The New Yorker Radio Hour

Richard Linklater on His Two New Films, “Blue Moon” and “Nouvelle Vague”

<p>Richard Linklater is one of the most admired directors working today, and yet moviegoers may admire him for very different things. There are early comedies such as “Slacker” and “Dazed and Confused”; there’s the romance trilogy that started with “Before Sunrise,” starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy; and the crowd-pleasers like “School of Rock” and “Hit Man.” Linklater’s “Boyhood,” a coming-of-age story shot in the course of twelve years as its protagonist grew from child to young adult, is almost without precedent. This month, Linklater has two new movies releasing almost simultaneously, both dramatizing historical moments in the lives of creative geniuses. In “Blue Moon,” Hawke plays the Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart at the moment his career is being eclipsed by a rival, Oscar Hammerstein II. “My tagline for this movie, that they’re not going to use on any posters, but it’s my tagline: ‘Forgotten, but not gone,’ ” Linklater tells our film critic <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/justin-chang">Justin Chang</a>. “It’s so heartbreaking . . . to do a film about the end of someone’s career.” In “Nouvelle Vague,” which is almost entirely in French, Linklater depicts the unconventional filming of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless,” his triumphant 1959 début. “The most important film,” Linklater says, “is the one you make in your head.” </p><p><i>Justin Chang’s </i><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/richard-linklaters-uncompromising-artists"><i>article</i></a><i> about Richard Linklater was published on September 27, 2025.</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>

How the Trump Administration Made Higher Education a Target

<p>The swiftness and severity with which the Trump Administration has tried to impose its will on higher education came as a shock to many, not least university presidents and faculties from Harvard to U.C.L.A. But for conservatives this arena of cultural conflict has been a long time coming. The staff writer <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/emma-green">Emma Green</a> has been speaking with influential figures in the current Administration as well as in the larger conservative movement about how they mapped out this battle for Donald Trump’s return to power. “There’s a recognition among the people that I interviewed,” Green tells David Remnick, “that the Administration cannot come in and script to universities: this is what you will teach and this is the degrees that you will offer, and just script it from top to bottom. First of all, that would be not legally possible. And it also, I think in some ways, violates core instincts that conservatives have around academic freedom, because a lot of these people have been on élite campuses and had the experience of being told that their views weren’t acceptable.” Green also speaks with James Kvaal, an education official who served in both the Biden and Obama Administrations, and May Mailman, a conservative education-policy activist who worked in the Trump White House and coördinated its attacks against universities. “When you have federal grants, you do not need to be funding racism and racial hierarchies and violence and harassment,” Mailman told Green. “I think that line is: do what you wanna do, but we don’t want to have to fund it.” </p><p><i>Emma Green’s “</i><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/10/20/inside-the-trump-administrations-assault-on-higher-education"><i>Inside the Trump Administration’s Assault on Higher Education</i></a><i>” was published on October 13, 2025.</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>

John Carpenter Picks Three Favorite Film Scores

<p>The filmmaker John Carpenter has a whole shelf of cult classics: “They Live,” “The Thing,” “Escape from New York,” “Halloween,” and so many more. And while he hasn’t directed a new movie in more than a decade, Carpenter has continued working in the film industry, composing scores for other directors (Bong Joon Ho recently approached him about a horror movie). He has also released albums of cinematic music—no film required—often working with his son, Cody Carpenter, and the musician Daniel Davies, his godson. The New Yorker Radio Hour producer Adam Howard talks with Carpenter ahead of the launch of his new small tour, just in time for Halloween, and they discuss the unusual shift he made from directing to composing. “It’s a transition from pain to joy. Directing movies is very, very stressful,” Carpenter explains. “Playing music in front of a live audience—it’s joy. It’s just joy.” Carpenter suggests three inspirational scores from film history: Bebe and Louis Barron’s electronic music for “Forbidden Planet”; Bernard Herrmann work on Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”; and Hans Zimmer’s music for “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.”</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>

Zohran Mamdani Says He&apos;s Ready for Donald Trump

<p>Next month, New York City may elect as its next mayor a man who was pretty much unknown to the broader public a year ago. Zohran Mamdan, who is currently thirty-three years old and a member of the State Assembly, is a democratic socialist who won a primary upset against the current mayor, Eric Adams, and the former governor Andrew Cuomo, who was trying to stage a political comeback. Mamdani now leads the race by around twenty percentage points in most polls. His run for mayor is a remarkable story, but it has not been an easy one. His campaign message of affordability—his ads widely tout a rent freeze in the city—resonates with voters, but his call for further taxing the top one per cent of earners has concerned the state’s governor, Kathy Hochul. </p><p>In Congress, Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have yet to even endorse him. “There are many people who will say housing is a human right, and yet it oftentimes seems as if it is relegated simply to the use of it as a slogan,” Mamdani tells David Remnick at his campaign headquarters, in midtown Manhattan. “It often comes back to whether you’re willing to fight for these ideals that you hold.” Donald Trump, for his part, dubs Mamdani a Communist, and has threatened to withhold federal funds from New York if he’s elected, calling such a vote “a rebellion.” An attack by the President “will be an inevitability,” Mamdani says, noting that the city’s legal department is understaffed for what may be an epic battle to come. “This is an Administration that looks at the flourishing of city life wherever it may be across this country as a threat to their entire political agenda. And New York City looms large in their imagination.” </p><p><i>Zohran Mamdani’s campaign was </i><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/10/20/zohran-mamdani-profile"><i>chronicled</i></a><i> by Eric Lach, a staff writer covering New York politics and life for The New Yorker.</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>

How Lionel Richie Mastered the Love Song

<p>Lionel Richie has been making music for fifty years. He has sold more than a hundred million albums, his hits too numerous to list, and he has endeared himself to younger generations as a judge on “American Idol.” He’s now the author of a memoir, “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/006325364X">Truly</a>.” Although the book has a lot of triumphs to cover, Richie doesn’t shy away from his failed marriages and the mistakes that led to the breakup of the Commodores, the band that launched him to stardom. “When I started out this book, I had some great stories I was gonna tell, keep it real surfacy—you know, no big deal,” Richie tells <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/hanif-abdurraqib">Hanif Abdurraqib</a>. “I didn’t realize that it was going to take me on a journey of, It’s not this mountaintop and this mountaintop and this mountaintop. It was this mountaintop and then the valley. The book is about the valley. And . . . each time I went down in the valley it was painful because there were things in this book that I wanted to forget in life but what created the real substance of me was I had to face my insecurities.”</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 Conservative Professor on How to Fix Campus Culture

<p>Robert P. George is not a passive observer of the proverbial culture wars; he’s been a very active participant. As a Catholic legal scholar and philosopher at Princeton University, he was an influential opponent of Roe v. Wade and same-sex marriage, receiving a Presidential medal from President George W. Bush. George decries the “decadence” of secular culture, and, in 2016, he co-wrote an op-ed declaring <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/tag/donald-trump">Donald Trump</a> “manifestly unfit” to serve as President. Although George disagrees with the Administration’s tactics to change universities’ policies by punishment, he agrees with its contention that campuses have become hotbeds of leftism that stifle debate. He regards this not as a particular evil of the left but as “human nature”: “If conservatives had the kind of monopoly that liberals had,” George tells David Remnick, “I suspect we’d have the same situation, but just in reverse.” His recent book, “<a href="https://www.encounterbooks.com/books/seeking-truth-speaking-truth/?srsltid=AfmBOoqGEb-Y6OuN9mUo_X-oiILKhKjyz6mhIOpk8Z_pxoH_b7BT9H0v">Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth: Law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment</a>,” tries to chart a course back toward civil, functioning debate in a polarized society. “I encourage my students to take courses from people who disagree with me, like Cornel West and Peter Singer,” the latter of whom is a controversial philosopher of ethics. “Cornel and I teach together for this same reason. Peter invites his students to take my courses. That’s the way it should be.”</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>

Jimmy Kimmel and the Power of Public Pressure

<p>The Political Scene’s Washington Roundtable—the staff writers Jane Mayer, Susan Glasser, and Evan Osnos—discuss how, in the wake of the reinstatement of Jimmy Kimmel’s show, public resistance has a chance to turn the tide against autocratic impulses in today’s politics. They are joined by Hardy Merriman, an expert on the history and practice of civil resistance, to discuss what kinds of coördinated actions—protests, boycotts, “buycotts,” strikes, and other nonviolent approaches—are most effective in a fight against democratic backsliding. “Acts of non-coöperation are very powerful,” Merriman, the former president of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, says. “Non-coöperation is very much about numbers. You don’t necessarily need people doing things that are high-risk. You just need large numbers of people doing them.”</p><p><i>This segment originally aired on </i><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/political-scene"><i>The Political Scene</i></a><i> on September 26, 2025.</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>

Ezra Klein’s Big-Tent Vision of the Democratic Party

<p>The author and podcaster Ezra Klein may be only forty-one years old, but he’s been part of the political-culture conversation for a long time. He was a blogger, then a Washington <i>Post</i> columnist and editor, a co-founder of <i>Vox</i>, and is now a writer and podcast host for the New York <i>Times</i>. He’s also the co-author of the recent best-selling book “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1806158965">Abundance</a>”. </p><p>Most recently, Klein has drawn the ire of progressives for a column he wrote about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, in which he praised the late conservative activist for practicing politics “the right way.” He’s also been making a case for how the Democrats can reëmerge from the political wilderness. But some of his other ideas have also invited their share of detractors. </p><p>Klein tells David Remnick, “I try to take seriously questions that I don’t love. I don’t try to insist the world works the way I want it to work. I try to be honest with myself about the way it’s working.” In response to criticism that his recent work has indicated a rightward shift in his thinking, Klein says, “One thing I’ve been saying about the big tent of the Democratic Party is the theory of having a big tent doesn’t just mean moving to the right; it also means accepting in the left.”</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 Cartoonist Liana Finck Picks Three Favorite Children’s Books

<p><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/liana-finck">Liana Finck</a> is a cartoonist and an illustrator who has contributed to <i>The New Yorker</i> since 2015<i>.</i> She is the author of several books, including the graphic memoir “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/562653/passing-for-human-by-liana-finck/">Passing for Human</a>.” Like many of her forebears at the magazine, Finck has also published works for children, and her recent book, “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/722379/mixed-feelings-by-liana-finck-illustrated-by-liana-finck/">Mixed Feelings</a>,” explores the ways that emotions are often confusing—a truth for readers of any age. “Kids’ books were my first experience of art. They’re really why I do what I do,” she tells David Remnick. Finck discusses her time interning for Maira Kalman, and she shares three “deep cuts” from writers associated with <i>The New Yorker</i>: Kalman’s own “<a href="https://www.labyrinthbooks.com/what-pete-ate-from-a-to-z/">What Pete Ate from A to Z</a>”; William Steig’s “<a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/CDB!/William-Steig/9780689857065">C D B!</a>”; and “<a href="https://longfellowbooks.com/book/9781681377957">Tell Me a Mitzi</a>,” by Lore Segal, with illustrations by Harriet Pincus. </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>

Is The 2026 Election Already in Danger?

<p>“The Constitution gives the states the power to set the time, place, and manner of elections,” the election lawyer Marc Elias points out. “It gives the President no [such] power.” Yet, almost one year before the midterms, Donald Trump has called for a nationwide prohibition on mail-in voting, an option favored by Democrats, as well as restrictions on voting machines. The Justice Department has demanded sensitive voter information from at least thirty-four states so far, with little explanation as to how the information will be used. Will we have free and fair congressional elections in 2026? “I am very worried that we could have elections that do not reflect the desires and the voting preferences of everyone who wishes they could vote and have their vote tabulated accurately,” Elias tells David Remnick. “That may sound very lawyerly and very technical, but I think it would be a historic rollback.” Elias’s firm fought and ultimately won almost every case that Trump and Republican allies brought against the 2020 election, and Elias continues to fight the latest round of incursions in court. And while he rues what he calls “re-gerrymandering” in Texas—designed to squeeze Texas’s Democratic representatives out of Congress—Elias thinks states run by Democrats have no choice but to copy the tactic. “Before Gavin Newsom announced what he was doing, I came out publicly and said Democrats should gerrymander nine seats out of California, which would mean there’d be no Republicans left in the delegation. . . . At the end of the day, if there’s no disincentive structure for Republicans to jump off this path, [then] it just continues.” </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>

Kevin Young on His Book “Night Watch,” Inspired by Death and Dante

<p>Kevin Young is the <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/kevin-young">poetry editor</a> for <i>The New Yorker</i>, and the author of many books of his own poetry. His newest work, “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Night-Watch-Poems-Kevin-Young/dp/0593319621">Night Watch</a>,” focusses on death, while also drawing upon his wide view of history, from the end of slavery in the U.S. to Dante’s seven-hundred-year-old poem “The Divine Comedy.” Young tells David Remnick that Dante actually played an outsized role in bringing “Night Watch” to life: “This is a book that, I think, without him, I would have kept in a drawer because the subjects were kind of dark that I was trying to contend with, and [Dante] gave a framework for me,” Young explains. “How do you write about [hell] and frame it as a journey rather than a morass?” </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 the “Dangerous Gimmick” of the Two-State Solution Ended in Disaster

<p>For decades, the United States backed efforts to achieve a two-state solution—in which Israel would exist side by side with the Palestinian state, with both states recognizing each other’s claim to contested territory. The veteran negotiators Hussein Agha, representing Palestine, and Robert Malley, an American diplomat, played instrumental roles in that long effort, including the critical Camp David summit of 2000. But, in their new book, “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Tomorrow-Yesterday-Pursuit-Israel-Palestine/dp/0374617120">Tomorrow Is Yesterday</a>,” they conclude that they were part of a charade. There was never any way that a two-state solution could satisfy either of the parties, Agha and Malley tell David Remnick in an interview. “A waste of time is almost a charitable way to look at it,” Malley notes bitterly. “At the end of that thirty-year-or-so period, the Israelis and Palestinians are in a worse situation than before the U.S. got so heavily invested.” The process, appealing to Western leaders and liberals in Israel, was geared to “find the kind of solutions that have a technical outcome, that are measurable, and that can be portrayed by lines on maps,” Agha says. “It completely discarded the issue of emotions and history. You can’t be emotional. You have to be rational. You have to be cool. But rational and cool has nothing to do with the conflict.” </p><p><i>“</i><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/what-killed-the-two-state-solution"><i>What Killed the Two-State Solution?</i></a><i>,” an excerpt from Agha and Malley’s new book, was published in The New Yorker.</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>

Jeff Tweedy on His New Triple Album, “Twilight Override”

<p>Jeff Tweedy is best known as the front man of Wilco, the rock band he formed in Chicago in 1994. In recent years, he’s been working more often as a solo artist, putting out records under his own name as well as a memoir and essays on songwriting. <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/amanda-petrusich">Amanda Petrusich</a> sat down with the singer-songwriter to talk about “Twilight Override,” which comes out later this month. Recorded with Tweedy’s two sons and a number of his fellow Chicago-based musicians, “Twilight Override” is a triple album of songs centered on themes of time, aging, fear, and “making peace with something ending.” “If we're looking at the word override, what am I overriding?” Tweedy says. “I mean, twilight's beautiful . . . but you need to override your fear of it.” </p><p>Tweedy performs acoustic versions of “Love Is for Love,” “Lou Reed Was My Babysitter,” and “Forever Never Ends.” </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 Wintour Embraces a New Era at Vogue

<p>Speculation, analysis, and commentary circulated all summer, after the announcement, in June, that Anna Wintour would step back from her role as the editor-in-chief of American <i>Vogue</i>. This changing of the guard is uniquely fraught, because Wintour’s name has become nearly inextricable from the magazine, to a degree almost unknown today. And, as New York Fashion Week was set to begin, Wintour spoke with David Remnick about choosing her successor, the Vogue.com editor Chloe Malle. “It felt like this was the right time,” she says. With an unusual number of new creative directors in positions at major fashion houses, “It seemed like a good moment to bring in someone with a different perspective and a different generation who could look at things in a new way.” Wintour was appointed editor-in-chief in 1988, and generations of designers have come up under her famously acute and decisive judgments. She comes from a publishing family; her brother is a well-known journalist, and her father was the editor of the London <i>Evening Standard</i>. She credits him with steering her into a career in fashion, even suggesting that the teen-age Anna write down “editor of <i>Vogue</i>” as her career aspiration on a school form. “Working my first jobs in London, there [was] no money, there’s no staff, there’s no teams, so that you have to learn how to do everything,” Wintour says. “So, when I came to the States and there was a shoe editor and an underwear editor and a fabric editor, it was all so siloed. I felt very confident because I sort of knew how to do everything.” Wintour is also known for bringing politics to <i>Vogue</i>; she’s a noted Democratic supporter and donor. “I’ve been impressed by Governor Newsom, I think he’s certainly making a stand, and obviously I’m sure there’ll be many other candidates that will emerge, hopefully soon.” But, in this political environment, Remnick asks, “How do you make a case that fashion is important?” Fashion, she replies, “is always important. It’s a question of self-expression and a statement about yourself. . . . And, forgive me, David, but how boring would it be if everybody was just wearing a dark suit and a white shirt all the time?”</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>

Fred Armisen on “100 Sound Effects”

<p>The comedian Fred Armisen has a thing for sound. He’s a former punk musician and a master of accents, and he is now releasing a new album of sound effects. “I was lamenting that there aren’t sound-effects albums in our lives as much,” he tells <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/michael-schulman">Michael Schulman</a>. “I feel like they just used to exist more or they were more present. . . . And instead of just, you know, taking out my phone and just recording stuff, I wanted to treat it properly. Like, let me go to a recording studio and really do it. Let me try to mimic some things that I’ve heard before.” The result, “100 Sound Effects,” comes out this month on the venerable indie label Drag City. The track titles are themselves punch lines: “Guitar Tuned but Still Somehow Out of Tune,” “Supportive Booing at a Speech,” “Obligatory Applause at a Speech,” and “Terrified Audience at an Authoritarian Nation Official Event.” Talking about the importance of paying attention to the auditory world, Armisen and Schulman went out to record some classic sounds of New York City—and what they couldn’t find they faked.</p><p><i>This segment was produced with assistance from John DeLore. </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>

Donald Trump’s War on Culture Is Not a Sideshow

<p>The term “culture wars” is most often associated with issues of sexuality, race, religion, and gender. But, as recent months have made plain, when <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/tag/donald-trump">Donald Trump</a> refers to the culture wars, he also <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/09/01/the-trump-administrations-efforts-to-reshape-americas-past">means the arts</a>. He fired the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which Republicans want to rename for him. His Administration fired the national archivist and the Librarian of Congress, and pressured the director of the National Portrait Gallery to resign; it is reviewing the entire Smithsonian Institution, looking for what the President calls “improper ideology.” Some view these moves as low-hanging fruit for Trump, and a distraction from bad press about <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/fault-lines/donald-trump-jeffrey-epstein-and-three-conspiracy-theory-theories">Jeffrey Epstein</a>, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/donald-trump-self-own-summit-with-vladimir-putin">the Putin meeting</a>, and <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-financial-page/economic-reality-bites-trump-and-his-protectionist-trade-policies">tariffs</a>. But <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/adam-gopnik">Adam Gopnik</a> believes that interpretation is a misreading. The loyalty purge at institutions such as the National Portrait Gallery is a key part of his agenda. “Pluralism is the key principle of a democratic culture,” Gopnik tells David Remnick. Could we be following the path of Stalinist Russia, where a head of state dictated reviews of concerts, Remnick asks? “I pray and believe that we are not. But that is certainly the direction in which one inevitably heads when the political boss takes over key cultural institutions, and dictates who’s acceptable and who is not.” Gopnik recalls saying after the election that “Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert would be next.” “You would see them disappear,” he added. “Each time, we find a rationale for it or a rationale is offered. And it’s much easier for us to swallow the rationale than to face the reality.”</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 Extreme Heat Affects the Body

<p>The Korey Stringer Institute, at the University of Connecticut, is named after an N.F.L. player who died of exertional heatstroke. The lab’s main research subjects have been athletes, members of the military, and laborers. But, with the extreme heat wrought by climate change, even mild exertion will put more and more of us in harm’s way; in many parts of the United States, a combined heat wave and power outage could cause staggering fatalities. <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/dhruv-khullar">Dhruv Khullar</a>, a <i>New Yorker</i> contributor, practicing physician, and professor of health policy, visited the Stringer Institute to undergo a heat test—walking uphill, for ninety minutes, in a hundred-and-four-degree heat—to better understand what’s happening. “I just feel extremely puffy everywhere,” Khullar sighed. “You’d have to cut my finger off just to get my wedding ring off.” By the end of the test, he spoke of experiencing cramps, dizziness, and a headache. Khullar discussed the dangers of heatstroke with Douglas Casa, the lab’s head, who nearly died of the condition as a young athlete. “Climate change has taken this into the everyday world for the everyday American citizen. You don’t have to be a laborer working for twelve hours; you don’t have to be a soldier in training,” Casa tells him. “This is making it affect so many people, even just during daily living.” Although the treatment for heat-related illness is straightforward, Casa says that implementation of simple preventive measures remains challenging—and that there is much we need to do to better prepare for the global rise in temperatures.</p><p> </p><p><i>This segment originally aired on August 25, 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>

How Big Tech Sets the Agenda in Trump’s America

<p>Donald Trump is the most tech-friendly President in American history. He enlisted social media to win office; he became a promoter—and beneficiary—of cryptocurrency, breaking long-standing norms around conflicts of interest; and, in his second term, he brought Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest tech baron, to the White House, to disrupt the federal government in the manner of a Silicon Valley startup. While Musk was eventually ousted— or “flamed out,” as Katie Drummond puts it, for being “loud”—the influence of DOGE continues to reshape our lives in ways we have barely begun to understand. </p><p>Drummond is the global editorial director of <i>Wired</i>, and in this episode she talks with the <i>New Yorker</i> Washington correspondent <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/evan-osnos">Evan Osnos</a> about the unique intersection of technology and politics, which <i>Wired</i> has tracked assiduously. Tech companies and A.I., Osnos notes, are driving the agenda in the Trump Administration. “If they’ve learned anything from what Elon Musk was able to accomplish,” Drummond says, “it’s that this is open season.” Drummond also sounds a cautionary note about some of the doomsday framing of the A.I. revolution. Corporate leaders “want this technology to sound as big and daunting and powerful and impressive and scary as they possibly can,” she explains. In some cases, “that hyperbole masks the fact that these individuals have a stake in exactly the scenarios that they are outlining.”</p><p> </p><p><i>This segment originally aired on </i><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/political-scene"><i>The Political Scene</i></a><i> on July 26, 2025.</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>

A Palestinian Journalist Escapes Death in Gaza

<p>Mohammed R. Mhawish was living in Gaza City during Israel’s invasion, in the immediate aftermath of the October 7th attack. He witnessed the invasion for months and reported on its devastating consequences for Al Jazeera, The Nation, and other outlets. After his home was targeted in an Israeli strike, which nearly killed him, he fled Gaza. In The New Yorker, [he’s written](https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/treating-gazas-collective-trauma) about mental-health workers who are trying to treat a deeply traumatized population, while themselves suffering from starvation, the loss of loved ones, their own injuries—and the constant, remorseless death toll around them. “They were telling me, ‘We cannot wait for the war to stop to start healing—or for ourselves to heal—to start healing others,’” Mhawish relates to David Remnick. “I understood they were trying to heal by helping others heal.”</p><p> </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>

Spike Lee and Denzel Washington on a Reunion Making “Highest 2 Lowest”

<p>Spike Lee and Denzel Washington first worked together on “Mo’ Better Blues,” released in 1990. Washington starred as a trumpet player trying to make a living in jazz clubs; Lee, who directed the film, also played the musician’s hapless manager. They later worked together on “Malcolm X” and other films, but it has been nearly twenty years since their last collaboration, the hugely successful “Inside Man.” So the new film “Highest 2 Lowest” is something of a reunion. “I’ve become a better director, working with Mr. Denzel Washington,” Lee tells David Remnick.<i> </i>“It’s not about just what’s on the script.  It has to be deeper than that.” “Highest 2 Lowest” is an adaptation of a 1963 movie by Akira Kurosawa, who has been a major influence on Lee. “The script came to me first,” Washington explains. “I hoped that Spike would be interested in it, so I called him up. He said, ‘Send it to me.’ He read it. He said, ‘Let’s make it,’ and here we are.” Washington plays a music mogul targeted in a ransom plot; the feature is a crime drama with a message. “This film is about morals, and what someone will do and won’t do,” Lee says. The audience “will ask themselves, ‘If you’re in this situation, would you pay the ransom?’ ”  </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 Picks Three Favorite Clint Eastwood Films

<p>With seven decades in film and television, Clint Eastwood is undeniably a Hollywood institution. Emerging first as a star in Westerns, then as the embattled cop in the Dirty Harry films, the ninety-five-year-old filmmaker has directed forty features and appeared in more than sixty. The film critic Richard Brody <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/clint-highlights-the-artistic-modernity-of-an-old-school-man">just reviewed</a> a new <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/clint-shawn-levy?variant=43110377553954">biography</a> of Eastwood. “What fascinated me above all are the origins of Clint Eastwood-ness—the way he had an aura that preceded him before his career in movies.”  Brody joins David Remnick to pick three of the films that set Eastwood apart as an artist: “Play Misty for Me,” his 1971 directorial début; “Bird,” his bio-pic about Charlie Parker; and “Sully,” starring Tom Hanks as the heroic pilot Chesley Sullenberger.</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>

Your Questions Answered: Trump vs. the Rule of Law

<p>From the attempt to end birthright citizenship to the gutting of congressionally authorized agencies, the Trump Administration has created an enormous number of legal controversies. The Radio Hour asked for listeners’ questions about President Trump and the courts. To answer them, David Remnick speaks with two regular contributors: <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/ruth-marcus">Ruth Marcus</a>, who writes about legal issues and the Supreme Court, and <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/jeannie-suk">Jeannie Suk Gersen</a>, who teaches constitutional law at Harvard Law School. While the writers disagree on some significant questions—such as the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Trump v. CASA, which struck down the use of nationwide injunctions—both acknowledge the unprecedented nature of some of the questions from listeners. “They never taught you these things in law school, because he’s pushing on areas of the law that are not normally pushed on,” Marcus tells Remnick.</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>

Jamaica Kincaid on “Putting Myself Together”

<p>Jamaica Kincaid began writing for <i>The New Yorker</i> in 1974, reporting about life in the magazine’s home city. She was a young immigrant from Antigua, then a British colony; she had been sent to New York—against her wishes—to work as a nanny. Soon began a love affair with New York’s literary scene. “I had to change my name,” she tells David Remnick, “because Elaine Potter Richardson could not write about Elaine Potter Richardson. But Jamaica Kincaid could write about Elaine Potter Richardson.” Kincaid went on to write books about her family; about the dissolution of a marriage; about Antigua, and what colonialism feels like to people on a small island; and later gardening, which she took up with a passion after moving to Vermont. She once said, “Everything I write is autobiographical, but none of it is true in the sense of a court of law. You know, a lie is just a lie. The truth, on the other hand, is complicated.” Kincaid’s new book, “<a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374613235/puttingmyselftogether/">Putting Myself Together</a>,” is a collection of pieces that span almost half a century in print, and includes her first published piece in <i>The New Yorker</i>—an account of the West Indian-American Day Parade of 1974. </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 Brennan, Former C.I.A. Director, on Being Targeted by Trump

<p>In Donald Trump’s first term, he was furious that people were investigating his connections to Russia—“Russia, Russia, Russia,” he complained. Now, as Trump fulfills a campaign promise of retribution, his Administration has put the Russia “hoax” back into the headlines. They claim to have opened investigations into the former F.B.I. director James Comey and the former C.I.A. director John Brennan. A career C.IA. officer, Brennan served nearly thirty years, holding senior positions under Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama; his tenure included the controversial drone program, as well as the infamous Steele dossier on Trump during the 2016 election. David Remnick speaks with Brennan about why Trump officials are re-investigating old business. Are there real issues, or is this an attempt to direct the news cycle away from Jeffrey Epstein? “I've seen reports in the press that I’m under investigation,” Brennan points out. “But I’ve not heard anything from the Department of Justice, or the F.B.I., or the C.I.A., or the Office of Director of National Intelligence. No one has contacted me about anything.”</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 Drones and the Future of Warfare

<p>Since the end of the Cold War, most Americans have taken U.S. military supremacy for granted. We can no longer afford to do so, according to <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/07/21/is-the-us-ready-for-the-next-war">reporting</a> by the staff writer Dexter Filkins. China has developed advanced weapons that rival or surpass America’s; and at the same time, drone warfare has fundamentally changed calculations of the battlefield. Ukraine’s ability to hold off the massive Russian Army depends largely on a startup industry that has provided millions of drones—small, highly accurate, and as cheap as five hundred dollars each—to inflict enormous casualties on invading forces. In some other conflict, could the U.S. be in the position of Russia? “The nightmare scenario” at the Pentagon, Filkins tells David Remnick, is, “we’ve got an eighteen-billion-dollar aircraft carrier steaming its way toward the western Pacific, and [an enemy could] fire drones at these things, and they’re highly, highly accurate, and they move at incredible speeds. . . . To give [Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth credit, and the people around him . . . they say, ‘O.K., we get it. We’re going to change the Pentagon procurement process,’ ” spending less on aircraft carriers and more on small technology like drones. But “the Pentagon is so slow, and people have been talking about these things for years. . . . Nobody has been able to do it.”</p><p><i>Read Dexter Filkins’s “</i><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/07/21/is-the-us-ready-for-the-next-war"><i>Is the U.S. Ready for the Next War</i></a><i>?”</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>

Mayor Karen Bass on Marines in Los Angeles

<p>The city of Los Angeles has declared itself a sanctuary city, where local authorities do not share information with federal immigration enforcement. But L.A.—where nearly forty per cent of residents are foreign-born—became ground zero for controversial arrests and deportations by ICE. The Trump Administration deployed marines and the National Guard to the city, purportedly to quell protests against the operation, and the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, spoke of the government’s intention to “liberate” Los Angeles from its elected officials. This week, David Remnick talks with the city’s mayor, Karen Bass, a former congressional representative, about the recent withdrawal of some troops, and a lawsuit the city has joined arguing that the Trump Administration’s immigration raids and detentions are unconstitutional. (A federal judge has issued a temporary restraining order against the government.)  “I’ve described L.A. as a petri dish,” Bass says. The Administration “wanted to . . . show that they could come in and do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, and however they wanted. They were putting every other city in America on notice: ‘mess with us will come for you.’ ”</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>

Director Ari Aster Explains His COVID-Era Western “Eddington”

<p>“I’m personally desperate for art that at least attempts to grapple with whatever the hell is going on right now,” the writer-director Ari Aster tells Adam Howard, a senior producer of the Radio Hour. “ ‘Eddington’ is a film about a bunch of people who . . .  know that something’s wrong. They just—nobody can agree on what that thing is.” Many of us would prefer to forget a fearful time like the spring and summer of 2020, but Aster is relentless about putting his characters and his audience in states of anxiety, whether in his horror films “Hereditary” and “Midsommar,” or in the more genre-bending “Beau Is Afraid.” “Eddington,” his latest, is a neo-noir Western featuring a gun-toting, libertarian sheriff, played by Joaquin Phoenix, who confronts COVID, the George Floyd protests, and a mysterious A.I. data center that’s being built in his county.  It’s like a hand grenade tossed into the traditional summer-movie season.  The film is unapologetically political, but its satire doesn’t spare either side of the aisle. “My concern,” Aster admits, “is that I don't know how much of a hunger people have anymore for anything controversial or challenging.”</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>

Michael Wolff on MAGA’s Revolt Over Jeffrey Epstein

<p>The sense that the White House is covering something up about Jeffrey Epstein has led to backlash from some of Trump’s most ardent supporters. Even after the financier was convicted for hiring an underage prostitute, for which he served a brief and extraordinarily lenient sentence, Epstein remained a playboy, a top political donor, and a very good friend of the very powerful—“a sybarite,” in the words of the journalist Michael Wolff, “in that old -fashioned sense [that] ‘my identity comes from breaking all norms.’ ”  Wolff got to know Epstein and recorded, he estimates, a hundred hours of interviews with him. After Epstein was arrested again, in 2019, and was later found dead in his jail cell in what was ruled a suicide, it has been an article of faith within MAGA that his death was a conspiracy or a coverup, and the Trump campaign promised a reveal. Attorney General Pam Bondi initially asserted that she had Epstein’s so-called “client list” on her desk and was reviewing it, but now claims that there is nothing to share. Do the Epstein files have something incriminating about the President?  “The central point from which this grew is the [Bill] Clinton relationship with Epstein,” Wolff tells David Remnick. But the MAGA believers “seem to have overlooked the Trump relationship [with Epstein], which was deeper and longer.”  The men were “probably the closest friend either of them ever had,” until they reportedly fell out over real estate in 2004. Now Trump is frantically trying to control the narrative, pretending that he barely knew Epstein. This, Wolff thinks, “may be the beginning of Donald Trump’s lame-duck years.”</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>

Carrie Brownstein on Cat Power. Plus, “Materialists,” “Too Much,” and the Modern Rom-Com.

<p>For <i>The New Yorker’s</i> series <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/takes">Takes</a>, Carrie Brownstein—the co-creator of Sleater-Kinney and “Portlandia”—writes about an iconic rock-and-roll image. In the summer of 2003, the musician Chan Marshall, better known as Cat Power, was transitioning from an indie darling to a major rock artist, and the staff writer <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/hilton-als">Hilton Als</a> wrote a Profile of her in <i>The New Yorker</i>. Facing his piece was <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/08/18/cat-power-wayward-girl">a full-page portrait</a> of Marshall by the celebrated photographer Richard Avedon that puts her in the lineage of rock rebels of generations past. With a long ash dangling from her cigarette, a Bob Dylan T-shirt, and her jeans half unzipped, Cat Power “maybe doesn't give a shit about being in <i>The New Yorker</i>,” Brownstein thinks, “which I can't say is usually the vibe.” Avedon’s image reminds Brownstein “to keep remembering … to keep going back to that place that feels sacred and special and uncynical.” </p><p>Carrie Brownstein’s Take on <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/takes/carrie-brownstein-on-richard-avedons-portrait-of-cat-power">Richard Avedon’s portrait of Cat Power</a> appeared in the April 20, 2025, issue. </p><p>Plus, audiences have been bemoaning the death of the romantic comedy for years, but the genre persists—albeit often in a different form from the screwballs of the nineteen-forties or the “chick flicks” of the eighties and nineties. On this episode from the Critics at Large podcast, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss their all-time favorite rom-coms and two new projects marketed as contemporary successors to the greats: Celine Song’s “Materialists” and Lena Dunham’s “Too Much.”</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>

Janet Yellen on the Danger of a “Banana Republic” Economy. Plus, Susan B. Glasser on Why “We Are the Boiled Frog.”

<p>In conservative economics, cuts to social services are often seen as necessary to shrink the expanding deficit. Donald Trump’s budget bill is something altogether different: it cuts Medicaid while slashing tax rates for the wealthiest Americans, adding $6 trillion to the national debt, according to the Cato Institute. Janet Yellen, a former Treasury Secretary and former chair of the Federal Reserve, sees severe impacts in store for average Americans: “What this is going to do is to raise interest rates even more. And so housing will become less affordable, car loans less affordable,” she tells David Remnick. “This bill also contains changes that raise the burdens of anyone who has already taken on student debt. And with higher interest rates, further education—college [and] professional school—becomes less affordable. It may also curtail investment spending, which has a negative impact on growth.” This, she believes, is why the President is desperate to lower interest rates; he has spoken of firing his appointed chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, whom he has called a “numbskull” and a “stupid person,” and installing a more compliant chair. But lowering interest rates to further political goals, Yellen says, “are the words one expects from the head of a banana republic that is about to start printing money to fund fiscal deficits. … And then you get very high inflation or hyperinflation.”</p><p>Plus, “rarely have so many members of Congress voted for a measure they so actively disliked,” Susan B. Glasser noted in her latest <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/trumps-megabill-and-the-new-art-of-gop-capitulation">column</a> in <i>The New Yorker</i>, after the passage of a deficit-exploding Republican budget. Millions of people will lose access to Medicaid—a fact that the President lies about directly—and many trillions of dollars will be added to the deficit. Interest payments on the federal debt will skyrocket, and Trump is so desperate for lower interest rates that he seems poised to fire his own chair of the Federal Reserve and install a compliant partisan to head the heretofore independent central bank. “Anybody panicking about that in Washington?” David Remnick asks Glasser. “I think we are the boiled frog,” she replies. “We are almost panic-immune at this point, in the same way that Donald Trump has, I think, inoculated much of America against facts in our political debate. Even inside of Washington, there's so many individual crises at one time it’s very very hard in Trump 2.0 to focus on any one of them.”</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>