The New Yorker Radio Hour podcast

26:17

Thirty years ago, David Remnick published “ The Devil Problem ,” a profile of the religion professor Elaine Pagels—a scholar of early Christianity who had also, improbably, become a best-selling author. Pagels’s 1979 book, “ The Gnostic Gospels ,” was scholarly and rigorous, but also accessible and widely read. She changed how a lot of people thought about the Bible. Pagels went on to write “ The Origin of Satan ,” as well as works on Adam and Eve and the Book of Revelation. Pagels's upcoming book, “ Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus ,” is a summation of her lifetime of study, as it takes on some of the central historical controversies of Christianity, including the stories of immaculate conception and the resurrection. The daughter of a scientist, Pagels “was living in a world in which science defines what you can see, and there’s nothing else.” Then, as a teen-ager, she was born again after seeing the evangelist Billy Graham preach. “This was about opening up the imagination,” she tells Remnick. “I did feel like the sky opened up.” Her time in the evangelical community was brief, but her fascination with belief never faded. “I have a sense that what we think of as the invisible world has deep realities to it that are quite unfathomable.”…

1
Senator Chris Murphy: “This Is How Democracy Dies—Everybody Just Gets Scared” 24:23

6 days ago24:23

24:23

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

1
A West Bank Family on the Verge of Annexation 21:57

9 days ago21:57

21:57

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

1
Kaitlan Collins Is Not “Nasty”; She’s Just Doing Her Job 28:48

13 days ago28:48

28:48

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

1
We the Builders: Federal Employees Stand Up to DOGE; Plus, Celebrating 100 Years: Michael Cunningham on “Brokeback Mountain” 23:40

16 days ago23:40

23:40

Across the federal government, the number of federal workers fired under Donald Trump and DOGE currently stands at over a hundred thousand. Some of those workers have turned to a website called We the Builders. It was created by federal workers associated with the U.S. Digital Service as a resource for employees who have lost their jobs, who are afraid of losing their jobs, or who have a whistleblower complaint. The Radio Hour’s Adam Howard spoke with two of the site’s creators: Kate Green, who recently left the federal government for a job in the private sector, and a web developer who identifies himself as Milo – using a pseudonym, since he is still employed in the government. “Both the beauty and the tragedy is that the work the government does is largely invisible,” as Milo put it. “You don't always know that it is USDA inspectors who are working in the slaughterhouses, who are making sure that work is being done in a safe and sanitary fashion … But they give a damn about making sure that food is safe. If that goes away, that's not immediately visible to people. And they don't necessarily know that these people have lost their jobs or that food is going to be less safe until people get hurt or worse. And so, we want to make sure that people start to understand what the cuts in these programs actually mean.” Plus, this year, The New Yorker’s centennial, we’re revisiting some classics from the magazine’s past with a series called Takes . The novelist Michael Cunningham was already in his forties when Annie Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain”—about two young men working as shepherds who unexpectedly fall in love—was published. “ The New Yorker was not the first big-deal magazine to run a story about gay people. It wasn’t, like, ‘Oh, my God, a story, finally!,’ ” Cunningham recalls. But it made a huge impression nevertheless. “It was a story in The New Yorker about two gay men that was first and foremost a love story. . . . I didn't want to just read it; I wanted to absorb this story in a more lasting way.” Excerpts of Annie Proulx’s “ Brokeback Mountain ” were read by Monica Wyche.…

1
Atul Gawande on Elon Musk’s “Surgery with a Chainsaw” 27:00

20 days ago27:00

27:00

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

1
How Bob Menendez Came By His Gold Bars 23:51

24 days ago23:51

23:51

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

1
What Trump Has Got Wrong—and Right—About the War in Ukraine 37:50

27 days ago37:50

37:50

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

1
Alan Cumming on “The Traitors” and His Brush with Reality Television 16:04

4 weeks ago16:04

16:04

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

1
Does Tim Walz Have Any Regrets? 34:47

5 weeks ago34:47

34:47

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

1
Richard Brody Presents the 2025 Brody Awards 16:15

5 weeks ago16:15

16:15

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

1
John Fetterman on Trump’s “Raw Sewage,” and What the Democrats Get Wrong 34:35

6 weeks ago34:35

34:35

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

1
Celebrating 100 Years: Jia Tolentino and Roz Chast Pick Favorites from the Archive 16:15

6 weeks ago16:15

16:15

Staff writers and contributors are celebrating The New Yorker’s centennial by revisiting notable works from the magazine’s archive, in a series called Takes . The writer Jia Tolentino and the cartoonist Roz Chast join the Radio Hour to present their selections. Tolentino discusses an essay by a genius observer of American life, the late Joan Didion, about Martha Stewart. Didion’s profile, “ everywoman.com ,” was published in 2000, and Tolentino finds in it a defense of perfectionism and a certain kind of ruthlessness: she suggests that “most of the lines Didion writes about Stewart, it’s hard not to hear the echoes of people saying that about her.” Chast chose to focus on cartoons by George Booth, who contributed to Th e New Yorker for at least half of the magazine’s life. You can read Roz Chast on George Booth, Jia Tolentino on Joan Didion, and many more essays from the Takes series here .…

1
The A.C.L.U. v. Trump 2.0 33:44

7 weeks ago33:44

33:44

In Donald Trump’s first term in office, the American Civil Liberties Union filed four hundred and thirty-four lawsuits against the Administration. Since Trump’s second Inauguration, the A.C.L.U. has filed cases to block executive orders ending birthright citizenship, defunding gender-affirming health care, and more. If the Administration defies a judge’s order to fully reinstate government funds frozen by executive order, Anthony Romero, the A.C.L.U.’s executive director, says, we will have arrived at a constitutional crisis. “We’re at the Rubicon,” Romero says. “Whether we’ve crossed it remains to be seen.” Romero has held the job since 2001—he started just days before September 11, 2001—and has done the job under four Presidents. He tells David Remnick that it’s nothing new for Presidents to chafe at judicial obstacles to implement their agendas; Romero mentions Bill Clinton’s attempts to strip courts of certain powers as notably aggressive. But, “if Trump decides to flagrantly defy a judicial order, then I think . . . we’ve got to take to the streets in a different way. We’ve got to shut down this country.”…

1
“No Other Land”: The Collective Behind the Oscar-Nominated Documentary 23:41

7 weeks ago23:41