The New Yorker Radio Hour
Episodes
Jennifer Egan on the Literary Pleasures of the Concept Album
12 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Jennifer Egan’s new novel, “The Candy House,” one of the most anticipated books of the year, has just been published. It is related—not a sequ...
Anita Hill and Jane Mayer on Ketanji Brown Jackson, and the State of the Supreme Court
08 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Ketanji Brown Jackson has been voted in as a Supreme Court Justice—the first Black woman to serve in that role. But, to reach this milestone, Jackso...
The Missing Boater
05 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Dick Conant spent years of his life crisscrossing America by canoe, like a Mark Twain character. On land, he worked a variety of jobs and was often ho...
Investigating January 6th
01 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
With a judge declaring that Donald Trump “more likely than not” committed a felony in his attempt to overturn the Presidential election, the congr...
Connor Ratliff Talks with Sarah Larson, Plus Chef Bryant Terry
29 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
An aspiring actor named Connor Ratliff thought he had it made when he got a small part on the 2001 miniseries “Band of Brothers,” in an episode di...
Jill Lepore on Parents’ Rights and the Culture War
25 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
A wave of book bannings sweeping the country, along with conservative fury over titles like “Antiracist Baby,” seems like a backlash against the h...
Returning to the Office . . . While Black
22 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“Coming back to work is partially about surveillance and micromanagement,” Keisha, a podcasting executive, says. “Everybody feels it, but people...
Radio Ukraine
18 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Kraina FM is a radio station that broadcasts in Kyiv and more than twenty other cities, playing Ukrainian-language rock and pop. When Russia invaded U...
Jane Campion on “The Power of the Dog”
15 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog” opens like a classic Western: cattle are herded across the sweeping plains of Montana, with imposing mount...
Stephen Kotkin: Don’t Blame the West for Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
11 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
It’s impossible to understand the destruction and death that Vladimir Putin is unleashing in Ukraine without understanding his most basic conviction...
Pauline Kael on “The Godfather”
08 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As The New Yorker’s film critic from 1968 to around 1991, the influential Pauline Kael gave voice to her visceral reactions: she wrote as a moviegoe...
Masha Gessen and Joshua Yaffa on the Escalation of Violence in Ukraine
04 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Joshua Yaffa is a Moscow correspondent for The New Yorker, but he has been travelling throughout the war zone in Ukraine for weeks, reporting on the...
Sheryl Lee Ralph on Confronting Hollywood
01 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Sheryl Lee Ralph has been a staple of Black entertainment for decades. She played Deena Jones in the original Broadway production of “Dreamgirls,”...
How Black Creators Are Changing Hollywood
25 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In the past few years, it seems a floodgate has opened, releasing a deluge of tremendously successful media that centers the Black experience. “Get ...
How Should President Biden Respond to Putin’s War on Ukraine?
24 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Since last summer, Russian troops have been amassing on the Ukrainian border, and, in recent weeks, President Vladimir Putin warned that he intended a...
Peter Dinklage on “Cyrano”
22 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Joe Wright’s film “Cyrano,” nominated for an Academy Award for Best Costume Design, was based on Erica Schmidt’s 2018 stage musical of the sam...
Nicholas Britell on the Art of the Film Score
18 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Nicholas Britell has emerged as one of the most in-demand film composers working today, creating original music for projects that hew to no style or m...
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the Path Forward for the Left
14 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is one of the most prominent progressives in Washington. Her political ascent began with her shocking 2018 defeat of a longti...
On Cancel Culture and the State of Free Speech
11 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Every few weeks, it seems, another example of so-called cancel culture is dominating the headlines and trending on social-media platforms. The refrain...
David Remnick Talks with Lee Child, the Creator of Jack Reacher
08 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Lee Child didn’t start writing novels until he lost a prestigious job producing TV in England during a shakeup that he attributes to Rupert Murdoch....
Black Thought Takes the Stage
04 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Tariq Trotter, best known in music as Black Thought, the emcee of the Roots, is regarded by many hip-hop fans as one of the best freestyle rappers eve...
Guillermo del Toro and Bradley Cooper on the Enduring Appeal of Noir
01 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Guillermo del Toro has been called the leading fantasy filmmaker of this century. His movies include “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “Hellboy,” and “Th...
Russia’s Intentions in Ukraine—and America
28 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
“They push buttons,” says Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale. “What button of ours are they pushing here? What are they trying to ge...
The Trials of a Whistle-blower
25 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
As a nurse at the Irwin County Detention Center—a Georgia facility run by LaSalle Corrections, a private company operating an immigration-detention ...
The Olympic Games Return to China, in a Changed World
21 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Much has changed since China last hosted the Olympics, during the 2008 Summer Games. Those Games were widely seen as greatly improving China’s inter...
Hilton Als and Emma Cline on the Late Joan Didion
18 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Joan Didion tried and failed, she said, “to think”; that is, to write about abstractions and symbols, and make grand arguments in the manner of th...
The Biden Presidency, Year One
14 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
President Biden took the oath of office in a moment of deep crisis—the pandemic in full swing and just weeks after an unprecedented attempt to overt...
Nnedi Okorafor on Sci-Fi Through an African Lens
11 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Nnedi Okorafor, a recipient of the prestigious Hugo Award, is a prolific writer of science-fiction and fantasy novels for adults and young adults. She...
A New Civil War in America?
07 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
When rioters, encouraged by the President, stormed the Capitol, one year ago, to overturn the results of the election, the idea that such a thing coul...
The Power of Police Unions
04 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The repeal of Section 50-A of the New York State Civil Rights Law was no technical change. Passed in the wake of the George Floyd protests, it was a b...
Amanda Gorman on Life After Inauguration
31 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
One year ago, Amanda Gorman delivered the inaugural poem on the day that Joe Biden became President. Gorman was just twenty-two years old, and it was ...
For a French Burglar, Stealing Masterpieces Is Easier Than Selling Them
28 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Vjeran Tomic has been stealing since he was a small child, when he used a ladder to break into a library in his home town, in Bosnia. After moving to ...
Rhiannon Giddens, Americana’s Queen, Goes Global
24 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
By the standards of any musician, Rhiannon Giddens has taken a twisting and complex path. Trained as an operatic soprano at the prestigious Oberlin Co...
When Snow Came to San Juan
21 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
For several years in the early nineteen-fifties, Puerto Rico received snow, right around Christmas. Children in San Juan rode a sled and had a giant s...
Is the Gift of Tuition Enough?
17 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Élite schools are trying hard to recruit students of color and students who are less well-off financially; Yale University, as one example, now cover...
Millennial Writers Reflect on a Generation’s Despair
14 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The eldest millennials turned forty this year, and the producer Ngofeen Mputubwele comments on a sense of despair he finds in his generation, having...
Paul Thomas Anderson, Poet Laureate of the San Fernando Valley
10 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Paul Thomas Anderson first made a splash in Hollywood with his film “Boogie Nights,” a portrait of the porn industry that burgeoned in the San Fer...
Life After Prison
07 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
As a kid, Jonathan was good at soccer and making friends. But by the age of eighteen, he was a drug dealer facing his first serious conviction. For hi...
Mass Incarceration, Then and Now
03 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The United States has the largest prison population in the world. But, until the publication of Michelle Alexander’s book “The New Jim Crow,” in...
Aimee Mann Live, with Atul Gawande
30 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Aimee Mann, the celebrated Los Angeles singer and songwriter, recently released an album called “Queens of the Summer Hotel.” The album was inspir...
Dave Grohl’s Tales of Life and Music
26 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
At The New Yorker Festival, Dave Grohl talked with Kelefa Sanneh about Grohl’s new book, “The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music.” Grohl, who ...
Mexican Abortion Activists Mobilize to Aid Texans
23 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Mexico is a deeply Catholic nation where abortion was, for a long time, criminalized in many states; just a few years ago Coahuilla, near the U.S. bor...
If Roe v. Wade Goes, What Next?
19 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The Supreme Court, with a six-to-three majority of conservative justices, is hearing critical cases on abortion rights. If it approves restrictive sta...
The Essential Workers of the Climate Crisis
16 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
After storms and other climate disasters, legions of workers appear overnight to cover blown-out buildings with construction tarps, rip out ruined wal...
Anna Deavere Smith Retells Rodney King’s Story in Theatre
12 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
“Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” premièred nearly thirty years ago, but it’s one of the most current and important plays on Broadway right now. An...
Rachel Held Evans and Her Legacy
09 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Growing up, Rachel Held Evans was a fiercely enthusiastic evangelizer for her faith, the kind of kid who relished the chance to sit next to an atheist...
Will the Office Survive the Pandemic?
05 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Cal Newport, the author of “A World without Email” and other books, has been writing about how the shutdown has affected businesses and the cultur...
Wole Soyinka on His New Satire of Corruption and Fundamentalism
02 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Wole Soyinka is a giant of world literature. A Nobel laureate, he’s written more than two dozen plays, a vast amount of poetry, several memoirs, and...
The Nobel Prize Winner Maria Ressa on the Turmoil at Facebook
29 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The roughly ten thousand company documents that make up the Facebook Papers show a company in turmoil—and one that prioritizes its economic interest...
Jane Goodall Talks with Andy Borowitz
26 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Jane Goodall is as revered a figure as modern science has to offer, though she prefers to call herself a naturalist rather than a scientist. Goodall l...
How a Girls’ School Fled Afghanistan as the Taliban Took Over
22 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the summer, Shabana Basij-Rasikh came on the Radio Hour to speak with Sue Halpern about founding the School of Leadership Afghanistan—known as SO...
Jon Stewart: “That’s Not Cancel Culture”
19 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
“The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” defined an era. For more than sixteen years, Stewart and his many correspondents skewered American politics. At ...
Daniel Craig Takes Off the Tux
15 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Daniel Craig made his career as an actor in the theatre and in British indie films. When he showed up in Hollywood, it was usually in smaller roles, o...
Kara Walker Talks with Thelma Golden
13 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Kara Walker is one of our most influential living artists. Walker won a MacArthur Fellowship (the “genius” grant) before she turned thirty, and be...
An Interview with Merrick Garland, and Susan Orlean on Animals
08 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
At The New Yorker Festival, the renowned investigative journalist Jane Mayer asked Attorney General Merrick Garland about the prosecution of January 6...
Broadway’s Unusual Reopening, and Amanda Petrusich Picks Three
05 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Broadway theatres are welcoming audiences to a new season, mounting original works and restaging shows that closed in March, 2020. In this unusual sea...
Jonathan Franzen Talks with David Remnick About “Crossroads”
01 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Jonathan Franzen’s sixth novel, “Crossroads,” is set in 1971, and the title is firmly on the nose: the Hildebrand family is at a crossroads itse...
Should the Climate Movement Embrace Sabotage?
28 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Andreas Malm, a climate activist and senior lecturer at Lund University, in Sweden, studies the relationship between climate change and capitalism. Wi...
Jelani Cobb on the Kerner Report, an Unheeded Warning about the Consequences of Racism
24 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In 1967, in the wake of a violent uprising in Detroit, President Lyndon B. Johnson assembled the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to in...
Joaquin Castro: “Americans Don’t Know Who Latinos Are”
21 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
On Tuesday, the U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a preliminary report on the long-standing underrepresentation of Latinos in the media. Wh...
Wes Anderson and Jeffrey Wright on “The French Dispatch”
17 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
“I wanted to do a French movie, and I had this idea of wanting to do a New Yorker movie,” Wes Anderson explains. “Somehow, I also wanted to do o...
Bonus: “The French Dispatch” Reads The New Yorker
17 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Wes Anderson’s new film, “The French Dispatch,” is about a magazine, and it was inspired by Anderson’s long-standing love of The New Yorker. I...
The Insidious Procedural Traps of the Texas Abortion Law
14 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The new Texas law Senate Bill 8 effectively outlaws abortion in Texas, violating constitutional protections on reproductive rights. Yet the Supreme Co...
Remembering September 11th, and the Future of the Taliban
10 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Twenty years after the events of September 11th, the writer Edwidge Danticat reads from her essay “Flight,” about the way that tragedies are memor...
The Child Tax Credit: One Small Step Toward Universal Basic Income?
07 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
David Remnick talks with Senator Michael Bennet, of Colorado, who campaigned for the Presidency in 2020 advocating for the child tax credit, which is ...
Riz Ahmed on “Mogul Mowgli”
03 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
As a rapper, Riz Ahmed has released critically acclaimed albums, and he was featured on the chart-topping “Hamilton Mixtape.” At the same time, he...
Kim Stanley Robinson on “Utopian” Science Fiction
27 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
One of the premier writers of thinky sci-fi, Kim Stanley Robinson opened his book “The Ministry for the Future” with an all too plausible scenario...
The Joy of Beach Reads
27 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Our guest host, Vinson Cunningham, looks at the joys of the beach read, hitting Brighton Beach on a hot, muggy day to peer over readers’ shoulders. ...
Home Cooking with Jacques Pepin and Klancy Miller
24 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
For generations of cooks, Jacques Pépin has been the master. Early in his career he cooked for eminences like Charles DeGaulle, and was offered a job...
Dexter Filkins on the Fall of Afghanistan
20 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Dexter Filkins covered the American invasion of Afghanistan when he was a reporter for the New York Times, and has continued to report on conflicts in...
Liesl Tommy, Director of “Respect”
13 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Aretha Franklin was the Queen of Soul, the greatest voice of her generation, an eighteen-time Grammy Award winner whose career spanned five decades. S...
Amanda Petrusich Talks with the Weather Station’s Tamara Lindeman
10 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Amanda Petrusich describes herself as a “die-hard fan” of folk music, but not when it feels precious or sentimental. That’s why she loves the We...
Atul Gawande on the COVID-19 Resurgence
06 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
For a few brief moments this summer, in places where the vaccination rate was high, we could imagine life after COVID-19: restaurants and theatres wer...
Jack Antonoff on Growing up Jersey
03 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Jack Antonoff has had a busy pandemic. Sought out by Taylor Swift as a producer, he ultimately made two records for her—one of which, “Folklore,”...
John Kerry on the Battle Against Climate Change
30 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
With the world overheating, glaciers melting, and landscapes in flames, it’s difficult to think of a harder or more important job than John Kerry’...
An Iranian Plot Grew in Brooklyn, and the Revelations about Pegasus
27 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The indictment reads like a not-so-great spy novel: the operatives would kidnap the dissident from her home in Brooklyn, deliver her to the waterfront...
Eric Adams Talks with David Remnick
23 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The New York City mayoral primary, which culminated in a vote held in June, was full of surprises, including the introduction of ranked-choice voting ...
Helen Rosner’s Summer Drinks, Plus an Anxious Future in Afghanistan
20 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Shabana Basij-Rasikh is the co-founder of Afghanistan’s only all-girls boarding school, and she is anxiously waiting to see if the Taliban—which b...
The Golden Arches in Black America
16 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Marcia Chatelain, a historian at Georgetown, recently won the Pulitzer Prize for History for her book “Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America...
Gillian Flynn, Akhil Sharma, and Alison Bechdel on Their Most Memorable Jobs
13 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The U.S. economy seems to be showing real signs of life, and lots of people are finally returning to the labor force—eight hundred and fifty thousan...
Bon Iver Live at the New Yorker Festival
09 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the winter of 2007, a songwriter by the name of Justin Vernon returned to the Wisconsin woods, not far from where he grew up. Just a few months lat...
Janet Mock Finds Her Voice
06 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Janet Mock first heard the word “māhū,” a Native Hawaiian word for people who exist outside the male-female binary, when she was twelve. She had...
Ronan Farrow and Jia Tolentino Investigate Britney Spears’s Conservatorship
03 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Britney Spears has been one of the world’s most prominent pop stars since her début, in the late nineteen-nineties. But, since 2008, she’s been u...
A Family Divided Over the COVID-19 Vaccine
25 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Across the country, COVID-19 vaccines are becoming available for teen-agers. But most states still require parental consent for minors to receive the ...
The Newspaperman Who Championed Black Tulsa
22 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the years leading up to the horrific Tulsa massacre of 1921, the Greenwood district was a thriving Black metropolis, a city within a city. Buoyed b...
Naftali Bennett and the New Hard Line in Israeli Politics
18 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In 2013, David Remnick published a profile of Naftali Bennett. He wrote that Bennett was something new in Israeli politics, a man who would “build...
A Rift over Racism Divides the Southern Baptist Convention, Plus, the Fallout from Gamestop
14 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The largest Protestant denomination in America is in crisis over the group’s reluctance to acknowledge systemic racism; our reporter talks with the ...
Jon M. Chu on “In the Heights”
11 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
It’s easy to see why the director Jon M. Chu was adamant that the release of “In the Heights” wait until this summer, when more people could see...
Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax on Beethoven’s Politics of the Cello
08 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax have both been playing Beethoven’s Cello Sonata No. 3 in A Major for over forty years. But it took a global pandemic for the...
A Vaccinated Day at the Ballpark, and Sarah Schulman on ACT-UP
04 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The staff writer Patricia Marx checks out the new vaccinated sections at New York’s Major League Baseball parks. The author and activist Sarah Schul...
Looking Back at the Year of Protest Since the Death of George Floyd
01 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
We look back on the year since the murder of George Floyd galvanized the nation. David Remnick talks with Vanita Gupta, the No. 3 official in the Just...
Spike Lee on the Knicks’ Resurgence
28 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Spike Lee is one of the most passionate and committed fans of the New York Knicks—not to mention one of the most celebrated filmmakers of our time. ...
Can We Finally End School Segregation?
21 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
By many accounts, American schools are as segregated today as they were in the nineteen-sixties, in the years after Brown v. Board of Education. WNYC’...
“Fire in Little Africa,” A Rap Album about a Historical Tragedy
18 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The Tulsa massacre of 1921 was a coördinated assault on and destruction of the thriving Black community known as Greenwood, Black Wall Street, or Lit...
The Post-Pandemic Dress Code, Plus Hilton Als on Alice Neel
11 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When a very long year of doing business from home—in sweatshirts and pajamas and slippers—is over, how much effort will people be willing to expen...
Atul Gawande and Siddhartha Mukherjee on the State of the Pandemic
07 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
After a year of battling COVID-19, parts of the United States are celebrating a gradual turn toward normalcy, but the pandemic isn’t over—and it m...
Thomas McGuane Reads “Balloons”
04 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Thomas McGuane reads his story from the May 10, 2021, issue of the magazine. McGuane has published more than a dozen books of fiction, including the...
Three Women Who Changed the World
04 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
“The Agitators” is a book about three women—three revolutionaries—who changed the world at a time when women weren’t supposed to be in publi...
Are U.F.O.s a National Security Threat?
30 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In June, the director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of Defense are expected to deliver a report about what the government knows on the su...
A Surge at the Border, and the Children of Morelia
27 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Nearly a century ago, during the Spanish Civil War, a group of parents put five hundred of their children on a boat and sent them across the ocean to ...