The New Yorker Radio Hour

Nanfu Wang grew up under China’s one-child policy and never questioned it. “You don’t know that it’s something initiated and implemented by the authority,” she tells The New Yorker’s Jiayang Fan. “It’s a normal part of everything. Just like water exists, or air.” But when Wang became pregnant she started to understand the magnitude of the law—and the suffering behind it. Wang’s documentary, “One Child Nation,” explores the effects of one of the largest social experiments in history. She uncovers stories of confusion and trauma, in Chinese society and within her own family. After Wang’s uncle had a daughter, his family forced him to abandon her at a local market so that he and his wife could try for a son. “He stood there, across the street, watching to see if somebody would come and take the baby,” Wang tells Fan. “He wanted to bring her home, but his mom threatened to commit suicide. . . . He felt so torn. There was no right decision.” 

Toni Morrison read The New York Times with pencil in hand. An editor by trade, Morrison never stopped noting errors in the paper. In 2015, during a conversation with The New Yorker’s Hilton Als, Morrison noted that the stories she cared about were once absent from the news. Now they’re present, but distorted. “The language is manipulated and strangled in such a way that you get the message,” she noted wryly. “I know there is a difference between the received story… and what is actually going on.” Morrison, who died on Monday, was the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature and one of the most beloved writers of the 21st century. In a wide-ranging interview with Als, Morrison discusses her last novel, God Help The Child, writing in a modern setting, and her relationship to her father, whom she says was complicated man and bluntly calls a “racist.” When she was older, she learned that he had wittnessed the lynching of two of his neighbors. “I think that’s why he thought white people… were incorri

In January, The New Yorker’s Ben Taub travelled to Mauritania to meet with Mohamedou Salahi. An electrical engineer who had lived in Germany, Salahi was detained at Guantánamo Bay for fifteen years and tortured, despite the fact that he was not a terrorist.  But one of the key pieces of evidence was that Salahi’s cousin, known as Abu Hafs al-Mauritani, was a high-ranking member of Al Qaeda—a member of the group’s governing Shura Council and a spiritual adviser to Osama bin Laden, who had drafted bin Laden’s infamous fatwa against the United States. While Salahi endured torture at Guantánamo, Abu Hafs was never captured or detained by the United States. When Ben Taub met Abu Hafs at a wedding of Mauritanian élites, he wondered how this man had gone free while his cousin had suffered so much. Abu Hafs agreed to an interview, but it quickly took a turn that Ben didn’t expect.

When Mohamedou Salahi arrived at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, in August of 2002, he was hopeful.  He knew why he had been detained: he had crossed paths with Al Qaeda operatives, and his cousin had once called him from Osama bin Laden’s phone.  But Salahi was no terrorist—he held no extremist views—and had no information of any plots. He trusted the American system of justice and thought the authorities would realize their mistake before long.    He was wrong.    Salahi spent fifteen years at Guantánamo, where he was subjected to some of the worst excesses of America’s war on terror; Donald Rumsfeld personally signed off on the orders for his torture.  And, under torture, Salahi confessed to everything—even though he had done nothing. “If they would have wanted him to confess to being on the grassy knoll for the J.F.K. assassination, I’m sure we could have got him to confess to that, too,” Mark Fallon, who led an investigation unit at Guantánamo, said.     Ben Taub reported Mohamedou Salahi’s story for

The cultural critic Doreen St. Félix goes to Madame Tussauds with Justin Kuritzkes, the début author of the novel “Famous People,” to talk about the nature of celebrity. Jia Tolentino heads for the children’s section of a bookstore with Rivka Galchen to compare notes on the kids’ books that still inspire them. And Jelani Cobb recommends three recent works of history that shed light on our current moment.

Tana French was an actor in her thirties when she sat down to write about a mystery that took the lives of two children, which became the global blockbuster “In the Woods.” With her subsequent books about the Dublin Murder Squad, French became known as “the queen of Irish crime fiction”—despite having been born in the United States. French’s latest book, “The Witch Elm,” departs from her line of police procedurals: the narrator is a civilian, a happy-go-lucky young man named Toby whose life is turned upside down when he is attacked during a burglary. Although the book involves a murder, “The core story arc is not the murder and the solution,” French tells Alexandra Schwartz. “The core story arc is Toby going from this golden boy [with] his happy life to somebody who’s had that shattered. . . . Where will this crisis take him?” Though known as a literary mystery writer, French acknowledges that some of her fans have found the plot frustrating. “If you’re coming to this book expecting a straight-up crime novel

Fahamu Pecou has shown work in museums all over the country and appeared on television shows like “Empire” and “black-ish.” The men the artist depicts tend to strike exaggerated poses, with sagging bluejeans and a cascade of colorful boxer shorts. Pecou gained notoriety in Atlanta, for a poster campaign bearing the legend “Fahamu Pecou Is the Shit.” The New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb notes that Pecou “has the ability to deal with themes that relate primarily to black male identity in the U.S.,” including stereotypes and police violence, “while injecting a very subversive element of humor.” Cobb went to Atlanta to meet with Pecou and spoke with him about the influence of African tradition on his life and work.  L. D. Brown of Grey Reverend contributed music for this story.

Some people have always believed that the moon landing was a government hoax, and, in the age of the Internet, that conspiracy theory continues to thrive. Andrew Marantz explores the value of skepticism, and the point at which disbelief leads to a totalitarian breakdown. We went to the archives for three real-time accounts of what it was like to watch the moon landing on television. 

In 2014, Tom Hanks—the star of “Apollo 13,” among many other accomplishments—wrote a short story about going to the moon.  But his was not a dramatic story of NASA heroes facing grave danger. Hanks told the tale of a very twenty-first century mission, executed D.I.Y. style, with four misfits in a space capsule run off an iPad and held together with duct tape.  The story, “Alan Bean Plus Four,” was published in The New Yorker in 2014.  Hanks originally read the story for the New Yorker’s Writer’s Voice podcast.  

“I can remember, even four months after [“Call Me Maybe” ’s] release, being claimed in the press as a one-hit wonder,” Carly Rae Jepsen says. “Isn’t it too soon to decide that? Give me a chance!” The Canadian singer and songwriter was by no means a one-hit wonder, and her talent for crafting earworm pop songs about love in all its forms won her a legion of fans and the devotion of many critics, including The New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich. In 2017, while Jepsen was working on her fourth album, “Dedicated”—which was released in May, 2019—Jepsen sat down at the New Yorker Festival with Petrusich, to talk about her creative process. She had already written eighty songs for the record, she estimated. “If you wanted, I could write you a song right now, but it might not be good. I never run out of ideas, and I never stop enjoying doing it.” With her collaborator and guitarist Tavish Crowe, Jepsen performed an acoustic version of her hit “I Really Like You” live. 

It’s hard to recall a newly elected freshman representative to Congress who has made a bigger impact than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her primary victory for New York’s Fourteenth District seat—as a young woman of color beating out a long-established white male incumbent—was big news, and Ocasio-Cortez has been generating headlines almost daily ever since. Practically the day she took her seat in Congress, Ocasio-Cortez became the hero of the left wing of the Democrats and a favored villain of Fox News and the right. She battled Nancy Pelosi to make the Green New Deal a priority, and has been involved with a movement to launch primary challenges against centrist or right-leaning Democrats. Like Bernie Sanders, she embraces the label of democratic socialism and supports free college education for all Americans. She has called for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She joined David Remnick in the New Yorker Radio Hour studio on July 5th, just after her trip to the border to examine migrant-dete

As he set about adapting “To Kill a Mockingbird” for the stage, Aaron Sorkin found himself troubled by its protagonist, the small-town lawyer Atticus Finch. Harper Lee’s Finch, he thought, is tolerant to a fault—understanding rather than condemning the violent racism of many of his neighbors. Sorkin also felt that Lee’s two black characters, the maid Calpurnia and the falsely accused Tom Robinson, lacked a real voice. “I imagine that, in 1960, using African-American characters as atmosphere is the kind of thing that would go unnoticed by white people,” he tells David Remnick. “In 2018, it doesn’t go unnoticed, and it’s wrong, and it’s also a wasted opportunity.” Sorkin’s changes in his adaptation led to a lawsuit from Harper Lee’s literary executor, who had placed specific conditions on the faithfulness of his script. In Sorkin’s view, the criticisms of the executor, Tonja Carter, were tantamount to racism, in that they reinforced the lack of agency of black people in the South in the nineteen-thirties. (Cart

Tracy K. Smith was named Poet Laureate, in 2017, right after the most divisive election of our time. She could have spent her two-year appointment writing and enjoying a nice office in the Library of Congress, but she felt poetry might be able to help mend some of the divisions that the election had highlighted. Her plan was this: to put together a collection of poems from living poets, called “American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time,” that she felt were in some way relevant to our moment, and to hit the road—visiting community centers, senior centers, prisons, and colleges. While serving as Poet Laureate, Smith estimates that she travelled one or two nights every week, reading poems written by herself and others, and discussing them with groups of people. “It was exhausting, and exhilarating, and it was probably the best thing I could have done as an American,” she told The New Yorker’s poetry editor, Kevin Young. 

Valeria Luiselli first travelled to the U.S.–Mexico border in 2014, when the current immigration crisis began to heat up. Under the Trump Presidency, the border has become the dead center of American politics, and Luiselli returned with the radio producer Pejk Malinovski. Luiselli is a Mexican writer living in New York, and the author of “Lost Children Archive” and other books. She wrote in The New Yorker about Wild West reënactments, in which actors stage scenes like a gunfight at O.K. Corral. In Tombstone, Arizona, and Shakespeare, New Mexico, she finds a very particular view of Western history that elides the U.S.’s long and complicated relationship with Mexico, which once owned this region. She finds that historical reënactments feed a notion of the border region as a lawless frontier requiring vigilantes to defend American interests.

For decades, critical praise for a TV show was that it was “not like TV,” but more like a novel or a movie. That ingrained hierarchy always bugged Emily Nussbaum, who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for her criticism in The New Yorker. She has been compared to Pauline Kael, but Nussbaum—acknowledging the compliment—is quick to point out that she has never written about movies, nor has she wanted to. She was inspired to be a TV critic by “Television Without Pity,” a blog site of passionate, informed fans arguing constantly. In her new book, “I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way through the TV Revolution,” Nussbaum argues that the success of serious antihero dramas like “The Sopranos” and “Breaking Bad” has led many to devalue mainstays of TV, like comedies and even soap operas. It’s time to stop comparing TV to anything else, she tells David Remnick. 

The New Yorker contributor Jenna Krajeski recently met with a woman who calls herself Esperanza. In her home country, Esperanza was coerced and threatened into prostitution, and later was trafficked into the United States, where she was subjected to appalling conditions. Esperanza eventually obtained legal help, and applied for something called a T visa. The T visa contains unusual provisions that recognize the unique circumstances of human-trafficking victims in seeking legal status. It has also been a crucial tool to obtaining victims’ coöperation in prosecuting traffickers. The Trump Administration claims to want to fight the problem of human trafficking, but Krajeski notes that its policies have done the opposite: T-visa applicants can now be deported if their applications are rejected. This dramatic change in policy sharply reduced the number of applications from victims seeking help. “If what [the Administration] cares about is putting traffickers in prison, which is what they say they care about, their

After a U.S. drone was allegedly shot down by Iran last week, relations between Tehran and Washington are again approaching a low point; on Thursday, President Trump ordered and then called off an air strike. The situation has been deteriorating since the beginning of the Trump era, with the Administration actively supporting Saudi Arabia as a regional competitor to Iran, and the President withdrawing the United States from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. The New Yorker staff writer Dexter Filkins says that Iran’s initial strategy was to wait the Trump Presidency out. That calculus has changed as more hawkish advisors, like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, who are intent on imposing harsh sanctions on Iran, have joined the Administration. The result has been a series of tit-for-tat exchanges between the two countries, which could ultimately lead to a larger conflict. “If things got out of control in that region, that would be, Iraq, to Iran, to Afghanistan,” Filkins said. “I can't imagine where that would end, or how

Robert Caro is a historical biographer unlike anyone else writing today, with the Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, and other honors to prove it. But to call his books biographies seems to miss the mark: they’re so rich in detail, so accurate, and at the same time so broad in scope, that they’re more like epics of American history. David Remnick sat down with Caro at the McCarter Theater, in Princeton, New Jersey, on the occasion of the publication of “Working,” a volume of Caro’s speeches and other writings. They covered Caro’s early years as a newspaper reporter, his determination to tackle a project—the rise to power of Robert Moses—that no one had accomplished, and finally his chronicle of the life of Lyndon Johnson. Caro has completed four volumes on Johnson, with a fifth, covering the Presidency, in the works. Remnick asks about Caro’s singular method of interviewing in depth, and Caro describes his interview with Sam Houston Johnson, the president’s brother, which Caro conducted at the National Pa

Apple, Amazon, Alphabet (which owns Google), and Facebook—known in the tech world as the Big Four—are among the largest and most profitable companies in the world, and they’ve been accustomed to the laxest of oversight from Washington. But the climate may have shifted in a significant way. The Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice, and the House Judiciary Committee are all investigating different aspects of the Big Four; Elizabeth Warren has made breaking up these companies a cornerstone of her Presidential campaign. Sue Halpern, a New Yorker contributor, sounds a cautious note about these developments. Current antitrust law doesn’t well fit the nature of these businesses, and breaking up the companies will not necessarily solve underlying issues, like the lack of privacy law. In a twist, Halpern says, the Big Four and now asking the federal government for more regulation—because, she explains to David Remnick, the companies’ lobbyists can sway Washington more easily than they can influence stat

Masha Gessen co-hosts this episode of the New Yorker Radio Hour, guiding David Remnick through the fifty years of civil-rights gains for L.G.B.T.Q. people. From drag queens reading to children at the library to a popular gay Presidential candidate, we’ll look at how the movement for L.G.B.T.Q. rights has changed our culture and our laws. The actress and comedian Lea DeLaria takes us through five decades of queer history in five minutes. Gessen talks with a Stonewall historian named Martin Duberman about whether the movement has become too conservative, and, later, she visits with a gay asylum seeker who recently fled Russia’s state security agency. CORRECTION: An earlier version of this program misidentified the location of the 2016 Pulse night-club shooting.