When Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., appeared on this show back in July, it was early in his run for President, and he was considered a fringe candidate. He had the name recognition, obviously, and not much else. Now the question seems to be not whether Kennedy is going to be a spoiler in the election but which side he’s more likely to spoil. On The Political Scene , the New Yorker podcast, Washington correspondents Jane Mayer, Evan Osnos, and Susan B. Glasser gather to talk about Kennedy’s candidacy an...
May 07, 2024•29 min•Ep 909•Transcript available on Metacast From Cambridge to Los Angeles and at dozens of schools in between, campuses are roiled by protest against American financial and military support for Israel’s war in Gaza—and by university actions, including mass arrests, to suppress the protesters. There hasn’t been a college protest movement as widespread since the Vietnam War. Apart from the violence in the Middle East, the protests also engage crucial issues of speech and academic freedom in the context of America’s culture war. David Remnic...
May 03, 2024•50 min•Ep 908•Transcript available on Metacast Brad Raffensperger, who holds the usually low-profile office of secretary of state in Georgia, became famous after he recorded a phone call with Donald Trump. Shortly after the 2020 election, Trump demanded that Georgia officials “find 11,780 votes” so that he could win the state. The recorded phone conversation is a linchpin in the Fulton County racketeering case against Trump. Refusing that demand, Raffensperger—a lifelong Republican—received death threats from enraged Trumpists, and the state...
Apr 30, 2024•15 min•Ep 902•Transcript available on Metacast Jerry Seinfeld used to have a comedy bit about the invention of the Pop-Tart, but when his friend Spike Feresten—who wrote the famous “Soup Nazi” episode of “Seinfeld”—suggested it as a topic for a movie, even Seinfeld said “There’s no movie here.” But they workshopped the story, turning the invention of the Pop-Tart into a nutty postwar epic. Seinfeld has written films before, including “Bee Movie,” but this time he’s making his début as a director with “Unfrosted.” (The production did not, he ...
Apr 26, 2024•36 min•Ep 901•Transcript available on Metacast Probably far more people have now seen Judi Dench as M—the intelligence chief who’s the boss of James Bond—than anything she’s done in Shakespeare. With that unmistakably rich voice, she played royalty in “Mrs. Brown” and in “Shakespeare in Love.” But it is in Shakespeare’s plays, onstage, that Dench made her home as an actor, performing nearly all the major female roles in a stage career of some 60 years. It’s not just that the language is beautiful, she thinks; Shakespeare “understood about ev...
Apr 23, 2024•21 min•Ep 897•Transcript available on Metacast 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 19, 2024•30 min•Ep 896•Transcript available on Metacast At a band rehearsal in Brooklyn, Rachel Syme talks to Maya Hawke about switching gears between acting and music. In “Stranger Things,” Hawke plays Robin Buckley, a band geek who cracks a Russian code in her spare time; she also recently appeared in films including “ Asteroid City ” and “ Maestro .” “When I’m acting, I inhabit the character that I’m playing,” Hawke says, whereas when fronting a band, “I feel like I’m me… But sometimes I have to screw my courage to the sticking place, and that’s a...
Apr 16, 2024•32 min•Ep 892•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 12, 2024•19 min•Ep 891•Transcript available on Metacast The New Yorker’s newest staff member, Justin Chang, shares three films that he’s excited to see released in 2024: “Janet Planet,” the début feature film directed by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker; “Blitz,” a wartime drama by Steve McQueen, the director of “12 Years a Slave”; and “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” the widely anticipated new entry in George Miller’s Mad Max series—which, at forty-five years years old, predates Justin Chang.
Apr 08, 2024•14 min•Ep 886•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 05, 2024•37 min•Ep 885•Transcript available on Metacast By the standards of any musician, Rhiannon Giddens has taken a twisting and complex path. She was trained as an operatic soprano at the prestigious Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and then fell almost by chance into the study of American folk music and took up the banjo. With like-minded musicians, she founded the influential Carolina Chocolate Drops, which focussed on reviving the repertoire of Black Southern string bands . Giddens plays on Beyoncé’s new country album, which boldly asserts the B...
Apr 02, 2024•16 min•Ep 881•Transcript available on Metacast Alicia Keys’ new musical is opening on Broadway about a ten-minute walk from where she grew up in Hell’s Kitchen. She describes the New York City neighborhood in the eighties as a “place where anyone who didn’t belong anywhere accumulated.” She tells David Remnick, “There was this unique balance between that grime and the potential of Broadway” just steps away. “Hell’s Kitchen” is the name of the musical that incorporates her songs to tell a story about a teen-ager named Ali who is growing up an...
Mar 29, 2024•34 min•Ep 880•Transcript available on Metacast In a new novel, Percival Everett offers a radically different perspective on the classic story “ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn .” Everett tells the story of Jim, who is escaping slavery; he calls his book “ James .” “My Jim—he’s not simple,” Everett tells Julian Lucas . “The Jim that’s represented in Huck Finn is simple.” Everett, whose 2001 novel “ Erasure ” was adapted as the Oscar-winning film “American Fiction,” restores Jim’s inner life as a father surviving enslavement, and forced to ...
Mar 26, 2024•20 min•Ep 876•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 celebrated the January 6th insurrectionists as political...
Mar 22, 2024•30 min•Ep 875•Transcript available on Metacast As this year’s annual March Madness tournament kicks off, there’s a sense of malaise around men’s college basketball. The advent of the transfer portal is partly to blame, and the trend of top talents departing for the N.B.A. after just one year of college play. “There hasn’t been that kind of charismatic superstar like Zion Williamson at Duke,” Louisa Thomas tells David Remnick, “the big school and the big player, which is the perfect match.” But women’s college basketball is another story. Las...
Mar 19, 2024•15 min•Ep 871•Transcript available on Metacast A legal assault on trans rights by conservative groups and the Republican Party is escalating, the journalist Erin Reed reports, with nearly five hundred bills introduced across the country so far this year. Reed spoke with the Radio Hour about the tactics being employed. But long before gender theory became a principal target of the right, it existed principally in academic circles. And one of the leading thinkers in the field was the philosopher Judith Butler. In “Gender Trouble” (from 1990) a...
Mar 15, 2024•35 min•Ep 870•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•20 min•Ep 865•Transcript available on Metacast “Maestro,” about the legendary conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, is nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, as well as Best Actor for Bradley Cooper—who is not only the film’s star but its director and co-writer. Cooper’s movie focusses less on Bernstein’s musical triumphs, as a dominant figure in classical music for decades, than on his extremely complicated personal life. Bernstein was married to the actress Felicia Montealegre, played in the film by Carey Mulligan,...
Mar 08, 2024•31 min•Ep 864•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 02, 2024•22 min•Ep 860•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...
Mar 01, 2024•28 min•Ep 859•Transcript available on Metacast Lily Gladstone had been in several films, but unknown to most moviegoers, when she got a call for Martin Scorsese’s period drama “Killers of a Flower Moon.” The role was challenging. She plays the historical Mollie Burkhart, an Osage woman married to a white man, Ernest (played in the film by Leonardo DiCaprio), who perpetrates a series of murders of Osage people in a scheme to secure lucrative oil rights. Ernest may be poisoning her with a cocktail that includes morphine, and some of the dialog...
Feb 27, 2024•35 min•Ep 855•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 23, 2024•15 min•Ep 854•Transcript available on Metacast Brontez Purnell is a Renaissance man. He’s a musician, a dancer, a filmmaker, and the author of a number of books. His latest is “ Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt ,” a departure from the traditional memoir form. It's written in verse and playfully embellishes the truth throughout. “Memoir is fiction—I don’t care what anyone says,” Purnell tells The New Yorker Radio Hour’s Jeffrey Masters. “You [or] I could both write down our lives as true as we know it. But the second our mom reads it, or one of our sib...
Feb 20, 2024•18 min•Ep 849•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 16, 2024•31 min•Ep 848•Transcript available on Metacast The comedian Jacqueline Novak wasn’t well known before her Netflix début “Get on Your Knees.” The show was a big swing in her career, an ambitious attempt to establish her singular voice, and it worked. A fast-paced and raucous examination of her personal journey with oral sex, Novak tosses out so many tangents—philosophical, psychological, anatomical, linguistic—that you’re liable to miss many of her allusions. Novak knows that her hectic delivery is an acquired taste. “We’ve got to get through...
Feb 13, 2024•20 min•Ep 844•Transcript available on Metacast In a Presidential race with two leading candidates who are broadly unpopular, any small perceived edge can make a tremendous difference. According to Clare Malone , more and more people will have their judgments formed by memes—visual jokes about the candidates floating on social media. Republican memes capitalize on widespread discomfort with President Biden’s age, by highlighting his stumbles, verbal or otherwise. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is a master of turning bad press to his advantage: he pr...
Feb 09, 2024•30 min•Ep 843•Transcript available on Metacast The writer Sheila Heti is known for unusual approaches, but her latest work is decidedly experimental. Heti “is one of the most interesting novelists working today,” according to The New Yorker critic Parul Sehgal . “She is ruthlessly contemporary. By which I mean, she’s not interested in writing a novel as a nostalgic exercise. She’s constantly trying to figure out new places fiction can go. New ways that we’re using language, new ways that our minds are evolving.” To write her new book, “ Alph...
Feb 06, 2024•15 min•Ep 838•Transcript available on Metacast In the shadow of another election year, Democrats and Republicans are at a bitter crossroads over immigration, as the system becomes increasingly unmanageable. With as many as twelve thousand migrants arriving at the border per day, and resistance to asylum seekers growing—even among Democrats—the Biden Administration is in a political bind. “You have a global moment of mass migration converging on the border at a time when resources are down. Congress is refusing to give the president the money...
Feb 02, 2024•55 min•Ep 837•Transcript available on Metacast The wives and daughters of Dubai’s ruler live in unbelievable luxury. So why do the women in Sheikh Mohammed’s family keep trying to run away? The New Yorker staff writer Heidi Blake joins In the Dark’s Madeleine Baran to tell the story of the royal women who risked everything to flee the brutality of one of the world’s most powerful men. In four episodes, drawing on thousands of pages of secret correspondence and never-before-heard audio recordings, “The Runaway Princesses” takes listeners behi...
Jan 31, 2024•14 min•Ep 833•Transcript available on Metacast Journalism has often been a dangerous business, and many reporters have lost their lives reporting the news from conflict zones. But the rules that have, at least to a degree, protected the safety and freedom of journalists are being violated around the world, nowhere more so than in Gaza. “Gaza is unprecedented,” Jodie Ginsberg, the president of the Committee to Protect Journalists, says. “It is unprecedented for the intensity of the killings, the number of journalists killed in such a short sp...
Jan 29, 2024•23 min•Ep 832•Transcript available on Metacast 
