The New Yorker Radio Hour

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>

Kalief Browder: A Decade Later

<p>Kalief Browder was jailed at Rikers Island at the age of sixteen; he spent three years locked up without ever being convicted of a crime, and much of that time was spent in solitary confinement. In 2014, the <i>New Yorker</i> staff writer Jennifer Gonnerman <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/06/before-the-law">wrote about Browder</a> and the failings of the criminal-justice system that his case exposed: unconscionable delays in the courts, excessive use of solitary confinement, teen-agers being charged for crimes as adults, brutality on the part of correction officers. Ten years ago, on June 6, 2015, Browder died by suicide. On The New Yorker Radio Hour, Gonnerman shares excerpts from the interviews she recorded with Browder, in which he described the psychological toll of spending years in a twelve-by-seven cell.</p><p><i>This segment originally aired on June 3, 2016.</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>

U2’s Bono on the Power of Music

<p>In 2022, <i>The New Yorker</i> published a <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/09/26/from-boy-to-bono">personal history</a> about growing up in Ireland during the nineteen-sixties and seventies. It covers the interfaith marriage of the author’s parents, which was unusual in Dublin; his mother’s early death; and finding his calling in music. The author was Bono, for more than forty years the lyricist and lead singer of one of the biggest rock bands on the planet. As U2 sold out arenas and stadiums, Bono held forth on a range of social causes; he became “the definitive rock star of the modern era,” as Kelefa Sanneh puts it. Bono joined David Remnick at the 2022 New Yorker Festival to talk about his new memoir, “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0525521046">Surrender</a>.” “When I sang in U2, something got a hold of me,” Bono said. “And it made sense of me.” They discussed how the band almost ended because of the members’ religious faith, and how they navigated the Troubles as a bunch of young men from Dublin suddenly on the world stage. Bono shared a life lesson from Paul McCartney, and he opened up about the early death of his mother. “This wound in me just turned into this opening where I had to fill the hole with music,” Bono said. In the loss of a loved one, “there’s sometimes a gift. The opening up of music came from my mother.”</p><p><i>This segment originally aired on October 28, 2022.</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>

“Super Gay Poems”

<p>In 2024, Harvard University offered a course on Taylor Swift. It was popular, to say the least. That course was taught by a professor and literary critic named Stephanie Burt. In <i>The New Yorker</i>, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/stephanie-burt">Burt has written</a> seriously about comics and science fiction, but she’s also considered great poets such as Seamus Heaney and Mary Oliver. Now, Burt has put together an anthology titled, “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0674273117">Super Gay Poems</a>.” It’s a collection of L.G.B.T.Q. poetry, whose contents begin after <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1970/07/11/first-pride-march-after-stonewall-riot">the Stonewall uprising</a>, in 1969. When describing the collection, Burt tells the New Yorker Radio Hour producer Jeffrey Masters, “ There are poems where we read it and we say, Wow, that’s me. And there are poems where we read it and we say, Wow, I didn’t know that can happen; that’s not me; that’s new to me; that’s different. And there are poems where we read them and we just say, That’s beautiful. That is elegant. That is funny. That is sexy. That is hot. That is so sad that I don’t know why I like it, but I do. And I like making those experiences available to readers.”</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>

Bret Baier On Trump’s Love-Hate Relationship with Fox News

<p>The relationship between Fox News and Donald Trump is not just close; it can be profoundly influential. Trump frequently responds to segments in real time online—even to complain about a poll he doesn’t like. He has tapped the network for nearly two dozen roles within his Administration—including the current Secretary of Defense, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/pete-hegseths-secret-history">Pete Hegseth</a>, a former Fox News host. The network is also seen as having an outsized impact on his relationship with his base, and even on his agenda. Most recently, it’s been reported that Fox News’ coverage of <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/30/donald-trump-and-the-iran-crisis">the Iran-Israel conflict</a> played a role in Trump’s decision to enter that fight. And while the network’s right-wing commentators—from Sean Hannity to Laura Ingraham to Mark Levin—tend to grab the most headlines and stand as the ideological coloring of the network, “Special Report,” Fox’s 6 P.M. broadcast, anchored by Bret Baier, is essential to the conservative-media complex. Baier draws more than three million viewers a night, at times surpassing legacy brands like “CBS Evening News,” despite being available in half as many homes. Baier insists on his impartiality, but his network’s reputation as an outlet for the right and its connection to President Trump himself can make his job representing the news arm of the network more challenging. And, when it comes to Trump and his relationship to the media, Baier tells David Remnick, “I think it is this cat-and-mouse game. You know, for all of the things he says about the media . . . he’s reaching out and doing interviews with the same people he says are nasty.”</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>

America’s Oligarch Problem

<p>A mega-donor to the Republican Presidential campaign, Elon Musk got something no other titan of industry has ever received: an office in the White House and a government department tailor-made for him, with incalculable influence in shaping the Administration. But even with Musk out of Washington, it remains a fact that the influence of wealth in America has never been greater. As one case in point, Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” is estimated to raise or leave flat the taxes of about 57 million households, while the top five per cent of earners will have their taxes cut by more than $1.5 trillion. From his perch in Washington, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/evan-osnos">Evan Osnos</a> has for years been looking at the politics of hyper-wealth. While the wealthy have always held outsized influence, Osnos explains how tech tycoons, in particular, sought far greater influence under Donald Trump’s second Administration. “These are guys who really believed that they were the greatest example of entrepreneurship,” he tells David Remnick, “and that all of a sudden they found that, no, they were being called monopolists, that they were being accused of invading people's privacy, that in fact they had been blamed for the degradation of democracy, of our children’s emotional health, of our attention spans. They suddenly saw that there was a new President who would not only forgive any of those kinds of mistakes and patterns of abuse but would in fact celebrate them, and would roll back any of the regulation that was in their way.” Osnos’s new book, collected from his reporting in <i>The New Yorker</i>, is “<a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Haves-and-Have-Yachts/Evan-Osnos/9781668204481">The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich</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>

Why Israel Struck Iran First

<p>The Ayatollahs who have ruled Iran since 1979 have long promised to destroy the Jewish state, and even set a deadline for it.  While arming proxies to fight Israel—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and more—Iran is believed to have sought to develop nuclear weapons for itself. “The big question about Iran was always how significant is its apocalyptic theology,” Yossi Klein Halevi explains to David Remnick. “How central is that end-times vision to the Iranian regime? And is there a possibility that the regime would see a nuclear weapon as the way of furthering their messianic vision?” Halevi is a journalist and senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, and he co-hosts the podcast “For Heaven’s Sake.” He is a fierce critic of Benjamin Netanyahu, saying “I have no doubt that he is capable of starting a war for his own political needs.” And yet Netanyahu was right to strike Iran, Halevi asserts, no matter the consequences.  “The Israeli perspective is not … the American war in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s our own experience.” </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 Unfolding Genocide in Sudan

<p><i>The New Yorker</i> recently published a report from Sudan, headlined “<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/05/26/escape-from-khartoum">Escape from Khartoum</a>.” The contributor Nicolas Niarchos journeyed for days through a conflict to reach a refugee camp in the Nuba Mountains, where members of the country’s minority Black ethnic groups are seeking safety, but remain imperilled by hunger. The territory is “very significant to the Nuba people,” Niarchos explains to David Remnick. “They feel safe being there because they have managed to resist genocide before by hiding in these mountains. And then you start seeing the children with their distended bellies, and you start hearing the stories of the people who fled.” The civil war pits the Sudanese Army against a militia group called the Rapid Support Forces. Once allies in ousting Sudan’s former President, the Army and the R.S.F. now occupy different parts of the country, destroying infrastructure in the opposing group’s territory, and committing atrocities against civilians: killing, starvation, and widespread, systematic sexual violence. The warring parties are dominated by Sudan’s Arabic-speaking majority, and “there’s this very, very toxic combination of both supremacist ideology,” Niarchos says, and “giving ‘spoils’ to troops instead of paying them.” One of Niarchos’s sources, a man named Wanis, recalls an R.S.F. soldier telling him, “If you go to the Nuba Mountains, we’ll reach you there. You Nuba, we’re supposed to kill you like dogs.”</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>

Barbra Streisand on “The Secret of Life”

<p>Barbra Streisand has been a huge presence in American entertainment—music, film, and stage—for more than sixty years. She was the youngest person ever to achieve the EGOT, winning Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards by the age of twenty-seven. At eighty-three years old, Streisand is releasing a new album, “The Secret of Life: Partners, Volume 2.” It’s a collection of duets featuring Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, and Seal, along with younger artists including Hozier, Sam Smith, and Ariana Grande. Streisand sat down with David Remnick to talk about the record and the history behind it. Bob Dylan, for one, apparently had a crush on the singer from afar. “We were both nineteen years old in Greenwich Village, never met each other,” Streisand says. “I remember him sending me flowers and writing me a card in different color pencils, like a child’s writing, you know. And ‘Would you sing with me?’ And I thought, <i>What would I sing with him</i>?” Streisand talks with Remnick about her complicated childhood with her mother, who was jealous of her talent; her dislike of live performance; and the classy way to rebuff a come-on from Marlon Brando. </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 Seabrook on the Destructive Family Battles of “The Spinach King”

<p><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/john-seabrook">John Seabrook</a>’s new book is about a family business—not a mom-and-pop store, but a huge operation run by a ruthless patriarch. The patriarch is aging, and he cannot stand to lose his hold on power, nor let his children take over the enterprise. This might sound like the plot of HBO’s drama “Succession,” but the story John tells in “<a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324003526">The Spinach King</a>” is about a real family: the Seabrooks, of Seabrook, New Jersey. His grandfather C.F. Seabrook built a frozen-food empire in the farmland of South Jersey, which produced one third of the nation’s frozen vegetables at its height. The P.R. was about a hard-working and innovative farm family, but the business, behind the scenes, advanced with political corruption and violence against organized labor. Then C.F. destroyed his business and his family rather than cede control to his sons. John—a staff writer who has covered many subjects for <i>The New Yorker,</i> most notably music—talks with David Remnick about the consequences of inherited wealth, and overcoming a family legacy of suspicion and emotional abuse.</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 Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Doesn’t Understand About Autism

<p>When Donald Trump made an alliance with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., he brought vaccine skepticism and the debunked link between vaccines and autism into the center of the MAGA agenda. Though the scientific establishment has long disproven that link, as many as one in four Americans today believe that vaccines may cause autism. In April, Kennedy, now the Secretary of Health and Human Services, shocked the medical community and families across the country when he said that his agency would uncover the cause of autism—the subject of decades of research—once and for all. That news came even as Kennedy oversees drastic cuts to critical medical research of all kinds. Dr. Alycia Halladay, the chief science officer of the Autism Science Foundation, talks with David Remnick about the initiative, and the problems with focussing on environmental factors such as vaccines or mold. She also discusses why debunked claims and misinformation have such a powerful hold on parents. “You will do anything to help your child, so if it means a bleach enema”—referring to one extremely poisonous and falsely touted treatment—“and you think that’s going to help them, you’ll do it. It’s not because these people don’t love their children. It’s because they’re desperate.”</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>

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>