The New Yorker Radio Hour
Episodes
Kelela Reinvents R. & B., and Sally Yates Gets Fired
23 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
When the acting Attorney General Sally Yates wouldn’t defend the so-called Muslim travel ban, she was promptly sacked—“before it was fashionable...
In the Midterms, White Supremacy Is Running for Office
19 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
While the big story going into the midterm elections has been the possibility of a “blue wave”—an upsurge of Democratic progressives, including ...
Joan Baez Is Still Protesting
16 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
“You know, I think as I get older,” Joan Baez tells David Remnick, “someone will show me a photograph”—of the March on Washington, for examp...
Is Voting Safe?
12 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
For democracy to function, we have to trust and accept the results of elections. But that trust is increasingly difficult to maintain in a world where...
The Long-Distance Con, Part 2
09 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
This is part two of a two-part series. Part one can be heard here. On the day that Maggie Robinson Katz learned that her father had only a few days...
Rebecca Traister Is Happy to Be Mad
05 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
After the election of Donald Trump, the feminist journalist Rebecca Traister began channeling her anger into a book. The result, “Good and Mad: The ...
Joan Jett’s Reputation
02 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Joan Jett cut a massive figure in rock and roll, starting in the nineteen-seventies and continuing with a string of hits including “I Love Rock and ...
The Long-Distance Con, Part 1
28 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
On the day that Maggie Robinson Katz learned that her father had only a few days to live, she also found out that her wealthy family couldn’t pay hi...
Into the Woods with Scott Carrier
25 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
After a thirty-year lobbying effort, Congress designated the Pacific Northwest National Scenic Trail in 2009. Unlike the well-known Appalachian Trail ...
Lisa Brennan-Jobs on the Shadow of Steve Jobs, and Jill Lepore on the Long Sweep of American History
21 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Lisa Brennan-Jobs’s memoir, “Small Fry,” shares a common theme with many memoirs: the absent parent and the mark left by that absence in the adu...
Rachel Carson Dreams of the Sea
18 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Before she published “Silent Spring,” one of the most influential books of the last century, Rachel Carson was a young aspiring poet and then a do...
Illeana Douglas Steps Forward
14 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The day after The New Yorker published Ronan Farrow’s exposé about Harvey Weinstein, Farrow got a phone call from the actress and screenwriter Ille...
Kwame Anthony Appiah on the Complications of Identity
11 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Kwame Anthony Appiah is one of leading thinkers on identity. A professor of philosophy and law at New York University, Appiah also writes the New York...
Parenting While Deported
07 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Idalia and Arnold came to this country nearly two decades ago, from Honduras. They settled in a small city in New England and found the working-class ...
Rev. Franklin Graham Offers an Evangelist’s View of Donald Trump
04 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Like his father, Rev. Billy Graham, before him, Rev. Franklin Graham is one of the nation’s most prominent preachers, influential in the evangelical...
For a Palestinian Candidate, a Contested Election in Jerusalem
31 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Ramadan Dabash is a civil engineer and a mukhtar—an Arab community leader—in his neighborhood of East Jerusalem. His run for a seat on the city c...
David Simon’s “The Deuce” Charts the Rise of Pornography
28 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
David Simon is sympathetic to the sex workers he depicts in “The Deuce,” which will return to HBO for its second season in September. He is even s...
An N.Y.P.D. Sergeant Blows the Whistle on Quotas
24 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Sergeant Edwin Raymond is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by a group of New York City police officers who have become famous as “the N.Y.P.D.-...
Three Actors Explain What It Means to be “Presidential”
21 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
During the lead-up to the 2016 election, three actors who have played fictional Presidents of the United States discussed what it means to be “Presi...
Seth Meyers Talks with Ariel Levy
17 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Seth Meyers—a veteran of “Saturday Night Live” and the host of NBC’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers”—sat down at the 2017 New Yorker Festi...
David Remnick on Aretha Franklin
14 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Aretha Franklin brought Barack Obama to tears when she performed “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” at the Kennedy Center Honors tribute t...
Weeding with Parker Posey
14 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Parker Posey has been a vivid presence in American film, especially indie film, for twenty-five years. She got her start in “Dazed and Confused,” ...
Lee Child, “Moby-Dick,” and Other Summer Reads
10 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
We delve into the escapist joys of a great summer read. David Remnick talks with Lee Child, whose thrillers about Jack Reacher—twenty-three books an...
William Finnegan Surfing, and Kristen Roupenian Among the Pilgrims
07 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
William Finnegan’s memoir, “Barbarian Days,” from 2015, holds the distinction of being the one book about surfing to win a Pulitzer Prize. On a ...
Astrid Holleeder’s Crime Family
03 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
All her life, Astrid Holleeder knew that her older brother Willem was involved in crime; in their tough Amsterdam neighborhood, and as children of an ...
Tommy Orange and the Urban Native Experience
31 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Tommy Orange had never read a book about what it means to be a Native American in a big city. In a conversation with The New Yorker’s fiction editor...
Helsinki Fallout
27 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
At the recent summit in Helsinki, Vladimir Putin proposed that, in exchange for letting Robert Mueller interrogate some G.R.U. agents who are linked t...
Thomas McGuane and Callan Wink Go Fishing
24 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Thomas McGuane, the acclaimed author of “The Sporting Club,” thinks fiction set in the American West could stand to lose some of its ranching clic...
Philip Roth’s American Portraits and American Prophecy
20 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The novelist and short-story writer Philip Roth died in May at the age of eighty-five. In novels like “Portnoy’s Complaint,” “The Human Stain,...
The Rezneck Riders
17 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The Navajo Nation covers over twenty-seven thousand square miles in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico; it’s an area roughly the size of West Virginia. V...
Brazil, Bruce Lee, and Black Lives in the Music of Kamasi Washington, and the Uncertain Future of the Democratic Party
13 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Benjamin Wallace-Wells provides a survey of some key midterm races and considers what they tell us about the direction of the Democratic Party. And Da...
Love, War, and the Magical Lamb-Brain Sandwiches of Aleppo, Syria
10 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
When Adam Davidson was a reporter in Baghdad during the Iraq War, he started dating a fellow-reporter, Jen Banbury, of Salon. On a holiday break, they...
Tina Brown on Vanity Fair, the Eighties, and Harvey Weinstein
06 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Tina Brown is a legend in New York publishing. She was barely thirty years old when she was recruited from London to take over a foundering Vanity Fa...
Naomi Klein Interviewed by Jia Tolentino
03 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The author of “No Logo” and “The Shock Doctrine,” Naomi Klein has become what Noam Chomsky was to an earlier generation of leftists. Her theor...
Hasan Minhaj Interviewed by Vinson Cunningham
29 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
On a high-school speech-and-debate team, Hasan Minhaj learned the value of a joke: “If I made the judges laugh, I automatically saw an increase in t...
Molly Ringwald, Judd Apatow, and #MeToo
26 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The John Hughes films that made Molly Ringwald famous—“Sixteen Candles,” “Pretty in Pink,” and “The Breakfast Club”—look very differen...
The Government Took Her Son. Will It Give Him Back?
22 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Border Patrol, which has forcibly separated families in border detention, has put some immigrant children in the care of a separate agency, the Office...
The Comedian Hannah Gadsby Goes Big Time, and Renounces Comedy
19 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Hannah Gadsby is a headlining comedian in Australia, a regular at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and is about to become a very big deal in America wit...
James Wood Is Done “Prosecuting Wars”
15 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Jane Mayer explains why Charles and David Koch are willing to spend as much as thirty million dollars on advertising that opposes Donald Trump’s cam...
In the Civil Service, Loyalty Now Comes Before Expertise
12 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Donald Trump came into office promising to make so many cuts to the government that “your head will spin.” Evan Osnos has been reporting from Wa...
Another Fiasco for American Soccer, and Praying for Tangier
09 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The 2018 World Cup begins this week in Russia, and America is taking a powder. The men’s team failed to qualify for the tournament after a stunning ...
Anthony Bourdain’s Interview with David Remnick
08 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Anthony Bourdain—the chef turned author, food anthropologist, and television star—died this week, at sixty-one. Bourdain made his début in The N...
Angélique Kidjo and David Byrne on “Remain in Light”
05 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
When a young Amanda Petrusich, now a staff writer who covers music, first heard Talking Heads’ “Remain in Light,” she felt “almost like it wa...
Glenda Jackson Onstage, and Marco Rubio on “Modernizing” Conservatism
01 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Glenda Jackson, who has played both Queen Elizabeth and King Lear, served as a humble member of Parliament for more than two decades in between those ...
Malcolm Gladwell on the Sociology of School Shooters
29 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Malcolm Gladwell spoke with The New Yorker’s Dorothy Wickenden in 2015 about the social dynamics of school shootings. Studying the literature of soc...
Paul Schrader: Movies as Religion
25 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Paul Schrader made an auspicious début as the screenwriter of “Taxi Driver” and the director of “Blue Collar” and “American Gigolo.” But ...
The Breeders on Sexism, Drugs, and Rock and Roll
22 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
This year, the original members of the Breeders—indie-rock royalty—are back together, twenty-five years after “Last Splash,” an album that fan...
Diplomacy on the Rocks in Iran and North Korea
18 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Susan B. Glasser, a staff writer for The New Yorker based in Washington, speaks with Wendy Sherman about the Trump Administration’s withdrawal fro...
Dunya Mikhail on the Lives Stolen by ISIS
15 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Before she was placed on the list of Saddam Hussein’s enemies, the poet Dunya Mikhail worked as a journalist for the Baghdad Observer. In her new bo...
How to Contain the Threat of Russia
11 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Senator Mark Warner is the vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is trying to explore the possibility of Russian collusion with th...
Glenn Close Doesn’t Play Evil (with One Exception)
08 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Last year, Glenn Close was on Broadway as Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard,” reprising a role she had originally played in 1993. Since 1974, whe...
Robert Caro on the Fall of New York
04 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In a career spanning more than forty years, the biographer Robert Caro has written about only two subjects. But they’re very big subjects: Robert ...
Apocalypse Prepping, on a Budget
01 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Inspired by “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich,” by The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos, Patricia Marx gets herself ready for the apocalypse. The only pr...
ICE Comes to a Small Town in Tennessee
27 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
This week, a reporter looks at a rural town where the largest immigration raid in a decade has ripped apart a community; Ronan Farrow talks about his ...
Andrew Sean Greer’s “It’s a Summer Day”
24 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Last week, Andrew Andrew Sean Greer's novel "Less" won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. "Less" about a novelist in mid-life named Arthur Less, an...
James Comey Makes His Case to America
20 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In a long career in law enforcement, the former F.B.I. Director James Comey aimed to be above politics, but in the 2016 election he stepped directly i...
A Trans Woman Finds Her True Face Through Surgery
17 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The staff writer Rebecca Mead recently observed the seven-hour surgery of woman she calls Abby. (To protect her privacy, Abby’s real name was no...
Pope Francis the Disruptor
13 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
As a conservative columnist at the New York Times, Ross Douthat fills the post once held by no less a figure than William Kristol. A devout Catholic...
Frank Oz on Miss Piggy’s Secret Backstory and Jim Henson’s Legacy
10 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Frank Oz was a teenager when he started working with Jim Henson, the puppeteer and filmmaker behind the Muppets. Oz went on to create characters like ...
Emma González at Home, and a Crown Prince Abroad
06 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Emma González is a survivor of the Parkland attack, and a leader of the #NeverAgain movement. She talks with David Remnick about the ways her life ha...
How Not to Write a Caption
03 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Every week, a New Yorker cartoon is posted online and printed in the magazine without a caption, and thousands of people write in with their suggestio...
John Thompson vs. American Justice
30 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
When police showed up to question John Thompson, he was worried that it was because he had sold drugs to an undercover cop. When he realized they we...
The American Bombs Falling on Yemen
27 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Abdulqader Hilal Al-Dabab was the mayor of Sana’a, a politician with a long record of mediating disputes in a notoriously fractious and dangerous co...
Scott Pruitt, the “Originalist” at the E.P.A.
23 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
As the Attorney General of Oklahoma, Scott Pruitt sued the Environmental Protection Agency fourteen times, claiming that the Obama Administration had ...
A Homemade Museum in a Refugee Camp
20 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Tens of thousands of refugees from the civil war in Yemen have fled across the narrow Mandeb Strait to Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa. Nicolas Niarch...
Armando Iannucci on “The Death of Stalin”
16 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
As the fourth season of “Veep” came to an end, director Armando Iannucci turned from chronicling the foibles of cynical western democracy to somet...
In Secret, a North Korean Writer Protests the Regime
09 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Bandi is the pen name of a North Korean writer. He is believed to be a propaganda writer for the government who began to write, secretly, fiction and ...
Christopher Steele, the Man Behind the Dossier
06 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The dossier—a secret report alleging various corrupt dealings between Donald Trump, his campaign, and the government of Russia, made public after ...
Alone and on Foot in Antarctica
06 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Henry Worsley was a husband, father, and an officer of an élite British commando unit; also a tapestry weaver, amateur boxer, photographer, and colle...
Jennifer Lawrence on “Red Sparrow” and Times Up
02 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Jennifer Lawrence was nominated for her first Oscar at twenty, and since then she has balanced the biggest of big-budget franchises, like the “Hunge...
The New Yorker presents “The Brodies”
27 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Richard Brody hosts an alternative Oscars show — “The Brodies” — and recommends some of his favorite films from the past year, and the write...
Masha Gessen on Trump and Russia, and a Former Border Agent on the U.S.-Mexico Border
23 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Masha Gessen was born in the Soviet Union and has written extensively about Russian politics. She talks with David Remnick about the similarities betw...
Director Ava DuVernay on “Selma” and “A Wrinkle in Time”
20 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
No film adaptation of “A Wrinkle In Time,” Madeleine L’Engle’s beloved, and often banned, children’s book, published in 1962, has ever made...
A Reckoning at Facebook
16 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
We now know that Russian operatives exploited Facebook and other social media to sow division and undermine the election of 2016, and special counsel ...
Ian Frazier Among the Drone Racers
13 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Ian Frazier, who has chronicled American life for The New Yorker for more than forty years, recently travelled to a house in Fort Collins, Colorado, w...
Extremists on the Ballot, and America’s Endless War in Afghanistan
09 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The 2016 Presidential primaries were a rebuke to moderates in both parties. Bernie Sanders, a sometime Democratic Socialist, built a grassroots moveme...
Ryan Zinke’s Deregulation Quest, and the Future of Meatless Burgers
06 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
As a congressman from Montana, Ryan Zinke was considered a moderate—he resisted radical suggestions, for example, to turn over federal land to the s...
Laura Kipnis on the State of #MeToo, and a Night at Richard Nixon’s
02 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Laura Kipnis is a professor at Northwestern University and a provocative feminist critic. Her book “Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Camp...
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Discovering America
30 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has had commercial and critical success: Her best-seller “Americanah” won a National Book Critics Circle Awa...
Nathan Lane, Getting Serious, Plays Roy Cohn
26 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Nathan Lane may be best known for supplying the voice of the fun-loving meerkat in “The Lion King,” but in recent years he’s turned his focus to...
The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan
23 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The Ku Klux Klan was originally focused on maintaining the old racial order in the postwar South, chiefly through the violent suppression of African-A...
David Attenborough’s Planet (We Just Live on It)
19 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
David Attenborough’s films for the BBC—impeccably researched, ambitiously filmed, and executed with style and imagination—have set a high bar fo...
Deportation in America
12 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
A tougher stance on immigration is the signature position of the Trump Administration, and the President’s first year in office has been marked by s...
Tracee Ellis Ross on Being a “Black-ish” Woman and Jon Hamm Gets His Life Back from Don Draper
09 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Tracee Ellis Ross, who plays Dr. Rainbow Johnson on ABC’s “Black-ish,” joins Doreen St. Félix for a conversation about television, race, and se...
Jerry Seinfeld Gets Technical
05 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Jerry Seinfeld talks with David Remnick about his Netflix special “Jerry Before Seinfeld,” which is part standup show, part memoir. They discuss h...
Trolling the Press Corps
02 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Lucian Wintrich, a young blogger, was recently appointed as the White House correspondent for the conservative political site Gateway Pundit. He has n...
Jon Stewart’s Children
29 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In the years after September 11th, Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” made political satire a central part of the media landscape. This hour, we hear fr...
Leonard Cohen: A Final Interview
26 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Leonard Cohen was one of the world’s greatest songwriters, and a figure of almost cult-like devotion for generations of fans, including Bob Dylan. D...
Bonus: Holiday Greetings from Ian Frazier
24 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
For decades, The New Yorker has published a poem on or around Christmas -- a look back at the events and people that have shaped the past year, genera...
Children’s Letters to Satan, and a Changing of the Guard at the New York Times
22 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Every year, countless poor spellers accidentally address their Santa letters to Satan. Satan—played by Kathleen Turner—always replies Matt Pass...
Nicolás Maduro on the Brink of Dictatorship
19 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Nicolás Maduro was an unlikely successor to Venezuela’s popular and charismatic Hugo Chavez. And, since his election, the country has been wracked ...
The Alabama Fallout, and Louise Erdrich on the Future
15 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Roy Moore was a classic Trumpian candidate: a political outsider of extreme positions, rejected by the establishment and plagued by accusations of sca...
Don’t Worry, the Robots Can’t Do Your Job—Yet
12 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The business reporter Sheelah Kolhatkar has recently written for The New Yorker about a wave of advances in robotic technology that will have dangerou...
Susan Orlean on the Trail of Tonya Harding
08 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
When the Olympic skater Nancy Kerrigan was kneecapped in an attack by friends of her rival Tonya Harding, the scandal riveted the nation; twenty-fou...
Barry Blitt’s Rogues’ Gallery of Presidents
05 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Barry Blitt wasn’t into politics—music and hockey were more his things—but as an artist he’s become one of the keenest observers of American p...
Praying for Tangier Island
01 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Residents of Tangier Island, in the Chesapeake Bay, live through each hurricane season in fear of a major storm that would decimate their land. With i...
Bruce Springsteen Talks with David Remnick
24 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In October, 2016, Bruce Springsteen appeared at The New Yorker Festival for an intimate conversation with David Remnick. (The event sold out in six se...
Noah Baumbach’s Unhappy Families
21 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In his review of “The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected),” the New Yorker critic Anthony Lane paraphrased no less an author than Leo Tolstoy. “...
Will the Harvey Weinstein Scandal Change America?
17 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The allegations against Harvey Weinstein have opened the floodgates for women in other industries and walks of life to go public with claims of sexual...
Love, War, and the Magical Lamb-Brain Sandwiches of Aleppo, Syria
14 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
When Adam Davidson was a reporter in Baghdad during the Iraq War, he started dating a fellow-reporter, Jen Banbury, of Salon. On a holiday break, the...