Dave Davies
Appearances
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
She's the Emma Bloomberg Associate Professor of Public Policy and Management at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and director of the People Lab, which does research on how to recruit, retrain, and support the government workforce and integrate evidence-based policymaking into government.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
You know, I wonder if, you know, workers are, while they're getting these messages from the top, are having their personal supervisors reassure them at all saying, look, this is not something we're doing. What you do is important. We want to keep doing it. Hang in there. Have you heard things like that?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
There have been media reports of people who were discharged with language about poor performance or similar language, but who have said in interviews that they've had nothing but positive performance reports. Generally speaking, what kinds of rights do they have to appeal these firings?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Earlier in her career, she was a policy advisor to Prime Minister George Papandreou of Greece, pursuing government reform at a time of financial crisis. Well, Elizabeth Linos, welcome to Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
We're going to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Elizabeth Lino. She is an associate professor of public policy and management at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
You know, it's not a new complaint that government is bloated and wasteful. And there have been efforts by past presidents to trim the workforce. Can you talk a bit about that and what kind of results they produced?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
There's a perception in all of this recent activity that the public payroll is bloated, not just inefficient, but just too many people. How does the federal workforce compare with, I don't know, past decades?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Can you think of an example of that, a particular service or function which got privatized and kind of simply displaced the workforce outside the federal employment?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
In writing about these recent reductions, you wrote, the administration seems to be weakening or fully eliminating teams that were doing exactly the kind of work DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, claims to value. Focus on data, evaluation, and customer service teams that have spent years.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
reducing bureaucratic red tape, modernizing service delivery, and bringing in critical tech talent. In other words, there were people out there doing the kind of work that Doge was supposed to do, how to get more for the taxpayer's dollar. Some might be skeptical of that statement. Can you give us an example of this?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
The administration's response to some of the complaints that have arisen, I mean, have – is essentially that, look, extreme times sometimes demand extreme measures. Government spending is out of control. Musk himself has said, yes, we will make mistakes, but we will correct them quickly. What's your reaction to that? Do you think things could get better with time?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Let's take another break here. We're speaking with Elizabeth Linos. She's an associate professor of public policy and management at Harvard University School of Government. We'll be back after this short break. This is Fresh Air. You know, earlier in your career, I mentioned that you were a policy advisor to the prime minister of Greece at a time of financial crisis.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
I mean, I wonder if you can share any of that experience that might offer insight into this effort to reshape the American government.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
You know, something like 80 percent of the federal workers live outside the Washington, D.C. area. What might be the economic impact of these job cuts on communities where workers live?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Now, before we talk about the specific measures that the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, as Elon Musk's outfit is called, let's just talk a little bit about the rules here. I mean, I know that most federal government employees work under the civil service system. Just tell us a little bit about how long we've had that, what it was intended to do.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Elon Musk and Doge claimed at one point $55 billion in savings. That's kind of been picked apart. Do we know how much of that is real?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Yeah, it's interesting. I've covered local government where payroll costs are a huge part of the government because you're engaged in direct service delivery, collecting trash and operating libraries. The federal government is different. I mean how much of the federal budget is payroll?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
This effort is really just underway. I mean, it's been a few weeks really. Do you have any idea what to expect in the future? Where do you think this is going to go?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
What's an example of one of these cuts that will be apparent to citizens soon?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Elizabeth Linos, thank you so much for speaking with us.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Elizabeth Linos is the Emma Bloomberg Associate Professor of Public Policy and Management at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Coming up, Maureen Corrigan reviews Last Scene, a book about newly freed African Americans in the 1860s who took out ads to find lost children, spouses, siblings, and parents. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
When slavery ended in 1865, newly freed black Americans began to search for their lost family members, taking out ads, seeking information about children, spouses, siblings, and parents. In her new book, Last Seen, historian Judith Giesberg tells some of the stories of people who placed those ads. Book critic Maureen Corrigan has this review.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. Here's a hypothetical question. If he wanted to, could Elon Musk establish a new bathroom breaks policy for more than 2 million federal employees?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed Last Scene by Judith Giesberg, who also founded the Last Scene Project website. On tomorrow's show, we hear from actor Natasha Rothwell. She returns to the third season of HBO's The White Lotus as Belinda, the compassionate spa manager from season one.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
She'll talk about the unique experience of shooting in Thailand, as well as her time as a writer and performer on Insecure and her own show, How to Die Alone. I hope you can join us. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Oren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman, and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producer is Molly Sivinesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
What has been the posture of Donald Trump and his administration and his supporters towards civil service?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Well, he hasn't, but since the Trump administration took office and gave Musk's Department of Government Efficiency a mandate to shrink the government, Musk has wielded an astonishing level of authority over the federal workforce.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Speaking in general, what protections does the civil service system offer government employees?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
You know, it's been a really turbulent few weeks for federal employees. I wonder, you know, you've done work with these folks. Have you talked to federal employees? What have they told you about their experiences?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
After gaining access to the Treasury Department's massive payment system, Musk and his team have dismissed thousands of employees, terminated countless contracts, and targeted two government agencies created by Congress for elimination. Last weekend, federal workers received an email instructing them to reply with five bullet points stating what they'd accomplished the previous week.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Is there one employee that maybe you could describe for us without identifying them by name or position?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
So let's talk about what's happened here. Do we know how many government employees have been taken off the payroll so far by Doge, more or less?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Let's pause on that for a second. I mean, what does that tell you about how government employees feel about their jobs and about this buyout offer, if we can call it that?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
So let's talk about the next big effort, which was the sweeping purge of employees who were on probation, presumably because they didn't yet have the requisite time to get full civil service protection so that they were more vulnerable. You've written that this might be one of the worst ways to trim a workforce. Why?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Musk added in a social media post that failure to respond would be taken as a resignation. That got pushback from several Trump-appointed agency leaders who told their employees not to respond. Much of what Musk has done is under court challenge, but President Trump has said he'd like to see him become even more aggressive.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Trevor Burrus So if I put these two things together, it seems as if the deferred departure, so we call buyout offer, was designed as supposed to get higher paid, probably more experienced people in government who – Doge probably thought were not that productive anyway, try to get them to leave. The result seems to have been that the departures were exactly what you'd expect in a normal year.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
So that didn't really work. But they are trimming a lot of people who presumably are bringing new energy and talent.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
We have an older workforce, I gather, from your writing in the federal government. What are the implications of that for this massive reduction effort?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
To help us understand these efforts to drastically reshape the American government, we've invited Elizabeth Linus to join us.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
You know, there was an extraordinary move, and I mentioned this in the introduction, which I think is a measure of Musk's influence in the government, that he got these emails sent to people last weekend instructing them to reply with five bullet points stating what they'd accomplished the previous week. There was some pushback. Some agency had said, you don't have to do that.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
But, you know, Musk added in this social media post that failure to respond would be taken as a resignation. What was your reaction when you heard about this?
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. For decades, scientists have dreamed of computers so sophisticated they could think like humans and worried what might happen if those machines began to act independently. Those fears and aspirations accelerated in 2022 when a company called OpenAI released its artificial intelligence chatbot called ChatGPT.
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
You know, the account that you give us in the book is pretty detailed and really interesting about how all this unfolded. One of the things that struck me is that some of the leading players in developing AI weren't just coders or computer nerds. A lot of them studied classics or philosophy or worked in completely unrelated fields. Is there a connection here?
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
Rivlin has worked for the New York Times, among other publications, and published 10 previous books. In 2017, he shared a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the Panama Papers. His new book is AI Valley, Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion Dollar Race to Cash in on Artificial Intelligence. Well, Gary Rivlin, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thanks for having me. Let's just start with a couple of basics.
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
I'm going to take another break here. We are speaking with Gary Rivlin. He's a veteran investigative reporter. His new book is AI Valley, Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion Dollar Race to Cash in on Artificial Intelligence. He'll be back to talk more after a short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
You made the point earlier that it's enormously expensive to develop AI. I mean the talent is high-priced and it takes tons and tons of computing power to develop the systems, to run them once you have them, which means not a couple three million dollars but hundreds of millions in some cases or more, which means that the big companies in tech – Microsoft, Google, Meta, we all know the names –
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
have an edge but it's interesting as I read your story that doesn't that's no guarantee of success is it sometimes it's kind of an obstacle having a big organization you know it's interesting let's use the example of Google let's give Google credit first they were so far ahead of almost everyone else
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
You know, we're used to computers being very smart. I mean, way back in 2011, Siri appeared on Apple products. What distinguishes artificial intelligence from just smart computers?
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
Right, right. And so a lot of times you see the big companies buying smaller startups that have shown promise. It's interesting that this company called OpenAI kind of became the public face of artificial intelligence in a way. It was A startup that didn't have the power of a Microsoft or a Google behind it. It was this guy, Sam Altman and some other folks. Elon Musk.
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
Yeah, Elon Musk among others, right, right. And there's a moment that was sort of a critical transformational point. when they released this version of ChatGPT. But that was preceded by a dinner at Bill Gates House, which you described, which the house being as absolutely as magnificent as you would expect Bill Gates House to be. Tell us about that evening. What happened?
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
We're going to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Gary Rivlin. He's a veteran investigative reporter. His new book is AI Valley, Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion Dollar Race to Cash in on Artificial Intelligence. We'll be back to talk more in just a moment. This is Rush Air.
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
You know, a few weeks ago, there was this development which kind of shook the stock market. This Chinese company called DeepSeek announced that they had created this artificial intelligence system at far less cost without the sophisticated microchips that American companies were using. It made Americans wonder, heavens, are we about to be overtaken? I don't know. Where does all this leave us?
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
You know, Reid Hoffman, the investor who's been very active in this area, is ultimately very optimistic about where AI is going to take us. Where are you on that scale?
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
Speaking of guardrails, what rules, if any, do you have for your kids and their use of chatbots?
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
You know, within three... You just told about a million people what you may or may not have done. God, I'm doing...
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
It's learned a lot of words. Okay. Now, this may be another artificial distinction, but new talk is now of artificial general intelligence, a great leap forward. What is that exactly?
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
Our guest veteran investigative reporter Gary Rivlin has burrowed deep into the AI world to understand the plans and motivations of those pushing artificial intelligence and what impact they could have for good or ill. In his new book, Rivlin writes that in March of 2023, there were more than 3,000 startup companies in the U.S.
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
A few days ago, I'm sure you saw this, Kevin Roos, the respected tech columnist for the New York Times, wrote a piece saying that we're going to quickly see companies claiming they have artificial general intelligence. And whatever you call it, these dramatically more powerful AI systems are coming and soon. And Ezra Klein of the New York Times opinion section says essentially the same thing.
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
Both of them agree we're not ready for the implications of this. Do you agree with that?
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
I mentioned in the introduction that President Biden had issued this executive order trying to establish some processes and guardrails and safeguards. Trump swept all that away saying, nope, that's onerous government regulation. Let innovation proceed. And it's funny. The last time you and I talked on this program, it was about –
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
Efforts to implement the Dodd-Frank reforms of the financial system. And one of the difficulties was that, was that that bill had general principles. But regulators had to actually spell out what it meant to regulate some pretty complicated contracts and instruments in the world of finance.
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
working on artificial intelligence, with new ones popping up at a rate of 30 per day. While AI is already in use in some fields, such as medical diagnosis, many believe the field is on the verge of a new breakthrough, achieving artificial general intelligence, systems that truly match or approximate human cognitive abilities.
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
And what you'd written about then was how the private interest had gotten in and kind of gummed all that up with – by disputing everything. But I'm wondering what does – what do regulations that control something as sprawling as AI – what does that look like? What do we need in terms of – how do we get prepared?
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
And they could learn how to pursue an agenda and keep it hidden, right, to deceive in their own interest. Yeah. So what would that look like in terms of – what are the dark fears here?
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
Some believe it could be as transformational to human society as the Industrial Revolution. But many fear where it may take us. A poll of AI researchers in 2022 found that half of them believe there's at least a 1 in 10 chance that humanity will go extinct due to our inability to control AI.
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
Wow. So what are some of the darkest fears? I mean, starting nuclear war, you set it to defend territory with drones and it gets – decides it needs to be more aggressive than the generals want to. I mean, what is it – what are the fears?
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
Right, right. You know, there's something that you wrote in the book. You wrote about a couple of tech guys, Tristan Harris and Azar Raskin, who had real experience in the tech world, who said they worried about AI because it's a technology whose creators confess they do not understand why their models do what they do. Is that literally true? That's kind of scary. Yeah.
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
In 2023, President Joe Biden issued an executive order imposing some regulatory safeguards on AI development. But President Trump quickly repealed that order upon taking office, saying Biden's dangerous approach imposed unnecessary government control on AI innovation. We've invited Gary Rivlin here to help us understand all these issues and developments.
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
One more thing about the national political scene. There's a lot of talk about tech bros and Donald Trump. Elon Musk is clearly a driving force in the administration's effort to cut federal workforce and contracts. There are a bunch of billionaires from the tech world at his inauguration. Do you think that there's an elite tech agenda to radically reshape society at work through Donald Trump?
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
Tell us what their training was like. This is really interesting. When they decided they are going to be sent to a foreign country to embed as in so-called illegal.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
brothers who had no idea their parents were Soviet agents born in Russia, until the day when the boys were 16 and 20 that the FBI raided their home in Cambridge, Massachusetts and arrested their parents. We'll hear more on that later.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
We need to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Sean Walker. He is an international correspondent for The Guardian. His new book is The Illegals, Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West. He'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
From the beginning of the Soviet Union, Walker writes, its leaders put enormous effort into training spies in the language and culture of targeted foreign countries and sent them on missions that could last for decades. The book explores the agents' efforts at espionage, but also the emotional strains they endured living a lie for so long.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
We're speaking with Sean Walker, international correspondent for The Guardian. When we left off, Walker was talking about Andrei Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova, a married couple recruited from their college in Siberia and trained for years to be sent on a mission to embed in the United States. So they had two sons, Timothy and Alexander, who as far as they knew were Canadian, right?
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
And the couple were making their way to the United States when to their shock, the Soviet Union was changing rapidly. Gorbachev was opening up the society and in 1989, the Berlin Wall falls and the satellite states around the Soviet Union are demanding independence. And this couple, who are known as Don Heathfield and Ann Foley, are in a motel room in Buffalo in 1991. And what do they see on CNN?
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
Right. So all of these agents that are all around – in 1991, I guess the KGB is disbanded, right? So the instructions stop coming. The money stops coming and they have to decide what they're going to do. What do all these agents that are around or the so-called illegals do? I guess they took different courses.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
The program largely fell apart with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but Walker says it's been revived in Russia under Vladimir Putin. Sean Walker is an international correspondent for The Guardian. He reported from Moscow for more than a decade and is the author of The Long Hangover, Putin's New Russia and the Ghosts of the Past. He currently divides his time among Warsaw, Kiev and London.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
All right. Well, we'll see what happens to this couple after we take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We're speaking to Sean Walker. He's an international correspondent for The Guardian. His new book is The Illegals, Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West. We'll continue our conversation after this break. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
So the Russian government begins to revive the program under Vladimir Putin. And so once again, they are now filing reports on things they're observing in the United States. Unfortunately for them, the FBI got onto them in part because a Russian agent who knew all about this, who was right in the middle of this program, flipped and started providing information.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
And in 2010, the FBI swooped in and arrested them. Tell us what happened that day in Cambridge.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
His new book is The Illegals, Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West. Well, Sean Walker, welcome back to Fresh Air. You know, so many countries spy on each other.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
Now what's fascinating about this is that at the time that this arrest happens, I mean the boys have never been told anything about their true identities. As far as they know, they're all Canadians and their grandparents live so far away they never see them. There are various excuses for that. The family had been planning – they had traveled a lot but they had been planning a trip to Moscow.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
They had been all over Europe but never to Russia. And so they had visas to go there. The couple are taken to an American court where they have to admit their guilt. And you wrote a fascinating story because you talked to the two boys in 2018 and wrote the story in The Guardian. But if I have this right –
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
The sons who were taken to a hotel by the FBI didn't really know what to think about any of this and they have a brief conversation with their mom in court. She's still wearing an orange jumpsuit from prison, right? What is that conversation like?
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
And one typical technique that is used is to give their agents cover when they go to another country by having them employed as a diplomat at the embassy or as a business person traveling in the host country. This practice you write about is very different. How common is this idea of training agents to impersonate an ordinary citizen and embed in another country?
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
Yeah, it is a fascinating story when suddenly their lives are turned upside down, these boys. The couple stays in Russia. You know, they hadn't been there in decades. What were their lives like? Are you still in touch with them? Are they comfortable with it? You did speak with Elena, right?
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
And what about the two boys, Timothy and Alexander? Do you know where they live, what they do, how they regard their parents?
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
You spent more than a decade reporting in Russia. You mentioned earlier that you're on a blacklist, which prevents you from traveling there now. How did that happen? What got you there?
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
Well, Sean Walker, we'll look forward to more of your reporting. Thanks so much for speaking with us.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
Sean Walker is an international correspondent for The Guardian. His new book is The Illegals, Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West. Coming up, jazz historian Kevin Whitehead pays tribute to the versatile tenor saxophonist Gene Ammons, born 100 years ago this week. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
Jazz tenor saxophonist Gene Ammons was born 100 years ago on April 14, 1925. Ammons was a second-generation jazz musician from Chicago who earned early attention for his fiery work in Billy Eckstein's big band and his staged duels with fellow saxophonists. Jazz historian Kevin Whitehead says Gene Ammons was one of the music's great and most popular saxophone stylists.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. The FX TV series The Americans portrayed a seemingly ordinary couple raising two children in a suburb of Washington, D.C., except that mom and dad were actually Soviet spies working on long-term assignment for the KGB.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
Kevin Whitehead is the author of New Dutch Swing, Why Jazz and Play the Way You Feel. On tomorrow's show, New Yorker staff writer Sarah Stillman reports on the shocking number of people who died of starvation or dehydration in county jails, often mentally ill people arrested for minor crimes.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
She finds many of the deaths occur in counties where private companies are providing correctional health services. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
You know, you're right that the roots of this program date back to the beginnings of the Soviet Union, really before the Russian Revolution. So what were Lenin and his compatriots doing that led to this kind of espionage?
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers and Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Challoner, Susan Yakundi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavey Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
In the 1920s and 30s when the new Soviet Union had a lot of international enemies, it ended up with a lot of these embedded spies, so-called illegals in the field.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
But things changed when there were these purges instituted by Joseph Stalin, the dictator of the Soviet Union, in which many people in many aspects of Soviet society, particularly government, were accused of disloyalty and tortured and forced to make public confessions. This happened to the illegals too. Why did Stalin target those who presumably were among the most loyal of his followers?
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
In this scene, the couple, played by Matthew Reese and Kerry Russell, are talking after learning that their new neighbor is an FBI counterintelligence agent. The husband's telling his wife maybe it's time to give up their ruse and defect to the U.S. government.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
And ends up with a very long prison term.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
I think one of the most interesting points of this description is when he is being repeatedly tortured, beaten and tortured by this operative who is trying to get him to sign a statement making this false admission that he had betrayed his country. And at some point he realizes what his interrogator is going through. Tell us about this.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
I want to move to the post-war era when Germany was defeated and it was clear to the Soviet leaders that their greatest rival would be the United States. They refer to it as the main enemy, right? So a new crop of these sleeper agents, these illegals were trained. and dispatched to the United States, typically going through Canada.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
They go to Canada and then they eventually make their way to the U.S. One difficulty was that this life was hard on these agents, mostly single men, and would lead them to make mistakes or abandon their missions. You want to give us an example of this? You cite some of this in the book.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
Another issue was – and this is fascinating that a lot of these agents had advanced education in the Soviet Union but they couldn't carry their degrees with them. So they would often get trained in blue-collar employment and then be sent to the United States in many cases, often through Canada. And then given instructions that were pretty unrealistic, right?
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
There was this guy who adopted the name Rudy Herman, right? He was a delivery man and what was his instruction?
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
Right. Well, I want to talk about the couple that we mentioned this earlier that actually were partly inspired the TV series The Americans. This was a couple that came from the Soviet Union to Canada and eventually to the United States and stayed for a long, long time. Their names were Andrei Bezrukov and Elena Vavilova, right?
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
The series, which earned a host of honors, including two Peabody Awards, was fiction. But our guest today, investigative reporter Sean Walker, has written a new book about the real-life espionage program that inspired it. Among others, Walker interviewed two members of the family the show was partly based on.
Fresh Air
The Real-Life Russian Spies Who Inspired 'The Americans'
They were actually recruited as college students from a university in Siberia, right, where they were both in school.
Fresh Air
His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
So when Celgene creates Revlimid and it's an effective treatment for this disease, they have to deal with the fact that you don't keep an exclusive patent forever. There are laws that allow generics to eventually come in, provide competition and lower prices. This company was remarkably effective in stalling that. How did they do it?
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
And the FDA and the Federal Trade Commission became aware of this, took some steps, but somehow were ineffective, right? Right.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Revlimid is one of the best-selling pharmaceuticals of all time, with total sales of more than $100 billion. This is also remarkable since the parent compound in Revlimid, thalidomide, was banned in most of the world in the 1960s, after it was shown to cause severe birth defects when given to pregnant women. David Armstrong is a senior reporter for ProPublica who focuses on health care.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
That's right. For a drug that was released in 2005. So that's a long stretch when Celgene kind of had the ability to raise the cost of the drug at its own discretion. What did you discover about the price hikes?
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
And you found some evidence of objections even within the company, right?
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
So that was the company, the CEO's response. A little complaining. Don't worry about it.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
We need to take another break here. We are speaking with David Armstrong. He is a senior reporter for ProPublica. His new story about the high cost of the cancer drug Revlimid is the price of remission. He'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
You know, along with the story that you've just published about the price of Revlimid, you have a companion story which asks the question, why do Americans pay more for prescription drugs? And you write that Americans do pay more than other wealthy countries for the same drugs. Why?
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Right. Well, President Trump has announced that he's assigned an executive order, which he says will require pharmaceutical companies in the United States to give Americans the lowest price they charge to other countries, which he says are much cheaper in Europe, for example. And he says that'll have a big impact. What's your sense of what we might expect from this effort?
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
He previously reported for STAT, the online service reporting on health and medicine, as well as the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal, where he shared a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 9-11 attacks. His new story about Revlimid is The Price of Remission. You can find it at the ProPublica website. Well, David Armstrong, welcome to Fresh Air.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Right. You know, there's been a lot of discussion of the federal government negotiating for better prices for Medicaid and Medicare, where the government is in fact the one buying the product. In the case of you know, controlling transactions among two private entities, right? I mean, an American drug maker and American buyers and those who buy in Europe.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
You're really talking about price controls, aren't you?
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Right. Now, the Biden administration has claimed credit for reducing prices of certain widely used drugs, I think particular diabetes medications.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
One of the things President Trump said when he was talking about his new executive order is that he plans to cut out the, quote, middlemen in drug purchasing who make a fortune without ever offering a product. I guess these are presumably the pharmacy benefit managers whose role I've read about but don't really understand.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
I want to begin with your illness and the drug that you need to treat it. Multiple myeloma is an incurable blood cancer. Tell us about its symptoms, the course it typically takes in the human body.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
You know, the drug companies say in their defense— that yes, they make a lot of money, but that's the cost of doing all the expensive research and testing that it requires to get new medication, to innovate. How well does their defense stand up?
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
You know, I've always wondered when, I mean, like in the case of Revlimid, I mean, the medical breakthroughs, the research breakthroughs occurred here, I guess, at a hospital in Arkansas and doctors in Boston. What kind of credit or compensation did they or their institutions get for this breakthrough drug?
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Is it typically the case that grants from the National Institutes of Health, which go to research hospitals and teaching hospitals all over the country, that when they achieve something that's lucrative for a drug company, they share in the proceeds?
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Going to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with David Armstrong. He is a senior reporter for ProPublica investigating health care. His new article about the high cost of the cancer medication Revlimid is the price of remission. We'll talk more after this break. This is Fresh Air. You know, we talked about the high cost that people pay for prescription medications.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
You've also written about many cases in which insurance companies deny doctors and patients reimbursement for certain tests or treatments that they have ordered. And you wrote extensively about a young man named Christopher McNaughton who suffered from a condition called ulcerative colitis. This really affected him in a bad way. He got it when he was in college. He finally got to the Mayo Clinic.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
He had a doctor, Edward Loftus, who put him on doses of two biologics, which are more expensive drugs because of the way they're produced. But his insurance company, United Health, scrutinized the cost. What ensued then?
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Right. Even delaying care could be terribly damaging, right? That's true.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Yeah. There was also a moment at which UnitedHealthcare said that the doctor who had diagnosed him and had provided this elaborate and expensive treatment, that he was agreeing that a lower dose of the medication would be medically appropriate, which was simply not true, right? Yeah.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
What did the United Healthcare officials say when you reach out to them for explanations? I mean, you know, you had these documents, these recordings. It must have looked terrible.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
You know, you and some of your colleagues at ProPublica looked into companies whose business it is to review claims that insurance companies have been submitted for reimbursement and help decide what to pay and what not to pay. I don't know if I'm accurately stating this. One of the biggest is called Evacor. There's another one, Carillon Medical Benefits Management.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
What did you find that these companies do? What role do they play?
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Right. Now, insurance companies note that there are tests and treatments that are unnecessary or ineffective and that some unscrupulous doctors and other providers pad their income by ordering tests and treatments that they know aren't indicated. I mean, that is a real thing, right? Yeah.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
It's interesting that you have a story in which you note that anyone who is having a dispute with their insurance company about a claim, payment for a claim, could get actually internal information from the company about its deliberations including memos, emails, maybe even phone recordings. How do they do this?
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
When you were reporting the story about Revlimid, you're doing this research, which you've done so many times, and you're also dealing with the effects of your own illness, the multiple myeloma. I wonder, did you or any of your editors have a concern that this might compromise your objectivity or offer an opening for critics to challenge your reporting?
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Well, David Armstrong, good luck with your treatment, and thanks for your reporting, and thanks for speaking with us. Well, thanks for having me. I enjoyed it. David Armstrong is a senior reporter for ProPublica. His new story about the high cost of the cancer drug Revlimid is The Price of Remission. We recorded our interview Monday.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Coming up, David Bianculli reviews a new documentary about the remarkable life of singer-songwriter Janice Ian, whose career dates back to her early teens. This is Fresh Air. Janice Ian, the singer-songwriter who had her first hit record as a teenager in the 1960s, is the subject of a new documentary, Janice Ian, Breaking Silence, now available to stream on demand.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Our TV critic David Bianculli has this review.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
And how long do typically patients live with this illness?
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
David Bianculli is a professor of television studies at Rowan University. He reviewed Janice Ian, Breaking Silence, now available on many streaming sites to view on demand. On tomorrow's show, writer Amy LaRocca joins us to talk about her new book, How to Be Well, a guide drawn from her search for balance in a world obsessed with wellness.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
From fitness fads to mental health trends, she tries to unpack what it really means to take care of ourselves. I hope you can join us. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Mali Sivinesper.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
And with the treatments you have now, what kind of shape are you in? How's your day?
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
So being the dogged reporter that you are, you decided there was a story here in the high cost of the drug. We should note that you don't pay $1,000 a pill, right? You're lucky to have a health plan which covers it. But that's what it costs, the health plan, right? Yeah.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
You know, thalidomide is such a notorious drug. Tell us a little bit about why it was originally developed and what caused the birth defects.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
And the thalidomide would basically cut off the development of blood vessels to the fetus?
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Right, which is ironically what made it helpful in fighting cancer tumors.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
So it's a fascinating story as you tell it in the article. I mean, there's a breakthrough at a hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas, aided in part by a tenacious woman named Beth Wollmer. You want to tell us that story?
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
And she went to Bologi, the doctor, and he said, try it?
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
So the doctor who was treating Jimmy, this multiple myeloma patient, I guess was involved in a study of 89 patients or so, I guess. And the results showed what?
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. Our guest today, David Armstrong, is a veteran investigative reporter who in 2023 was writing stories about challenges for patients in American health care when he was suddenly plunged into his subject in a deeply personal way. He was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, an incurable blood cancer.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
So it turns out there's a company called Celgene that held the patent for thalidomide. What did this discovery do to their financial position?
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
It's interesting that when they were using the thalidomide-based drug to treat AIDS patients, they kept the prices low. And there was an interesting explanation for this, which did not apply to the multiple myeloma patients. Do you want to explain that?
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
Because multiple myeloma patients wouldn't protest?
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
So we were saying that there was this discovery that thalidomide, this drug which had such a terrible reputation for causing birth defects, proved effective in treating multiple myeloma. And the patent was held by Celgene, this little pharmaceutical company. And it's interesting. You write that, I guess, not all patents are created equal. Celgene's patent was limited in a way.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
How and why does this matter?
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
He would soon be prescribed a drug called Revlimid, which is cheap to make but really expensive to buy. A single pill costs nearly $1,000, roughly the price of a new iPhone. Armstrong decided to research the development and marketing of the drug, and he discovered tactics used by drug companies to maintain monopolies on their medications as long as possible and keep prices high.
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
And when they finally released the drug in 2005, how expensive was it?
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
And what did it cost to manufacture a pill?
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His Cancer Meds Were Nearly $1K A Pill. How Did That Happen?
That heavy cost drew criticism, of course, including from some doctors treating multiple myeloma patients. How did the company respond to complaints that this was just too expensive? I mean the typical claim is, look, we spend a lot on researching and developing these drugs. I mean that really wasn't the case here, was it?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Right. And it's a little strange because civil service is not just a notion, right? It's a policy established by acts of Congress. What made those in Project 2025 think the president has the authority to sweep away this protection from thousands of employees just with an executive order?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
While fathers work, mothers stay at home with larger families. Graham observes that some proposals made in pursuit of that vision may be harder to implement, with deep cuts to government programs inflicted by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency. David Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Right. Now we should note that there were thousands of employees in the government that are not in civil service jobs, that serve at the will of the president and his appointees. So there is an idea here that policymakers should have some flexibility to change things if they want. And so a lot of jobs at the top aren't civil service.
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
I gather one of the things in the first Trump administration was that some of those went vacant either because they weren't kind of – didn't have it together to appoint them all or wanted to save money.
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
So do we have any idea how many of these 10,000 people in the Project 2025 database actually got jobs in the Trump administration?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Does it seem that this Trump administration has been more effective in filling those jobs, those non-civil service jobs with Trump supporters?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
All right, let's take another break here, then we'll talk some more. We are speaking with David Graham. He's a staff writer for The Atlantic. His new book is The Project, How Project 2025 is Reshaping America. He'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air. On NPR's through line.
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
His coverage of the 2020 presidential election won the 2021 Toner Prize for Excellence in National Political Reporting. He previously reported for Newsweek, The Daily Beast, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications. His new book is The Project, How Project 2025 is Reshaping America. Well, David Graham, welcome to Fresh Air. Oh, thank you for having me.
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
You write that the number one priority of Project 2025 is to restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children. As I mentioned in the introduction, you say this is a vision of an avowedly Christian nation but one that kind of resembles the 1950s while fathers work and moms stay at home with larger families.
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
How does the project suggest moving the country in this direction?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Right. I mean, you mentioned that they would want these government agencies to track data on, for example, for folks who receive temporary assistance to needy families, what people typically call welfare, which families are married, which ones aren't, and how they do. The Labor Department is supposed to produce monthly data on the state of the American family.
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
And you mentioned school performance would be tracked and measured against the family structure? Right. Did I get that right? Local school boards typically do that, right? I mean they don't do that. I mean the local school boards govern education. But the idea was that the – that what? The Department of Education would make local school boards do this or what?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
I want to begin by sort of what drove this project. I mean, this was years in the making, well in advance of the 2024 election. And there was a sense of emergency in those who were – getting this project going. I think Russell Vogt said that we are in the last stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country. The stakes were really high here for these people, weren't they?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Yeah. How do you push people in that direction? Is that clear?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Another proposal is having the Department of Health and Human Services enlist churches and faith-based organizations in providing guidance for low-income fathers.
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
What's an example of the coercive force of government employed here?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
And the family structure we're talking about, I assume, is not same-sex couples. It is not trans couples. It's a man and a woman, right?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
A lot of this stuff, of course, requires affirmative steps by a government implementing a policy, which kind of goes against the grain of the classical conservative notion that less government is better. And it also is in conflict with a lot of these really deep cuts inflicted by Elon Musk and the Department of Government efficiency. Have these folks – I don't know. What do they say about that?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
You say that they're paying enormous attention to trans people who are, of course, a small fraction of the population. But it's been a very politically important issue for the right in culture wars. Why so much of an issue, a focus on trans folks in the 2025 project?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Abortion is now in the hands of the state after the Supreme Court ruling. What does the plan envision for future policy on abortion?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
And does Project 2025 have a coherent policy on health care? I mean, for a long time, abolishing the Affordable Care Act was a goal of conservatives. Not so much lately. Where is Project 2025 on health care policy?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Let's take another break here, then we'll talk some more. We are speaking with David Graham. He's a staff writer for The Atlantic. His new book is The Project, How Project 2025 is Reshaping America. We'll talk more after this break. This is Fresh Air. You know, it's interesting. There's so many policy areas that are addressed in Project 2025.
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
And there are moments where it seems that the authors are torn between advocating for traditional conservative policies and those in some cases that President Trump has articulated. They're not quite sure what to say. One of these is trade policy, right?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
You know, you said an article in 2016 in the Claremont Review of Books. It was anonymous at the time, although the author was later revealed called The Flight 93 Election. What was the message here?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
So this – the project advocates for a more aggressive use of executive power. But in this case, not quite sure what it should do with it.
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
What about foreign policy and national security? I mean issues like the war in Ukraine and the European alliances?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Right. And in some ways, they are much more aggressive towards China than Trump has been, right? I mean, Trump often praises Xi Jinping. He has been kind of lukewarm about the defense of Taiwan. There are differences here, aren't there?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
They meaning Project 2025, right? Right. The other interesting thing is that I gather Project 2025 really wants the United States to compete with China for influence around the world. I mean China has this Belt and Road Initiative where it's spending a lot of money on infrastructure projects in the developing world. They want the United States to get in there and play in that arena also?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
And when you say USAID, you mean that's the acronym for Agency for International Development, this tool of foreign policy, right? And international aid. Yeah.
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Right. I believe Elon Musk's phrase was, I just put AID in the wood chipper. Let's look at some other policy areas. One is in the environment and climate change. You write in your book that Project 2025's discussion of environmental issues and energy production feels like a dispatch from an alternate world. What do you mean?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Does it try and refute climate science or argue that it's political propaganda?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Does the project share Trump's hatred of wind power?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
I mean what did the research show about the problem with the Texas blackout?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
You know, I'm wondering how the leaders of Project 2025 view its impact on the administration. It kind of seems as if the administration has adopted its efforts to expand the power of the executive branch in very aggressive ways and its advocacy of a tough immigration crackdown. But a lot of the other policy programs are kind of not really embraced, are they?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Democratic attacks on Donald Trump often cited Project 2025, a policy blueprint for his second term developed by the Conservative Heritage Foundation.
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Yeah. So what is the Heritage Foundation up to in the coming years? What's next?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Well, David Graham, thank you so much for speaking with us.
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
David Graham is a staff writer for The Atlantic. His new book is The Project, How Project 2025 is Reshaping America. Coming up, David Bianculli reviews a new PBS documentary about the history and impact of our public library system and its many opponents and controversies. This is Fresh Air.
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Beginning today, the PBS series Independent Lens presents a new documentary about the history and impact of our public library system and also a look at its many opponents and controversies. The program is called Free For All, The Public Library.
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Wow. Now, the main document that was presented was called Mandate for Leadership, which is actually kind of a reboot of a 1980 Reagan-era document, I guess. You say that this is a disorienting read. Why?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
David Bianculli is a professor of television studies at Rowan University. He reviewed the new PBS documentary Free For All, The Public Library, part of the Independent Lens series. It's also streaming on the PBS app and YouTube channel. On tomorrow's show, a once-fringe movement to increase birth rates is exploding into the mainstream, but it's not just about having more babies.
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
We'll explore the politics of pronatalism, from Elon Musk's crusade against population collapse to ideas about genetic engineering and the so-called Great Replacement. We'll speak to NPR's Lisa Hagen and demographer Karen Guzzo. I hope you can join us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show.
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Right, right. You can find it online, 30 chapters on every government agency from the Commerce Department to the intelligent community and so on. You write that one prong of this Project 2025, a playbook for the first six months of the administration, was never made public. Still not public?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
There were a few major players that really organized this project. Do you want to just mention two or three and tell us who they are?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Democrats targeted many proposals from the plan, such as replacing thousands of civil servants in the government with Trump loyalists and abolishing the Department of Education. In response, candidate Trump sought to distance himself from the effort.
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
And he sort of openly embraces the notion of Christian nationalism.
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
You know, a lot of our listeners I'm sure have heard of Project 2025. A lot of people have. And I think it's thought of as a policy document with ideas that they hoped Trump would embrace. And it is that. But it's not just that. It was an organization. I mean the project wasn't just a document. It was an organization with a lot of people.
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
And part of it was a personnel recruitment and training operation. And I gather that's because a lot of the people running this project, some of them had served in Trump's first term and felt it was not effective because it was undermined by those running the government, both career civil servants and even some political appointees.
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
What were their complaints about those they saw who failed to implement Trump's agenda?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
That's one of the organizers of this thing. Yeah, go ahead.
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Right. So they developed a list of as many as 10,000 people who they thought would be good candidates for working in the second Trump administration. What kind of folks were these?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
But once in office, Trump pursued many of the initiatives outlined in the project. An analysis by the publication Bloomberg Government found that 37 of the 47 executive actions taken in Trump's first few days in office directly or partially matched recommendations from Project 2025.
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Right. I think Paul Danz used this phrase, people who figured it would be given blood for the movement. That's to say they've paid a price. They've been canceled online or punished in some way for their beliefs. Exactly. Yeah. So they established a lot of training for these folks. And you can see on the website some of the main topics. What did this training consist of?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
You know, it's interesting that the authors of Project 2025 couch it as a defense of the Constitution. And they say that Congress has abdicated too much power to the executive branch, which I think would surprise a lot of people because I think what they see Trump is doing is expanding executive power. Is there a contradiction here?
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Right. Well, I guess the question is which president is in power. One of the things that they advocate is use of impoundment. This is a term some people will know to explain this.
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Our guest, journalist David Graham, has a new book about the origins, authors, and policy proposals of the more than 900-page report the project produced. Graham writes that the project's vision of America is that of an avowedly Christian nation, but following a very specific narrow strain of Christianity. In many ways, he writes, it resembles the 1950s.
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
Another expansion of presidential power that is conceived of in the plan and I guess in the reality we've seen so far in the Trump administration is treating the Justice Department and the FBI not really as independent investigative and prosecuting agencies but as tools of the president's will. That's explicit in Project 2025? It is.
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
There's also the matter of civil servants and the government. Civil service is an institution that's close to 100 – I guess more than 100 years old, right? More than 100 years old. The idea being that you want people to be hired not for their political connections but for their qualifications and that they're –
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How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America
that their actions in government should be to serve the public and not politicians, and they are protected in that way. President Trump had this idea of changing that with something called Schedule F in the first Trump term, which I gather he did issue an executive order about, but it wasn't really effective. Do you want to explain what that was supposed to do and why it didn't work?
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. If you follow the news, you know these are strange and turbulent times in Washington as the Trump administration sinks to shrink and recast the federal government with blinding speed and fury. Trump's opponents would no doubt like to see Congress assert its authority to stop the dismantling of agencies and programs its past members have authorized.
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Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
And there's plenty of evidence in stories you tell in the book that if people forget the MAGA base, they will pay for it. And so it's not just Donald Trump. It's the people who have come to believe. Right.
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Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
You know, people know of Steve Bannon. They may know he has a podcast, but it's a four-hour daily podcast. Is this right?
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
We recorded our conversation yesterday. Annie Carney, Luke Broadwater, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thank you so much for having us. Yeah, thank you. That is a colorful title. And I thought we would begin with an audio clip of a moment in 2024 which kind of captures some of the craziness of this particular Congress and its breakdown in civility.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
We're going to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Luke Broadwater and Annie Carney. Both are correspondents for The New York Times. Annie Carney covers Congress. Luke Broadwater covers the White House. Both of them were deeply involved in covering the last Congress, and they have a new book about it. It's called Madhouse.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
How Donald Trump, MAGA Mean Girls, a former used car salesman, a Florida Nepo baby, and a man with rats in his walls broke Congress. We'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
You know, Annie Carney, you were saying that – I think you both mentioned this – that there were cases in the last Congress where there were Republicans who publicly towed the MAGA line and were good soldiers but that privately had serious qualms about it. And I'm wondering if you are hearing privately from Republican members these days whether they're worried about –
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
The cuts that the administration is making through Elon Musk and Doge and the effect of tariffs, are they concerned about what this is going to do to Republicans' popularity?
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
This was a hearing of the House Oversight Committee where the ostensible purpose was to consider a motion to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress. The sound we'll hear, you might have heard it before. It's a little confusing at moments. We'll hear eventually from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
I'm wondering how they feel about Elon Musk generally. I mean this – he came in and got a hold of the payment system and the treasury department and was able to essentially – as he said, it put AID in the wood chipper, the agency for international development. How do they view his role?
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
Trump has a big agenda of tax cuts coming, apart from all that he's doing to restructure the government. He wants to make the tax cuts that were made in the last administration permanent, and that's probably going to have a big impact on the deficit, increasing it. How does that look to play in the Congress?
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
But it begins when Texas Democrat Jasmine Crockett is criticizing Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. And Greene makes an insulting comment about Crockett's eye makeup. Let's listen.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
Let me reintroduce you again. We are speaking with Annie Carney and Luke Broadwater. Both are correspondents for The New York Times. Their new book about the last Congress is titled Madhouse. We'll talk more after this short break. This is Fresh Air. One of the reasons that the last congress that you wrote about was so chaotic was that Republicans had a majority but a very narrow one.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
And you had about 20 or so members who simply were going to follow their own dictates and couldn't be persuaded by Kevin McCarthy or anybody else to do what the leadership wanted. Who were they? What were they after?
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
Right. And he's done a complete 180 on Ukraine. I mean, one of the things that you describe is when Biden was still in office and they wanted to get that military aid package for Ukraine done, that Mike Johnson actually quite skillfully negotiated an arrangement where he could make that happen. Yes.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
Those guys are all in a deep state now. It just isn't a great gig, really, which is surprising, you know, because, I mean, look, this is a dream come true. You're a member of this body that Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy served in. Why was it a bad gig?
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
I was also just surprised to read that a lot of members sleep, don't rent apartments. They actually sleep in their offices and then shower in the members' gyms.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
We haven't seen much of that, but we have seen bills introduced to enable a third Donald Trump term, rename Dulles Airport after him and carve his image into Mount Rushmore. Whatever happens, our two guests today have the experience, insight and sources to tell the story.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
Good times under the Capitol Dome. That was an insane night. Yeah, well, so either of you can pick this up. But just tell us a little. Give us some context for this and what it tells us about this Congress.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
Sorry to interrupt, but I read this in the book and I was astonished to read this.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
Annie Carney and Luke Broadwater are both veteran reporters who cover Washington for The New York Times, and they've written a new book about the 118th Congress, the one elected in 2022.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
You know, it's interesting because I remember in the book where you describe this shift in strategy by Democrats. We're not going to sort of stay above the fray. We are going to engage and give it right back to them.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
And part of the theory was that Republican members would think about what their future careers will be like if they have embarrassed themselves and adopted things which, you know, defy reality or decorum. Did that strategy work at all?
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
It's a look inside the corridors of power when Democrat Joe Biden was president, dealing with what the authors say was the first MAGA-controlled Congress, one that fully adopted the extremism and stagecraft of Trumpism. There are fascinating accounts of high stakes negotiations and of House members cursing, insulting and threatening each other, but not a lot of serious legislating.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
One other thing that I just – a general observation about the account of this congress that you provide us is how many times there are physical threats among members. And I mean in many cases, leaders of congress, things – say that again and I'll kick your you-know-what or I'll drop you. You both have been around a while. I know, Luke, I know you covered City Hall and the Maryland legislature.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
Have you ever seen anything like this?
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
Reporters are sometimes criticized for revelations in books that people wish they had read in the newspapers. As you did this, did you put some of this stuff in the paper or did you mostly save it for the book?
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
The House passed only 27 bills that became law in its two-year session, the lowest number since the Great Depression. Before joining the New York Times in 2018, Annie Carney worked at Politico, the New York Daily News, and the New York Post.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
Well, I want to talk about what's going on these days in the Capitol. I mean, your book deals with the two-year period that ended, I guess, in January. But boy, a lot's happening right now. And Democrats are trying to figure out how to deal with Donald Trump, who is riding a wave. And with his team trying to reshape government in a dramatic fashion.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
And there are real divisions within the Democratic Party on what to do about it, how to handle it. You've written about how the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, kind of has a take-it-all-on approach, respond to everything, whereas Hakeem Jeffries, the leader of the Democrats in the House, kind of picks his battle. I guess a difference in emphasis.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
I'm wondering what you are hearing from rank-and-file Democrats in Congress about this debate.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
Luke Broadwater worked for nearly a decade at the Baltimore Sun, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for stories about a scandal at the state's largest hospital system that led to the resignation of Baltimore's mayor. Carney and Broadwater's new book is Madhouse, how Donald Trump, MAGA mean girls, a former used car salesman, the Florida Nepo baby, and a man with rats in his walls broke Congress.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. If you enjoyed the HBO series Succession about the children of an aging media mogul competing to inherit his business empire, you'll want to read the new article in The Atlantic by my guest, McKay Coppins.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
James Murdoch, you write, was the executive who became the public face of the scandal, even though he says he was really not deeply involved in running those papers. When this broke out, what posture did Rupert Murdoch take towards his son in this crisis?
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
It's on The Atlantic's website, and it's also the magazine's April issue cover story. Well, McKay Coppins, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thanks for having me. Early in the piece, you describe a day in the case when James Murdoch is being deposed. He's in a Manhattan law office under oath, and one of his dad's lawyers is asking questions. Do you want to just set the scene? Tell us what happened.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
We need to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with McKay Coppins. He's a staff writer for The Atlantic. His new article is Growing Up Murdoch, James Murdoch on Mind Game, Sibling Rivalry, and the War for the Family Media Empire. He'll be back to talk more after a short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air. So I want to move us into the Trump era here.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Lachlan Murdoch, the elder son, had left the company. He had been in Australia for many years. And then in 2015, he moves back, gets an office in Los Angeles. He's with the company. James, the younger brother, has an office in New York, putting them in kind of an awkward position, both being prominent executives in the company.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
And then in 2015, Donald Trump appears on the scene as a presidential candidate. One question I've always had is how much Rupert Murdoch is motivated by an ideological agenda as opposed to accumulating in wealth and power. And you write that in 2016, Rupert Murdoch was openly scornful of Trump's candidacy at first saying his election would be the end of the Republican Party.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
But once he had momentum, you write the Fox News primetime lineup turned into a four-hour Trump commercial. How did James regard this, his turn in Fox News?
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
And Lachlan was still in the company. Do we know what his attitude was towards the Fox News embrace of Trump and what his relationship was like with James during this time?
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
So James gradually became a bit more public about his views. I mean particularly he put out a statement about Trump's remarks on the march in Charlottesville saying – Trump saying that there were very fine people in the Tiki Torch march there. And then there was another occasion when there were terrible forest fires in Australia.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
And some media, I think the Daily Beast, asked for comment about, well, what about the fact that the Murdoch papers in Australia ignore climate change as an element of all this? What happened?
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
It's about the real-life drama involving the children of 93-year-old Rupert Murdoch and their battle over who will someday lead his business properties, most prominently Fox News. And even if you didn't see Succession, the story is still fascinating, both because of the intense family dynamics and the stakes in this conflict.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
We are speaking with McKay Coppins. He's a staff writer for The Atlantic. His new article online is Growing Up Murdoch, James Murdoch on Mind Games, Sibling Rivalry, and the War for the Family Media Empire. We'll continue our conversation after this short break. This is Fresh Air. So let's get to the court battle that's at the heart of this story.
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
There was a plan in place for many, many years, a trust which said that when Rupert Murdoch passed away, that the voting rights in the company would be split among four siblings, Lachlan and James, the two boys, Liz, their sister, and then Prue, who was their sister from a previous marriage.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
And to a lot of observers, that meant that it might be James who had the upper hand over Lachlan because it was assumed that the two sisters might work with him in terms of the future direction of the company. This was problematic for Rupert Murdoch, right? So he hatches a plan. What does he do?
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Right. Now, we should note that it was an irrevocable trust, right? I mean it was not supposed to be meddled with and it spread the wealth in one way. But this involved the voting rights for control of the direction of the company would be four equal ways. And the only way in this irrevocable trust it could be amended would be if you could show – tell me if I have this right –
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
that the proposed change was in the interest of all of the beneficiaries. In other words, they had to show that putting Lachlan in charge was better for everybody, right?
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
What kind of communications were there among the parties? I mean did Rupert – I mean did he arrange a meeting with the four siblings? Did he approach them individually? I mean what do we know about how he presented it and how they reacted?
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
In the depositions, which were really brutal as you know, there was one section that you talked about where Rupert Murdoch's lawyer was suggesting to James in his deposition that Fox's value actually derives from – well, let's just say something other than journalistic standards. Tell us about this.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
We're going to take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with McKay Coppins. He is a staff writer for The Atlantic. His new article now online is Growing Up Murdoch, James Murdoch on Mind Game, Sibling Rivalry, and the War for the Family Media Empire. He'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
This trial began in September 2024 in this county courthouse. James took the stand. What did he say the experience was like for him emotionally?
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
So after all this testimony, it didn't go particularly well for Rupert. It went much better for James and his siblings' side of it. And this all came down to a single man, Edmund Gorman, who's the Washoe County Probate Commissioner. This multibillion-dollar company and all this comes down to one man, one county official, and he issues a clear ruling, right?
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Rupert and Lachlan have appealed. Is it likely to stand, do you think? What's the course from here?
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
You note that James and his wife Catherine have spent millions on political contributions, mostly to Democrats I think and to pro-democracy causes and other philanthropic work, particularly climate change. Is it fair to assume that if this verdict holds that when Rupert Murdoch dies, Fox News is not going to be the same product?
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
I'm not sure any of us would be still speaking to our siblings if we had gone through a legal process in which everything that any of us had said about each other in person or in texts or messages or conversations behind our back, if all that came flooding back, boy, it would be awful.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
You know, I mentioned the HBO series Succession in the introduction. You know, I thought it was great television, but I wouldn't have guessed that the people who actually lived lives like this would be interested in it because, I mean, come on, it's television. But actually, you discovered that members of the family were into it, right?
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
McKay Coppins, thank you so much. This is interesting. Thank you. McKay Coppins is a staff writer for The Atlantic. His new article is Growing Up Murdoch, James Murdoch on Mind Games, Sibling Rivalry, and the War for the Family Media Empire. On tomorrow's show, Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has eliminated the jobs of thousands of government employees and
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
and left many more uncertain about their positions. We'll talk with Harvard professor of public policy Elizabeth Linos about what that means for federal workers and the rest of us who depend on government services. I hope you can join us. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Diana Martinez.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our senior producer today is Teresa Madden. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Monique Nazareth, Faya Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman, and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavey-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
All right. Well, let's talk about this story. I mean, the Murdoch story. I mean, Rupert Murdoch actually inherited a newspaper from his dad who had an interesting background in journalism. And then he went off on this swashbuckling campaign to acquire one paper and then use the leverage on that to get another and another. And at the time, he was 40.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
He was the most powerful media owner in Australia. He moves to the United Kingdom and buys tabloids and eventually a broadsheet there, eventually ends up in the States where he gets the Wall Street Journal and starts Fox News, which was a big success. I wouldn't normally assume that someone who owns media businesses would necessarily want his kids to get involved in the family business.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
The outcome could mean big changes for Fox News, which Coppins describes as the most powerful conservative media force in the world. Late last year, the parties in this family dispute squared off in an epic court battle over the succession plan for the Murdoch empire.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
They have resources. They could get educations, do whatever they want. Did Rupert Murdoch consciously try to bring his children, get them interested in the media?
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Now, he had two sons, Lachlan and James, born 15 months apart. Lachlan was a little older. James was a little younger. And the other major character in this is their sister, Liz. Those three were the children of Murdoch's second wife, Anna. There was a fourth, Prudence, known as Prue, and she was the daughter of his previous marriage.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
But those three, James, Lachlan, and Liz, were the main characters for most of this drama. James and Lachlan would both eventually play prominent roles in the businesses and would be rivals for succession over the years at various times. But James didn't start out that way, did he? I mean he went a whole different direction out of college and thereafter.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Rupert Murdoch wanted to amend the family trust to ensure his eldest son Lachlan would take the helm, shutting out his younger son James, who was troubled by Fox News' hard right bent.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
So we were talking about the Murdoch family. James, the younger of the two sons, wasn't in the business at first, but he eventually did get in. This is interesting. One of the things that I found puzzling watching the succession, the HBO drama, was seeing each of these children assuming that they're ready to take over this big company or even a division of a big company.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
I mean, to me, they just looked like regular people, but they had no problem thinking they could manage hundreds of people and budgets of Hundreds of millions of dollars. And then in your story, I see that James Murdoch at age 27 gets sent to run an Asian satellite TV company that his father owned called Star, which was losing money. And he does it and succeeds. Yeah.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Coppins writes that the trial testimony and depositions and discovery in the case were often intensely personal, bringing up years of painful secrets, scheming and manipulation, lies, media leaks, and devious betrayals. For his story, Coppins had extensive interviews with James Murdoch and his wife Catherine. Their side prevailed in the trial verdict, which is under appeal.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Now, Lachlan, the other son, the eldest son, who had been in the company longer and had seemed to be the heir apparent to the family business, eventually got fed up after some disputes internally and in 2005 resigned and moved his family back to Australia, right? Out of the succession picture? Yeah.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Right. He ended up moving to the UK and becoming quite the powerful and influential person, having dinner with the prime minister. Some said that he sort of was striking a figure kind of like his father. Is that fair? Yeah.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
McKay Coppins is a staff writer for The Atlantic and the author of two books, The Wilderness, about the battle over the future of the Republican Party, and Romney, A Reckoning, a biography of Mitt Romney. The online version of his new article is Growing Up Murdoch, James Murdoch on mind games, sibling rivalry, and the war for the family media empire.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Right. I mean you're right that in Sky, it's a British satellite TV company that he actually brings in people who have standards of conduct and business negotiation which weren't the typical Rupert Murdoch way of doing things.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
In 2011, the Murdoch family business was hit by an epic scandal, revelations by The Guardian and other media that reporters at the Murdoch-owned paper The News of the World had used private investigators to hack the cell phones of subject of their stories, including the mother of a murdered child and families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and others.
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. In the 2024 presidential campaign, Democrats' warnings that American democracy was in jeopardy if Donald Trump was elected failed to persuade a majority of voters. Our guest, Stephen Levitsky, says there's plenty of reason to worry about our democracy now. Levitsky isn't a politician or political pundit.
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
You know, there was some reporting over the weekend, this is pretty wild, that suggested that the government's letter, which made these extensive demands of Harvard to eliminate DEI and change the balance of its faculty in terms of their ideological point of views, that that letter may have been sent by mistake. What do you make of this? I mean, the administration has not backed down.
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America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
You note in this article that Freedom House, which is a nonprofit that's been around for a long time, which produces an annual global freedom index, has reduced the United States rating. It has slipped from 2014 to 2021. How much? Where are we now and where did we used to be?
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
It's not said that the letter is inoperable.
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
Stephen Levitsky is a professor of government at Harvard and co-author with Luke and Wei of a new article in the journal Foreign Affairs titled The Path to American Authoritarianism.
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
After we recorded our interview yesterday, news broke that Harvard had sued the Trump administration over its announced funding cuts, accusing the government of violating the First Amendment by seeking to control what Harvard teaches its students. We contacted Levitsky to get his reaction. He said, quote, I'm very pleased to see Harvard leading by example.
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America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
The most powerful among us must lead the way, unquote. A White House spokesman said in a statement that taxpayer funds are a privilege and Harvard fails to meet the basic conditions to access that privilege. We'll hear more of our interview with Stephen Levitsky after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.
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America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
We've been talking about some of the troubling signs that you see since the second Trump administration was inaugurated. One thing we haven't talked a lot about is other Republicans. In your book, The Tyranny of the Minority, you write about politicians who are semi-loyal to democracy. That is to say they believe in it or apparently believe in it but tend to be quiet when it is attacked.
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America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
What's the state of the Republican Party? What's its role in all of this?
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America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
You know, in an interview with The New Republic, I read that you said that if Trump were to refuse to obey, to openly violate the law and potentially not comply with judicial orders, judicial rulings, saying that you're in violation of the law, that that's really outside of this competitive authoritarianism. You said that's the realm of outright dictatorship.
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America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
And I wonder how close are we to that right now? I mean the Supreme Court ordered the administration to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was, according to the administration, mistakenly arrested and transported to that prison in El Salvador. The administration is claiming now that he's in the custody of El Salvador and they can't bring him back.
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America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
Isn't the administration in effect defying an order of the Supreme Court here?
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America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
There were reports last week by Politico and NPR that the administration is cutting back on annual reports, the State Department's reports on countries' human rights records, removing critiques of abuses such as harsh prison conditions, government corrections, and restrictions on political participation. What's the impact here, do you think?
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
We talked about one of the key elements of an authoritarian state is weaponizing the state against opponents. And of course, people will remember that Trump and his supporters have said that it's the Democrats who weaponized the state. the state and weaponized the Justice Department under the Biden administration.
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America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
And I wonder if there was some credibility to that in the prosecution of Donald Trump in the hush money case, where it was a state prosecution for him, the money that he paid to keep the affair with Stormy Daniels quiet as the election was approaching.
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America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
And what he was actually convicted of was 34 counts of falsely entering business records, misstating the purpose of an expenditure, which I have to believe is the Technically, the kind of thing that happens in business is all the time. In this case, you can argue that it was – yes, it was to shield information from voters on the eve of the presidential election.
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America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
But it was information about a consensual sexual encounter. And again, that's not been uncommon among powerful politicians in the past. What do you make of that? Is there an argument that the democrats went too far in that example?
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America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
And does Freedom House explain its demotion? Why? Why did this happen?
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
We're going to take another break here. We are speaking with Stephen Levitsky. He is a professor of government at Harvard and co-author with Lucan a way of a new article in the journal Foreign Affairs. It's titled The Path to American Authoritarianism. We'll continue our conversation after this short break. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
One thing that distinguishes this administration from others is the outsized influence of Elon Musk, the billionaire head of a social media company and other companies. He's had this enormous influence on the administration through his efforts to cut staff and budgets and all of that. Is there anything comparable to this in other democracies that have slid towards authoritarianism?
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
I wonder if there's anything comparable in Putin's rise in Russia where you had oligarchs who made fortunes and increased Putin's power by allowing themselves to his administration.
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America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
Final question. How optimistic or pessimistic are you about the future of American democracy?
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America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
Well, Stephen Levitsky, thank you so much for speaking with us again.
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America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
Stephen Levitsky is a professor of government at Harvard. His new article with Lucan Way in the journal Foreign Affairs is titled The Path to American Authoritarianism. Coming up, David Bianculli reviews the second season of HBO's The Rehearsal, in which Nathan Fielder stages elaborate recreations or anticipations of events using a mix of actors and real people. This is Fresh Air.
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America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
HBO's The Rehearsal, in which Nathan Fielder stages elaborate recreations or anticipations of events using a mix of actors and real people, just started its second season and is available to stream on Max. Our TV critic David Bianculli says it's even more surprising, disturbing, and fascinating than season one. Here's his review.
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America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
David Bianculli is a professor of television studies at Rowan University. He reviewed the second season of HBO's The Rehearsal, now streaming on Max. On tomorrow's show, we hear from Oscar-nominated filmmaker Ryan Coogler. His films include both Black Panther movies and Creed. His latest, Sinners, was number one at the box office this weekend and received raved reviews.
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America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
It's a vampire thriller about twins, both played by Michael B. Jordan, opening a juke joint in Jim Crow, Mississippi. I hope you can join us. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krensel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavey-Nesper.
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
So free and fair elections lead us to a leader which takes us in a different direction.
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
It's interesting that you say that no democracy is entirely free of politicization of these tools and that that was the case in the United States in recent decades, true?
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
He's a Harvard professor of government who spent much of his career studying democracy and dictatorship and and how healthy democracies can slide into authoritarianism. He was last on Fresh Air to talk about the book he co-authored with Daniel Ziblatt titled How Democracies Die. In a new article for the journal Foreign Affairs, Levitsky and co-author Lucan A. Way write, "...U.S.
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
You know, it's interesting. I read in some of the recent reporting that in the U.S. criminal code, it is expressly prohibited. It is unlawful for the president or the vice president or any member of their executive staff to directly or indirectly suggest that the IRS audit or investigate a particular taxpayer. Right?
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
You know, it struck me that it's one thing to say you're going to prosecute someone you don't like, but But I wonder if it will actually happen. I mean you do have to find a provision of the federal criminal code that has been violated and make a case to convince a jury, right? This isn't really so easy, is it?
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
You also write about how elected governments can slide towards autocracy. And one of the things that they do is find ways to get private actors, particularly corporations, on their side. To what extent are we seeing this in the Trump term?
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration." in the sense that it will cease to meet standard criteria for a liberal democracy, full adult suffrage, free and fair elections, and broad protection of civil liberties, unquote.
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
There are countervailing forces in this trend that you note towards authoritarianism. You say in this article that Trump is unlikely to consolidate authoritarian rule in his term. Why do you say that?
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
We've invited Levitsky here to explain the threats he sees to democracy and to talk about dramatic developments in the Trump administration's confrontation with Harvard University. Stephen Levitsky is director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. He's also senior fellow at the Kettering Foundation and a senior democracy fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
I wanted to talk about what's happened at Harvard University, your employer, which became a leader in the opposition to Trump recently. When the university refused to comply with the list of demands from the administration and the administration responded by freezing $2.2 billion in federal grants. Let's just talk about this for a moment.
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
The letter that the administration sent to Harvard a week ago Friday, that's April 11th, is a pretty remarkable letter. I just read this over the weekend. I wanted to cite a passage here. This is a part of the letter that deals with Harvard's apparent imbalance in viewpoint diversity according to the administration, obviously underrepresenting conservatives.
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
But here's what the text of the letter says. By August 25, the university shall commission an external party which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith. to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse.
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
This review shall begin no later than this summer and shall be submitted to the university and the federal government by the end of the year. Harvard must abolish all criteria, preferences, and practices, whether mandatory or optional, throughout its admissions and hiring practices that function as ideological litmus tests."
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity. That's a pretty remarkable thing for a government to demand of a university, isn't it?
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
Besides the book How Democracies Die, Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt co-authored the 2023 book Tyranny of the Minority. We recorded our interview yesterday. Well, Stephen Levitsky, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thanks for having me.
Fresh Air
America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
I'm wondering what role, if any, you might have played in urging the administration of Harvard to take the position it did. I think you wrote an open letter with Ryan Enos. Is that right?
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Right. I mean we should just note in passing that President Zelensky of the Ukraine has categorically rejected the idea of ceding any territory to Russia. I realize that an armistice isn't exactly the same thing as that. But that wouldn't be easy to sell. But there's also the fact – and in your book, you note that Trump essentially kind of agreed with –
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Putin that Ukraine isn't even a real country. He's been very warm towards Putin. He's expressed sympathy with the idea that it was provocative to even talk about putting Ukraine in NATO. So I guess another question is, is Trump going to do all he can to shut off all U.S. military assistance to Ukraine and try and get allies to do the same?
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
You know, there's also the broader question of Donald Trump and his attitude and relations with Russia and Putin. You know, he's always said very warm things about him. Seems to think he can do a lot because of their personal relationship.
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
This was last week. And this is a moment where you're asking him about some of this, you know, ambitions that he has articulated for taking Greenland and Canada and the Panama Canal. Let's listen.
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
What's not to like, huh? We are speaking with David Sanger. He is the White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times. His latest book published last April is New Cold Wars, China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West. A paperback edition will be coming out later this spring.
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
We'll talk more after a break about the challenges facing the Trump administration. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
You noted recently that when President Biden agreed to let Ukraine send long-range missiles deep into Russia, Russia formally announced a change to its policy on the use of nuclear weapons. This is interesting. What was the change?
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
I mean, the other thing, I guess, is the buildup of weapons. And the START treaty, which limits nuclear weapons, expires, I think, early next year, right?
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
And of course, it's more complicated because in the old Cold War, it was the United States and the Soviet Union. I mean, the stakes were terrifying, but there was a stability to it. Now, you got the United States facing Russia and China that are increasingly cooperative with each other and with North Korea and with Russia. Iran. And the stakes and the methods of contention are different.
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
I mean, cyber attacks are a part of this. Access to technology and precious metals are part of this. It's a lot more complicated, isn't it?
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
You know, the fact that these challenges are so much more complicated comes at a time that we have a president who famously doesn't have a lot of patience for listening to detailed briefings or reading detailed policy papers. And, you know, who has said his unpredictability is an asset. The fact that I think he once said Xi Jinping knows he's effing crazy. Referring to himself.
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Yeah. Yeah. Referring to himself. Is Trump suited for the challenges here?
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. The inauguration of Donald Trump to the presidency is just days away, which means, among other things, that U.S. foreign policy is about to see an adjustment. In addition to some major known challenges – the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Iran's nuclear program, and relations with China – Trump has thrown some new initiatives into the mix.
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
We are speaking with David Sanger. He is a White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times. His book published last April is New Cold Wars, China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West. A new paperback edition will be out this spring. We'll continue our conversation after this break. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Let's focus on Iran a bit. You know, there's some big decisions coming here. Trump pulled the United States out of the nuclear deal that the Obama administration had negotiated with Iran, saying it was a terrible deal. Let me just ask you, first of all, was it a bad deal in the eyes of independent analysts?
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
And that is Donald Trump speaking to our guest David Sanger last week at Mar-a-Lago. Before we get into the substance of all of this, one quick fact check. Is China operating the Panama Canal?
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Trump has talked about maximum pressure, right? Sanctions, cutting off oil, that kind of thing. This has happened before. Is it effective?
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
And the fact that Iran has these alliances with Russia, right, and China, does that make it trickier?
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
We are speaking with David Sanger. He's a White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times. His book published last April is New Cold Wars, China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West. A paperback edition will be coming out later this spring. We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Well, let's talk a little bit about the Middle East and specifically Israel. You know, it's interesting that I think you wrote that at Donald Trump's news conference in Mar-a-Lago last week. Four times he repeated what he has said, that if the hostages taken by Hamas are not out by Inauguration Day, quote, all hell will break out in the Middle East, unquote. Do we know what that means?
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Do you have a sense of how he's going to approach this?
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
I have to ask you, you know, with all of the known serious foreign policy challenges that Trump has to tackle, why do you think he chose to bring up these American expansionist ambitions now? I can't believe it was an accident.
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
You know, there's still these huge questions that remain, even if there's a truce and return of some hostages, like who's going to govern Gaza in the future and what sort of autonomy will Israeli forces give it? And what about the broader question of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza?
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
I mean, you know, Trump has gotten some credit for the Abraham Accords, which established relations between Israel and some Arab states. Do you have any sense that there's any commitment to or prospect of broader progress on these issues?
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
You know, David Sanger, before I let you go, I want to just ask you a bit about the reporting process here. I mean, you've covered five presidents and one of them was Trump in his first term. You've written that one of the characteristics of Trump's presidency is conspiracy theories and made up facts.
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
How do you deal with facts that are made up, particularly if you have a press office that, you know, isn't going to run to try and clarify or, you know, walk them back at all?
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Well, David Sanger, thank you again for speaking with us. Thank you. David Sanger is a White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times. His latest book, New Cold Wars, China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West, comes out in paperback this spring. We recorded our interview yesterday.
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
On tomorrow's show, Pico Ayer talks about his memoir that's sadly a little too relevant. It's called A Flame, Learning from Silence. It's about his many retreats to a Benedictine monastery in California's Big Sur and the wildfires that have threatened the monastery and burned down his mother's home while he was there. He nearly died in a fire. I hope you can join us.
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham.
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
He's revived his interest in somehow buying or annexing Greenland and said he wants to take control of the Panama Canal, refusing to rule out military action to achieve both objectives. And for good measure, he said Canada would make a nice 51st state and said he might use economic force to make that happen.
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
You know, it's a self-governing territory of Denmark. Does anyone think the U.S. could legally use force to take Greenland? I mean, what's been the reaction in Congress and foreign capitals to this kind of talk?
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Yeah, well, I mean the whole kind of notion of the world order led by the United States, an important element of it was that international boundaries are not open to negotiation or change by force. This is a pretty dramatic turn, isn't it?
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Our guest, New York Times White House and national security correspondent David Sanger, has written that Trump's recent comments are a reminder that something else is coming back to Washington, a chaotic stream of consciousness presidency.
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Right. And other places in the South China Sea, I guess. Canada is certainly a different animal in a way. I mean, what has been the reaction to him suggesting that Canada should join with the United States?
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
I mean, you'd have to think if you were serious about any of these initiatives, you wouldn't start with public declarations. You would have a plan. You would meet privately with all of the relevant players, wouldn't you?
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Sanger has spent four decades at the Times covering five presidents from Clinton to Biden and sharing in three Pulitzer Prizes, most recently for coverage of Russia's role in the 2016 election. Last April, Sanger published his fourth book, one which offers a framework for understanding the challenges the United States faces in an increasingly dangerous and volatile world.
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Let's talk about Ukraine and Russia. Trump has expressed admiration for Putin. That's well known. And he has said that this war is horrific, would never have happened on his watch, and that he will quickly resolve it without ever saying how. Now he's going to have to actually do something. What are you hearing from sources about what that might be?
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
It's called New Cold Wars, China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West. We've invited him back on the show to share some insights on what we might expect from a Trump foreign policy. Well, David Sanger, welcome back to Fresh Air. Dave, great to be back here with you. Let's start by listening to a bit of the news conference that Trump had in Mar-a-Lago.
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
So much of the discussion here focuses on kids because obviously parents are really concerned about helping their kids and helping them grow and flourish. To what extent is this a growing diagnosis among adults?
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
You know, it's interesting because you mentioned this multimodal study earlier found that there were clear benefits to Ritalin and stimulants, but that they tended to disappear after about 36 months. Do we know if that's also true of adults who take these medications?
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
This is such a common issue that we all know people that are dealing with this. And just over the past two days, just among the producers here at Fresh Air, I've had one producer who has a son who struggles with some of this and finds the medication very helpful.
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
And then I had another producer whose brother, when he was in second grade, had real trouble focusing and his teachers were struggling with him because he was just all over the place. And they told – His mom, look, you're going to have to put him on Ritalin or one of these drugs or otherwise he can't come to school here. And the mom said, nope, I'm not doing that.
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
And I know it's a public school so you have to deal with him. He ended up in front of a school psychologist who taught him chess and they began playing chess once a week. And at least as my friend told the story – That was a real breakthrough. I mean he really changed his behavior and he's gone on. He's never taken medication.
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
He's had a productive career as an artist and animator and lives a happy life. So I mean an anecdote doesn't – isn't the same thing as research but it just seems like there are a lot of ways this can go.
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
We're going to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Paul Tuff. He is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. His recent cover story is titled, Have We Been Thinking About ADHD All Wrong? He'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
You know, it's interesting, you write that the roots of treatment for this disorder go way back to an experiment, I guess, in the 1930s by a Harvard trained psychologist in Rhode Island, right? Tell us about this.
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
And later researchers followed up on this and did similar experiments. What did they find?
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
Yeah, there was another test that you described involving putting stuff in knapsacks. Explain that.
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
So a massive study was organized by a number of researchers. Tell us how this was put together.
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. If you live in the United States, chances are good that you either are or know a parent whose child is being treated for ADHD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Last year, the Centers for Disease Control reported that more than 11% of American children had been diagnosed with ADHD, a record high. For 14-year-old boys, the figure was 21%.
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
You mentioned some other things that were troubling about continued use of these stimulants. What were some of the other issues that came up?
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
Is there an explanation for that biologically that we know of?
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
These are amphetamines, right? I mean, can they be addictive?
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
We are speaking with Paul Tuff. He is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. His recent cover story is titled, Have We Been Thinking About ADHD All Wrong? We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
Paul Tuff, you spoke to students across the country about this with ADHD diagnosis who'd been taking these stimulants. What did you hear?
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
Yeah, there was this one guy who you called Cap who used it when he was preparing for his SAT exams and for baseball and baseball practice because he could really focus on pitches. And he thought it made him a better hitter. But he didn't like it. And I guess people felt that it changed their personalities in some ways.
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
You wrote that there are some people who believe that ADHD is a clear, identifiable biological disease and therefore best treated with medication. But that increasingly people think that it may be thought of not as a condition that you have but as something that you experience. What exactly does that mean? What are the implications of that idea?
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
Right. I mean, school is sometimes just going to be boring. And if your particular brain has a hard time focusing on boring stuff, I guess it's harder. What are the implications of that for treatment?
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
Right. Results were released in 1999. What did they show?
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
There was one thing that you mentioned in the research that some children with ADHD symptoms are at greater risk of more serious issues. And those are kids whose symptoms are accompanied by intense angers. What are the different risks there?
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
You know, I'm sure we're going to get a lot of reaction to this interview because it affects so many people and people's experiences are all unique and there is disagreement about this. You know, I happen to look at this magazine called Attitude. That's A-D-D-itude.
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
You're familiar with this, which describes itself as the nation's leading source of important news expert advice and judgment-free understanding for families and adults living with attention deficit disorder. I just went to the website and right away was struck by a story attacking your article. It calls it misrepresentative, biased, and dangerous. Have you looked at this stuff? I have, yeah.
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
Yeah. I mean it specifically says that in some cases you quoted people who you didn't interview. Wes Crenshaw says he told a Times fact checker before the article was published that the reporter's information was incorrect and asked for an interview to set the record straight. None was granted. Generally, what do you say about this?
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
Over time, of course, more and more kids were diagnosed with ADHD. And you write about a guy named James Swanson who was at the University of California, Irvine, who, among others, grew uneasy about these trends in diagnosis and treatment. What was troubling them?
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
You know, the human mind is an awfully complicated thing, to say the least. And there are many circumstances in treatment in which medications are effective for reasons that just aren't clear, right? I think that was true of a lot of antidepressants, right, for a long time. I don't know if it still is.
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
And I'm just wondering, as you looked at this research on ADHD, are there people who are optimistic that they will get to a clearer understanding of its origins?
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
Well, Paul Tuft, thank you so much for speaking with us.
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
Paul Tuff is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. His recent cover story is titled, Have We Been Thinking About ADHD All Wrong? Coming up, Martin Johnson reviews a new tribute to Anthony Braxton, who Johnson says is one of the most polarizing figures in jazz. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
Composer and multi-instrumentalist Anthony Braxton is one of the most polarizing figures in jazz. To fans, he's a remarkable artist who's refused to set limits on his vision or his musical range. To his detractors, he's the man who made sterile and impenetrable music with numbers and geometric diagrams for titles instead of words.
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
Braxton, who's won a MacArthur Fellowship and an NEA Jazz Master Award, turns 80 this year. One of his protégés, Steve Lehman, has created a tribute that highlights the composer's early work and shows the roads to and from his music. Guest jazz critic Martin Johnson has this review.
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
Martin Johnson writes about jazz for The Wall Street Journal and Downbeat. He reviewed the music of Anthony Braxton by Steve Lehman. And to find out what's happening behind the scenes of our show and get our producers' recommendations for what to watch, read, and listen to, subscribe to our free newsletter at whyy.org. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller.
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Susan Yakundi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Thea Challenger directed today's show.
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
You write that Swanson is now 80 years old and is troubled by the way ADHD research and treatment is going. Is there a kind of fundamental theme to his concern?
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
And there's been a lot of research into what it actually is biologically. And has that guided treatment at all? I guess that's the question. Is there a real connection between the understanding of the biological origins of this and the way it's treated?
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
This is such a big deal for parents. Nothing is more troubling than to see your child in pain or struggling. You have kids yourself, right? You have two sons?
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
In a recent article for the New York Times Magazine, journalist Paul Tuff examines how ADHD is diagnosed and treated, often with commonly prescribed stimulants such as Ritalin and Adderall. Though they're regarded as highly effective and thus very popular, he finds three decades of scientific studies have raised questions about their efficacy and safety and about the nature of ADHD itself.
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
Yeah. So you know the stakes here. Absolutely. What are some of the things that they observe that make them so desperate for help?
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
And I guess one of the other things that's tricky about it as a diagnosis is that a lot of the things that you observe are also symptoms from other causes such as injury to the head or other psychological conditions, anxiety and depression, right?
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
Or the DSM you mentioned, that's the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which guides treatment for a lot of practitioners. I guess one of the other things that's a little hard to understand about this is that two kinds of symptoms for ADHD are pretty different, right? I mean, there's inattention, not paying attention, and then there's hyperactivity and impulsivity.
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
And they seem like pretty different behaviors. Why is it assumed that they arise from the same condition?
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
You know, it seems kind of counterintuitive that stimulants would help with hyperactivity and impulse control, right? I mean, it seems like you're pushing it in the same direction that's the problem. What's the medical explanation for that?
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
Some researchers think the notion that ADHD is a distinct, identifiable brain disorder may be wrong, or at least oversimplified, and that treatments other than medication should be considered. Paul Tuff is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and the author of four books, most recently, The Inequality Machine, How College Divides Us. Paul Tuff, welcome to Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
So what are some of the non-drug treatments that are helpful in treating ADHD that people are discovering?
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
You read about Russell Barkley, a prominent ADHD researcher, and he has a lecture that has been viewed more than four million times on YouTube, right? What is his perspective of the disorder?
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
And you have to treat it because there will be downstream effects that you really want to avoid. Yes, exactly. I want to talk a bit about some of the research into the nature of this disorder. In 2002, you're right, there was an international consensus statement signed by 85 researchers defending the validity of the diagnosis of ADHD because there had been questions about it.
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
You write that in the early 90s, there were rising rates of ADHD diagnoses, about 2 million American kids in 1993, roughly two-thirds of them taking Ritalin. This provoked protests from some, particularly the Church of Scientology, you know, arguing that you're drugging our kids. You write that you didn't have to be a Scientologist to acknowledge there were legitimate questions about ADHD.
Fresh Air
Are Kids With ADHD Being Treated Effectively?
You're right that you found a consensus of sorts among most scientists that you spoke to about this question of whether it's a biological condition. What's the consensus?
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
All right. Warmly received by the Bitcoin crowd. One of the things he has said is that we ought to have a national crypto – I don't know if it's Bitcoin or crypto generally but a stockpile. I mean there's a strategic reserve of petroleum, right? And we have gold in Fort Knox. How do we explain the idea of a crypto coin national stockpile? What would be the purpose? Yeah.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Right. And just to clarify, you mentioned that the supply of Bitcoin is limited. That's different from other meme coins where people can just make up as many as they want. Bitcoin, when it was established, there was a limited quantity that can be made. So there is a real supply and demand there, I guess.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
All right. All right. So limited item isn't necessarily valuable. All right. We're going to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Zeke Fox. He's an investigative reporter for Bloomberg. His book is Number Go Up, Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall. We'll talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
And people trade for it, right? They speculate in it hoping that its value will rise or fall, right? Right.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Donald Trump has gotten support from some of the giants in the tech world, you know, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and I think Peter Thiel probably too. Are those folks also crypto advocates? What is their relationship with the crypto world?
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Let's talk about some of the appointments that Trump has made, which, again, are good news for crypto supporters. He wants a change at the Securities and Exchange Commission. Gary Gensler, the previous chair, was very unpopular in the crypto world. Why?
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Now, just so I understand the principle in these lawsuits, the idea is that if investors buy money in the stock market, there are rules that say that in order to get your security in the stock market, you have to provide certain information, orderly reports and earnings reports and assets and liabilities. And so that there's, in theory, some basis that an investor has to evaluate the value of it.
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
In the case of cryptocurrency exchanges … What? Any of that required?
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Right. Now, these cases that the Securities and Exchange Commission filed, are they still pending in courts?
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
We are speaking with Zeke Fox. He's an investigative reporter for Bloomberg. His book is Number Go Up, Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall. We'll talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies. This is Fresh Air.
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
So, Zeke Fox, let's talk about Howard Lutnick, who has been designated as the Commerce Secretary by Donald Trump. He's been nominated. He faces confirmation. He is the chief executive officer and a principal owner of a New York investment bank, Cantor Fitzgerald, which some may remember was famous for having lost more than 600 employees in the 9-11 attacks, including Howard Lutnick's brother.
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
There has been concern about Letnick and his bank's ties to a cryptocurrency operator called Tether. You want to explain what Tether is and what it does?
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
You mean there were 50 billion Tether coins in circulation, for which they presumably had 50 billion in U.S. dollars somewhere?
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Right, and his is a particular subspecies called a meme coin. You want to explain what that is?
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. Besides the executive orders, pardons, and other moves, Trump and his family have started selling a brand new cryptocurrency coin featuring an image of Trump drawn from the assassination attempt he experienced during the presidential campaign.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Yeah. So it's not like Lutnik himself is personally making deals with human traffickers or drug dealers. He accepts assets from this company Tether that uses its stable coin for transactions with all kinds of people, including people who in some cases are criminals. Is that the case?
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
You know, in your book, you describe discovering a center of ripoff artists, scammers based in Cambodia, like a whole kind of little mini city of apartment blocks of people in these rooms, calling people, luring them into handing over their money. And Tether is involved in all this. Tell us what you found.
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
I have to ask you, since people read stories about crypto going through the roof and Bitcoin being worth $100,000, have you invested in any crypto? And what do you say – I'm sure friends must ask you since they know you're reporting on this. Hey, should I get into this?
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
All right. Well, we'll leave it there. Zeke Fox, thanks so much for speaking with us. Thanks, Dave. Zeke Fox is an investigative reporter for Bloomberg. His book is Number Go Up, Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall. We recorded our conversation earlier this week. Coming up, we remember cartoonist and writer Jules Feiffer, who died last week. This is Fresh Air.
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Jules Feiffer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, playwright, and screenwriter, died Friday at his home in Richfield Springs, New York. He was 95. Feiffer's syndicated strip, titled Feiffer, used simple line drawings to portray characters in scenes that satirized contemporary life. The strip began in the Village Voice and ran for more than four decades.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Pfeiffer's creative impulses found expression in many media. He illustrated the classic children's book The Phantom Tollbooth. He wrote screenplays for the films Little Murders and Carnal Knowledge, among others. He wrote novels and Broadway plays, and his cartoons appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Playboy magazine.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Terry spoke to Jules Feiffer in 1982 when a collection of his cartoons titled America from Eisenhower to Reagan was published. He told her that finding anyone who knew what to do with his cartoons and his particular brand of humor took a while.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Right. So you get people who, for a lark or whatever, just decide to do it for the fun of having this digital image. And if they drive the price up, the folks who own a lot can make them a lot of money and people have made fortunes, right?
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
It's a venture that by some accounts could make the president billions of dollars, though we'll discuss what that actually means. The new coin, which has drawn criticism from government ethics lawyers, is just one of several moves Trump has made to embrace cryptocurrency. He plans to replace the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who sued many crypto companies.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
And what are government ethics watchdogs saying about this?
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Now, this actually isn't Trump's first crypto coin, right? I mean, in July, I think, he launched an enterprise called World Liberty Financial, which issues digital tokens. You want to explain what this is?
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Trump's nominee to head the commission is Paul Atkins, a pro-crypto executive. And Trump's nominee for Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, heads an investment bank that's deeply involved with the cryptocurrency that's been used by arms dealers, scam artists, and drug traffickers, among others. If you find the whole subject of cryptocurrency confusing, fear not.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
I have to mention one other colorful aspect of the World Liberty Financial Enterprise. And that is that one of the co-founders, I guess, was a guy named Chase Hero. Who is he?
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Wow. You know, we have a little audio clip of this guy, Chase Hero. And he's driving a car, which I think he says is a Rolls Royce in the audio, right? And kind of explaining kind of, I guess, what you might call the amorality of the crypto industry. Let's listen to this.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Our guest today, Bloomberg investigative reporter Zeke Fox, has written a fascinating and accessible book about crypto and he's reported on Trump's newfound enthusiasm for the industry. We'll talk about Trump's crypto moves as well as the nature of cryptocurrency, its role in the economy, and what the future holds for digital currency.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Trump was not always a fan of cryptocurrency. Here's something he said. I believe this was on Fox Business in 2021.
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Okay, throwing cold water on crypto, about four years ago, a little less, I guess, what accounts for his conversion, do you think?
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Again, not a real card. It's a digital card, right? What do they call it? A non-fungible token? Yeah.
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Wow. You know, I think we have a clip of some of that speech. It's probably worth spending that. Let's listen. This is Donald Trump at the Bitcoin Magazine convention in July.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Zeke Fox's book is Number Go Up, Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall. We recorded our conversation earlier this week. Zeke Fox, welcome to Fresh Air. Thanks, Dave. So let's start with a simple understanding of what cryptocurrency is, right? It's a coin or a currency that really only exists as a digital entry in some computers of whoever creates or issues the coin.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
You know, an important element of holding jailkeepers and private health providers accountable is maintaining records of treatment and making them available to investigators. What was your experience in seeking public records about these cases?
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
What do county coroners do when they find these folks who have been under the care of prison health officials for weeks or months and die in these circumstances? How do they rule the deaths?
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
and taken to a county jail after something that I guess was a parole violation, technically a failure to register her address, something relatively minor. Before we get to what happened there, just tell us something about her life before she entered the Pima County Jail.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
And that makes a difference in when civil litigation has occurred, what the coroner says?
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
We're going to take another break here. We are speaking with Sarah Stillman. She's a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her new article about mentally ill people who suffer from dehydration and malnutrition in county jails is titled Starved in Jail. She'll be back to talk more after a short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
Why did the lawyers approach you for this story about Mary Casey?
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
You know, you worked with the Yale Investigative Reporting Lab and identified, you write, more than 20 private companies providing care in jails where alleged deaths from neglect occurred. I'm wondering what you heard from those companies, particularly NAFCARE, which was the provider in the case of Mary Casey, the woman that you write so much about.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
You know, you make the point that cash bail is an important part of this. I mean, when people can't make bail to get out of jail, if they have mental health issues, it's going to get worse. And particularly if they're denied medications and treatment will get worse quickly and continue to get worse. There are some states that have experimented with eliminating this. I think New Jersey.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
When you dive deeply into a case like this, in which so many people have suffered and continue to suffer, and the issues really aren't resolved, is it hard to move on as a journalist to the next project?
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. Nobody wants to go to jail or see a loved one taken there. They're crowded, unpleasant, and sometimes dangerous. But we generally expect that the incarcerated will get the basics—a bed and toilet, three meals a day, and health care.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
Sarah Stillman is the staff writer for The New Yorker. We will be right back. This is Fresh Air. This legal doctrine, felony murder, kind of sounds weird because everybody thinks, well, surely murder is already a felony. I mean, what is the idea here?
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
Let's talk about the case that you cite, which is sort of your vehicle for exploring this. This is an event in August of 2012. What happened on the ground? What actually occurred?
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
So the title of your article is Sentenced to Life for an Accident Miles Away. So Sadiq was in handcuffs, but the guy who he had robbed cars with fled and killed these two bike lists in a car accident. And he was arrested and charged with felony murder. And as is typical in these cases, Wright was offered a plea deal.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
This is something I gather that is more attractive to prosecutors about felony murder. It allows them to exert more pressure on a defendant.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
You know, one of the remarkable things about this story and this use of felony murder is that the son of one of the bicyclists actually felt that Sadiq Baxter had been treated unfairly. Tell us that story.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
Her children and siblings had struggled to get her help through mental illness and homelessness and previous arrests over the years. Very difficult, of course. And you describe in this piece her son Carlin driving to the hospital where she had finally been taken after about four months in this county jail. What did he see when he entered this hospital and saw his mom in a bed?
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
And all three of these kids became public defenders. Is that right?
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
There's a legislative debate about this, right, in states. And some argue that felony murder is a deterrent because it shows that if you go out to do some bad stuff, even if you don't think you're going to kill somebody, it can work very badly for you. You say studies show that's really not the case because nobody knows about this until they're caught up in such a case.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
Are there movements to change the law here? Are some states experimenting with doing it differently?
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
I can imagine some people who are listening who are thinking, well, look, if you go out and you rob a store and you know that people are going to be armed, you're engaging in something with the risk of lethal violence. I mean what's the distinction here with felony murder?
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
Sadiq Baxter, actually before his trial, he noticed in another case involving felony murder where a judge had sentenced somebody to life in prison for felony murder but had said, look, if there were a circumstance where the person were literally in police custody, in a police car or in cuffs while their confederate went and committed a murder … It might be different.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
He hoped that this would be a basis for him avoiding this fate. It wasn't. But he stayed at it, didn't he? He became a serious jailhouse lawyer.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
And do we know how many people are in prison around the country from this doctrine?
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
And in Sadiq's case, do you think it'll matter that the three children of one of the victims in this case feel passionately that this was unjust, that he was given life in prison for this?
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
Well, Sarah Stillman, thank you so much for speaking with us.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
Sarah Stillman is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her new article is titled Starved in Jail. Coming up, we'll remember renowned jazz critic and a friend of Fresh Air, Francis Davis. This is Fresh Air. We're ending with some fresh air family news. We want to send our sympathy and love to Terry Gross.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
And generally speaking, what did they learn about her experience in those four months in the jail?
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
Her husband, the noted writer and jazz critic Francis Davis, died Monday under home hospice care following an illness. For many years, Francis was the jazz critic for The Village Voice and later a contributing editor for The Atlantic Monthly. He's the author of many books on jazz, including Bebop and Nothingness, In the Moment, and Outkats, Jazz Composers, Instrumentalists, and Singers.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
He won a Grammy in 2009 for his liner notes to the 50th anniversary reissue of the iconic Miles Davis recording Kind of Blue. In 2006, he started a critics poll for the Village Voice that included 30 critics weighing in on the year's jazz releases. Now named after him, the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll had over 150 participating critics last year.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
And he was Fresh Air's jazz critic when we were a local show in Philadelphia and during our earliest days as a national program. This is an excerpt from a piece he recorded in 1980 for his feature, Interval, on the jazz pianist Jackie Byard.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
Francis Davis from a piece he wrote for Fresh Air in 1980. We asked our jazz historian, Kevin Whitehead, a friend of Francis, for his thoughts.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
To find out what's happening behind the scenes of our show and get our producers' recommendations for what to watch, read, and listen to, subscribe to our free newsletter at whyy.org slash freshair. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavey-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
Yeah, or would stay in jail much longer than they would have had they actually been sentenced for their alleged crimes. Exactly. She eventually ends up in this hospital. And what happened from there?
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
But our guest, New Yorker staff writer Sarah Stillman, begins her latest article with the story of a woman in her 60s who died of protein calorie malnutrition, the apparent result of prolonged starvation during her four-month stay at a Tucson, Arizona jail. Stillman finds that starving in jail is far more common than you might think.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
You know, there's a history worth recalling here about how mental health care changed in the 1960s when many, many more people were institutionalized. Do you want to just remind us of that?
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
You have the striking fact that the three largest mental health providers in the country are the county jail systems of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Right.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
Now, another big part of this story is the privatization of healthcare, generally including mental healthcare in correctional institutions. You know, it's not so easy to treat people with these difficult and often, you know, multiple diagnosis, even in a good clinical setting. What drove this trend towards having private companies come in to manage healthcare for the incarcerated?
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
The victims are often mentally ill people who were arrested for minor crimes and then languish behind bars, untreated and unable to make bail. Lawyers and activists say the problem has increased with the practice of counties granting contracts to private companies to provide health care to the incarcerated.
Fresh Air
Starvation In American Jail Cells
Now, in Pima County, Arizona, which was where Mary Casey was incarcerated, the health care was provided by a company called Neff Care. Am I saying that correctly? And her children decided they wanted to have a lawyer look into the possibility of litigation. And when they went to this firm who'd done this work, they said, yeah, we're familiar with them.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
What did they tell them about their practices and results over the years?
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
One detail kind of stuck out to me when the attorneys looked at Mary Casey's experience at this jail and they looked at the intake form when she was admitted to the prison and what was missing. Tell us about that.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
Stillman interviewed many surviving relatives and reviewed countless records of disturbing cases for her article titled Starved in Jail. In addition to her work for The New Yorker, Sarah Stillman teaches journalism at Yale, where she also runs the Yale Investigative Reporting Lab.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
You write that there are hundreds of hours of abusive neglect captured on video and preserved in these cases, many of which you reviewed. What did you see?
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
At the risk of being overly graphic, you noted that the records also contain cases of people who suffered from insect infestation or even rodent activity.
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
Stillman won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for her article about the little-known but widely used legal doctrine of felony murder. That's a subject we'll get to a little later. Well, Sarah Stillman, welcome to Fresh Air. You open your story about starvation with the case of Mary Faith Casey, a woman in her 60s who's arrested—
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Starvation In American Jail Cells
Right. You say that after years of studying these deaths, you find it hard to describe as anything but a pattern of widespread torture of people with mental health issues. That's strong language, but it's more akin to what we see in situations of torture than situations of incarceration.
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
In 1949, a Republican activist named Suzanne Stevenson formed an organization called the Minute Women of the USA to fight what she perceived as the creep of Soviet communism in America.
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
The group would attract tens of thousands of members, and they were told to meet in small cells and appear as individual concerned citizens when they wrote letters or heckled liberal speakers or packed a city council meeting to oppose public housing. The story of the Minutewomen is one of many told in a new book by our guest, journalist and historian Clay Risen.
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
Risen examines the frenzy of anti-communist activity that swept the nation after the Second World War, most often associated with the Hollywood blacklist and the relentless and mostly unfounded charges of communist infiltration leveled by Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy.
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
Risen describes the red-baiting hysteria of the period in colorful detail, and he writes that there's a through-line to be found from that era up to our current political moment. Clay Risen is currently a reporter and editor at the New York Times, now assigned to the obituaries desk, and is the author of eight books, some about American history and some about whiskey.
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
Before writing obituaries, Risen was a senior editor on the Times 2020 politics coverage and before that an editor on the opinion desk. His new book is Red Scare, Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. Clay Risen, welcome to Fresh Air. Thanks for having me.
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
There's a lot of detail in this book, but there's also a big picture sense of what was really happening with this outbreak of anti-communist fervor.
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
And one of the strands you say was a culture war, a long simmering resentment among conservatives about the changes that had taken place in the nation with the New Deal, new rights for organized labor, the beginnings of the social security system, etc., Roosevelt was enormously popular really as the result of these programs.
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Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
What were the greatest objections to those changes and what form did the opposition take?
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Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
Yeah.
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Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
Right. So you had that thing going on. There's this people who were angry, felt that they had been pushed aside, left out, that their way of life was ignored and replaced with something alien. The second strand you cite, of course, is the emergence of the Cold War and the fear of the Soviet Union. And that was connected to a communist presence in the United States.
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
And we should note that while Soviet-style communism is discredited among Americans today, it was different in the 30s and 40s, right?
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Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
Thank you.
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Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
Thank you. Thank you.
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
Thank you.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Dave Davies. Terry has our first interview. I'll let her introduce it.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
Tilda Swinton is starring in the new Pedro Almodovar film, The Room Next Door, now showing in select theaters. She spoke with Terry Gross. In 1997, Marianne Jean-Baptiste became the first black British actress to receive an Oscar nomination for Mike Lee's drama Secrets and Lies.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
Now, nearly 30 years later, she and Lee have reunited on the comedic drama Hard Truths, in which she plays a profoundly unhappy woman living in North London. The performance has earned Jean-Baptiste best actress prizes from several critics groups. Our film critic, Justin Chang, has this review.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. He reviewed hard truths. Coming up, we hear from Adrian Brody. His new film, The Brutalist, just won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture Drama. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Dave Davies. Today, Tilda Swinton. She stars in the new Pedro Almodovar film as a woman who has suffered from cancer and therapies haven't worked and now intends to end her life within a month. She asks a friend, played by Julianne Moore, to stay with her during that time.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
Adrian Brody spoke with Tanya Mosley. He's currently starring in the film The Brutalist. It's now playing in select theaters, including IMAX, and opens nationwide on January 17th. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
And we hear from Oscar and now Golden Globe Award winning actor Adrian Brody. He stars in the film The Brutalist, which just won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture Drama. Brody plays a Hungarian Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor who seeks a fresh start in post-war America. Brody drew from his mother and grandfather's experience as Hungarian immigrants for the role.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
Also, film critic Justin Chang reviews the new Mike Lee film Hard Truths. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
We're listening to Terry's interview with Tilda Swinton. She stars in the new Pedro Almodovar film, The Room Next Door. It's now showing in select theaters. We'll hear more of their conversation after a break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
This trial began in September 2024 in this county courthouse. James took the stand. What did he say the experience was like for him emotionally?
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
After all this testimony, it didn't go particularly well for Rupert. It went much better for James and his siblings' side of it. And this all came down to a single man, Edmund Gorman, who's the Washoe County Probate Commissioner. This multibillion-dollar company and all this comes down to one man, one county official, and he issues a clear ruling, right?
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Rupert and Lachlan have appealed. Is it likely to stand do you think? What's the course from here?
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Dave Davies. If you enjoyed the HBO series Succession about the children of an aging media mogul competing to inherit his business empire, you'll want to read the new article in The Atlantic by my guest McKay Coppins.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
You know, you note that James and his wife, Catherine, have spent millions on political contributions, mostly to Democrats, I think, and to pro-democracy causes and other philanthropic work, particularly climate change. Is it fair to assume that if this verdict holds that when Rupert Murdoch dies, Fox News is not going to be the same product?
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
You know, I mentioned the HBO series Succession in the introduction. You know, I thought it was great television. But I wouldn't have guessed that the people who actually lived lives like this would be interested in it because, I mean, come on, it's television. But actually you discovered that members of the family were into it, right?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
It's about the real-life drama involving the children of 93-year-old Rupert Murdoch and their battle over who will someday lead his business properties, most prominently Fox News. And even if you didn't see Succession, the story is still fascinating, both because of the intense family dynamics and the stakes in this conflict.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
McKay Coppins, thank you so much. This is interesting. Thank you. McKay Coppins is a staff writer for The Atlantic. His new article is Growing Up Murdoch, James Murdoch on mind games, sibling rivalry, and the war for the family media empire.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Flow is an animated movie from Latvia that follows an unlikely collection of animals who are brought together by a massive flood that overwhelms the countryside. The film, which is now streaming on Max, already won animation prizes from the Golden Globes, the New York Film Critics, and the Los Angeles Film Critics, among others.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
And it's received Oscar nominations for both Best Animated Feature and Best International Film. Our critic-at-large John Powers says it is quite simply wonderful.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
The outcome could mean big changes for Fox News, which Coppins describes as the most powerful conservative media force in the world. Late last year, the parties in this family dispute squared off in an epic court battle over the succession plan for the Murdoch empire.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Rupert Murdoch wanted to amend the family trust to ensure his eldest son Lachlan would take the helm, shutting out his younger son James, who was troubled by Fox News' hard right bent.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
John Powers reviewed the animated film Flow, which is up for two Oscars. Coming up, Harvard professor of public policy Elizabeth Linos talks about the extraordinary measures Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has taken to shrink the size of the federal government. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
If he wanted to, could Elon Musk establish a new bathroom breaks policy for more than 2 million federal employees? Well, he hasn't. But since the Trump administration took office and gave Musk's Department of Government Efficiency a mandate to shrink the government, Musk has wielded an astonishing level of authority over the federal workforce.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
After gaining access to the Treasury Department's massive payment system, Musk and his team have dismissed thousands of employees, terminated countless contracts, and targeted two government agencies created by Congress for elimination. Last weekend, federal workers received an email instructing them to reply with five bullet points stating what they'd accomplished the previous week.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Coppins writes that the trial testimony and depositions and discovery in the case were often intensely personal, bringing up years of painful secrets, scheming and manipulation, lies, media leaks, and devious betrayals. For his story, Coppins had extensive interviews with James Murdoch and his wife Catherine. Their side prevailed in the trial verdict, which is under appeal.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Musk added in a social media post that failure to respond would be taken as a resignation. That got pushback from several Trump-appointed agency leaders who told their employees not to respond. Much of what Musk has done is under court challenge, but President Trump has said he'd like to see him become even more aggressive.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
To help us understand these efforts to drastically reshape the American government, we've invited Elizabeth Linus to join us.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
She's the Emma Bloomberg Associate Professor of Public Policy and Management at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and director of the People Lab, which does research on how to recruit, retrain, and support the government workforce and integrate evidence-based policymaking into government.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Earlier in her career, she was a policy advisor to Prime Minister George Papandreou of Greece, pursuing government reform at a time of financial crisis. Well, Elizabeth Linos, welcome to Fresh Air.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
There's a perception in all of this recent activity that the public payroll is bloated, not just inefficient, but just too many people. How does the federal workforce compare with past decades?
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
So let's talk about what's happened here. Do we know how many government employees have been taken off the payroll so far by Doge, more or less?
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Let's pause on that for a second. I mean, what does that tell you about how government employees feel about their jobs and about this buyout offer, if we can call it that?
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
McKay Coppins is a staff writer for The Atlantic and the author of two books, The Wilderness, about the battle over the future of the Republican Party, and Romney, A Reckoning, a biography of Mitt Romney. The online version of his new article is Growing Up Murdoch, James Murdoch on mind games, sibling rivalry, and the war for the family media empire.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
You know, there was an extraordinary move, and I mentioned this in the introduction, which I think is a measure of Musk's influence in the government, that he got these emails sent to people last weekend instructing them to reply with five bullet points stating what they'd accomplished the previous week. There was some pushback. Some agency had said, you don't have to do that.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
But, you know, Musk added in this social media post that failure to respond would be taken as a resignation. What was your reaction when you heard about this?
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Dave Davies. Today, a real-life succession drama. Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins describes the rivalry among the children of 93-year-old media titan Rupert Murdoch over who will control his business empire when he passes from the scene.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
You know, I wonder if workers are, while they're getting these messages from the top, are having their personal supervisors reassure them at all saying, look, this is not something we're doing. What you do is important. We want to keep doing it. Hang in there. Have you heard things like that?
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
It's on The Atlantic's website, and it's also the magazine's April issue cover story. Well, McKay Coppins, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thanks for having me. All right. Well, let's talk about this story, the Murdoch story. I mean, Rupert Murdoch actually inherited a newspaper from his dad who had an interesting background in journalism.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
There have been media reports of people who were discharged with language about poor performance or similar language, but who have said in interviews that they've had nothing but positive performance reports. Generally speaking, what kinds of rights do they have to appeal these firings?
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
You know, in writing about these recent reductions, you wrote, the administration seems to be weakening or fully eliminating teams that were doing exactly the kind of work DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, claims to value. Focus on data evaluation and customer service teams that have spent years.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
reducing bureaucratic red tape, modernizing service delivery, and bringing in critical tech talent. In other words, there were people out there doing the kind of work that Doge was supposed to do, how to get more for the taxpayer's dollar. Some might be skeptical of that statement. Can you give us an example of this?
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
And then he went off on this swashbuckling campaign to acquire one paper and then use the leverage on that to get another and another. And at the time, he was 40. He was the most powerful media owner in Australia. He moves to the United Kingdom and
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
The administration's response to some of the complaints that have arisen is essentially that, look, extreme times sometimes demand extreme measures. Government spending is out of control. Musk himself has said, yes, we will make mistakes, but we will correct them quickly. What's your reaction to that? Do you think things could get better with time?
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
buys tabloids and eventually a broadsheet there, eventually ends up in the States where he gets the Wall Street Journal and starts Fox News, which was a big success. I wouldn't normally assume that someone who owns media businesses would necessarily want his kids to get involved in the family business. They have resources. They could get educations, do whatever they want.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
You know, something like 80 percent of the federal workers live outside the Washington, D.C. area. What might be the economic impact of these job cuts on communities where workers live?
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
This effort is really just underway. I mean, it's been a few weeks really. Do you have any idea what to expect in the future? Where do you think this is going to go?
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
What's an example of one of these cuts that will be apparent to citizens soon?
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Did Rupert Murdoch consciously try to bring his children, get them interested in the media?
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Elizabeth Linos, thank you so much for speaking with us.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Elizabeth Linos is the Emma Bloomberg Associate Professor of Public Policy and Management at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Now, he had two sons, Lachlan and James, born 15 months apart. Lachlan was a little older. James was a little younger. And the other major character in this is their sister, Liz. Those three were the children of Murdoch's second wife, Anna. There was a fourth, Prudence, known as Prue, and she was the daughter of his previous marriage.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
But those three, James, Lachlan, and Liz, were the main characters for most of this drama. James and Lachlan would both eventually play prominent roles in the businesses and would be rivals for succession over the years at various times. But James didn't start out that way, did he? I mean he went a whole different direction out of college and thereafter.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Murdoch's effort to ensure his elder son Lachlan inherits the throne led to a no-holds-barred legal brawl that unearthed painful family stories of manipulation and betrayal.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
So I want to move us into the Trump era here. Lachlan Murdoch, the elder son, had left the company. He had been in Australia for many years. And then in 2015, he moves back, gets an office in Los Angeles. He's with the company. James, the younger brother, has an office in New York, putting them in kind of an awkward position, both being prominent executives in the company.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Also, we'll talk with Harvard professor Elizabeth Linos about the extraordinary measures Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has taken to shrink the size of the federal government and what that means for federal workers and the rest of us who depend on government services. And John Powers reviews the animated film Flow, which he says is wonderful.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
And then in 2015, Donald Trump appears on the scene as a presidential candidate. One question I've always had is how much Rupert Murdoch is motivated by an ideological agenda as opposed to accumulating in wealth and power. And you write that in 2016, Rupert Murdoch was openly scornful of Trump's candidacy at first saying his election would be the end of the Republican Party.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
But once he had momentum, you write the Fox News primetime lineup turned into a four-hour Trump commercial. How did James regard this, this turn in Fox News?
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
And Lachlan was still in the company. Do we know what his attitude was towards the Fox News embrace of Trump and what his relationship was like with James during this time?
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
So James gradually became a bit more public about his views. I mean particularly he put out a statement about Trump's remarks on the march in Charlottesville saying – Trump saying that there were very fine people in the tiki torch march there. And then there was another occasion when there were terrible forest fires in Australia.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
And some media, I think the Daily Beast, asked for comment about, well, what about the fact that the Murdoch papers in Australia ignore climate change as an element of all this? What happened?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
McKay Coffins is a staff writer for The Atlantic. His new article is Growing Up Murdoch, James Murdoch on mind games, sibling rivalry, and the war for the family media empire. He'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. So let's get to the court battle that's at the heart of this story.
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Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
There was a plan in place for many, many years, a trust, which said that when Rupert Murdoch passed away, that the voting rights in the company would be split among four siblings, Lachlan and James, the two boys, Liz, their sister, and then Prue, who was their sister from a previous marriage.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
And to a lot of observers, that meant that it might be James who had the upper hand over Lachlan because it was assumed that the two sisters might work with him in terms of the future direction of the company. This was problematic for Rupert Murdoch, right? So he hatches a plan. What does he do?
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Right. And this is fascinating because Pope Paul VI, he issues this encyclical called Of Human Life, which fully rejects the findings of this commission about liberalizing rules on birth control and rejects it completely. What was the reaction in the church among Catholics? How was it received?
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Right. Polling showed that Catholics everywhere disapproved of this, and clergy in the Netherlands basically revolted, right?
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
You know, this backsliding and essentially rejection of the reforms of Vatican II lasted over the next four popes that followed John XXIII, all who were different from each other in one way or another. But they pretty much used their power to impede or roll back these reforms.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
I wonder, have you reflected on what motivated so many of these popes to resist change and embrace practices out of step with the lives so many Catholics were leading?
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
We need to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Philip Sheenan. He is a veteran investigative reporter. His new book is Jesus Wept, Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church. He'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies. This is Fresh Air.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
I wanted to return to a moment with Pope Paul VI, who was the one after John XXIII. In the 60s and 70s, he was the pope, and he had affirmed the church's ban on birth control despite the recommendation of a commission that had been established, which favored relaxing the rules.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
And this happened in the late 60s when there were a lot of sweeping cultural changes including the sexual revolution, which certainly troubled church conservatives. And in 1975, Pope Paul was so angry about the criticism he received about the birth control issue and the rejection of his views.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
He is known for not having spoken out against Nazi crimes despite substantial evidence that he was aware of them. But there's even more. You tell a story in the book which was new to me of this Pope Pius before he was pope, when he was an archbishop in Munich, meeting personally with a then rising Adolf Hitler. What happened here?
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
that he directed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, that's a unit within the Vatican, to release a long declaration on sexual morality, which had hardened condemnations of extramarital sex, masturbation even, homosexuality. That really prompted some revelations in the press about Paul's personal life. What happened?
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
And you note that this raised the question among some whether the church's failure to address sexual abuse among the clergy was influenced at least in part by the fact that high-ranking church officials themselves had their own closely guarded sexual secrets. Yes.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
You note that there have been some studies by former clergy on this issue who have some professional training in mental health. I mean there was a Father Kennedy who was a Loyola psychologist and then later a former priest and monk, Richard Seip, who became a psychotherapist and treated clergymen. Both of them kind of mused upon what the celibacy vow that is imposed on clergy was.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
the psychological effect that it had that might have played a role in this abuse scandal? What did they conclude?
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Pacelli being the name of the cardinal before he became pope, yeah.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
You know, the scandal of sexual abuse in the church has been widely reported. And I think it's fair to say from a reading of your book that none of the popes that you write about confronted this terrible problem honestly and forcefully, all of them in varying degrees protected predators. In your research, did you come across any documents on this that really surprised you?
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. We in the media regularly cover the decisions of powerful leaders in government and business and how they affect our lives. My guest today, veteran investigative reporter Philip Sheenan, has spent much of the last 10 years examining the impact of seven powerful men who've exercised a different kind of authority.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
I want to take one more break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Philip Sheenan, a veteran investigative reporter. His new book is Jesus Wept, Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church. We'll continue our conversation after this break. This is Fresh Air.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Well, I want to talk about Pope Francis, the current pope who, as you and I record this, is suffering from pneumonia. I hope he does well and recovers. He was elected in 2013, and he took the name of Francis of Assisi, the 13th century cleric who wore rags and focused on the needs of the poor. It's interesting that when he took office—
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
The initial impression kind of reminds you of John XXIII, the guy who initiated the Second Vatican Council in that Francis sort of rejected some of the finer trappings of the office. Tell us about that.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
So, you know, what about some of the rules that had been in place for so long that had been controversial, like the refusal to provide communion to Catholics who had been divorced, giving, you know, sacraments to gay couples, that kind of thing? What's actually changed?
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
And what about the attitude towards birth control and abortion? Any change there?
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
This housekeeper, Sister Pascalina Leonard, it turns out was a very close advisor of Pius and wrote these interesting diaries. And it said that she actually advised him to speak out against the Nazis during World War II when all this was happening, right?
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
One of the ways that a pope has impact apart from what he says about doctrine and practice is who he appoints. I mean there's a lot of authority. They appoint cardinals. And I'm wondering – it seems you think that there might be some liberalizing impact of his appointments within the Vatican, right?
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Does Francis have a better record in terms of dealing with the sexual abuse crisis within the church than his predecessors?
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
You know, the Pope and the Vatican have been portrayed in various films and movies over the years. Recently, we had the movie Conclave starring Ralph Fiennes. How do you find the portrayals of Popes and the Vatican in PVN movies that we've seen?
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
You know, in the movie Conclave, there were these details about how the cardinals are truly kept isolated and unable to communicate. You know, windows are covered. Cell phones are not available. Is that true?
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
And are there caucuses among like-minded cardinals on the side?
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
You know, in this book, you point out a lot of hypocrisy and corruption in the church. And some may regard the book or maybe this interview as anti-Catholic. After all of these years of research, how do you regard the value or harm of this institution?
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
And yet it endures. I mean, more than a billion people are still there, right? Presumably getting some comfort and value from it.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Well, Philip Sheenan, thank you so much for speaking with us.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Philip Sheenan is a veteran investigative reporter who spent 20 years with the New York Times. His new book is Jesus Wept, Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church. Coming up, John Powers reviews a new autobiographical novel by Brigitte Giroux, which looks back at the accident that killed her husband. This is Fresh Air.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
In the new autobiographical novel Live Fast, Brigitte Giraud looks back at the accident that killed her husband. She speculates on the many ways that tragedy could have turned out differently. The book won the French equivalent of the Booker Prize. Our critic-at-large John Power says that he read it in a sitting, and it left him thinking about how we all want to rewrite the past.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
John Powers reviewed the novel Live Fast by Brigitte Giroux. On tomorrow's show, we get a revealing look at the children of an aging billionaire as they maneuver for control of their father's media empire when he passes away. It's not HBO's Succession, but the real-life family drama surrounding Rupert Murdoch and Fox News. We'll speak with The Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
I hope you can join us. The Atlantic Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman, and Joel Wolfram.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Before we leave Pope Pius, I want to mention the will. When he died, there was a very short will which was discovered and, well, it was kind of surprising. What did it say?
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
So in 1958, after Pope Pius dies, the cardinals in the Vatican gather to select the new pope. We're all familiar with this ritual. They settle on an Italian bishop, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, who takes the name Pope John XXIII. He's short, quite overweight, not the most imposing figure visually.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
They're the last seven popes of the Catholic Church, whose intense power struggles and doctrinal debates affect more than a billion Catholics in countless ways. Whether they can use birth control or get an abortion or divorce and remain in good standing in the faith,
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
But you say, without saying so directly, he made it clear quickly that things were going to be different from the grim sobriety of the previous pope. What did he do?
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
All right. Let's talk about some of the issues of potential reform that came up at the Vatican II Council, some issues that the church was confronting. One of them was the longstanding practice of requiring priests to remain unmarried and celibate. Now, there's a fascinating history here, right? This was not always the case, right?
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Whether priests must forever remain unmarried and celibate, a rule with little biblical authority that fuels a drastic shortage of priests and leaves millions unable to regularly attend Mass or receive sacraments. Whether same-sex couples can be accepted in the church. And whether sexual predators will be stopped and held accountable.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
So there's this requirement that priests can't marry and can't have sex. This has created a problem for the church, hasn't it? A real shortage of priests.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
There was another issue involving sexuality and that is birth control. I mean it was against Catholic doctrine. There was thought that perhaps it's time to change that. You write about a Belgian bishop, Leo Joseph Sunans, who talked about his experiences hearing the confessions of women and what this restriction meant for them in their lives.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
There was one really significant change, which was it was decreed that they didn't have to – priests did not have to conduct mass solely in Latin, which meant that people around the world could understand more of what was being said. That was really the one enduring change, wasn't it?
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Sheenan's book is the story of a bold attempt to reform the church in the early 1960s and decades of backsliding that followed under pontiffs more comfortable with conservative traditions and power concentrated in the Vatican. Philip Sheenan spent more than 20 years at the New York Times covering the Pentagon, the Justice Department, the State Department, and Congress.
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
And I guess another thing that Pope John XXIII did make some progress on is changing church doctrine on how the Catholic Church regarded other faiths, particularly Protestant faiths, but also particularly the Jewish faith. It was pretty harsh before that, right?
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
So Philip Sheenan, we talked about how Pope John XXIII with the Second Vatican Council initiated a lot of reforms in the Catholic Church. Some were enacted. The four popes who followed by and large didn't advance those efforts and in many cases kind of reversed them.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
The pope who immediately followed John XXIII was Pope Paul VI, the guy who was kind of reluctant to take it on and seemed to have come under the influence of some of the more conservatives in Catholicism. Vatican. One of the things that John XXIII had done was he had developed a commission to investigate the subject of birth control. This was a pretty serious effort, wasn't it?
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
His two previous books focused on the 9-11 investigation and unanswered questions about the Kennedy assassination. His new book is Jesus Wept, Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church. Philip Sheenan, welcome back to Fresh Air.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
The other thing that's happening in this story with your character is – I mentioned before that this series kind of the germ of it began during COVID when you were hearing from first responders and the crises they were facing. And in the show, your character, Dr. Robbie – During COVID, lost a mentor, another doctor.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And I believe this day that is the focus of the series is the anniversary of his death, right? Correct. We learned that early on. And then you want to just talk a bit about how his flashbacks, his PTSD, if you will, is portrayed in the show?
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
You know, I mentioned in the introduction that your character, maybe I didn't, he's the senior attending physician in this emergency room. And, you know, in addition to treating patients, you're really running this big organization, and it's a teaching hospital.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
So while you're an experienced pro, there are all these others who are less experienced, residents in training and medical students, on their first day, I believe, in their rotation as this thing begins. So there's a lot going on here. Tell us just a little bit more about your character, Dr. Robbie.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And she's carried that painful memory for all these years.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
We're going to take another break here. We are speaking with Noah Wiley. He's an executive producer, writer, and star of the new Max series, The Pit, which is streaming now. He'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
The next clip I wanted to play is a painful moment in the emergency room where a young child has died. And in this case, she drowned, I think, after jumping into a swimming pool to try and save her sister who survived, right? Yes. Right. So after the child dies, you gather the medical students and residents into a room for a moment. And let's listen to what you say.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
What an interruption. You wrote this scene, didn't you? This was your episode, right?
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Your speech about how to overcome a loss like this is interrupted. It's because they say patients are throwing chairs and fists. And it turns out to be two women who are fighting because one has – in the waiting room, I guess. One woman has asked another woman to mask her coughing child. And the other mom calls her a Fauci zombie and slugs her.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
This is one of the many topical issues that you get into in this series, which weren't even around in ER. I mean, people listened to their doctors. They didn't resist vaccines and masks then.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And you do have an episode later about a measles outbreak.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
You know, one of the things that I like about the show is that it is set in a real place. It's in Pittsburgh. And we're in Philadelphia. I've traveled around Pennsylvania a bit. And if you listen carefully, you can hear a lot of Pittsburgh stuff. I mean, Primanti sandwiches, which is a thing there.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And when the charge nurse breaks up this fight between the two women, there's this moment where she says, what are you doing? What are you doing? Where do you think you are? This ain't Philly. It's a hospital. I really appreciated that.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. Our guest today, Noah Wiley, is an executive producer, writer, and star of the new Mac series, The Pit, which gives viewers an inside look at the chaos and drama of a big city hospital emergency room.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
One of the interesting storylines in The Pit involved the Freedom House Ambulance Service, which had been established by a group of black men in Pittsburgh. I believe it's really the first kind of 911 ambulance services in the nation. And one of the patients, I guess, is a veteran of that. Do you want to tell us how that got into the story?
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
You know, one of the other things that you see in this series depicted is – and I think this was the kid who died of the fentanyl overdose. And the parents, once they come to terms with the fact that he is brain dead, agree to let him become an organ donor. And then when he's wheeled out, when the son is wheeled out to start his journey, the whole staff line up in honor of this contribution.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Right. And things – he runs into some rough seas. You know, he's surrounded by these young medical students. And I don't think I recognize any of the actors in this, but they are just so terrific.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
It's an honor walk, I guess, is what you call it, right? Yes. That's a real thing, right?
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Going to take another break here. We are speaking with Noah Wiley. He's an executive producer, writer, and star of the new Mac series, The Pit, which is streaming now. We'll continue our conversation after this short break. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Let's talk a little bit about your own life. You grew up in Los Angeles, right? Your mom was an orthopedic head nurse and you said an OR nurse too, right? You had two siblings and then I guess your parents divorced when you were pretty young and both remarried and had other kids.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Right. You went to a private school about 100 miles away from L.A., I gather, and got interested in theater there?
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Yeah, performing is fun. Getting praised for it is better. Yeah.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
So you spent a few years, you know, I assume you were taking acting lessons, right, and going to auditions. And was that, I mean, that stretch where you were going to auditions and getting small parts, what did it feel like at the time? Was it frustrating? It can be tough, right?
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Right, which was a huge success from the beginning. It was a big project for NBC. So this was like, what, 1994 when it debuted, right, the series? Yeah, we shot the pilot in 93 and 94. So that's when there weren't all these videos on the internet and all that stuff and people watched network television.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And NBC, they had a two-hour special I think on Sunday night and then the next episode was on Thursday night at 10 where it stayed for 15 seasons. Quite a remarkable thing. Were you ready for that kind of success? What was it like for you?
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Did you trust it? I mean, you know, when you have that kind of huge success as a young person, it can give you kind of an imposter syndrome. Like, do I really deserve this?
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
You stayed for 11 seasons, right? By that point, most of the original cast had moved on, right? And then you took a couple of years off to have kids, right? And then came back for the last season? Is that
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Yeah, John Carter was your character who began as a med student, right?
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Over the course of the series, we see him mature, become a doctor, get stabbed and nearly die.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Yeah, a lot happens. You know, during the series run, you had a platform to connect with causes that matter to you. And you got connected with an organization called Doctors of the World. That's distinct from Doctors Without Borders. Tell us about that relationship, what you did.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And they're great. Well, let's listen to a scene and get a little bit of a flavor of the show. This scene is typical of many where a new patient is being wheeled in by paramedics from an ambulance. And we hear them barking out critical facts as they're rolling them in.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Right, you carried it into ER. What kinds of things did you see in Macedonia? I mean, you weren't treating people, obviously.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And then you hear this one, two, three as the team coordinates lifting the patient from the ambulance stretcher to a hospital gurney. And then the team gets to work. Let's listen.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Well, you have been renewed for a second season of The Pit, right? I mean, you've got your work there. Yes.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Well, Noah Wiley, thank you so much for speaking with us. It's been fun. Oh, this has been a pleasure. Thank you. Noah Wiley is an executive producer, writer, and star of the series The Pit, which is streaming on Max. Coming up, Maureen Corrigan recommends reading from two witty women authors, one a long-deceased legend, the other a debut novelist. This is Fresh Air.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
If you could use some humor right now, our book critic Maureen Corrigan has a couple of books she strongly recommends.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed poems by Dorothy Parker and The Unusual Desire to Kill by Camilla Barnes. On tomorrow's show, we speak with Harvard government professor Stephen Levitsky. He spent years studying how democracies die. He argues that the Trump administration is pushing the U.S.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
towards a 21st century form of autocracy, where elections, opposition parties, and independent media still exist— but are weakened by the incumbent rulers' abuses of power. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Ripper Shorrock directs the show.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And that's a scene from The Pit where our guest Noah Wiley is a star.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Right. And you don't see it on the radio, but it is dramatic there. But just the audio, I mean, you can hear the intensity of it. And there's all this medical jargon flying by. I mean, did you know all this stuff before you got into this series?
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Yeah. I watched this series with my wife who's 25 years as a primary care physician. She gets almost all of it. I get maybe a third of it. But I don't feel like I'm missing much. But I did wonder – you were a writer on the show, I know. I mean do you think about maybe letting up on some of that or is getting all that in critical to the authenticity of it?
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Well, the other thing that's interesting about those scenes is everybody's moving and all of these different actors are – Barking these observations and commands, and they've got to be careful not to talk over each other so much that you can't hear it. So it's got to be crisply delivered and well-miked. I imagine this took some pretty meticulous rehearsal.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
The effect is impressive. You know, the origins of this show are interesting. As I understand it, during the pandemic, you began hearing from medical providers and first responders who were dealing with all this high stakes, stressful demand on them. Is that right?
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
The pit has drawn critical praise for its engaging storylines, intelligent dialogue, and well-drawn characters. And it's gained a following of real-life emergency room doctors who praise the accuracy of the show's depiction of medical conditions and treatments. Noah Wiley is a veteran of stage, screen, and television who's no stranger to lab coats and hospital scrubs.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
What was it like for you to put on scrubs and a lab coat and get back in a hospital setting again after all those years?
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
But now you have a beard. I mean, you were a callow young kid when you started that show and then you were eventually an attending physician. Now you're a guy with a lot of miles on you.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Right, right. You know, I should just mention, it's been widely reported that there is some litigation around this. The estate of Michael Crichton, who was the creator of ER, has sued alleging that The Pit is an unauthorized reboot of the program. I mean one of the differences between the two shows is that The Pit is the entire 15 episodes are one day in the life of this ER.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
There's an hour – essentially in real time, an hour per episode is one hour of the day. And so you get to see these things develop just over a day. So that's the real distinction.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
You're the lead attending in this emergency room. And in real life, you're also an executive producer and a writer and an experienced actor among a cast, which includes a lot of, you know, much younger actors. Were you kind of a coach on the set in the same way you're a medical coach for these people learning the craft?
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
He played a medical student and then a physician on the hit NBC TV series ER for most of its 15 seasons, where he earned nominations for three Golden Globe and five Primetime Emmy Awards. He starred in the TNT series Falling Skies and The Librarians and has appeared in many movies. He's also been active in the organization's Human Rights Watch and Doctors of the World.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
Was there a wrap party after you finished taping in which those barriers broke down or –
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
You know, we listened to a clip earlier that was an intense moment in which a patient is being wheeled in and the staff is immediately getting to work on him. There are a lot of quieter moments in this series where you are dealing with a patient or a relative and have some tough issues to communicate.
Fresh Air
Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
This is one I want to play now where a man and a woman who are a brother and sister, played here by Rebecca Tilney and Mackenzie Astin, are at the hospital. with their elderly father who has pneumonia. The father has left instructions. He does not want to be intubated. And they're talking to you as Dr. Robbie about it. Dr. Robbie speaks first. Let's listen.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
And that is our guest, Noah Wiley, in a scene from The Pit, which is now streaming on Max. There are a lot of these scenes where you're dealing with loved ones who just can't accept what's happening. And there's another one, two parents who just can't accept the fact that their son, who came in with a fentanyl overdose, is brain dead.
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
You want to just say a little bit about preparing for these scenes?
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Noah Wyle Is At Home In 'The Pitt'
The Pit is now wrapping up its 15-episode run and has been renewed for a second season – Noah Wiley, welcome to Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. In 1949, a Republican activist named Suzanne Stevenson formed an organization called the Minute Women of the USA to fight what she perceived as the creep of Soviet communism in America.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
And they met with their lawyers preparing. And one of the things that you write about in the book is that their lawyers met with Eric Johnston, who was head of the Motion Picture Association of America, the chief industry trade group, who told the lawyers for these artists who were expecting a tough time before this committee, don't worry, there will never be a blacklist, right?
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
I mean, this is remarkable, but things changed.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Yeah. And what about the unions, the Screen Actors Guild, the Screenwriters Guild?
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
So it was hard to find friends if you were one of these actors or writers who was targeted.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Because I guess there was a national consensus that Soviet communism was a danger.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
You know, new rights for organized labor, the beginnings of the social security system, etc., Roosevelt was enormously popular really as the result of these programs. What were the greatest objections to those changes and what form did the opposition take?
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
All right, let's take another break here, then we'll talk some more. We are speaking with Clay Risen. He is a reporter and editor for The New York Times and the author of eight books. His latest is Red Scare, Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. He'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Going back to Hollywood for a moment, there was never a blacklist exactly as you say. But as close as it came was a book called Red Channels, a report of communist influence on radio and television produced by something called the American Business Consultants. Who were they? What did they do with this?
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Makes you think of social media today. It does. Somebody sees an opportunity. Yeah, let's push this farther.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
We haven't talked about Joe McCarthy. His story is better known than some of the others that we've talked about. But he was certainly the shining knight of the anti-communist crusade.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
A senator from Wisconsin who made many speeches beginning in 1950 claiming to have lists of communists in the State Department or the Defense Department or whatever, but never really seemed to come up with much credible evidence. That run lasted until about 1954 when he was embarrassed in a in a really dramatic Senate hearing and was then censured by his colleagues at the Senate.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
It struck me when I read, particularly the way he interacted with Republicans, that this in some ways reminds me of Donald Trump, not completely, but the firing from the hip with accusations that he couldn't prove and the fact that Republicans, a lot of Republicans in Congress didn't particularly respect him, didn't think he was credible, but wouldn't challenge him, right?
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
The group would attract tens of thousands of members, and they were told to meet in small cells and appear as individual concerned citizens when they wrote letters or heckled liberal speakers or packed a city council meeting to oppose public housing. The story of the Minutewomen is one of many told in a new book by our guest, journalist and historian Clay Risen.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
It was also striking that there would be hearings in which – in some cases, the chair of the hearings thought, OK, we're going to get McCarthy on the record here and prove that he doesn't know what he's talking about. So he would make some charges and then witnesses would come in who would completely debunk the charges that he had made.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
But by then, he'd opened up the fire on somebody else and had two or three more new charges. And somehow just kept it rolling and the media – I mean he knew how to play the media. They would always report a new charge because, oh my heavens, if this official really is a subversive, we don't want to miss that story. He really manipulated the media pretty effectively, didn't he?
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Let's take another break here. We are speaking with Clay Risen. He is a reporter and editor for The New York Times. His book is Red Scare, Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. We'll continue our conversation after this break. This is Fresh Air. You know, it's a fascinating story that you tell here. And it did kind of have an end, right? It lasted about a decade, I guess.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
And there are really two things that seemed to help close the door on this frenzy of anti-communism. One was Republican President Dwight Eisenhower. What did he do?
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
We're going through a remarkable transition in national policy now with the Trump administration. And you write in the book that you think you see a through line from the events in the Red Scare to our current political moment. What do you see as the relevance of these events for us understanding what's happening now?
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Right. So you had that thing going on. There's this people who were angry, felt that they had been pushed aside, left out, that their way of life was ignored and replaced with something alien. The second strand you cite, of course, is the emergence of the Cold War and the fear of the Soviet Union. And that was connected to a communist presence in the United States.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Clay Risen, thanks so much for speaking with us.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Clay Risen is a reporter and editor for The New York Times and the author of eight previous books. His latest is Red Scare, Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. This is Fresh Air. Our TV critic David Bianculli has been impressed by two new TV series that tell their stories using time in a very inventive fashion.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
One is the new Max medical drama The Pit, which presents new episodes each Thursday through April 10th. The other, now streaming in its entirety, is the four-part Netflix series Adolescence, which follows the case of a murdered teen from several different perspectives. Here's David's review.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
And we should note that while Soviet-style communism is discredited among Americans today, it was different in the 30s and 40s, right?
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
David Bianculli is a professor of television studies at Rowan University. He reviewed The Pit on Max and Adolescence, now streaming on Netflix. On tomorrow's show, we speak with Seth Rogen, star and co-creator of the new TV comedy series The Studio. It's about a freshly appointed movie studio head trying to keep the company afloat as Hollywood changes around him.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Episodes include Martin Scorsese, Zoe Kravitz, and Ice Cube playing versions of themselves. I hope you can join us. Thank you. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
You know, I often think of... The excesses of the Red Scare as being driven by congressional hearings, people demanding loyalty statements and the like. But Harry Truman, the Democratic president who followed Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was actually pretty active on this front as well. Tell us why he embraced this idea of asking citizens to commit to loyalty hosts and the like.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Risen examines the frenzy of anti-communist activity that swept the nation after the Second World War, most often associated with the Hollywood blacklist and the relentless and mostly unfounded charges of communist infiltration leveled by Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Right. I mean, it's interesting. He comes up with this loyalty oath that he expects government employees to swear to. People identified problems with this approach. What were they?
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Risen describes the red-baiting hysteria of the period in colorful detail, and he writes that there's a through-line to be found from that era up to our current political moment. Clay Risen is currently a reporter and editor at The New York Times, now assigned to the obituaries desk, and is the author of eight books, some about American history and some about whiskey.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
So the organizations could have been civil rights organizations or people opposing Franco and Sprain, a whole lot of things, which communists might or might not support but which were not per se communist fronts.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
The dimensions of this program were astonishing when I read them. 4.76 million background checks, which resulted in more than 26,000 FBI field investigations. The result being 6,800 people who resigned or withdrew their applications for employment, 560 who were fired, and no spies identified, by the way.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Did Truman ever express regret about this as far as we know?
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
You know, some of the most memorable sounds and images of the Red Scare comes from hearings on the movie industry. You know, there's not a lot of espionage in Hollywood as far as I know. Why was it such an early and attractive target?
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Before writing obituaries, Risen was a senior editor on the Times 2020 politics coverage and before that an editor on the opinion desk. His new book is Red Scare, Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. Clay Risen, welcome to Fresh Air. Thanks for having me.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
You know, these hearings were of the House Un-American Activities Committee were extensively covered by the media. And, you know, you can see the film of this and like reporters jammed all around the witness table, you know, right in the faces of the witnesses. And, you know, TV coverage wasn't really a thing yet.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
But back then, movies and theaters would often, before the movie is shown, open with newsreels of, you know, stuff going on and hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee happening. appeared in them, which is why some of this film footage is preserved. And I thought we would listen to a little clip here. This is a piece of testimony from Hollywood screenwriter Howard Lawson.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
There's a lot of detail in this book, but there's also a big picture sense of what was really happening with this outbreak of anti-communist fervor. And one of the strands, you say, was a culture war, a long simmering resentment among conservatives about the changes that had taken place in the nation with the New Deal.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
And with about 35 wraps of the gavel there, boy, intense stuff. This is the House Un-American Activities Committee, Howard Lawson, who himself was actually a member of the Communist Party, right?
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
And it was not illegal to be in the communist party then?
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
You know, it's fascinating to read how quickly this anti-communist movement gained momentum. And the events around this particular hearing are a case in point. You know, there were 10 witnesses who were all screenwriters, I think, who everyone knew were going to be really targeted by the committee. And they flew as a group from L.A. to New York. to get ready for the hearing.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. Our guest today, David Leitch, is a successful Hollywood director who got into the business in an unusual way, as a stuntman, performing daring feats as stunt doubles for actors including Matt Damon and Keanu Reeves.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
David Leitch is a former stuntman who now produces and directs films. He spoke to Terry last year when his film The Fall Guy was released. We'll hear more of their conversation after this short break. And Justin Chang reviews the new Wes Anderson film The Phoenician Scheme. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
His breakthrough was on Fight Club, as a stunt double for Brad Pitt, who he worked with on several subsequent films, including Troy, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and Ocean's Eleven. He became an action coordinator and stunt coordinator and eventually a director of big-budget films.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
We're listening to Terry's interview recorded last year with film director and former stuntman David Leitch. We'll hear more of their conversation after this short break. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
David Leitch spoke with Terry Gross last year when his film The Fall Guy, starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, was released. Coming up, Justin Chang reviews Wes Anderson's new movie The Phoenician Scheme. This is Fresh Air. In Wes Anderson's new movie The Phoenician Scheme, Benicio del Toro plays a wealthy European tycoon trying to lock down partners for a big infrastructure deal abroad.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
The film is set in the 1950s and features an ensemble cast that includes Michael Cera, Tom Hanks, and in a major role, Mia Threpleton. The Phoenician Scheme opens in theaters today. Our film critic Justin Chang has this review.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. He reviewed Wes Anderson's new film, The Phoenician Scheme.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
On Monday's show, we talk with Todd Purdom about his new book on Desi Arnaz. Arnaz became a star playing Ricky Ricardo on I Love Lucy. Behind the scenes, though, he created what became standard procedures for producing, shooting, lighting, and broadcasting TV sitcoms. Purdom's new book is Desi Arnaz, The Man Who Invented Television. I hope you can join us. Thank you.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly C. Vinesper. Hope Wilson is our consulting visual producer. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
He directed Bullet Train, Fast and Furious Presents Hobbs and Shaw, Deadpool 2, Atomic Blonde, and was an uncredited co-director of the first John Wick movie. Today we're going to listen to the interview Terry recorded last year with David Leitch when his film The Fall Guy, starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, was released.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
Inspired by the 1980s TV series The Fall Guy, it's about a stuntman who ends up having to execute spectacular stunts in his real life to save the film he's working on and regain the love of the woman who's directing it. Terry's interview begins with the opening scene of The Fall Guy.
Fresh Air
A Veteran Stunt Performer Shares Tricks Of The Trade
It's a series of action sequences in which the stunts include tumbling down a rocky cliff, riding a motorcycle over the roofs of several cars, getting thrown through a bus window, and running through a battlefield surrounded by explosions and getting blown off the ground. The sequence is narrated by Ryan Gosling's character over plenty of gunfire, explosions, and shattering glass.
Fresh Air
The Exile Of Charlie Chaplin
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. Charlie Chaplin is a legendary figure of American cinema, remembered for silent films such as Modern Times about the alienation of factory work and The Great Dictator, a talking picture in which Chaplin satirized and imitated Adolf Hitler. But Chaplin also led a colorful and controversial life beyond his film career.
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The Exile Of Charlie Chaplin
Scott Iman speaking last year with Terry Gross. Iman's book, Charlie Chaplin vs. America, When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided, is now out in paperback. We'll hear more of their conversation after a break, and Justin Chang will review the movies Wicked and Gladiator 2. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies.
Fresh Air
The Exile Of Charlie Chaplin
We're listening to the interview Terry Gross recorded last fall with author Scott Iman about his book on the remarkable life of actor and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin. His book, Charlie Chaplin vs. America, When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided, is now out in paperbacks.
Fresh Air
The Exile Of Charlie Chaplin
Scott Eyman speaking with Terry Gross. Eyman's book, Charlie Chaplin vs. America, When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided, is now out in paperback. We'll hear more after a break. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air, and we're listening to the interview Terry Gross recorded last fall with author Scott Iman about his book Charlie Chaplin vs. America, When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided.
Fresh Air
The Exile Of Charlie Chaplin
Today we're going to listen to Terry's interview with writer Scott Iman about his book, Charlie Chaplin vs. America, When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided. It's now out in paperback. Eyman writes about Chaplin's affairs with younger women, a paternity suit in which he was falsely accused, and the FBI's investigation into his alleged communist ties, among other things.
Fresh Air
The Exile Of Charlie Chaplin
Scott Iman, speaking with Terry Gross, recorded last fall. Iman's book, Charlie Chaplin vs. America, When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided, is now out in paperback. Coming up, Justin Chang reviews the movies Wicked and Gladiator 2. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. This pre-Thanksgiving week sees the release of two much-anticipated studio movies.
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The Exile Of Charlie Chaplin
Paul Meskel and Denzel Washington star in Gladiator II, the sequel to the Oscar-winning Roman epic Gladiator, while Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande star in Wicked, an adaptation of the Broadway musical fantasy featuring characters from The Wizard of Oz. Our film critic Justin Chang has seen both Wicked and Gladiator II. Here's his take.
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The Exile Of Charlie Chaplin
Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. He reviewed Wicked and Gladiator 2. On Monday's show, we speak with Marine Corps veteran Bailey Williams about her experiences as a woman in the military and the pressure she felt to prove her strength and push her body to dangerous extremes. Running for hours a day, starving herself, binging and purging.
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The Exile Of Charlie Chaplin
Her book is Hollow, a memoir of my body in the Marines. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorrock.
Fresh Air
The Exile Of Charlie Chaplin
Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Adam Staniszewski, Joyce Lieberman, and Julian Hertzfeld. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Faya Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producers are Molly C.V.
Fresh Air
The Exile Of Charlie Chaplin
Nesper and Sabrina Seaworth. With Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
Fresh Air
The Exile Of Charlie Chaplin
When Chaplin went to England in 1952 to promote a film, his reentry papers were revoked, forcing him to spend the last 25 years of his life in exile. Scott Iman is also the author of books about John Wayne, Cary Grant, John Ford, and Cecil B. DeMille. Cary spoke to him last fall when his book Charlie Chaplin vs. America was published in hardback.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
I want to talk with a basic staple of sports reporting, and that's the locker room interview after the game when guys gather around athletes. And I want to just call on my limited experience here. Back in the 1980s, NPR relied on its member stations for a lot of its sports reporting. And although I mostly covered politicians and elected officials, I did cover some big sporting events.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And what I noticed in the athletes' locker rooms was how relatively timid the sports reporters seemed to be about asking a tough question. And it occurred to me that elected officials and politicians need the media. They have some obligation to talk. Athletes really don't need sports journalists, do they?
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Right. And a lot of your book is about the business of getting meaningful access to players and coaches, moments in which they may be candid. How did you learn that?
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Right. But then the athlete thinks he's having a conversation when he's in fact giving you on-the-record comment. Is that an issue?
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Now, the other issue you have is you establish friendly relationships with athletes, and then you have to sometimes be tough on them. How do you handle that?
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
You've written a lot about golf, some great stuff. And I have to ask you about Tiger Woods, who was just such an incredible talent when he arrived. I mean, he dominated his sport in a way that is rare in athletics. What was he like when you first got to know him on the tour?
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And one of the things you'd written about his father was that his father was the kind of manipulative sports dad.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
You have some great stories in here about tennis. And one of them I liked was when you followed John McEnroe into the locker room at the U.S. Open because he wasn't talking to anybody. And this was an example of you just getting access that other people couldn't get and it paying off. Tell us what happened.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
One more thing. I've noticed in my career writing mostly about things other than sports that when I occasionally have done a story at a newspaper that dealt with sports, like I did a piece once about Philadelphia Eagles tickets and whether they were distributed fairly. And I got many, many times the email that I did when I did something about the mayor.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And it's clear that sports is something that people are really, really passionate about. But I also wonder, are there times that you want to just tell people, folks, these are games. This is not life and death.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Well, John Feinstein, thanks so much for spending some time with us.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
You know, I thought we would listen to a piece of tape from an NPR report. This is from 2012, a reporter named Greg Allen. And it's based on his conversation with a guy who survived Dozier named Jerry Cooper and what happened when he had committed some offense and was taken to the White House for some discipline. Let's listen.
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
And that's from a report from NPR reporter Greg Allen about abuses at the Dozer School. The story has inspired the novel by our guest Colson Whitehead. It's called The Nickel Boys. That really is the way it happened, isn't it?
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Right. And what would it do to a student's back to get 100 of those kinds of lashes delivered with that kind of force?
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
We're listening to my interview with Colson Whitehead. His novel The Nickel Boys has been adapted into a film of the same name, now in theaters. We'll hear more of the interview after a break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Coulson Whitehead, welcome back to Fresh Air. It's good to have you, and the book is remarkable. I thought we would begin with a reading. I mean, your book is about some students at this thing that's called the Trevor Nickel Academy.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
So a lot of kids were beaten and there are a lot of stories about this. Do we believe that kids were murdered?
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Right, or get the flu. We should note that no one has been criminally accused of killing anybody there. Of course, a lot of this happened decades ago, and so the evidence isn't easy to acquire, and some of the perpetrators are now deceased. The kids did work and produce stuff. Was the school a source of profit for some local people?
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Thus, The Nickel Boys is the book, but it's based on the story of the Dozier School in the Panhandle of Florida, which is now closed and where many abuses were discovered. This is a reading about a group of ex-students, right? Just set it up for us.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
There are quotes from Martin Luther King in the story because they come from this record that Elmwood loved to play. And one of them you quote a couple of times and it's striking. It's in which King describes the nonviolent resistance and the importance of loving your oppressors. And kind of an abridged version of the quote is he says, throw us in jail and we will love you.
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
We will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. We will not only win freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory. Tell me why that quote was something you wanted to use in the story.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
In the last part of the book, we meet some of the characters later in life. And I don't want to say more than that about it because it would spoil it for readers and they deserve to experience this. But I have to say the narrative structure here of how the course of their lives is revealed I think is pretty brilliant.
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
And I wonder if you can, without giving away the story, just talk a little bit about how you – decide to reveal the outcomes?
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
You know, the book is a lot about the struggle between optimism about social change and kind of a pragmatic acceptance of the world as it is. And we're in some pretty turbulent times in this country these days. How optimistic are you for positive change?
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. In 2019, Colson Whitehead landed on the cover of Time magazine next to a caption that called him America's storyteller. He's earned that honor over the course of nine novels that have ranged from wry speculative fiction to zombie apocalypse to sobering historical fiction, all of them in various ways considering the topic of race in America.
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
So the older one especially is in a position to be aware of a lot of things.
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
While you were writing this book, I'm wondering what was happening in the country on race relations. I mean a lot has happened in the last few years. I'm wondering what events might have informed your thinking as you were writing this.
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
This is your ninth book and your last one, The Underground Railroad, won a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize selected by Oprah Winfrey, which I'm sure boosted sales a lot and gave it a much bigger profile. As you finished and published this book, did it feel like a completely different experience because of where your career is?
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Is it true you had to sign 15,000 copies of this one?
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
All right. Well, congratulations on the book. Colson Whitehead, it's been great to have you back. Thanks so much.
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Novelist Colson Whitehead. His novel The Nickel Boys has been adapted into a film now in theaters. Whitehead won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his previous novel, The Underground Railroad, which was adapted into a miniseries of the same name by Barry Jenkins.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
After we take a short break, guest jazz critic Martin Johnson will review a new recording featuring two of the giants of jazz, McCoy Tyner and Joe Henderson, in concert in 1966. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Mention of the label Blue Note Records will evoke a sound familiar to most jazz fans. Pristine, warm, as if the greatest musicians of the 60s were playing in your living room. Yet very few live recordings exist of the stars from the label's golden era. But that's been changing. A new recording features two giants of jazz, McCoy Tyner and Joe Henderson in concert from 1966.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Guest jazz critic Martin Johnson says you can hear jazz changing in several ways.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
And that is Colson Whitehead reading from his new book, The Nickel Boys. This school really changed people's lives, didn't it?
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Martin Johnson writes about jazz for The Wall Street Journal. He reviewed McCoy Tyner and Joe Henderson, Force of Nature, live at Slugs. Coming up, film critic Justin Chang reviews Mike Lee's new film, Hard Truths. This is Fresh Air. In 1997, Marianne Jean-Baptiste became the first black British actress to receive an Oscar nomination for Mike Lee's drama Secrets and Lies.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Now, nearly 30 years later, she and Lee have reunited on the comedic drama Hard Truths, in which she plays a profoundly unhappy woman living in North London. The performance has earned Jean-Baptiste best actress prizes from several critics groups. Our film critic, Justin Chang, has this review.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Your last book, The Underground Railroad, which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, was a look at slavery. What made you want to write about Dozier, about this school?
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. He reviewed Mike Lee's new film Hard Truths. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. On Monday's show, President-elect Donald Trump will be sworn in for a second term in the White House on Martin Luther King Day.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
We'll speak with scholars Tressie McMillan Cottom and Eddie Glaude to talk about what lies ahead and the legacy of Dr. King. I hope you can join us. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our senior producer today is Thea Chaloner. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld, and Al Banks.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Susan Yakundi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
And how did you research the subject? Did you go down and visit Dozier?
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
But you didn't feel the need to go there?
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
His 2016 novel The Underground Railroad was adapted into an Amazon TV series directed by Barry Jenkins, who directed Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk. Whitehead's 2019 novel The Nickel Boys has been adapted into a film of the same name, now in theaters.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
So how did you get the texture of the place to write about it?
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
How did kids get into a school like that? What sort of offenses or circumstances would cause them to be sent to this school?
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Right. In a lot of cases, kids who just ran away, right, because they came from places where they were abused or unwanted.
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
So the teenager – well, the young man who is at the heart of our story, Elwood, isn't a kid who has come from an abusive home. Do you want to just talk about this character and why he's the kind of kid you wanted to take us into this school?
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
And we should just note this. He's in Tallahassee, Florida, in the Jim Crow South in this late 50s, early 60s, right?
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
It's based on the true story of the now-closed Dozier School for Boys in Florida, where former students have reported being brutally beaten or sexually abused. The central character of Whitehead's book is Elwood, a hardworking, college-bound African-American high school student who believes in the promise of the civil rights movement. Here's a clip from the film directed by Rommel Ross.
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
So what happened when you were pulled over in handcuffs? What happened?
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Right, right. Or you could be misidentified by somebody.
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Elwood is in high school in the early 60s when the civil rights movement is really rolling and he has a teacher, Mr. Hill, who's interested in this and kind of committed to the battle for civil rights. There was a very compelling moment when you described the first day of school when the kids in this segregated school get their textbooks. Do you want to share that with us?
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
So Elwood, he is committed to the principles of the civil rights movement and looks forward to participating. What's his attitude towards – You know, the life ahead of him where he's got to deal with segregation and deal with a white power structure and limited opportunities. How does he conduct himself?
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Elwood, played by Ethan Harisi, is speaking to Turner, a fellow schoolmate played by Brandon Wilson. Elwood has just been beaten by the school staff after he intervened to help a student being attacked by a bully. If everybody looks the other way, then everybody's in on it.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
So Elmwood, this optimistic young man, ends up in this reform school because he hitches a ride with a guy who happens to have stolen a car. He gets convicted of car theft and he's in this place. How do his values mesh with the experience that confronts him?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Let's back up a second. You said that you knew you wanted to be a stand-up comedian. How did you know that? What got you interested in comedy?
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Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
At the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo? That's great. Yeah.
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Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
How old were you when that happened? I was nine. Oh, wow. You were little. And how did you start doing it? You start cracking your friends up. Did you do it in front of a mirror? How did you develop stand up as a kid?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Well, you know, one thing I observed in the performances that I've seen of yours is the way you use your voice. Like an instrument, you can quickly get loud and kind of come up in pitch in a way that totally works. Was that something that you always did or is it something that you worked on?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Mo Ammer, recorded in 2022. He stars in the Netflix series called Mo. After a long hiatus, season two is now streaming. He'll be back to talk more after this short break. And later, Justin Chang reviews Black Bag, the new spy thriller directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
So you spent a lot of years traveling as a comedian. Before you got your citizenship, what was your immigration status and how did you travel?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Moe, short for Mohamed, has made a name for himself in comedy, starring in stand-up specials, touring in the U.S. and other countries, and co-starring in the Hulu series Rami. In his Netflix series Moe, he's close to his mother and autistic brother, his Mexican-American girlfriend, and a kaleidoscope of ethnically diverse friends.
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Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
And they would read that back to you. This is not a passport.
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Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
How would you big time it with a skeptical border agent or airline employee? You have to be super confident.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
And I learned that from my mom. It took you, I think, 20 years roughly from when you got to Houston before you got your citizenship. Why did it take so long?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Season 2 eventually takes him to his ancestral home in the West Bank, where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is integral to the story. A review in The Guardian says season two of Mo brings together food, identity, immigration, family, and Middle Eastern politics in a way that's as fresh and intriguing as the falafel tacos that become central to the plot.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
So your family applied for asylum and you were waiting for a hearing and a decision for all those years.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
You traveled a lot and I happen to know that there's one occasion when you got upgraded to first class and seated next to Eric Trump of all people. Tell us that story.
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Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
When you gave him the business and said, you know, talked about the Muslim ban, how did he respond?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Mo Amherst stars in the series based on his life called Mo, which is in its second season on Netflix. We'll hear more after this short break. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Today we're going to listen to my 2022 interview with Mo Amr when the first season of Mo aired. Mo Amr, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you for having me. I got to tell you, I struggled a little bit when I was writing your introduction because I feel like if I describe you as Palestinian, that doesn't quite capture the Mo Amr I see in your stuff. You kind of have more than one identity, don't you?
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Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
One of the interesting things about your career, I read that relatively early in your career, you got gigs performing before American troops in Europe and then in the Middle East, right?
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Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
What kind of stuff did you do before then? Did you – I don't know. Did you play upon your ethnic background or –
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Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Yeah, you know, it's been 21 years since then. And there's a generation of people who didn't experience that. And people can forget the intensity, you know, of the... Well, I mean anti-Arab and anti-Islam feeling which rippled through the population and I'm sure through service people that you performed for. Did you get blowback? I mean how did you deal with it?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
So how did you lean into this discomfort? What did that sound like on stage?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
And the emotional moments that you had with soldiers, what kind of things did they say to you?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
You know, in your Netflix special, Mohammed in Texas, you end with a really touching story of you that now that you got your American passport, you went and paid a visit to the village near Nablus where your family had come from. Was that your first time in Palestine?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Yeah, well, you know, what happens in the stand-up special is you see you describing some things about this visit, and we see footage from the documentary. And, you know, you talk about tender moments with your family, aunts and cousins, and then you— see a mosque and you go and pay a visit to this mosque in the middle of this town where you pray.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
And then men in the mosque insist that you say the call to prayer, which is, you know, broadcast from a little sound system in the mosque and the whole village hears it and knows that it's time for prayer. And you say, no, no, no, no, I can't do this. And well, they go, well, don't you know the prayer? You say, well, don't you know the call?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
And you say, yes, of course I know the call, but I can't, I can't. They just absolutely insist that you agree to do it. And so now I want to, at this point, I want to pick up the story from the special where you're describing the moment when you have agreed to go and do the call for prayer. Let's listen.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
And that's our guest, Mo Amr, from his Netflix comedy special, Mohammed in Texas. Does it still give you a chill to hear that?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. Season two of the comedy series Mo is now available on Netflix. It's based on the life of Mo Amr, a comedian of Palestinian descent who grew up in Kuwait and Houston and is fluent in Arabic, Spanish, and English.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Yeah, I mean, it's like the mosque is centuries old, and there's this thread pulling you back to it.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Well, Mo Ammer, it's been fun. Thanks so much for spending some time with us.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Mo Ammer recorded in 2022. The second season of his Netflix series Mo is now streaming. Coming up, Justin Chang reviews Black Bag, the new spy thriller directed by Steven Soderbergh. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Right. And when people first met you, I mean, given your skin color, they probably assumed you were Mexican-American. And I can tell from the series that you speak obviously Arabic. You speak Spanish pretty fluently to me and at least a couple of three dialects of English too, right? Yeah.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
In the new comic spy thriller Black Bag, Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender play a married couple who both work as British intelligence agents and who are drawn into a web of intrigue concerning a possible in-house mole. Steven Soderbergh directed the film, which opens in theaters today. Our film critic Justin Chang has this review.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
I wanted to listen to a scene from the series Moe, which, as we said, premieres on Netflix tomorrow. And this will give us a little bit of sense of some of your linguistic ability to fit in.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Justin Chang is a film critic at The New Yorker. He reviewed Black Bag. On Monday's show, writer Clay Risen describes a political movement which destroyed the careers of thousands of teachers, civil servants, and artists whose beliefs or associations were deemed un-American.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
His book, Red Scare, is about post-World War II America, but he says there's a through line connecting that era to our current political moment. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Sam Brigger is our managing producer.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorrock. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Joyce Lieberman and Julian Hertzfeld. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Leah Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman, and Joel Wolfram.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
The series is about you, a character named Moe, kind of pretty much you in your 20s, I guess, single, living in Houston, dating a Mexican-American woman, which, of course, your Palestinian mom sort of disapproves of. This is a scene where you've just lost a job you had in an electronic shop because the owner – was concerned about an immigration raid and you didn't have your papers.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Our digital media producer is Mollie C.V. Nesper. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
So you've returned to an old side hustle of selling knockoff merchandise out of the trunk of your car. And this scene happens in – you've got your big car backed up to the edge of a strip mall, which you see plenty of in Houston. And there's this heavyset guy, white guy in a cowboy hat walking down the sidewalk. And you engage him and say, hey, he looks like he got orthopedic shoes there.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Does that hurt your back? And try and sell him a pair of shoes from the trunk. And there are these – they're imitations of these odd-looking shoes marketed by Kanye West kind of in part made from the foam – The easy foam runners.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Well, here, you open this, and then you pull out a little stool. You've got a little portable store there. So it begins with you engaging this fellow. Let's listen.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
As the first season ended, Mo was trying to stop the theft of his family's olive trees from a Texas farm when he ended up trapped in the thieves' truck and transported to Mexico. As season two opens, he's stuck in Mexico City because he's undocumented. He sells falafel tacos from a vending cart and plays in a mariachi band to get by.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
And that is Mo Ammer making a sale in the series Mo, which premieres on Netflix tomorrow. You know, we hear you speaking kind of the Texan version of English, which I will say I grew up in South Texas. I recognize that accent. You used that to connect to people, I guess, lots of times growing up, didn't you?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
So you did sell knockoff stuff on the street. This is a real thing.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
That's how it worked. Imagine you develop some kind of skills for reading people and communicating that probably helped in stand-up when you got to that.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
And when it's time to close things up and split too, I imagine.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
You know, we mentioned earlier that your family left Kuwait and ended up in Houston. Tell us a bit more about that. Your family was in Kuwait, had a comfortable life. And then the first Gulf War happened, which was Saddam Hussein invading Kuwait. How much do you remember of that departure?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
But he's desperate to get back to Houston, where his long-awaited asylum hearing is fast approaching. Here he's talking to a clerk at the American Embassy in Mexico where he's been seeking a travel document to get into the United States. You know me. This is like the 12th time I've seen you. I've seen your colleague like six times.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
So tell us what happened in Kuwait. I mean, you were there. Your dad was working in telecommunications, making a good living. You had a pretty comfortable life. What happened that forced you to leave? I mean, I know the Iraq invaded, but how did your family experience that?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
So you were describing how your family left Kuwait after the invasion by Iraq in the first Gulf War in 1991. You and your mom and your siblings eventually made it to Houston. Your dad wasn't there for quite a while. He got there a couple of years later. And you got into school. And as we heard in that clip, it was a weird beginning.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
You were used to wearing a bow tie to school and speaking with an English accent. And everybody assumed you were Mexican-American. And You managed. You made your way. And then your father died. You were 14. Is that right? What was the effect of that on you?
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. David Johansson, a founding member of the legendary 1970s band the New York Dolls, died last week. He was 75. The New York Dolls never sold many records, but the band had lasting influence, paving the way for punk rock. He also performed in his persona Buster Poindexter, a pompadour-wearing lounge lizard.
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Terry's interview starts with a track from the album called Looking for a Kiss. The Dolls used to play this one in the 1970s. It was written by David Johansson, who also sings lead.
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
David Johansson, co-founder of the 1970s band The New York Dolls, speaking with Terry Gross in 2004. He died last week at the age of 75. Johansson is the subject of a 2022 documentary, co-directed by Martin Scorsese on Showtime, titled Personality Crisis, One Night Only. Later, film critic Justin Chang reviews Mickey 17, a futuristic action comedy by Bong Joon-ho, starring Robert Pattinson.
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Here's David Johansson performing in his lounge lizard persona Buster Poindexter from the documentary. We'll continue our conversation after a break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
David Johansson, who co-founded the 1970s band the New York Dolls, speaking with Terry Gross in 2004. He died last week. He was the last surviving member of the band. We'll hear more after a break. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Thank you, Terry. David Johansson, co-founder of the 1970s band the New York Dolls, speaking with Terry Gross in 2004. He died last week. He was 75. He was the subject of a Showtime documentary, co-directed by Martin Scorsese, titled Personality Crisis, One Night Only. Here's David Johansson performing in his lounge lizard persona buster Poindexter from that documentary.
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
In the futuristic action comedy Mickey 17, Robert Pattinson plays a space traveler who's repeatedly killed and resurrected for scientific research purposes as part of an expedition to a distant planet. It's the first movie from South Korean writer-director Bong Joon-ho after his Oscar-winning film Parasite. Mickey 17 opens in theaters this week. Our film critic Justin Chang has this review.
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
And he played the blues with his band David Johansson and the Harry Smiths. Johansson was the subject of a 2022 Showtime documentary co-directed by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi called Personality Crisis, One Night Only. Much of the documentary is built around Johansson's 2020 performance as Buster Poindexter at the Cafe Carlisle in New York City.
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. He reviewed Bong Joon-ho's new movie, Mickey 17. On Monday's show, Terry speaks with comic Bill Burr about his anger issues, which are hilarious on stage but not so much in real life, and how therapy, mushrooms, and becoming a father have helped. Terry says the interview was a wild ride and she really enjoyed it.
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Burr has a new Hulu comedy special and is the star of the new Broadway revival of Glengarry Glen Ross. I hope you can join us. Our senior producer today is Thea Chaloner. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
The film also featured newly discovered and archival interviews with him and others. Here's a clip from the documentary with English singer and songwriter Morrissey. He says he was obsessed with the New York Dolls as a teenager because they brought a sense of danger to rock. Their music was loud and rough, but more than that...
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
English singer Morrissey from the Showtime documentary about the New York Dolls. Terry Gross spoke to David Johanson in 2004. The surviving members of the band had just reunited at Morrissey's request for a festival in England. Their performance was recorded on a CD and DVD titled The Return of the New York Dolls, live from Royal Festival Hall.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
Your character, Jim, and then Pam, the receptionist, were important characters throughout The Office and the relationship – evolved and you eventually got together and got married, had a kid. What is it like to have a long-term fictional romance with somebody that lasts that long?