The New Yorker Radio Hour

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

<p>Staff writers and contributors are celebrating <i>The New Yorker’s</i> centennial by revisiting notable works from the magazine’s archive, in a series called <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/takes">Takes</a>. 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, “<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/02/21/martha-stewart-joan-didion">everywoman.com</a>,” 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 <i>Th</i>e <i>New Yorker</i> for at least half of the magazine’s life. </p><p>You can read Roz Chast on George Booth, Jia Tolentino on Joan Didion, and many more essays from the Takes series <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/takes">here</a>.  </p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>

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

<p>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.”</p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>

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

<p>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. </p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>

Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.

<p>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,” <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/jelani-cobb">Jelani Cobb</a> 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.”</p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>

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

<p>David Remnick talks with <i>The New Yorker’s </i>literary guiding lights: the fiction editor <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/deborah-treisman">Deborah Treisman</a> and the poetry editor <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/kevin-young">Kevin Young</a>. Treisman edited “<a href="https://store.newyorker.com/products/a-century-of-fiction-in-the-new-yorker">A Century of Fiction in <i>The New Yorker</i></a>,” and Young edited <a href="https://store.newyorker.com/products/a-century-of-poetry-in-the-new-yorker">“A Century of Poetry in <i>The New Yorker</i></a>,” 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 <i>The New Yorker</i> that went to famous writers, or later-famous writers. And they were probably justified, those rejections.”</p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>

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

<p>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, “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/742811/source-code-by-bill-gates/">Source Code,</a>” 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.”</p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>

Returning to a Home Consumed by the Wildfires

<p>The staff writer <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/dana-goodyear">Dana Goodyear</a> 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 <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/the-woolsey-fire-engulfs-southern-california">covered</a> 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.” </p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>

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

<p>“Saturday Night Live” turns fifty this year. <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/01/20/lorne-michaels-profile">Profiling</a> its executive producer, Lorne Michaels, the <i>New Yorker </i>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, “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/532520/lorne-by-susan-morrison/">Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live</a>,” 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 <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1975/11/24/saturday-night-live-review">the magazine’s review</a> of the show’s first season, back in 1975. </p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>

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

<p>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”?</p><p><i>This segment was originally published January 17, 2025, in The New Yorker’s Political Scene podcast.</i></p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>

Antony Blinken’s Exit Interview

<p>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.”</p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>

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

<p>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 “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/709947/power-metal-by-vince-beiser/">Power Metal</a>,” 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 <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/elizabeth-kolbert">Elizabeth Kolbert</a>, 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. </p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>

Representative Ro Khanna on Elon Musk and the Tech Oligarchy

<p>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.”</p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>

Sara Bareilles Talks with Rachel Syme

<p>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 <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/rachel-syme">Rachel Syme</a> 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!’ ” </p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>

Rachel Aviv on Alice Munro’s Family Secrets

<p><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/rachel-aviv">Rachel Aviv</a> reports on the terrible conundrum of Alice Munro for <i>The New Yorker</i>. 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 <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/12/30/alice-munros-passive-voice">piece</a>, 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.”</p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>

Julianne Moore Explains What She Needs in a Film Director

<p>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.”</p><p>New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever <a href="https://link.chtbl.com/XL9LVVAk">you get your podcasts</a>.</p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>

The Art of Cooking with Ina Garten

<p>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 “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Be-Ready-When-Luck-Happens/dp/0593799895">Be Ready When the Luck Happens</a>,” a memoir.</p><p><i>This segment originally aired on December 16, 2022.</i></p><p>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.”</p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>

Christmas in Tehran During the 1979 Iran Hostage Crisis

<p>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.”</p><p><i>This segment originally aired on December 15, 2023.</i></p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>

Willem Dafoe on “Nosferatu”

<p>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 <a href="https://www.wnycstudios.org/people/adam-howard">Adam Howard</a>. 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.”</p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>

From the Archive: James Taylor Will Teach you Guitar

<p>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 <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/adam-gopnik">Adam Gopnik</a> a quick lesson.</p><p><i>This segment originally aired on July 7, 2017.</i></p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>

From the Archive: St. Vincent’s Seduction

<p>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.</p><p><i>This segment originally aired on October 13, 2017.</i></p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>

From the Archive: Elvis Costello Talks with David Remnick

<p>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.”  </p><p>Costello spoke from outside his home in Vancouver, B.C., where a foghorn is audible in the background.</p><p><i>This segment originally aired on October 16, 2020.</i></p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>

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

<p>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?”</p><p>This episode originally aired on Critics at Large, December 12, 2024.</p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>

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

<ol><li>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, “<a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781627798556/thehundredyearswaronpalestine/">The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine</a>” 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.”</li><li>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 <i>Wall Street Journal</i>, who has also <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/adam-kirsch">written</a> about philosophy for <i>The New Yorker</i>. “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, “<a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324105343">On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice</a>.”</li></ol><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>

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

<p>“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 <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/michael-schulman">Michael Schulman</a>, 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. </p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>

Inside Donald Trump’s Mass-Deportation Plans

<p>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 <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/jonathan-blitzer">Jonathan Blitzer</a> 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 “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Everyone-Who-Gone-Here-Central/dp/1984880802">Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here</a>,” a definitive account of the immigration crisis.</p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>

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

<p>If “Wicked, Part I” and “Gladiator II” are not getting you into the theatre this weekend, Justin Chang, <i>The New Yorker’s</i> 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.” </p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>

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

<p>“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.”<br /><i>This segment originally aired on April 14, 2023. </i></p><p><br />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.”</p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>

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

<p>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.</p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>

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

<p>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. </p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>

Danielle Deadwyler on August Wilson and Denzel Washington

<p>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 <i>New Yorker’s </i><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/doreen-st-felix">Doreen St. Félix</a>. “The Piano Lesson” is playing in select theatres, and will be available on Netflix starting November 22nd.</p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.</p>