ideas about gender as a social construct, a “performance,” a matter of learned behavior. Those ideas proved highly influential for a younger generation, and Butler became the target of traditionalists who abhorred them. A protest at whic...
Mar 18, 2024•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser , Jane Mayer , and Evan Osnos discuss how foreign policy is shaping the 2024 campaign, such as a possible ban on Chinese-owned TikTok and the wars in Europe and the Middle East. The panel also considers Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s sharply conflicting views of America’s role in the world. This week’s reading: “I Listened to Trump’s Rambling, Unhinged, Vituperative Georgia Rally—and So Should You,” by Susan B. Glasser To discover more podcasts from The ...
Mar 15, 2024•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast John Cassidy joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss President Biden’s “bold proposal” to shift the tax burden back to the wealthy and tackle inflation, both key concerns for voters in the run-up to Election Day. The pair also considers why companies continue to rake in “bigger profits than ever before,” even as the economic fallout of the pandemic recedes. To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker , visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com. Learn...
Mar 13, 2024•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Like most Americans, Vinson Cunningham first became aware of Barack Obama in 2004, when he gave a breakout speech at the Democratic National Convention. “Very good posture, that guy,” Cunningham noted. “We hang our faith on objects, on people, based on the signs that they put out,” Cunningham tells David Remnick. “And that’s certainly been a factor in my own life. The rapid and urgent search for patterns.” Although Cunningham aspired to be a writer, he got swept up in this historic campaign, wor...
Mar 12, 2024•18 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser , Jane Mayer , and Evan Osnos discuss President Biden’s energetic State of the Union address, the positive response among Democrats in the polls, and how press coverage is shaping the public’s perceptions of Biden’s campaign. “He wasn’t looking to convince anybody,” Glasser says. “What he was looking to do was to tell his side, ‘Stop freaking out. I’m in the fight.’ ” This week’s reading: “ So Much for ‘Sleepy Joe’: On Biden’s Rowdy, Shouty State of th...
Mar 08, 2024•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Benjamin Wallace-Wells joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the results of Super Tuesday, and how a “general decay” in Biden’s support, on top of his tight margins, could be exploited by a third-party candidate. Plus, Antonia Hitchens takes us behind the gilded curtain at a Mar-a-Lago primary-night watch party. Read Benjamin Wallace-Wells on the primaries and Antonia Hitchens on experiencing Super Tuesday at Mar-a-Lago . To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker , visit newyorker.com/podcasts . To...
Mar 07, 2024•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Despite hand-wringing among Democrats about Joe Biden’s age and his discouraging poll numbers, the President’s campaign for reëlection displays an “ostentatious level of serenity,” Evan Osnos says about the election. “This is a matter of great personal importance to Joe Biden. He feels almost, viscerally, this contempt for Trump and for what Trump did to the country,” Osnos tells David Remnick, after a rare private interview at the White House. “And let’s remember, he didn’t just try to steal th...
Mar 04, 2024•21 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Washington Roundtable: In the Michigan primary on Tuesday, more than a hundred thousand Michigan Democrats chose “uncommitted” instead of voting for Biden, as a protest of his support for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. In Dearborn, which is home to a large Arab American and Muslim population, fifty-seven per cent of the vote was “uncommitted.” And, while former President Trump has so far swept the Republican contests, Nikki Haley has seized on college-educated and moderate-to-liberal Re...
Mar 01, 2024•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast After a decade of provoking Russian President Vladimir Putin through organized protest, anti-corruption investigations, and taunting social-media posts, the opposition leader Alexei Navalny has died in a Russian prison, from what the Kremlin claims was a pulmonary embolism. The New Yorker staff writer Masha Gessen, who knew Navalny, calls his death “a shock, but not a surprise,” and says that, had Navalny been killed a decade ago, the incident might have led to even more widespread outrage. But ...
Feb 28, 2024•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ty Cobb represented the Trump White House during the height of the Mueller-Russia probe, so he has a unique insight into the former President’s admiration for all things Putin, and his refusal to condemn the dissident Alexey Navalny’s death in prison. Trump’s response, bizarrely, was to compare his own legal troubles to Navalny’s political persecution and likely murder. Yet Cobb still feels certain that Russia has nothing concrete on Trump, which was the question of the Mueller investigation. Ra...
Feb 26, 2024•14 min•Transcript available on Metacast Since Joe Biden’s earliest days in the Oval Office, some House Republicans have sought to remove the President and his Cabinet members from office. Last week, the Homeland Security Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, was impeached —on a second attempt—by a slight margin, in regard to the Biden Administration’s handling of the U.S.-Mexico border crisis. Meanwhile, the House’s other impeachment investigation, into Biden, is on the verge of collapse, after its star witness was charged with providing fal...
Feb 23, 2024•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Representative Matt Gaetz is one of the most outspoken critics of the status quo in Washington, which he demonstrated most recently by playing a key role in removing fellow-Republican Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House. How was Gaetz able to pull off such a feat given his deep unpopularity in Congress, and the fact that he’s under a House Ethics Committee investigation for the sex trafficking of a minor? The New Yorker staff writer Dexter Filkins, who recently profiled Gaetz in the magazine ...
Feb 22, 2024•29 min•Ep 1040•Transcript available on Metacast Jon Lovett had been deep inside politics, as a speechwriter in the Obama Administration, before he joined his colleagues Tommy Vietor and Jon Favreau to launch Crooked Media, a liberal answer to the burgeoning ecosystem of right-wing news platforms. “There was too much media that treated people like cynical observers,” Lovett tells David Remnick, “and not enough that treated them like frustrated participants.” Crooked Media has gathered millions of politically engaged listeners—“nerds,” Lovett c...
Feb 19, 2024•30 min•Ep 1039•Transcript available on Metacast The Biden campaign has come out in full force against a special-counsel report that refers to the President as an “elderly man with a poor memory.” But, as the staff writer Andrew Marantz points out, this “October-surprise-level political stumbling block” may require a more substantial response if Democrats hope to recapture the White House in November. Marantz joins Tyler Foggatt to outline the issues the Democratic Party is facing right now, and discuss why one lesson from Lyndon B. Johnson ma...
Feb 15, 2024•25 min•Ep 1038•Transcript available on Metacast The Washington Roundtable: The special counsel investigating President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents, Robert Hur, released a report Thursday that describes the President as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Biden will not face charges for “willfully” retaining classified documents, but the report has reignited concerns about the President’s mental acuity. In a late-night press conference, Biden forcefully pushed back against the report’s findings, declaring, “My me...
Feb 10, 2024•41 min•Ep 1037•Transcript available on Metacast 
