The New Yorker Radio Hour

If Roe v. Wade Goes, What Next?

<p><span>The Supreme Court, with a six-to-three majority of conservative justices, is hearing critical cases on abortion rights. If it approves restrictive state laws, large swaths of the country might quickly ban abortion. Jia Tolentino co-hosts a special episode on the future of abortion rights for Americans, which includes a discussion of the legal issues at stake and the doctrine of privacy that is now in jeopardy, and a visit to the Mississippi clinic at the center of one of the court cases.</span></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 Essential Workers of the Climate Crisis

<p><span>After storms and other climate disasters, legions of workers appear overnight to cover blown-out buildings with construction tarps, rip out ruined walls and floors, and start putting cities back together. They are largely migrants, predominantly undocumented, and lack basic protections for construction work. Their efforts are critical in an era of increasing climate-related disasters, but the workers are subject to hazards including accidents, wage theft, and deportation. “</span><span>Right now, there is a base camp for the National Guard; FEMA officials in Louisiana are staying in hotels,” </span><span>Saket Soni, the founder of the nonprofit group Resilience Force, tells </span><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/sarah-stillman"><span>Sarah Stillman</span></a><span>. “</span><span>But the workers who are doing the rebuilding with their hands are sleeping under their cars to protect themselves from rain.” </span><span>Stillman travelled to Louisiana, to the parking lot of a Home Depot, to report on Soni’s effort to organize and win recognition for these laborers as a distinct workforce performing essential work. </span><span>“These years ahead,” she notes, “are going to bring more brutal hurricanes, more awful floods, more terrifying wildfires, and heatwaves—more than any of us is really prepared to handle. … And what’s at stake is not just these workers’ fates but also our collective shared survival.” </span></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>

Anna Deavere Smith Retells Rodney King’s Story in Theatre

<p><span>“Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” premièred nearly thirty years ago, but it’s one of the most current and important plays on Broadway right now. Anna Deavere Smith pioneered a form now known as verbatim theatre: instead of creating characters and writing dialogue, she would interview dozens or hundreds of people about an event, and weave a story from those real characters and their words. “Twilight” is about the deadly violence and unrest that erupted after police officers were acquitted of the ferocious beating of Rodney King—one of the first episodes of police brutality caught on videotape and broadcast to the nation. Her form, she tells David Remnick, let her complicate the racial dynamics of Black and white people, to include the voices of Asian Americans and Latinx people involved in the uprising. Deavere talks about how the play reads now, after George Floyd’s murder and the uprising that followed, and about what still hasn’t changed in the cultural climate for Black theatre artists. </span></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 Held Evans and Her Legacy

<p><span>Growing up, Rachel Held Evans was a fiercely enthusiastic evangelizer for her faith, the kind of kid who relished the chance to sit next to an atheist. But when she experienced doubt, that sense of certainty began to crumble. “</span><span>We went to all these conferences about how to defend your faith, how to have an answer for what you believe,” her sister Amanda Held told<span> </span></span><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/eliza-griswold"><span>Eliza Griswold</span></a><span>. “That’s why it was particularly unsettling to have questions, because we were taught to have answers.”<span> </span></span><span>Held Evans began to blog and then wrote a string of best-sellers about her faith, beginning with “Evolving in Monkey Town,” in which she separated the Jesus she believed in from the conservative doctrine she was raised with. Her work spoke to the millions of Christians who have left evangelical churches since 2006. “</span><span>There’s this common misperception that either you are a conservative evangelical Christian or . . . you become agnostic or atheist,” Griswold explains, but many Christians were turning away from politics and still retaining their faith. She calls Held Evans “the patron saint of this emerging movement.” After<span> </span></span><span>Held Evans died, at thirty-seven, after a sudden illness, her final, incomplete manuscript was finished by a friend, Jeff Chu. Griswold travelled to Held Evans’s home town of Dayton, Tennessee, to meet with her widower, Dan Evans, as well as Chu and others. “</span><span>I think people resonate so much with her work [because] she was giving words that people couldn’t say themselves,” Evans says. “It’s not going to stop for them just because Rachel died.</span><span><span> </span></span><span>There’s going to be one less traveller.</span><span><span> </span></span><span>One less person to translate for them. But there’s more people born every day.”</span></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 Office Survive the Pandemic?

<p><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/cal-newport"><span>Cal Newport</span></a><span>, the author of “A World without Email” and other books, has been writing about how the shutdown has affected businesses and the culture of work. Remote operation, he says, has raised fundamental questions about the purpose of work, its role in our lives, and how productivity is measured. While most companies are asking employees to return to the office as the pandemic eases, Newport predicts that economic forces will eventually drive an exodus toward permanent remote work. Tech companies that launched as fully remote operations, he thinks, have a head start on the economic advantages of ditching the office for good. </span></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>

Wole Soyinka on His New Satire of Corruption and Fundamentalism

<p><span>Wole Soyinka is a giant of world literature. A Nobel laureate, he’s written more than two dozen plays, a vast amount of poetry, several memoirs, and countless essays and short stories—but, up until recently, only two novels. His third novel was published this past September, forty-eight years after the previous one. It's called “Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth.” The book is both a political satire and a murder mystery involving four friends, with subplots that include a secret society dealing in human body parts and more corruption than any one country can bear. </span></p> <p><span>Like his cousin the Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti, Soyinka has made social commentary integral to his work. Soyinka’s journey into political activism began at a young age, and, in 1965, when he was twenty-one, he was arrested for armed robbery. But Soyinka tells </span><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/vinson-cunningham"><span>Vinson Cunningham</span></a><span> that political opposition didn’t come naturally to him. “I love my peace of mind and my tranquility,” he says, “[but] I cannot attain that if I have not attended to an issue or problem which I know is . . . manifesting itself in a dehumanizing way in others.” “Chronicles” explores not only how the governments are corrupt but the effect of corruption on societies and peoples. Soyinka also talks about why he waited so long to write another novel, and what the medium offers that theatre does not. </span></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 Nobel Prize Winner Maria Ressa on the Turmoil at Facebook

<p><span>The roughly ten thousand company documents that make up the Facebook Papers show a company in turmoil—and one that prioritizes its economic interests over known harms to public interest. Among other things, they catalogue the company’s persistent failure to control disinformation and hate speech. David Remnick spoke with Maria Ressa, an investigative journalist, in the Philippines, who runs the news organization Rappler. She has been the target of hate campaigns by supporters of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, and in October Ressa (along with the Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov) </span><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-nobel-peace-prize-acknowledges-a-dangerous-era-for-journalists"><span>received the Nobel Peace Prize</span></a><span> for working to protect freedom of expression. Ressa is also a co-founder of what’s called the Real Facebook Oversight Board, a group of expert observers and critics who are not affiliated with Facebook’s own quasi-independent </span><a href="https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/tnyradiohour/episodes/supreme-court-facebook"><span>Oversight Board</span></a><span>.  She doesn’t see easy tweaks to ameliorate the damage; the fundamental approach of steering content to users to maximize engagement, she feels, is inherently destructive. “We’ve adapted this hook, line, and sinker: ‘personalization is better,’ ” Ressa points out. “It does make the company more money, but is that the right thing? Personalization also tears apart a shared reality.” Plus, a disinformation researcher says that, to understand dangerous conspiracy stories like QAnon, you have to look at the online horror genre known as creepypasta. </span></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>

Jane Goodall Talks with Andy Borowitz

<p><span>Jane Goodall is as revered a figure as modern science has to offer, though she prefers to call herself a naturalist rather than a scientist. Goodall learned a great deal about being human by studying our close relatives among the primates. When she began working, some of her research habits, such as naming her subjects and describing their personalities, caused consternation among other primatologists, who insisted that intelligence and emotion were the exclusive province of human intellect; Goodall persevered, and shifted how we conceive of the relationship between humans and other creatures. She’s the author of more than thirty books for adults and children, including a new volume called “The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times.” </span></p> <p> </p> <p><span>In her work as a conservationist and a United Nations “Messenger of Peace,” the eighty-seven-year-old Goodall used to travel as many as three hundred days per year. Since the pandemic began, she’s been at her home in England, in the house where she grew up. In a conversation for the New Yorker Festival, </span><i><span>The New Yorker’s</span></i><span> Andy Borowitz (known primarily as a </span><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report"><span>humorist</span></a><span>) asked Goodall about the secrets to her success as both a researcher and an advocate. “I’m very passionate,” she told him. “Secondly, I’m probably obstinate and I’m pretty resilient. So knock me over and I’m going to bounce back up. Because I will not be defeated.”</span></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 a Girls’ School Fled Afghanistan as the Taliban Took Over

<p><span>In the summer, Shabana Basij-Rasikh </span><a href="https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/tnyradiohour/segments/afghanistans-only-all-girls-boarding-school-fears-return-taliban"><span>came on the Radio Hour</span></a><span> to speak with </span><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/sue-halpern"><span>Sue Halpern</span></a><span> about founding the School of Leadership Afghanistan—known as </span><span>SOLA</span><span>—</span><span>which was the country’s only boarding school for girls. She and those around her were watching the Taliban’s resurgence in the provinces anxiously, but with determination. “</span><span>It’s likely that Taliban could disrupt life temporarily here in Kabul,” one woman told Basij-Rasikh, “but we’re not going to go back to that time. We’re going to fight them.” </span></p> <p> </p> <p><span>In fact, Basij-Rasikh had already been forming a plan to take her girls’ school abroad, and soon settled on Rwanda. When the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan led to a precipitous collapse of the government, she suddenly had to sneak nearly two hundred and fifty students, staff, faculty, and family members to the airport to flee as refugees. She seems traumatized by the terror of that experience. “</span><span>That thought still haunts me—it suddenly takes over all my senses in a way, just this idea of ‘what if’? What if we lost a student?</span><span>” She spoke with Halpern about the evacuation to Rwanda, and what she hopes for as the school resettles. </span></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>

Jon Stewart: “That’s Not Cancel Culture”

<p><span>“The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” defined an era. For more than sixteen years, Stewart and his many correspondents skewered American politics. At the </span><a href="https://festival.newyorker.com/"><span>2021 New Yorker Festival</span></a><span>, Stewart spoke with David Remnick about his new show, “The Problem with Jon Stewart”; the potential return of Donald Trump to the White House; and the controversy around cancel culture in comedy. “What do we do for a living?” Stewart asks, of comedians. “We criticize, we postulate, we opine, we make jokes, and now other people are having their say. And that’s not cancel culture, that’s relentlessness.” </span></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>

Daniel Craig Takes Off the Tux

<p><span>Daniel Craig made his career as an actor in the theatre and in British indie films. When he showed up in Hollywood, it was usually in smaller roles, often as a villain. So, in 2005, when Craig was cast as the original superspy, James Bond, he seemed as surprised as anyone. In “No Time to Die,” Craig gives his final performance as Bond—a role, he tells David Remnick, that sometimes grated on him. Craig hasn’t lost his love of theatre, and is set to play Macbeth on Broadway. “I try not to differentiate” between Shakespeare’s work and Ian Fleming’s, he tells David Remnick. “You’re trying to aim for some truth, to ground things in reality,” and “both require the same muscles.” Though he admits that “there’s a lot more chat” in a Shakespeare script. </span><span>Plus, the beloved comic character actor Carol Kane discusses her Oscar-nominated turn in 1975’s “Hester Street,” which is being re-released.</span></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>

Kara Walker Talks with Thelma Golden

<p><span>Kara Walker is one of our most influential living artists. Walker won a MacArthur Fellowship (the “genius” grant) before she turned thirty, and became well known for her silhouettes, works constructed from cut black paper using a technique that refers to craft forms of the Victorian era. Walker has put modest materials to work to address very large concerns: the lived experience and historical legacy of American slavery. Though she often depicts the racial and sexual violence that went largely unspoken for centuries in the past, her work is aimed squarely at the modern world. “What I set out to do, in a way, worked too well,” she said, “which was to say, if I pretty everything up with hoop skirts and Southern belles then nobody will recognize that I’m talking about them. And then they didn’t! They said, ‘The past is so bad.’ But I’m not from the past. . . . I do live here now. And so do you.” Walker was interviewed at </span><a href="https://festival.newyorker.com/"><span>The New Yorker Festival</span></a><span> by Thelma Golden, the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem.</span></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>

An Interview with Merrick Garland, and Susan Orlean on Animals

<p><span>At The New Yorker Festival, the renowned investigative journalist Jane Mayer asked Attorney General Merrick Garland about the prosecution of January 6th insurrectionists, the threat of domestic terrorism, and what the Justice Department can do to protect abortion rights. Plus, the staff writer Susan Orlean talks with David Remnick about her obsession with animal stories, and her new book, “On Animals.”</span></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>

Broadway’s Unusual Reopening, and Amanda Petrusich Picks Three

<p><span>Broadway theatres are welcoming audiences to a new season, mounting original works and restaging shows that closed in March, 2020. In this unusual season, Broadway is featuring atypical works such as “Is this a Room,” directed by Tina Satter, which stages the F.B.I. interrogation of the whistle-blower Reality Winner using the official transcript verbatim for all of its dialogues. But the most notable thing about Broadway this season is the record-breaking eight plays by Black playwrights, including Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s “Pass Over,” and the reopening of Jeremy O. Harris’s “Slave Play.” Two theatre critics, Alexandra Schwartz and Vinson Cunningham, discuss whether this diversity is a sign of change on Broadway or a short-term response to the racial reckoning that began in 2020. Plus, the music critic Amanda Petrusich shares three tracks from her playlist for a new baby—featuring Aretha Franklin, Paul and Linda McCartney, and the Velvet Underground. </span></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>

Jonathan Franzen Talks with David Remnick About “Crossroads”

<p><span>Jonathan Franzen’s sixth novel, “Crossroads,” is set in 1971, and the title is firmly on the nose: the Hildebrand family is at a crossroads itself, just as the America of that moment seemed poised to come apart. In the course of his career, Franzen has evolved away from an early postmodernist sensibility that highlighted “bravura” writing, and “with this book I threw away all the po-mo hijinks and the grand plot elements,” he tells David Remnick. “It’s really only in the course of writing ‘Crossroads’ that I have said to myself, What I am is a novelist of character and psychology. . . . It’s not about formal experimentation and it’s certainly not about changing the world through my social commentary.” Franzen also discusses the complex ethics behind writing a character of another race, and takes issue with the belief of some in the academy (and much of the political right) that leftist sensibilities are stifling free expression; he declined to sign the “</span><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/thomas-chatterton-williams-on-race-identity-and-cancel-culture"><span>Harper’s Letter</span></a><span>” last year. Despite political polarization, Franzen says, “It’s a much better time to be an American writer than I would have guessed twenty-five years ago.”</span></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>

Should the Climate Movement Embrace Sabotage?

<p><span>Andreas Malm, a climate activist and senior lecturer at Lund University, in Sweden, studies the relationship between climate change and capitalism. With the United Nations climate meeting in Glasgow rapidly approaching—it begins on October 31st—Malm tells David Remnick that he believes environmentalists should not place too much faith in talks or treaties of this kind. Instead, he insists that the climate movement rethinks its roots in nonviolence. His book is provocatively titled “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” though it is not exactly an instruction manual. Malm advocates for “intelligent sabotage” of fossil-fuel infrastructure to prevent more carbon from being emitted in the atmosphere. “I am in favor of destroying machines, property—not harming people. That’s a very important distinction,” he tells Remnick. Plus: Parul Sehgal, </span><i><span>The New Yorker</span></i><span>’s newest staff writer, introduces David Remnick to some notable works off the syllabus of a class she is teaching. It’s called “Writing the Unspeakable,” about the literature of trauma and atrocity.</span></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>

Jelani Cobb on the Kerner Report, an Unheeded Warning about the Consequences of Racism

<p><span>In 1967, in the wake of a violent uprising in Detroit, President Lyndon B. Johnson assembled the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to investigate what had happened. This seemed futile: another panel to investigate yet another uprising. “A lot of people felt that way—‘We don’t need more studies, nothing’s going to come out of that commission,’ ” Fred Harris, a former senator from Oklahoma and the commission’s last surviving member, tells </span><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/jelani-cobb"><span>Jelani Cobb</span></a><span>. But the conclusions were not typical at all. In the final analysis, known as the Kerner Report, the commission named white racism—no euphemisms—as the root cause of unrest in the United States, and said that the country was </span><b>“</b><span>moving toward two societies, one Black, one White—separate and unequal.”</span> <span>The report called for sweeping changes and investments in jobs, housing, policing, and more; the recommendations went so far beyond Johnson’s anti-poverty programs of the nineteen-sixties that the President shelved the report and refused to meet with his own commission. The Kerner Report, Cobb says, was “an unheeded warning,” as America still struggles today to acknowledge the reality of systemic racism. </span></p> <p><span>Jelani Cobb co-edited and wrote the introduction to “The Essential Kerner Commission Report,” which was published this year. </span></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>

Joaquin Castro: “Americans Don’t Know Who Latinos Are”

<p><span>On Tuesday, the U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a preliminary report on the long-standing underrepresentation of Latinos in the media. While most people consider Hollywood a relatively liberal industry, “the system as a whole is actually quite regressive and . . . exclusionary,” Joaquin Castro, the representative of a Texas district that includes much of San Antonio, says. “I’m convinced that Americans don’t know who Latinos are,” Castro tells </span><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/stephania-taladrid"><span>Stephania Taladrid</span></a><span>. Unlike Black Americans, who are linked in the white imagination to the civil-rights era and other historical turning points, Castro says, non-Latinos “don’t associate us with any particular time period in American history. They don’t know who among us has contributed to the nation’s prosperity or success. And they have no sense where to place us within American society.” What Castro calls a “void” in America’s narrative gets filled by pernicious stereotypes of Latinos as criminals and “illegals.” “There has been now, for several years at least, this dangerous nexus between representation, portrayal, and the abuse of Latino stereotypes . . . by politicians who abuse them for their own political gain. And, in that dangerous mix, in its worst form, you get what happened in El Paso in August of 2019, where a madman drove ten hours and killed twenty-three people because he considered them Hispanic invaders.” Castro suggests that states and local governments should do more to hold the media accountable, for example, by tying tax breaks for entertainment production to improvements on diversity. </span></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>

Wes Anderson and Jeffrey Wright on “The French Dispatch”

<p><span>“I wanted to do a French movie, and I had this idea of wanting to do a </span><i><span>New Yorker</span></i><span> movie,” Wes Anderson explains. “Somehow, I also wanted to do one of those omnibus-type things where it was a collection of short stories.” The result is the new film “The French Dispatch.” Anderson describes his interest in </span><i><span>The New Yorker</span></i><span> as “almost fetishistic.” Each of the movie’s four story lines was inspired by a work from the magazine</span> <span>or by one of its writers, though Anderson has played freely with biography. Jeffrey Wright, for example, plays Roebuck Wright, an amalgam of James Baldwin, a Black American expatriate in provincial France, and A. J. Liebling, a beloved writer on food and much else from </span><i><span>The New Yorker</span></i><span>’s early years. “Even in exile,” the actor says, his character “realizes that he’s only at home within himself, that there is no home for him.</span> <span>And maybe there is no home for anyone, really, other than within one’s own body and one’s own soul.” Anderson and Wright join David Remnick to discuss “The French Dispatch” and the classic </span><i><span>New Yorker</span></i><span> essays that inspired it. </span></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>

Bonus: “The French Dispatch” Reads The New Yorker

<p><span>Wes Anderson’s new film, “The French Dispatch,” is about a magazine, and it was inspired by Anderson’s long-standing love of </span><i><span>The New Yorker.</span></i><span> In this special episode, introduced by the articles editor Susan Morrison, cast members read excerpts from classic works associated with the magazine. </span><span>Bill Murray reads a letter from the editor Harold Ross to an angry writer, Steve Park reads James Thurber, and Elisabeth Moss reads E. B. White. Owen Wilson reads Joseph Mitchell’s piece on rats; Frances McDormand reads Mavis Gallant’s record of the 1968 student uprising in Paris; Tilda Swinton reads a Calvin Tomkins art-world profile; and Jeffrey Wright reads James Baldwin’s “Equal in Paris,” a remarkable indictment of French institutions. </span></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 Insidious Procedural Traps of the Texas Abortion Law

<p><span>The new Texas law Senate Bill 8 effectively outlaws abortion in Texas, violating constitutional protections on reproductive rights. Yet the Supreme Court is in no rush to review it. The law professor and staff writer Jeannie Suk Gersen speaks with Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan. They examine the novel ways in which the law insulates itself from judicial review. “It seems like the Texas law is an onion, with layers upon layers of unconstitutionality,” Suk Gersen notes. “It’s basically saying to the courts, ‘We’ll do your job for you. You are cut out of this.’ ” </span></p> <p> </p> <p><span>Plus, Jia Tolentino talks with the pop musician Caroline Polachek, as the singer-songwriter gets ready to play her first live concert since March of 2020, for the biggest crowd of her career. </span></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>

Remembering September 11th, and the Future of the Taliban

<p><span>Twenty years after the events of September 11th, the writer Edwidge Danticat reads from her essay “Flight,” about the way that tragedies are memorialized by those who survive them. And the </span><i><span>New Yorker</span></i><span> contributor Anand Gopal reports from Afghanistan, where, he says, the younger rank and file of the Taliban are hardly aware of the way that the 9/11 attacks have shaped the last two decades. </span></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 Child Tax Credit: One Small Step Toward Universal Basic Income?

<p><span>David Remnick talks with Senator Michael Bennet, of Colorado, who campaigned for the Presidency in 2020 advocating for the child tax credit, which is now a centerpiece of the Democratic agenda. Bennet describes why direct cash payments make such a big difference. Our economics correspondent Sheelah Kolhatkar describes the policy as a scale model of universal basic income. She moderates a conversation between two academics on different sides of the issue: Michael Strain, a </span><span>senior fellow and the director of economic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, </span><span>and Amy Castro, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania.</span> <span>Plus, Radio Hour listeners go toe to toe in a round of </span><i><span>The New Yorker’s</span></i><span> Name Drop, a new quiz.</span></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>

Riz Ahmed on “Mogul Mowgli”

<p><span>As a rapper, Riz Ahmed has released critically acclaimed albums, and he was featured on the chart-topping “Hamilton Mixtape.” At the same time, he was becoming a leading man in the movies, with roles including a small part in the Star Wars picture “Rogue One” and an extraordinary, Oscar-nominated performance in “Sound of Metal.” Like his previous film, “Mogul Mowgli” is about a musical artist facing a health crisis that could end his career. Ahmed stars as the British-Pakistani rapper Zaheer—stage name Zed—and he co-wrote the film with Bassam Tariq. “</span><span>It was very much a kind of inward journey,” Ahmed tells David Remnick. “It was very much about holding up a mirror and hoping that in the honesty and the vulnerability of that exercise, people would just connect emotionally—even if they couldn’t necessarily connect to the specificity of the experience. But for those who could connect to that specificity, you would be, like, ‘Jesus Christ, I never thought I’d see that onscreen!’ ” </span></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 Joy of Beach Reads

<p><span>Our guest host, Vinson Cunningham, looks at the joys of the beach read, hitting Brighton Beach on a hot, muggy day to peer over readers’ shoulders. He relates his own fortuitous encounter with </span><span>Lawrence Otis Graham’s </span><span>“Our Kind of People,” after finding the book in a rented house on Martha’s Vineyard. Plus, Rachel Syme feels that “</span><span>books have a season that they tell you to read them in,” and “summer is the season of the classic Hollywood memoir”; she shares three favorites with David Remnick.</span></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>

Kim Stanley Robinson on “Utopian” Science Fiction

<p><span>One of the premier writers of thinky sci-fi, Kim Stanley Robinson opened his book “The Ministry for the Future” with an all too plausible scenario: a lethal heat wave descends on India, with vast, horrifying consequences. It’s a sobering read, especially after July, 2021, was declared the hottest month on record. And yet Robinson tells </span><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/bill-mckibben"><span>Bill McKibben</span></a><span><span> </span>that his work is not dystopian; his central concern is how the globe could respond to such a disaster and begin to halt the momentum of global warming. “That whole dystopian postapocalyptic strain—it doesn’t serve as a warning, it doesn’t make you change your behavior,” Robinson notes. “I reject all that. I write as a utopian science-fiction writer.” But, “at the moment we’re at right now in world history,” he admits, “I have to set a pretty low bar for ‘utopia.’ If we dodge a mass-extinction event in this century, that’s utopian writing. That’s the best we can expect from where we are right now. Having put that story on the table as being possible, it suggests that we ought to be trying for it.”</span></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>

Home Cooking with Jacques Pepin and Klancy Miller

<p><span>For generations of cooks, Jacques Pépin has been the master. Early in his career he cooked for eminences like Charles DeGaulle, and was offered a job at the White House. But after a serious car accident ended his time in restaurants, Pépin remade a new career as a teacher, cookbook author, chef, and broadcaster. On television—at first alongside his friend Julia Child—he brought the gospel of French cooking into so many American homes, at a time when there was no other fine cuisine. At eighty-five, he is still active on Facebook Live, with a notably humble variety of use-what-you-got cooking that’s well suited to the pandemic era. Pépin consented to a one-on-one lesson with David Remnick, a cooking novice, and together they tackled the subtle art of making a crêpe. Plus, Klancy Miller, <span>the author of “Cooking Solo,” talks with the food correspondent Helen Rosner about her underlying philosophy: you should treat yourself as well as you would treat anyone else.</span></span></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>

Dexter Filkins on the Fall of Afghanistan

<p><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/dexter-filkins"><span>Dexter Filkins</span></a><span> covered the American invasion of Afghanistan when he was a reporter for the New York </span><i><span>Times</span></i><span>, and has continued to report on conflicts in the region for </span><i><span>The New Yorker</span></i><span>. Filkins’s best-seller from 2008 carried the resonant title “The Forever War.” Thirteen years after the book’s publication, the forever war is over, but its end has been the chaotic worst-case scenario that many feared. Filkins talks with David Remnick about whether it had to go this way, and whether twenty years of war changed America more than it did Afghanistan. Plus, <i><span>The New Yorker’s</span></i><span> puzzles editor puts David Remnick and Naomi Fry through a couple of rounds of the new online quiz, Name Drop. </span></span></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>

Liesl Tommy, Director of “Respect”

<p><span>Aretha Franklin was the Queen of Soul, the greatest voice of her generation, an eighteen-time Grammy Award winner whose career spanned five decades. She was also a famously private person, which makes the project of directing a film about her life challenging. The job of telling Aretha’s story went to a South African-born director named Liesl Tommy, known for her work in theatre and nominated for a Tony, in 2016. Tommy had also directed episodes of TV shows like “The Walking Dead” and “Jessica Jones,” but the movie about Franklin—called, almost inevitably, “Respect”—is her first feature film. Tommy’s long-standing passion for the singer, she says, made the job relatively easy, even though she first fell in love with Franklin’s voice as a child living on a different continent.  “I don’t think I ever thought of her as American,” she told </span><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/vinson-cunningham"><span>Vinson Cunningham</span></a><span>. “I thought of her as a woman that I wanted to grow up to be.” As a small child, she recalls, “Even if I don’t understand the feelings specifically, I understand how the way she sang them made me feel. And that was, excited to be alive.”</span></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>

Amanda Petrusich Talks with the Weather Station’s Tamara Lindeman

<p><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/amanda-petrusich"><span>Amanda Petrusich</span></a><span> describes herself as a “die-hard fan” of folk music, but not when it feels precious or sentimental. That’s why she loves the Weather Station, whose songs, she thinks, “could take a punch to the face.” A solo project of the songwriter and performer Tamara Lindeman, the Weather Station’s new album, “Ignorance,” focusses on the theme of climate grief: Lindeman was responding to a devastating report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change about the consequences of elevated carbon levels for human societies. If that sounds heady, Lindeman tells Petrusich that it may be her heritage. “There’s this thread in Canadian music of philosophical songwriting, and that’s how I like my lyrics to be. I like them to be about ideas as well as stories. . . . Most people want songs that just tell a story; they don’t want the complicated ideas. But I do.”</span></p> <p><span>The Weather Station performs “Robber” and “Tried to Tell You,” with Evan Cartwright on percussion and Karen Ng on saxophone. </span></p> <p> </p> <p><i><span>This segment originally aired February 5, 2021.</span></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>