The New Yorker Radio Hour

Brian Eno Knows “What Art Does”

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

Lesley Stahl on What a Settlement with Donald Trump Would Mean for CBS News

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

Louisa Thomas on a Ballplayer’s Epic Final Game; Plus, Remembering the Composer of “Annie”

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

Cécile McLorin Salvant Performs Live In-Studio

<p>When the jazz singer Cécile McLorin Salvant was <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/22/cecile-mclorin-salvants-timeless-jazz">profiled </a>in <i>The</i> <i>New Yorker</i>, Wynton Marsalis described her as the kind of talent who comes along only “once in a generation or two.” Salvant’s work is rooted in jazz—in the tradition of Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan and Abbey Lincoln—and she has won three Grammy Awards for Best Jazz Vocal Album. But her interests and her repertoire reach across eras and continents. She studied Baroque music and jazz at conservatory, and performs songs in French, Occitan, and Haitian Kreyòl. “I think I have the spirit of a kind of a radio d.j. slash curator,” she tells David Remnick. “It’s almost like making a mixtape for someone and only putting deep cuts.” And even when singing the standards, she aims “to find the gems that haven’t been sung and sung and sung over and over again.” During a summer tour, she visited the studio at WNYC to perform “Don’t Rain on My Parade,” made famous by Barbra Streisand; “Can She Excuse My Wrongs,” by John Dowland, the English composer of the Elizabethan era; and “Moon Song,” an original from Salvant’s album “Ghost Song.”</p><p><i>This segment originally aired on May 31, 2024.</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 “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”

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

Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson on President Joe Biden’s Decline, and Its Cover-Up

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

Percival Everett’s “James” Wins a Pulitzer

<p>A year ago, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/18/percival-everett-profile">Percival Everett</a> published his twenty-fourth novel, “<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/173754979-james">James</a>,” and it became a literary phenomenon. It won the National Book Award, and, just this week, was announced as the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. “James” offers a radically different perspective on the classic Mark Twain novel “<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/76/76-h/76-h.htm">The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn</a>”: Everett centers his story on the character of Jim, who is escaping slavery. The <i>New Yorker</i> staff writer <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/julian-lucas">Julian Lucas</a> is a longtime Everett fan, and talked with the novelist just after “James” was released. “My Jim—he’s not simple,” Everett tells Julian Lucas. “The Jim that’s represented in ‘Huck Finn’ is simple.” </p><p><i>This segment originally aired on March 22, 2024.</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>

Elissa Slotkin to Fellow-Democrats: “Speak in Plain English”

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

<p>For a long time, Republicans and many Democrats espoused some version of free-trade economics that would have been familiar to Adam Smith. But Donald Trump breaks radically with that tradition, embracing a form of protectionism that resulted in his extremely broad and chaotic tariff proposals, which tanked markets and deepened the fear of a global recession. John Cassidy writes <i>The New Yorker’s</i> <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-financial-page">The Financial Page</a> column, and he’s been covering economics for the magazine since 1995. His new book, “<a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374601096/capitalismanditscritics/">Capitalism and Its Critics: A History</a>,” takes a long view of these debates, and breaks down some of the arguments that have shaped the U.S.’s current economic reality. “Capitalism itself has put its worst face forward in the last twenty or thirty years through the growth of huge monopolies which seem completely beyond any public control or accountability,” Cassidy tells David Remnick. “And young people—they look at capitalism and the economy through the prism of environmentalism now in a way that they didn’t in our generation.”</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>

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

<p>Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, has been undermining public trust in vaccines and overseeing crippling cuts to research across American science. And yet his “make America healthy again” highlights themes more familiar in liberal circles: toxins in the environment, biodiversity, healthy eating. Kennedy has put junk food at the center of the political conversation, speaking about ultra-processed foods and their established links to chronic disease—despite President Donald Trump’s well-known reverence for fast food of all kinds. Marion Nestle, a leading nutrition researcher and the author of “<a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/books/food-politics/paper">Food Politics</a>,” has written in depth on how money and politics affect our diet and our health, and about the ways that American science research has been hampered by limited funding. She tells the physician and contributing writer <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/dhruv-khullar">Dhruv Khullar</a>, who’s been <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/01/13/why-is-the-american-diet-so-deadly">reporting</a> on the American diet, that “it would be wonderful if R.F.K., Jr., could make the food supply healthier. I just think that in order to do that, he’s going to have to take on the food industry, and I don’t think Trump has a history of taking on corporations of any kind. . . . I’ll believe it when I see it.” </p><p>Kraftwerk—the pioneering electronic music group that débuted more than half a century ago —has been touring the U.S., with stops planned in Europe this year. The staff writer <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/kelefa-sanneh">Kelefa Sanneh</a> calls them one of the most influential bands of all time, playing a formative role in hip-hop, techno, EDM, and much of popular music as we know it. Sanneh picks tracks from Kraftswerk’s repertoire and demonstrates how those sounds trickle out through music history, from Afrika Bambaataa to Coldplay. </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 Historical Epic of the Chinese in America

<p>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,” <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/michael-luo">Michael Luo</a> tells David Remnick. Luo is a longtime <i>New Yorker</i> editor, and the author of a <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/704981/strangers-in-the-land-by-michael-luo/">new book</a> about the Chinese American experience. He looks at how tensions over labor—with native-born workers often blaming immigrants for their exploitation by business interests—intersected with racial and religious prejudice, culminating in episodes of extraordinary violence and laws that denied immigrants civil rights and excluded new arrivals from Asia. “The way politicians, craven politicians, talk about immigrants today could be just torn from the nineteenth century,” he points out. “I do think that the ‘stranger’ label is still there.” But Luo also uncovers the extraordinary support of Chinese Americans from Frederick Douglass, who argued extensively for the immigrants’ political participation and civil rights. “Asian American history is American history,” Luo says. “I want all the dads who are reading about World War Two, . . . who are interested in Civil War literature, to read about this different racial conflagration.” Luo’s book is “Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America.”</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>

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

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

Nikki Glaser at the Top of Her Game

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

How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE

<p>Elon Musk, who’s chainsawing <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/the-new-yorker-radio-hour/atul-gawande-on-elon-musks-surgery-with-a-chainsaw">the federal government</a>, is not merely a chaos agent, as he is sometimes described.<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/jill-lepore"> Jill Lepore</a>, the best-selling author of “<a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393357424">These Truths</a>” and other books, says that Musk is animated by obsessions and a sense of mission he acquired through reading, and misreading, science fiction. “When he keeps saying, you know, ‘We’re at a fork in the road. The future of human civilization depends on this election,’ he means SpaceX,” she tells David Remnick. “He means . . . ‘I need to take these rockets to colonize Mars and that’s only going to happen through Trump.’ ” The massive-scale reduction in social services he is enacting through DOGE, Lepore thinks, is tied to this objective. “Although there may be billions of [people] suffering here on planet Earth today, those are miniscule compared to the calculation of the needs of the billions of humans that will one day ever live if we can gain escape velocity from planet Earth. . . . That is, in fact, the math that lies behind DOGE.” Lepore’s BBC radio series on the SpaceX C.E.O. is called “<a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0d7q0h8/episodes/player">X-Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story</a>.” Plus, an organizer of the grassroots anti-Musk effort TeslaTakedown speaks with the Radio Hour about how she got involved, and the risks  involved in doing so. that poses. “It’s a scary place we all find ourselves in,” Patty Hoyt tells the New Yorker Radio Hour producer Adam Howard. “And I won’t stop. But I am afraid.”</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>

Ryan Coogler on “Sinners”

<p>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. <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/jelani-cobb">Jelani Cobb</a> sat down with the director to discuss setting the film in the South, the mythology of the blues, and how he made a vampire story his own. </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>

Will the Supreme Court Yield to Donald Trump?

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

<p>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 <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/jennifer-wilson">Jennifer Wilson</a> that she thought for a long time about an actress as protagonist, as a way to highlight the roles women play, and to provoke questions about agency. “I teach creative writing, and in class often ... if there is a character who the group feels doesn't have agency, that is often brought up as a criticism of the character,” she tells Wilson. Other students will say, “ ‘She doesn't have any agency,’ as if a character without agency is implausible or in some way not compelling in narrative terms. But of course, the reality is very few of us have total agency. I think we operate under the illusion or the impression that we have a great deal of agency. But in reality when you look at your life, our choices are quite constricted.” </p><p>“Audition” comes out this week.  </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>

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

<p>The microchip maker Nvidia is a Silicon Valley colossus. After years as a runner-up to Intel and Qualcomm, Nvidia has all but cornered the market on the parallel processors essential for artificial-intelligence programs like ChatGPT. “Nvidia was there at the beginning of A.I.,” the tech journalist Stephen Witt tells David Remnick. “They really kind of made these systems work for the first time. We think of A.I. as a software revolution, something called neural nets, but A.I. is also a hardware revolution.” In <i>The New Yorker</i>, Stephen Witt <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/04/how-jensen-huangs-nvidia-is-powering-the-ai-revolution">profiled</a> Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s brilliant and idiosyncratic co-founder and C.E.O. His new book is “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/757558/the-thinking-machine-by-stephen-witt/">The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip</a>.” Until recently, Nvidia was the most valuable company in the world, but its stock price has been volatile, posting the largest single-day loss in history in January. But the company’s story is only partially a business story; it’s also one about global superpowers, and who will decide the future. If China takes military action against Taiwan, as it has indicated it might, the move could wrest control of the manufacturing of Nvidia microchips from a Taiwanese firm, which is now investing in a massive production facility in the U.S. “Maybe what’s happening,” Witt speculates, is that “this kind of labor advantage that Asia had over the United States for a long time, maybe in the age of robots that labor advantage is going to go away. And then it doesn’t matter where we put the factory. The only thing that matters is, you know, is there enough power to supply it?” </p><p>Plus, the staff writer Joshua Rothman has long been fascinated with A.I.—he even <a href="https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/tnyradiohour/articles/geoffrey-hinton-its-far-too-late-to-stop-artificial-intelligence">interviewed</a> its “godfather,” Geoffrey Hinton, for The New Yorker Radio Hour. But Rothman has become increasingly concerned about a lack of public and political debate over A.I.—and about how thoroughly it may transform our lives. “Often, if you talk to people who are really close to the technology, the timelines they quote for really reaching transformative levels of intelligence are, like, shockingly soon,” he tells Remnick. “If we’re worried about the incompetence of government, on whatever side of that you situate yourself, we should worry about automated government. For example, an A.I. decides the length of a sentence in a criminal conviction, or an A.I. decides whether you qualify for Medicaid. Basically, we’ll have less of a say in how things go and computers will have more of a say.”</p><p>Rothman’s essay “<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/are-we-taking-ai-seriously-enough">Are We Taking A.I. Seriously Enough?</a>” appears in his weekly column, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions">Open Questions</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>

Elaine Pagels on the Mysteries of Jesus

<p>Thirty years ago, David Remnick published “<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/04/03/the-devil-problem">The Devil Problem</a>,” 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, “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/126049/the-gnostic-gospels-by-elaine-pagels/">The Gnostic Gospels</a>,” 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 “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/126050/the-origin-of-satan-by-elaine-pagels/">The Origin of Satan</a>,” as well as works on Adam and Eve and the Book of Revelation. Pagels's upcoming book, “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/677236/miracles-and-wonder-by-elaine-pagels/">Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus</a>,” is a summation of her lifetime of study, as it takes on some of the central historical controversies of Christianity, including the stories of immaculate conception and the resurrection. The daughter of a scientist, Pagels “was living in a world in which science defines what you can see, and there’s nothing else.” Then, as a teen-ager, she was born again after seeing the evangelist Billy Graham preach. “This was about opening up the imagination,” she tells Remnick. “I did feel like the sky opened up.” Her time in the evangelical community was brief, but her fascination with belief never faded. “I have a sense that what we think of as the invisible world has deep realities to it that are quite unfathomable.”</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>

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

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

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

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

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

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

<p>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 <a href="https://www.wnycstudios.org/people/adam-howard">Adam Howard</a> spoke with two of the site’s creators: Kate Green, who recently left the federal government for a job in the private sector, and a web developer who identifies himself as Milo – using a pseudonym, since he is still employed in the government.  “Both the beauty and the tragedy is that the work the government does is largely invisible,” as Milo put it. “You don't always know that it is USDA inspectors who are working in the slaughterhouses, who are making sure that work is being done in a safe and sanitary fashion … But they give a damn about making sure that food is safe. If that goes away, that's not immediately visible to people. And they don't necessarily know that these people have lost their jobs or that food is going to be less safe until people get hurt or worse. And so, we want to make sure that people start to understand what the cuts in these programs actually mean.”</p><p>Plus, this year, <i>The New Yorker’s</i> centennial, we’re revisiting some classics from the magazine’s past with a series called <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/takes">Takes</a>. The novelist Michael Cunningham was already in his forties when Annie Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain”—about two young men working as shepherds who unexpectedly fall in love—was published. “<i>The New Yorker</i> was not the first big-deal magazine to run a story about gay people. It wasn’t, like, ‘Oh, my God, a story, finally!,’ ” Cunningham recalls. But it made a huge impression nevertheless. “It was a story in <i>The New Yorker</i> about two gay men that was first and foremost a love story. . . . I didn't want to just read it; I wanted to absorb this story in a more lasting way.”  </p><p><i>Excerpts of Annie Proulx’s “</i><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/10/13/brokeback-mountain"><i>Brokeback Mountain</i></a><i>” were read by Monica Wyche.</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>

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does Tim Walz Have Any Regrets?

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

Richard Brody Presents the 2025 Brody Awards

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

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

<p>Since the election, Senator John Fetterman—once a great hope of progressives—has conspicuously blamed Democrats for the electoral loss. Fetterman tells David Remnick that the Democratic Party discouraged male voters, particularly white men. He has pursued a lonely course of bipartisanship by meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago before his Inauguration, joining Truth Social, and voting to confirm Pam Bondi as Attorney General—the only Democrat to do so. But, despite Trump’s relatively high approval ratings, he lambasts the Administration for the “chaos” it is currently sowing in America. Fetterman sympathizes with voters’ widespread disgust with contemporary politicking. “Unlimited money has turned all of us in some way into all OnlyFans models,” he says. “We’re all just online hustling for money.”</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>