The New Yorker Radio Hour

The British writer, activist, and rapper Riz Ahmed has had a very public life since leaving drama school to star in “The Road to Guantánamo.” He won an Emmy for playing the lead in “The Night Of,” appeared in the Star Wars film “Rogue One,” and played Hannah Horvath’s baby daddy on “Girls.” He has continued his music career as Riz MC and was featured on the song “Immigrants (We Get the Job Done)” from “The Hamilton Mixtape.” Riz has been an outspoken activist for immigrants in the U.S. and Britain, and, at this year’s New Yorker Festival, he spoke to Alexis Okeowo about how his past has shaped who he is and steered his career choices. Ahmed’s work is often political, but he resents the category of political art, which he sees as a way to marginalize viewpoints that the mainstream views with suspicion.  

In 2010, the Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, then known as Bradley Manning, sent nearly seven hundred and fifty thousand classified military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks. The leak earned Manning a thirty-five-year prison sentence, which was commuted by President Obama to seven years. Less than five months out of prison, she sat down with The New Yorker’s Larissa MacFarquhar at the 2017 New Yorker Festival. Manning discussed her tumultuous upbringing, including her months living as a homeless teen in Chicago; her highly public gender transition; and her treatment in military prison. She also described the quick decision that led her to send the documents to WikiLeaks. Having seen “All the President’s Men,” Manning had originally intended to send the documents to the Washington Post or The New York Times, but, at the time, she said, the newspapers struggled to provide her with the security protocols she insisted on. Only WikiLeaks offered the necessary level of security, and she took the cha

The death last month of Hugh Hefner reopened a conversation about the “Playboy” founder and the world he created. Hefner said that his magazine’s pictures of naked or near-naked women were an empowering blow against puritanism; his critics argued that they normalized the degradation of women. Janice Moses was just nineteen and in desperate need of a job when she started in the magazine’s photo department, eventually rising to become a photo editor. Empowered as a professional woman, she became increasingly uncomfortable with the content, especially as “Playboy” began competing with more explicit rivals such as “Hustler.” After Hefner died, Janice’s daughter, Michele Moses—a member of the The New Yorker’s editorial staff—had a few questions about her mother’s years making centerfolds. Also: The New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb talks with Bill Rhoden, a writer-at-large for ESPN’s “Undefeated,” about the fifty-year history of black athletes embracing politics on the field. Is it time, they ask, to retire “The

Annie Clark, known as St. Vincent, launched her career as a guitar virtuoso—a real shredder—in indie rock, playing alongside artists like Sufjan Stevens. As a bandleader, she’s moved away from the explosive solos, telling David Remnick, “There’s a certain amount of guitar playing that is about pride, that isn’t about the song. . . . I’m not that interested in guitar being a means of poorly covered-up pride.” Her songs are dense, challenging, and not always easy, but catchy and seductive. Remnick caught up with Clark before the launch of her new album, “MASSEDUCTION.”  They talked about the clarity of purpose she needed in order to “clear a path” to write the “glamorously sad songs” she’s become known for.

Patricia Marx is a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, and Roz Chast is a celebrated cartoonist. Chast’s book “Can’t We Please Talk About Something More Pleasant,” about dealing with her aging parents, was a best-seller in 2014, winning awards that don’t usually go to books of cartoons. But something you don’t know about Chast and Marx is that they played in a band. As the Daily Pukeleles, they claim, they influenced some of the biggest names in music in the sixties and beyond. But they were always a little too far ahead of the curve for the mainstream. For the first time ever, Patricia Marx and Roz Chast tell their story. Plus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jennifer Egan talks with David Remnick about cops and mobsters, and the torture of writing a novel.    

The Trump SoHo was supposed to be a splash for the Trump Organization and for Ivanka and Donald Trump, Jr., who were leading the project. Instead, they were stuck trying to market very small units to buyers as the financial crisis hit. That they lied in selling the building isn’t in question, and the Manhattan District Attorney's office began investigating; but, after a meeting between the D.A. and  Marc Kasowitz, a Trump lawyer, the government never filed charges. What happened? Andrea Bernstein, of WNYC, and the Pulitzer Prize-winner Jesse Eisinger, of ProPublica, jointly reported on the Trump SoHo; they spoke to The New Yorker’s Adam Davidson, who has reported extensively on the Trump Organization. Plus, the staff writer Doreen St. Félix tells David Remnick why Cardi B, the first female rapper since Lauryn Hill to hit the Billboard No. 1—is shaking up the music industry.

A crime reporter and a business writer try to figure out how the government can charge a bank a sixteen-billion-dollar fine for wrongdoing yet fail to prosecute any individual at that bank for a crime. Plus, a long walk with Karl Ove Knausgaard. Knausgaard’s monumental autobiographical novel in six volumes, “My Struggle,” describes the events of his life in immense detail over thousands of pages—a most unlikely literary hit. His new project is only a bit less ambitious. It’s a four-part series named after the seasons, one book per season, which he wrote for his daughter while awaiting her birth. Each book consists of dozens of short essays, reflections on the most common things, tangible and intangible. The first book in the series, “Autumn,” was just published in the U.S. When Karl Ove Knausgaard was in New York recently, he met up with The New Yorker’s Joshua Rothman, and they covered all the basics: near-death experiences, raising kids, puberty, brain surgery, and turtles.

David Simon believes in the dignity of labor, “even when it’s undignified.” What “The Wire” (which he created) did for the drug trade in Baltimore, “The Deuce,” also on HBO, does for sex work and the beginnings of the pornography industry in New York, in the seventies. Critics have compared Simon not so much to other television showrunners as to novelists like Dickens; Simon’s work is similarly wide in scope, with large casts, and aims to create a picture of a whole world. At bottom, he wants to follow the money from the street to the bosses to the politicians. But while Simon is sympathetic to the sex workers he depicts in “The Deuce,” and even to some of the pimps and mobsters who exploit them, he is unambiguously critical of porn’s effect on America. He tells David Remnick that porn—universally available on the Internet in its most extreme forms—has warped a whole culture toward misogyny. Plus, Ellie Kemper as a character with pathological delusions of gracefulness; and the rapper Wiki grows up.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus recently won her sixth consecutive Emmy for Best Actress in a Comedy for the role of Selina Meyer, the hapless Vice-President turned President, in HBO’s “Veep.” The show has been on for six seasons so her record is perfect. In 2016, Louis-Dreyfus spoke with David Remnick as the Presidential race was growing more outrageous by the day, and “Veep,” which began as a satire of Washington, had come to seem like “a somber documentary” about the political process. They also spoke about Louis-Dreyfus’s early days on “Saturday Night Live,” and her fight to be taken seriously as a woman in Hollywood.   Plus, another, earlier fight for women’s rights: the 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs is the subject of the new film starring Emma Stone and Steve Carrell called “Battle of the Sexes.” The composer Nicholas Britell wrote the score, and talks with The New Yorker editor Henry Finder about how a piano concerto is like a tennis match.

Donald Trump mocked Kim Jong Un by calling him “rocket man,” and threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea if the U.S. or its allies were attacked. Kim, in turn, dismissed Trump as a “barking dog Evan Osnos recently reported from Washington and Pyongyang on the tensions between the United States and North Korea. Osnos tells David Remnick that North Korea will never give up its nuclear weapons; they are no longer a bargaining chip but a source of national identity and security. Despite the forceful rhetoric and threats, Osnos found little appetite for war in either government, concluding that North Korea is not “a suicidal cult.”  And he predicts that Trump will contain the risk, rather than eliminate it. Plus, critic Amanda Petrusich picks a book, a T.V. show, and an album for the end of summer.

Since the Inauguration, in January, there’s been a kind of protest renaissance for those on the left and some in the center of American politics; at rallies and marches, they’ve dusted off chants and songs that became symbols of resistance during the civil-rights and Vietnam eras. But many of these protesters weren’t alive in the sixties, and the songs of their parents’ or grandparents’ generations may not resonate for them. “Primer for a Failed Superpower” was a concert performance, organized by the theatre company the Team, that mixed classic protest songs with contemporary anthems, all sung by a cast that spanned generational lines from boomers to teens. The New Yorker’s Vinson Cunningham talked to two young performers, Maxwell Vice and Logan Rozos, about how that generational divide played out, and what public protest is worth in the age of social media.  

Hillary Clinton harbors no doubts, she tells David Remnick in a long interview, that political allies of Donald Trump astutely “guided” the release of hacked e-mails by WikiLeaks and the planting of fake news in order to sabotage her. In a new book, “What Happened,” Clinton is by turns angry, accusatory, and apologetic about the 2016 election and its outcome. She describes the infiltration by Russia as a “clear and present danger” to the electoral process that Republicans should take as seriously as Democrats; Putin could, she points out, just as easily turn on Trump. She also tells Remnick that the media failed voters by focussing coverage on scandals rather than policies; she analyzes how sexism affected voters as they judged a woman who sought the highest office in the land; she wishes that President Obama had acted more forcefully on what was known about Russian involvement; and she lays out a plan for diplomatic efforts to address the North Korea nuclear crisis. A resolution is possible, she believes, bu

A magical time of unfettered creativity but zero productivity, the days before the Internet were so strange that it’s hard to believe they were real. Clearly no one got anything done, ever. Jenny Slate performs Emma Rathbone’s “Before the Internet,” from The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs. Plus: Ten years ago, Susan Orlean, a staff writer at The New Yorker, wrote about a former laser physicist who had given up a successful career to become an origami artist. In time, Robert Lang became one of the world’s top practitioners,and origami became a surprising area of scientific activity, with government grants encouraging research into how materials fold. Orlean caught up with Lang at the OrigamiUSA convention recently, where she tried her hand at Lang’s popular goldfish—which has a hinged jaw and fins—and talked with him about the life lessons of folding paper.

When is speech no longer just speech? David Remnick looks at how leftist protests at Berkeley, right-wing violence in Charlottesville, and open-carry laws around the country are testing the traditional liberal consensus on freedom of expression. He speaks with Mark Bray, the author of a new and sympathetic book about Antifa; Melissa Murray, a law-school professor at U.C. Berkeley; and Dahlia Lithwick, a legal analyst for Slate.

We have yet to learn just how closely the views of the Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch resemble those of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, a staunch conservative and a standard-bearer for the legal philosophy known as originalism. Originalists claim to interpret the Constitution by relying on its words and on the contemporary writings of the Constitution's framers. The New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore, a professor of history, says that Gorsuch has been candid about the limitations of historical thinking. But she also notes that liberal jurists, for their part, have become more engaged in historical research to bolster their decisions, and thus are “out-originalizing originalists.” Plus: Alexa is the voice-recognition program in Echo, Amazon’s speaker device. It sits in your house, always on, listening for commands to look up information, play media on your computer, or order stuff from Amazon. The New Yorker’s Sarah Larson tests out Alexa, and finds it to be like “2001: A Space Odyssey”

We take for granted that popular entertainers can and should advocate for causes they believe in. But until Harry Belafonte pioneered that kind of activism in the middle of the last century, stars largely kept their political leanings private. In the lead-up to last year’s Many Rivers to Cross festival, which Belafonte helped dream up, the New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb paid a visit to the actor, musician, and civil-rights icon. Belafonte turned ninety this year and is looking to pass the torch, but he’s worried about the state of the civil-rights movement and what he sees as a lack of organized response: we have a struggle, he says, but not a movement. Cobb, who covers many civil-rights and other political issues for the magazine, teases out what Belafonte means.   Plus, the Mashco Piro tribe is one of the last remaining groups to survive only by hunting and gathering with tools that its members make themselves. Residing deep in the Amazon rain forest, they are extremely isolated and, for nearly a centu

Nick Lowe made it big as a pioneer of what the English called “pub rock” and Americans usually call power-pop. Lowe had his biggest successes in the New Wave era but continues to release records and perform, and six of his middle-period records are being reissued this year on the Yep Roc label. In the opinion of one fan, staff writer Nick Paumgarten Nick Paumgarten, Lowe is as great as he ever was. Now Lowe is engaged in figuring out how to age gracefully in rock and roll. “Some of my colleagues and associates have to behave like they did when they were young, and I wanted to avoid that rubbish at all costs,” he told Paumgarten on a recent visit. “The thing was for me to accept the fact that I was getting older, and to actually embrace it and use it as an advantage instead of trying to hide it.” But, after the rocker recently lost close friends to illness, accepting old age might be getting a little harder. Plus: on-the-job horror stories from three great writers—Gillian Flynn, Akhil Sharma, and Alison Bechde

John Ridley has been active in in film and television since the nineteen-nineties; he also has seven novels under his belt, as well as a play and several graphic novels. And, since the release of “12 Years a Slave,” for which he wrote the screenplay, Ridley has emerged as one of Hollywood’s strongest voices on issues of race. This year he came out with the series “Guerrilla,” a fictional account of a couple in the black-power movement of the nineteen-seventies; and “Let It Fall,” a documentary about the Rodney King verdict and the years of tension leading up to it. Yet, despite the recent resurgence of some of the most glaring examples of racism in America, Ridley tells David Remnick that he’s committed to a view that the nation can change for the better, and that to be honest about racism need not lead to despair: “I absolutely want to work on things right now where the hope is not so aspirational—it is there, it is underscored a little bit more.” Plus, hostility toward identity politics—nurtured by Steve Ba

The New Yorker’s Josh Rothman explains why men are missing out on romance novels, and Sherman Alexie reads a new story about a motel maid confronting the ugly sides of human nature.

A former C.I.A. operative writes about the struggle between East and West, and Annie Dillard describes the awesome, frightening experience of a total eclipse.