In fiction and nonfiction, the author Danzy Senna focusses on the experience of being biracial in a nation long obsessed with color lines. Now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic candidate for President, some of Senna’s concerns have come to the fore in political life. Donald Trump attacked Harris as a kind of race manipulator, implying that she had been Indian American before becoming Black for strategic purposes.  The claim was bizarre and false, but Senna feels that it reflected a mind-set in white America. “Mixed-race people are sort of up for debate and speculation, and there’s a real return to the idea that your appearance is what matters, not what your background is or your identity,” she tells Julian Lucas, who wrote about Senna’s work in The New Yorker.  “And if your appearance is unclear to us, then we’re going to debate you and we’re going to discount you and we’re going to accuse you of being an impostor.”  Senna talks about why she describes people like herself and Lucas using the old word “mulatto,” despite its racist etymology. “The word ‘biracial’ or ‘multiracial’ to me is completely meaningless,” she says, “because I don’t know which races were mixing.  And those things matter when we’re talking about identity.”  Senna’s newest novel, “Colored Television,” follows a literary writer somewhat like herself, trying to find a new career in the more lucrative world of TV.

In honor of what is for many people the final days of summer, the New Yorker Radio Hour team presents a conversation that may inspire your end-of-summer reading list: David Remnick talks to Hernan Diaz about his book, Trust, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2023. The novel’s plot focuses on the daughter of eccentric aristocrats after she marries a Wall Street tycoon of dubious ethics during the Roaring Twenties. The novel is told by four people in four different formats, which offer conflicting accounts of the couple’s life, the tycoon’s misdeeds, and his role in the crash of 1929. “What I was interested in, and this is why I chose finance capital, I wanted a realm of pure abstraction,” he tells David Remnick. Diaz’s first book, In The Distance, will be released in hardback for the first time in October.

Kamala Harris will face barriers as a woman running for the Presidency. “Women constantly have to credential themselves,” Jennifer Palmieri, a veteran of Democratic politics who served in the Clinton Administration, says. She was also the director of communications for the Obama White House, and then for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential campaign. Harris will “need to remind people of what she has done in her career and what she’s done as Vice-President, because people assume that women haven’t accomplished anything.” But Harris also has notable strengths as a candidate, and, having avoided a bruising primary campaign—and having been handed a torch from the incumbent—she has advantages that no other woman running for office has had. For a woman candidate, the world has changed since 2016, Palmieri believes. She shares insights into how Joe Biden was finally persuaded to step out of the race, and explains what she meant by advising women to “nod less and cry more.”

The daughter of eccentric aristocrats marries a Wall Street tycoon of dubious ethics during the Roaring Twenties. That sounds like a plot that F. Scott Fitzgerald might have written, or Edith Wharton. But “Trust,” by the writer Hernan Diaz, is very much of our time. The novel is told by four people in four different formats, which offer conflicting accounts of the couple’s life, the tycoon Andrew Bevel’s misdeeds, and his role in the crash of 1929. And though a book like “The Great Gatsby” tends to skirt around the question of how the rich make their money, Hernan Diaz puts that question at the heart of “Trust.” “What I was interested in, and this is why I chose finance capital, I wanted a realm of pure abstraction,” he tells David Remnick. Diaz was nearly unknown when “Trust,” his second novel, won the Pulitzer Prize this year.

Twenty years after her breakout on “American Idol,” Kelly Clarkson released an album called “Chemistry” that deals with the long arc of a relationship and her recent divorce. She sat down to talk with Hanif Abdurraqib, a music writer passionate about the craft of songwriting. “This literally was written in real time,” Clarkson reflects. “That was me being indecisive. Man, I have kids. Do I want to do this? Can I try again?” But writing about divorce as one of the best-known celebrities in America is very different from a young artist’s heartbreak anthem. “It’s easy to hide in metaphors when it’s not the biggest thing that’s ever happened,” she says. “Everyone’s going to know. Unfortunately my life is very public, especially in the rough times.” 

Plus, Robert Samuels, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer on politics and race, shares his secret indulgence: watching classic figure-skating routines on YouTube. 

For twenty-some years, Naomi Klein has been a leading thinker on the left. She’s especially known for the idea of disaster capitalism: an analysis that the forces of big business will exploit any severe disruption to take over more space in our lives. She was often confused with another prominent political writer, Naomi Wolf—once a feminist on the left who has, in recent years, embraced conspiracy theories on the right and is now on good terms with Steve Bannon. Klein’s new book, “Doppelganger,” starts with this simple case of mistaken identity and broadens into an analysis of our political moment, which she describes as “uncanny” in the psychological sense. “Freud described the uncanny as that species of frightening that changes what was once familiar to something unfamiliar,” she tells the staff writer Jia Tolentino. “It’s that weirdness of ‘I think I know what this is, but it’s not what I think.’ ” Klein argues that the left and the right have become doppelgangers of one another—and that denialism regarding climate change has widened to any number of topics, including the claim that Joe Biden is dead and is being played by an actor. “Whenever you don’t like reality, you can just say that it’s not real,” she says.

About 1.2 million people in the United States experience homelessness in a given year—you could nearly fill the city of Dallas with the unhoused. But there are proven solutions. For the chronically homeless, a key strategy is supportive housing—providing not only a stable apartment, but also services like psychiatric and medical care on-site. The New Yorker contributor Jennifer Egan spent the past year following several individuals as they transitioned into a new supportive-housing building in Brooklyn. She found that this housing model works and argues that it could be scaled up nationally for less than the cost of emergency services for the homeless. But “no one,” Egan notes ruefully, “wants to see that line item in their budget.” Plus, Joe Garcia, an inmate serving a life sentence for murder in California’s High Desert State Prison, reads from his essay “Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison,” recently published by The New Yorker.

At the end of this month, after more than two decades, Netflix is phasing out its DVD-rental business. While that may not come as a surprise given the predominance of streaming platforms, it’s a great loss to cinephiles, according to the New Yorker’s Richard Brody. Streaming services routinely drop titles from circulation, and amazing films may be lost to moviegoers. “Physical media is what protects us from being at the mercy of streaming services for our movies and our music,” Brody says. “It’s like a library at home.” Brody gives the producer Adam Howard a peek into his own personal stash of films, and picks a few DVDs of films he would take with him in a fire: Godard’s “King Lear” (“the greatest film ever made – literally”); “Chameleon Street,” by Wendell B. Harris, Jr.; “Stranded” and “The Plastic Dome of Norma Jean,” by Juleen Compton; and a box set of five films by John Cassavetes.

David Grann is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of two nonfiction books that topped the best-seller list this summer: “The Wager” and “Killers of the Flower Moon,” from 2017, which Martin Scorsese has adapted into a film opening in October. Grann is among the most lauded nonfiction writers at The New Yorker; David Remnick says that “his urge to find unique stories and tell them with rigor and style is rare to the vanishing point.” Grann talks with Remnick about his beginnings as a writer, and about his almost obsessive research and writing process. “The trick is how can you tell a true story using these literary techniques and remain completely factually based,” Grann says. “What I realized as I did this more is that you are an excavator. You aren’t imagining the story—you are excavating the story.” Grann recounts travelling in rough seas to the desolate site of the eighteenth-century shipwreck at the heart of “The Wager,” his most recent book, so that he could convey the sailors’ despair more accurately. That book is also being made into a film by Scorcese. “It’s a learning curve because I’ve never been in the world of Hollywood,” Grann says. “You’re a historical resource. … Once they asked me, ‘What was the lighting in the room?’ I thought about it for a long time. That’s something I would not need to know, writing a book.” But Grann is glad to be in the hands of an expert, and keep his distance from the process. “I’m not actually interested in making a film,” he admits. “I’m really interested in these stories, and so I love that somebody else with their own vision and intellect is going to draw on these stories and add to our understanding of whatever this work is.”

Henry Worsley was a husband, father, and an officer of an élite British commando unit; also a tapestry weaver, amateur boxer, photographer, and collector of rare books, maps, and fossils. But his true obsession was exploration. Worsley revered the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton and he had led a 2009 expedition to the South Pole. But Worsley planned an even greater challenge. At fifty-five, he set out to trek alone to ski from one side of the Antarctic continent to the other, hauling more than three hundred pounds of gear and posting an audio diary by satellite phone. The New Yorker staff writer David Grann wrote about Worsley’s quest, and spoke with his widow, Joanna Worsley, about the painful choice she made to support her husband in a mortally dangerous endeavor.

This segment originally aired March 2, 2018.

David Souter is one of the most private, low-profile Justices ever to have served on the Supreme Court. He rarely gave interviews or speeches. Yet his tenure was anything but low profile. Deemed a “home run” nominee by the George H. W. Bush Administration, Souter refused to answer questions during his confirmation hearing about pressing issues—most critically, about abortion rights and Roe v. Wade, which Republicans were seeking to overturn. He was confirmed overwhelmingly. Then, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey and other decisions, he defied the expectations of the Party that had nominated him. Why? This episode, produced by WNYC Studios’ “More Perfect” and hosted by Julia Longoria, explains how “No More Souters” became a rallying cry for Republicans and how Souter’s tenure on the bench inspired a backlash that would change the Court forever.

You can listen to more episodes of “More Perfect” here.

The Korey Stringer Institute at the University of Connecticut was named after an N.F.L. player who died of exertional heatstroke. The lab’s main research subjects have been athletes, members of the military, and laborers. But, with climate change, even mild exertion under extreme heat will affect more and more of us; in many parts of the United States, a heat wave and power outage could cause a substantial number of fatalities. Dhruv Khullar, a New Yorker contributor and practicing physician, visited the Stringer Institute to undergo a heat test—walking uphill for ninety minutes in a hundred-and-four-degree temperature—to better understand what’s happening. “I just feel puffy everywhere,” Khullar sighed. “You’d have to cut my finger off just to get my wedding ring off.” By the end of the test, Khullar spoke of cramps, dizziness, and a headache. He discussed the dangers of heatstroke with Douglas Casa, the lab’s head (who himself nearly died of it as a young athlete). “Climate change has taken this into the everyday world for the everyday American citizen. You don’t have to be a laborer working for twelve hours, you don’t have to be a soldier in training,” Casa tells him. “This is making it affect so many people even just during daily living.”

Although the treatment for heat-related illness is straightforward, Casa says that implementation of simple measures remains challenging—and there is much we need to do to better prepare for the global rise in temperature.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is an unlikely literary star. A botanist by training—a specialist in moss—she spent much of her career at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry. But, when she was well established in her academic work, having “done the things you need to do to get tenure,” she launched into a different kind of writing; her new style sought to bridge the divide between Western science and Indigenous teachings she had learned, as a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, about the connections between people, the land, plants, and animals. The result was “Braiding Sweetgrass,” a series of essays about the natural world and our relationship to it. The book was published by Milkweed Editions, a small literary press, and it grew only by word of mouth. Several years later, it landed on the Times best-seller list, and has remained there for more than three years; fans have described reading the essays as a spiritual experience. Kimmerer herself was recently recognized with a MacArthur Fellowship. Parul Sehgal, who writes about literature for The New Yorker, went to visit Kimmerer on the land she writes about so movingly, to talk about the book’s origin and its impact on its tenth anniversary. “I wanted to see what would happen if you imbue science with values,” Kimmerer told her. She is an environmentalist, but not an activist per se; her ambition for her work is actually larger. “So much of the environmental movement to me is grounded in fear,” she explains. “And we have a lot to be afraid about—let’s not ignore that—but what I really wanted to do was to help people really love the land again. Because I think that’s why we are where we are: that we haven’t loved the land enough.”

Catalina Ituralde is the protagonist of the novel that bears her name, “Catalina.” In the summer before her senior year of college, she’s working as an intern at a prestigious literary magazine, and come fall she’ll be back at Harvard to plot her future. But, contrary to a life of comfort that this scenario suggests, Catalina’s situation is complicated and uncertain: she’s an undocumented immigrant, raised in Queens by her grandparents, and after graduation she might not have the privilege of choosing what job she takes. “Catalina” is the second book by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, who first gained attention with the essay “I’m an Illegal Immigrant at Harvard,” published anonymously in the Daily Beast; her first book, “The Undocumented Americans,” was a finalist for the National Book Award. Though Villavicencio has since become an American citizen, “There’s this Latin American paranoia that comes from my parents, [who] grew up under a dictatorship,” she tells David Remnick. “I’ve heard all of these stories . . . and then there’s also being undocumented here, where the idea that I could disappear at any time, my parents could disappear at any time – I don’t think that I’m necessarily capable of feeling that kind of permanence.”

The New Yorker first published a short story by Tessa Hadley in 2002. Titled “Lost and Found,” it described a friendship between two women who had been close since childhood.  Hadley’s fiction is often consumed with relationships at this scale: tight dramas close to home. She captures, within these relationships, an extraordinary depth and complexity of emotion. The New Yorker recently published its thirtieth story from Hadley—a higher count than any other fiction writer in recent times. That figure is particularly remarkable because Hadley had such a late start to her career, publishing her first work of fiction in her forties. She talks with the New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman about her long struggle to stop imitating the writing of others, instead telling stories authentic to her own experience and voice. “I was just a late developer, and I was trying to write other people’s novels for all that time,” she says. Treisman also asks Hadley about why her work has been labelled “domestic fiction” by many critics. The term is disproportionately applied to female writers, and “tends to have a bit of condescension to it,” Hadley says. But she is willing to at least consider whether her work is too focussed on certain kinds of bourgeois-family relationships. “I almost completely accept the challenge,” she tells Treisman. “I think one should feel perpetually slightly on edge as to whether your subject matter justifies the art.”

Even in a summer of record-breaking heat and disasters, Republican Presidential candidates have ignored or mocked climate change. But some conservative legislators in Congress recognize that action is necessary. David Remnick talks with a leader of the Conservative Climate Caucus about her party’s stance on climate change, her belief that fossil fuels cannot be rapidly phased out, and the problems she sees with the Inflation Reduction Act. Then, the authoritative climate reporter Elizabeth Kolbert talks with Ben Jealous, who was recently named executive director of the Sierra Club, about his strategy for building support in Republican-led states.

The author Esmeralda Santiago has been writing about Puerto Rico and questions of immigration and identity since the early nineties. But, in 2008, she suffered a stroke that left her unable to decipher words on a page. In the months that followed, she relied on some of the same strategies she’d used to teach herself English after moving to the United States as a young teen-ager—checking out children’s books from the library, for example, to learn basic vocabulary. Santiago’s latest book, “Las Madres,” includes a character named Luz who goes through a similar experience after a traumatic brain injury. “That sense stayed with me long after I was over that situation—that feeling between knowledge and ignorance,” she tells the staff writer Vinson Cunningham. “For me, Luz is almost representative of Puerto Rico itself. We have this very long history that we don’t necessarily have access to. . . . Those of us who live outside of the island, we live the history but we don’t really know it.”

The practice of legacy admissions—preferential consideration of the children of alumni—has emerged as a national flash point since the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in June. Even some prominent Republicans are joining the Biden Administration in calling for its end. David Remnick speaks with the U.S. Education Secretary, Miguel Cardona, about the politics behind college admissions. Cardona sees legacy preference as part of a pattern that discourages many students from applying to selective schools, but notes that it is not the whole problem. How can access to higher education, he asks, be more equitable when the quality of K-12 education is so inequitable?   

Plus, Jeannie Suk Gersen, a professor at Harvard Law School, looks at the problems facing admissions officers now that race cannot be a consideration in maintaining diversity. Gersen has been reporting for The New Yorker on the legal fight over affirmative action and the movement to end legacy admissions. She speaks with the dean of admissions at Wesleyan University, one of the schools that voluntarily announced an end to legacy preference after the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action. “So far, the responses have been overwhelmingly positive,” Amin Abdul-Malik Gonzalez tells her. “But we’re obviously some time removed from the results of the decision. . . . I think it’s both symbolic and potentially substantive in terms of signalling our value to not have individually unearned benefits.”

James McBride’s new novel, “The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store,” centers on the discovery of a skeleton at the bottom of a well in a small town in Pennsylvania. What unfolds is the story of a young Black boy raised by a Jewish woman decades earlier, a story that has been closely held secret among the communities that call the area home. McBride has been writing at the intersection of race, Blackness, whiteness, and Judaism in America since his 1995 memoir “The Color of Water,” a tribute to his own Jewish mother. He speaks with the staff writer Julian Lucas. “I want to read a book that makes me feel good about being alive,” McBride says. “If I want the bad things to happen, I’ll just read the New York Times. I want a book to take me to a place that I like to be.”

Last month, the country singer Jason Aldean released a music video for “Try That in a Small Town,” a song that initially received little attention. But the video cast the song’s lyrics in a new light. While Aldean sings, “Try that in a small town / See how far ya make it down the road / ’Round here, we take care of our own,” images of protests against police brutality are interspersed with Aldean singing outside a county courthouse where a lynching once took place. Aldean’s defenders—and there are many—say the song praises small-town values and respect for the law, rather than promoting violence and vigilantism. The controversy eventually pushed the song to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The staff writer Emily Nussbaum has been reporting from Nashville throughout the past few months on the very complicated politics of country music. On the one hand, she found a self-perpetuating culture war, fuelled by outrage; on the other, there’s a music scene that’s diversifying, with increasing numbers of women, Black artists, and L.G.B.T.Q. performers claiming country music as their own. “I set out to talk about music, but politics are inseparable from it,” Nussbaum tells David Remnick. “The narrowing of commercial country music to a form of pop country dominated by white guys singing a certain kind of cliché-ridden bro country song—it’s not like I don’t like every song like that, but the absolute domination of that keeps out all sorts of other musicians.” Nussbaum also speaks with Adeem the Artist, a nonbinary country singer and songwriter based in East Tennessee, who has found success with audiences but has not broken through on mainstream country radio. “I think that it’s important that people walk into a music experience where they expect to feel comforted in their bigotry and they are instead challenged on it and made to imagine a world where different people exist,” Adeem says. “But, as a general rule, I try really hard to connect with people even if I’m making them uncomfortable.”

Alex Kotlowitz is known as a chronicler of Chicago, and of lives marred by urban poverty and violence. His books set in the city include “An American Summer,” “There Are No Children Here,” and “Never a City So Real.” Nevertheless, for some 40 years he has returned to a remote stretch of woods, summer after summer. At a young age, he found himself navigating a canoe through a series of lakes, deep in the woods along Minnesota’s border with Canada. This stretch of country is known as the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Larger than Rhode Island, it is a patchwork of more than a thousand lakes, so pristine you can drink directly from the surface. Now in his late sixties, Kotlowitz finds the days of paddling, the leaky tents, the long portages, and the schlepping of food (and alcohol) harder than before, but he will return to the Boundary Waters as long as he can. Last summer, he took a recorder with him on his annual canoe trip, capturing what has kept him coming back year after year. 

This segment originally aired on August 6, 2022.

Twenty years ago, Regina Spektor was yet another aspiring musician in New York, lugging around a backpack full of self-produced CDs and playing at little clubs in the East Village—anywhere that had a piano, basically. But anonymity didn’t last long. She toured with the Strokes in 2003, and, once she had a record deal, her ambitions grew beyond indie music: she began writing pop-inflected anthems about love and heartbreak, loneliness and death, belief and doubt. Her 2006 album “Begin to Hope” went gold.  

“Home, Before and After” was released in 2022, six years after her previous studio album. To mark the occasion, Spektor sat down at a grand piano with Amanda Petrusich to play songs from the record and talk about the role of imagination in her songwriting and vocals. “I think that life pushes you—especially as an adult and especially when you’re responsible for other little humans—to be present in this logistical sort of way,” she says. “I try as much as possible to integrate fun, because I love fun. And I love beauty. And I love magic. . . . I will not have anybody take that away.”

Spektor performed “Loveology,” “Becoming All Alone,” and the older “Aprѐs Moi,” accompanying herself on piano. The podcast episode for this segment also features a bonus track, “Spacetime Fairytale.” 

This segment originally aired on June 10, 2022.

Colson Whitehead is one of the most lauded writers working today. His 2016 novel “The Underground Railroad” won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction; he won the Pulitzer again for his next novel, “The Nickel Boys,” in 2020.  His career is notable for hopping from genre to genre. As an artist, he tells David Remnick, “it seemed like, if you knew how to do something, why do it again?” Whitehead is again trying something new: a sequel. He’s following up “Harlem Shuffle,” his 2021 heist novel, bringing back the furniture salesman and stolen-goods fence Ray Carney. He talks to David Remnick about how he mined the language of mid-century furniture catalogues, and his interest in teasing out the nuance in his characters. “I’m exploring different ways of being a criminal and trying to think about who actually is bad,” Whitehead says. “Carney has this secret self, this criminal self. But I think all of us have these different uncivilized impulses in us that we have to tame in order to function in society.”

In making “Oppenheimer,” which opens in theatres this weekend, the director Christopher Nolan relied on a Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography of the father of the atomic bomb, “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin. Bird is credited as a writer of Nolan’s movie, and he spoke with David Remnick about the ambivalence that the scientist expressed publicly about the use of the bomb, which led to a McCarthyist show trial that destroyed his career and reputation.  “What happened to him in 1954 sent a message to several generations of scientists, here in America but [also] abroad, that scientists should keep in their narrow lane. They shouldn’t become public intellectuals, and if they dared to do this, they could be tarred and feathered,” Bird notes. “The same thing that happened to Oppenheimer in a sense happened to Tony Fauci.”

Plus, Greta Gerwig talks about her path to directing. Like “Barbie,” Gerwig’s two previous films as a director and writer are concerned with coming of age as a woman. Once criticized as a “bossy girl,” Gerwig recalls, she tamped down her instinct to direct, focusing early in her career on acting and then screenwriting. She told David Remnick how she finally gave herself permission to be a filmmaker.

The movement to persuade President Biden—long after the primaries—to drop out of the Presidential race is unprecedented. So is the candidacy of a convicted felon. But this election season went from startling to shocking with the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and the death of a bystander. Despite the unknowns, the contours of the race are becoming clear, the CNN data journalist Harry Enten tells Clare Malone. President Biden’s support in national polls following his disastrous performance in the June debate slipped just slightly. But in key swing states, Biden’s support has ebbed to a point that has terrified Democrats. Malone spoke with Enten while he was covering the Republican National Convention, in Milwaukee. She asked Enten about how the attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life affected his favorability. Malone also spoke with the highly regarded pollster Ann Selzer, who runs polling for the Des Moines Register. Selzer explains how the polls know what they know—even when so many people don’t pick up their phones. 

“When people think of the crack epidemic, they think of crime,” the journalist Donovan X. Ramsey tells David Remnick. “But they don’t necessarily know the ways that it impacted the most vulnerable—the ways that it changed the lives of people who sold it, who were addicted to it, who loved people who sold it or were addicted to it.” Ramsey’s new book, “When Crack Was King: A People’s History of a Misunderstood Era,” weaves the stories of four people who survived the epidemic into a historical analysis of how crack led to the erosion of dozens of American cities—but also of how the crack epidemic eventually ended. “I didn't know what life was like before crack,” Ramsey, who was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1987, says. “I wanted to understand the ways that it shaped our society.”

No Labels, which pitches itself as a centrist movement to appeal to disaffected voters, has secured a considerable amount of funding and is working behind the scenes to get on Presidential ballots across the country. The group has yet to announce a candidate, but “most likely we’ll have both a Republican and Democrat on the ticket,” Pat McCrory, the former governor of North Carolina and one of the leaders of No Labels, tells David Remnick. Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are reportedly under consideration, but McCrory will not name names, nor offer any specifics on the group’s platform, including regarding critical issues such as abortion and gun rights. That opacity is by design, Sue Halpern, who has covered the group, says. “The one reason why I think they haven’t put forward a candidate is once they do that, then they are required to do all the things that political parties do,” she says. “At the moment, they’re operating like a PAC, essentially. They don’t have to say who their donors are.” Third-party campaigns have had significant consequences in American elections, and, with both Donald Trump and Joe Biden historically unpopular, a third-party candidate could peel a decisive number of moderate voters away from the Democratic Party. 

Plus, three New Yorker critics—Doreen St. Félix, Alexandra Schwartz, and Inkoo Kang—discuss why so many scripted and reality shows use psychotherapy as a central plotline.

Nearly one in ten Americans owe significant medical debt, a burden that can become crippling as living costs and interest rates rise. Over the past decade, a nonprofit called RIP Medical Debt has designed a novel approach to chip away at this problem. The organization solicits donations to purchase portfolios of medical debt on the debt market, where the debt trades at steeply discounted prices. Then, instead of attempting to collect on it as a normal buyer would, they forgive the debt. The staff writer Sheelah Kolhatkar reports on one North Carolina church that partnered with RIP Medical Debt as part of its charitable mission. Trinity Moravian Church collected around fifteen thousand dollars in contributions to acquire and forgive over four million dollars of debt in their community. “We have undertaken a number of projects in the past but there’s never been anything quite like this,” the Reverend John Jackman tells Kolhatkar. “For families that we know cannot deal with these things, we’re taking the weight off of them.” Kolhatkar also speaks with Allison Sesso, the C.E.O. of RIP Medical Debt, about the strange economics of debt that make this possible.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the son of a former Attorney General and the nephew of President John F. Kennedy, has announced that he’s running for the Democratic Presidential nomination. He is nearly seventy years old, and has never held public office. “There’s nothing in the United States Constitution that says that you have to go to Congress first and then Senate second,or be a governor before you’re elected to the Presidency,” he tells David Remnick. With no prominent elected Democrat challenging President Biden, Kennedy is polling around ten to twenty per cent  among Democratic primary voters—enough to cause at least some alarm for Biden. He is best known as an influential purveyor of disinformation: that vaccines cause autism; that SSRIs and common anxiety medication might be causing the increase in school shootings; that “toxic chemicals” in the water supply might contribute to “sexual dysphoria” in children. He wrote a book accusing Anthony Fauci of helping to “orchestrate and execute 2020’s historic coup d’état against Western democracy.” He seems not at all concerned that Donald Trump, Roger Stone, Tucker Carlson, and Alex Jones—all of whom would like to see Biden bruised in a primary challenge—have praised him. “I'm trying to unite the country,” he says to Remnick. “You keep wanting to focus on why don't I hate this guy more? Why don't I hate on this person more?” Kennedy, who regularly attends recovery meetings for addiction to drugs including heroin, says that “the recovery program is an important part of my life, is an important part of keeping me mentally and physically and spiritually fit. . . . And my program tells me not to do that. I’m not supposed to be doing that.”

This summer, the most anticipated tour (in close contest with Taylor Swift) is Beyoncé’s tour for her seventh studio album, “Renaissance,” which came out in 2022. Her previous record “was about the turbulence of [her] marriage and was in some ways a monument to marriage as an institution,” The New Yorker’s music critic Carrie Battan tells David Remnick. “Renaissance”—a homage to club music and queer culture—“is about breaking free of all of those chains. It’s about going to the club, and quitting your job and dancing and experiencing the ultimate freedom.” Battan talks through her favorite tracks on the record.

Yevgeny Prigozhin’s march on Moscow last weekend, which killed more than a dozen Russian soldiers, fizzled as quickly as it began, but its repercussions are just beginning. The Wagner Group commander issued a video from Belarus claiming that he did not attempt a coup against Putin but a protest against the Defense Ministry.  David Remnick talks with Masha Gessen and the contributor Joshua Yaffa, who has written on the Wagner Group, about what lies ahead in Russia. Both feel that by revealing the reality of the war to his own following—a Putin-loyal, nationalist audience—Prigozhin has seriously damaged the regime’s credibility. If an uprising removes Putin from power, “there will be chaos,” Gessen notes. “Nobody knows what happens next. There’s no succession plan.”  Plus, Jill Lepore on amending the Constitution: suggesting a constitutional amendment these days is so far-fetched, it’s almost a punch line, but the Framers intended the document to be regularly amended, the historian Jill Lepore tells David Remnick. She argues that the failure to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment sank the country into a political quagmire from which it has not arisen, and her latest historial project brings awareness to the problem of amendability.

In recent years, the attorney Jonathan Mitchell has become a crucial figure in the anti-abortion movement. Advising a Texas state senator, Mitchell developed Texas’s S.B. 8 legislation, which allows for civil lawsuits against individuals who have helped facilitate an abortion—acts like driving a patient to an appointment. The law was crafted to evade review by the Supreme Court in the period before Dobbs ended the precedent of Roe v. Wade. Opponents of the law have called it state-sponsored vigilantism. Mitchell is now representing a man seeking millions of dollars in civil damages from friends of his ex-wife—who helped her access abortion medication—in a wrongful death lawsuit. And yet, despite his conservative politics, Mitchell has something in common with some legal thinkers on the left: a critique of the Supreme Court and its extraordinary power. As an opponent of the belief in judicial supremacy, Mitchell asks, “Why should it be the Supreme Court and not Congress?” to have the last word on what the Constitution means. “Why should it be the Supreme Court and not a state legislature that might have a different view?” Mitchell rarely gives interviews, but he agreed to speak with The New Yorker’s contributor, Jeannie Suk Gersen, a professor at Harvard Law School who clerked for the former Supreme Court Justice David Souter.

A year ago, the staff writer Emily Witt visited Fargo, North Dakota, to report on the Red River Women’s Clinic—the only abortion provider in the state. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision had just come down, and the clinic was scrambling to move across state lines, to the adjacent city of Moorhead, Minnesota. This spring, Witt returned to talk with Tammi Kromenaker, the clinic’s director. Kromenaker says the clinic’s new home has had some notable upsides—a parking lot that shields patients from protestors, for example—but North Dakota patients are increasingly fearful as they reach out for care, afraid even to cross the state line for an abortion. Plus, The New Yorker’s Alex Ross discusses John Williams, who has written scores for generations of blockbusters, including “Jaws,” “Star Wars,” “Harry Potter,” and many films of Steven Spielberg. Ross considers him the last practitioner of Hollywood’s grand orchestral tradition, and his retirement will mark the end of an era in music: at ninety-one years old, Williams has said that his score for “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” may be his last.

The singer-songwriter Joy Oladokun recently released her fourth album, called “Proof of Life.” Raised near Phoenix, Oladokun had aspirations of becoming a preacher before turning to music in earnest. Like many of the great songwriters, she has a way of staring down the hardest parts of life with an offbeat sort of wit. The New Yorker’s Hanif Abdurraqib calls her a “writer’s writer,” someone “interested in the lyric as an opportunity to build narrative worlds.” Oladokun talked with him about seeing a video of Tracy Chapman performing in a Nelson Mandela tribute concert: “I was ten years old, watching someone who looked like me play the guitar,” she recalls. “I asked my parents for a guitar that Christmas.” Chapman remained a lasting influence on her as an artist. “You could just tell that what drove her to open her mouth in the first place was conviction. Belief in her values and belief that if people would only think about this, it would change the world.” While in New York on tour, Oladokun performed “Trying” and “Keeping the Light On”—both from her new record—live at WNYC. Plus, the fiction writer Bryan Washington on the joys of a Houston ice house.

Dexter Filkins has reported on conflict situations around the world, and recently spent months reporting on the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border. In a recent piece, Filkins tries to untangle how conditions around the globe, an abrupt change in executive direction from Trump to Biden, and an antiquated immigration system have created a chaotic situation. “It’s difficult to appreciate the scale and the magnitude of what’s happening there unless you see it,” Filkins tells David Remnick. Last year, during a surge at the border, local jurisdictions struggled to provide humanitarian support for thousands of migrants, leading Democratic politicians to openly criticize the Administration. While hardliners dream of a wall across the two-thousand-mile border, “they can’t build a border wall in the middle of a river,” Filkins notes. “So if you can get across the river, and you can get your foot on American soil, that’s all you need to do.” Migrants surrendering to Border Patrol and requesting asylum then enter a yearslong limbo as their claims work through an overburdened system. The last major overhaul of the immigration system took place in 1986, Filkins explains, and with Republicans and Democrats perpetually at loggerheads, there is no will to fix a system that both sides acknowledge as broken. 

During the 2023 New Yorker Festival, three legendary staff writers got together to discuss the craft of investigative journalism: digging for information like detectives, and then presenting it in a way to rival the best thrillers. For each of these writers, the “bad guy” —whose actions usually set the story in motion – needs to be presented in three dimensions; trusting the reader to grapple with that person’s perspective is key to an engrossing story. “I look at these big, boring issues often, like economic inequality or corruption in politics,” Jane Mayer says. “You take a subject like campaign finance – the Citizens United decision and how it’s corrupted politics. If you can find somebody like [Charles or David] Koch and explain there actually was a billionaire behind so much of this, and he has a story, and he has a family, and there are always screwed-up fathers and sons involved in these families. . . . It means that you’re able to explain the ethical choices people make.” Mayer is best known for her book “Dark Money,” about the Koch brothers; David Grann wrote “Killers of the Flower Moon” and “The Wager,” both best-sellers; and Patrick Radden Keefe covered the Sackler family’s opioid dynasty in “Empire of Pain,” and a murder during the Troubles in Northern Ireland in “Say Nothing.”  They were joined by their editor, The New Yorker’s Daniel Zalewski.  

On January 6th, 2021, “On the Media” reporter Micah Loewinger recorded the secret communications of the Oath Keepers on a walkie-talkie app called Zello. After reporting on the findings, Loewinger received a subpoena calling on him to testify in the first Oath Keepers criminal trial last year. In conversations with “On the Media” host Brooke Gladstone, “Death, Sex & Money” host Anna Sale, and Roger Parloff, a senior editor at Lawfare, Loewinger grapples with the consequences of his reporting, and explores what happens when a journalist is forced to testify in court. Plus, Loewinger looks at the nineteen-seventies Supreme Court case United States v. Caldwell to understand the legal precedents for journalists being called on to testify in federal investigations, the limits of First Amendment privileges for the press, and the sometimes tenuous relationship between journalists and the government. 

This episode originally aired on “On the Media” on May 26, 2023. 

Over the past several years, as more democratic institutions and norms have come under attack, many journalists have raised the question of whether it is ethical to adhere to journalism’s traditional principles of non-bias, objectivity, and political neutrality. In May, A. G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, staked out his position in the traditionalist camp in an essay for the Columbia Journalism Review. “The traditionalists in the ranks have long believed that their long-standing view speaks for itself. I became increasingly convinced that the argument doesn’t make itself,” he tells David Remnick. Sulzberger shies away from the term objectivity, instead describing the “posture of independence” as one that prizes “an open mind, a skeptical mind,” and a clear-eyed pursuit of truth––even if it leads to uncomfortable conclusions. Sulzberger, whose family has owned the paper since 1896, says he wants to push back on a culture of “certitude” in journalism. “In this hyper-politicized, hyper-polarized moment, is society benefiting from every single player getting deeper and deeper, and louder and louder, about declaring their personal allegiances and loyalties and preferences?” he asks.

Plus, this week’s issue of The New Yorker features a new poem by Paul Tran, a young writer whose début collection was named one of the best books of 2022. The poem, “The Three Graces,” takes its name from a rock formation near Colorado Springs. “I was curious: what would these three rocks have to say about the nature of love,” Tran tells the producer Jeffrey Masters. Tran’s poetry explores their personal history—their family immigrated to the United States from Vietnam—as well as their trans identity. 

Evgeny Shtorn and Alexander Kondakov were living together in St. Petersburg when Vladimir Putin began his crackdown on the L.G.B.T.Q. movement in Russia, passing laws that prevented gay “propaganda.” Kondakov is a scholar of the movement, and Shtorn has studied the sociology of hate crimes against gay men. The couple also worked for an N.G.O. that received foreign funding, which made them appear particularly suspicious to Russian authorities. After Shtorn’s citizenship was rescinded, he became vulnerable to pressure from the F.S.B., the Russian security agency, which tried to make him an informant. Finally Shtorn decided to flee, seeking refuge as a stateless person in Ireland, where Masha Gessen spoke with him. Gessen says that Putin’s recent targeting of L.G.B.T. people is perfectly in line with his methods. “[We] make the perfect scapegoat, because we stand in for everything,” she says. “We stand in for the West. We stand in all the things that have changed in the last quarter century that make you uncomfortable. And, of course, no Russian thinks they’ve ever met a gay person in person—so that makes it really easy to create that image of ‘the villainous queer people.’ ”

This segment originally aired June 10, 2019. Since that time, Shtorn received refugee status, and was reunited with Kondakov in Ireland. They married in 2023.   

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, which created ChatGPT, says that AI is a powerful tool that will streamline human work and quicken the pace of scientific advancement  But ChatGPT has both enthralled and terrified us, and even some of AI’s pioneers are freaked out by it – by how quickly the technology has advanced.  David Remnick talks with Altman, and with computer scientist Yoshua Bengio, who won the prestigious Turing Award for his work in 2018, but recently signed an open letter calling for a moratorium on some AI research until regulation can be implemented. The stakes, Bengio says, are high. “I believe there is a non-negligible risk that this kind of technology, in the short term, could disrupt democracies.” 

The live-action remake of Disney’s classic “The Little Mermaid” is out this weekend. The performance of Halle Bailey as Princess Ariel has been widely praised, but some on the right lambasted the casting of a Black actress in the role as an example of—of course—wokeness on the part of Disney. The film’s director, Rob Marshall, dismisses the notion as quickly as he can. “It was never: ‘Let’s do a woke version of ‘Little Mermaid,’ ” he tells Naomi Fry. “It was: ‘Let’s just do the best version.’ ” Marshall took an unusual path toward directing: he began his career as a dancer on Broadway, moving to film only after becoming injured while performing in “Cats.” Since then, he has directed “Chicago,” “Memoirs of a Geisha,” and “Mary Poppins Returns.” For “The Little Mermaid,” he drew inspiration from the original Hans Christian Andersen text, which he says is a coming-of-age story about a young girl who breaks down barriers to understand herself and the world around her. “I just felt, wow, isn’t that the world we live in?,” he says. “I mean for me, the whole time I was doing this movie, it felt really like an antidote to the times we’re living in, the divisive world we live in.”

Earlier this month, E Jean Carroll won an unprecedented legal victory: in a civil suit, Donald Trump was found liable for sexual abuse against her in the mid-nineteen-nineties, and for defamation in later accusing her of a hoax. But no sooner was that decision announced than Trump reiterated his defamatory insults against her in a controversial CNN interview. Carroll has now filed an amended complaint, in a separate suit, based on Trump’s continued barrage. But can anything make him stop? “The one thing he understands is money,” Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, tells David Remnick. “At some point he’ll understand that every time he does it, it’s going to cost him  a few million dollars. And that may make a difference.” Carroll acknowledges that Trump will keep attacking her to get a laugh—“a lot of people don’t like women,” she says simply—but she is undaunted, telling Remnick, “I hate to be all positive about this, but I think we’ve made a difference, I really do.” 

Plus, the staff writer Dexter Filkins on Ron DeSantis, who finally announced his Presidential candidacy this week. In 2022, Filkins profiled the Florida governor as his national ambitions were becoming clear. “He’s very good at staking out a position and pounding the table,” Filkins notes, “saying, ‘I’m not giving in to the liberals in the Northeast.’ ”

It’s the time of year when many people feel an overpowering urge to dig—to plant their back yard or vegetable garden, or even the flowerpots on the fire escape. “I just love the whole process. I love the muck of it,” Jill Lepore tells David Remnick. “You’re kind of entrapped in a completely different rhythm, and it’s all so entirely out of your control. … It’s a never-ending process of education.” Lepore, a professor of history as well as a staff writer, wrote recently on her passion for seed catalogues, and shares a couple of things she’s excited about growing this year.

Tom Hanks has been a constant presence on the American movie screen for forty years. He has played a mermaid’s boyfriend, an astronaut, a soldier on D Day, an F.B.I. agent, an AIDS patient, a castaway, and a strange, innocent character running across America—among dozens of other roles. Hanks won the Academy Award for Best Actor two years in a row. Now in his sixties, Hanks has added another line to his résumé: novelist. “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece”—an overstuffed, often funny, work of fiction—captures what he’s learned from forty years in the business. Hanks describes the process of moviemaking as equal parts chaos and monotony. “If anybody who we call a noncombatant, or a civilian, wants to visit the making of a motion picture, they will be bored out of their skull,” he tells David Remnick, insisting that it’s impossible to know on set whether a production will be a masterpiece or a flop. “You do not know if it is going to work out. You can only have faith.”  

Hanks spoke with Remnick onstage at Symphony Space as part of The New Yorker Live to kick off his book tour.

In June, a first-of-its-kind lawsuit will go to trial in Montana. The case, Held v. Montana, centers on the climate crisis. Sixteen young plaintiffs allege their state government has failed in its obligation, spelled out in the state constitution, to provide residents with a healthful environment. The psychiatrist Dr. Lise Van Susteren is serving as an expert witness and intends to detail the emotional distress that can result from watching the environmental destruction unfolding year after year. “Kids are talking about their anger. They’re talking about their fear. They’re talking about their despair. They’re talking about feelings of abandonment,” she tells David Remnick. “And they don’t understand why the adults in the room are not taking more action.” Dr. Van Susteren is a co-founder of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance, a network of mental-health providers concerned with educating colleagues and the public about the climate crisis.

The last time the Writers Guild of America hit the picket line was fifteen years ago, with a strike that lasted a hundred days and cost the city of Los Angeles hundreds of millions of dollars. This year’s strike has the potential to drag on even longer. At the core of the dispute is the question of who deserves to profit from the revenue generated by streaming services. “[Studios] tell us that they can’t afford the cost of us,” Laura Jacqmin, a veteran TV writer and a W.G.A. strike captain tells the staff writer Michael Schulman. “And simultaneously they’re on their public earnings calls, trumpeting bright financial futures to their shareholders.” 

Plus, the comedian and essayist Samantha Irby talks with the staff writer and critic Doreen St. Félix. Irby is beloved by fans for her particularly unvarnished truth-telling. She recently started writing for television on shows like Hulu‘s “Shrill” and HBO’s “And Just Like That . . .,” the “Sex and the City” reboot, which returns for a second season in June. But she has also maintained her memoir-writing practice, and is out with a new essay collection, “Quietly Hostile,” in May.

The panic that gripped Democrats during and after President Biden’s performance in the June debate against Donald Trump didn’t come out of nowhere. In January of last year, the Radio Hour produced an episode about President Biden’s age, and the concerns that voters were already expressing. But no nationally prominent Democratic politician was willing to challenge Biden in the primaries. After the debate, Julián Castro was one of the first prominent Democrats to say that Biden should withdraw from the race, and he went on to tell MSNBC’s Alex Wagner that potential Democratic rivals and even staffers “got the message” that their careers would be “blackballed” if they challenged him. Castro—who came up as the mayor of San Antonio, and then served as President Obama’s Secretary for Housing and Urban Development—ran against Biden in the Presidential primary for the 2020 election. He talks with David Remnick about how we got here, and what the Democratic Party should have done differently.

A troubling question looms over the Kriegskinder, Germans who were children during the Second World War: Was my father a mass murderer? These innocent Germans carried the guilt of their nation while their families often remained silent. The New Yorker’s Burkhard Bilger, whose grandfather was a Nazi, speaks with Sabine Bode, a journalist who encourages the now-elderly Kriegskinder to speak about their unacknowledged trauma. Bilger’s new book, “Fatherland: A Memoir of War, Conscience, and Family Secrets,” chronicles his years-long quest to understand the truth behind his family history. 

This segment originally aired October 14, 2016.

Just a month ago, the story of two lawmakers expelled from the Tennessee legislature captured headlines across the country. Their offense wasn’t corruption or criminal activity— instead, they had joined a protest at the statehouse in favor of gun control, shortly after the Nashville shooting at a Christian school. Earlier this week, Representative Zooey Zephyr, of Montana, was barred from the House chamber after making a speech against a trans health-care ban. In the past few years, in Arizona, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, legislatures have worked to strip powers from state officials who happen to be Democrats in order to put those powers in Republican hands.  Jacob Grumbach, a political-science professor and the author of “Laboratories Against Democracy,” talks about how state politics  has become nationalized. “If you’re a politician, and you’re trying to rise in the ranks from the local or state level in your party,” he notes, “your best bet is to join the national culture wars”—even at the expense of constituents’ real concerns.

Plus, the contributing writer Joshua Yaffa talks with David Remnick about Evan Gershkovich, the first American reporter imprisoned in Russia on charges of espionage since the nineteen-eighties. “Evan was not sanguine or Pollyannaish or naïve about the context in which he was working,” Yaffa notes, but he returned to Russia again and again to tell the story of that country’s descent into autocracy.

On May 6th, King Charles will become the oldest person to ascend the throne of the United Kingdom. He is a bit of an odd duck to be the king, Rebecca Mead thinks. Charles has “long made clear that he considers his birthright a burden,” she writes. In fact, many things are a burden: during the ceremonies following the death of Queen Elizabeth, the new king “got into not one but two altercations with malfunctioning pens. . . . As his biographer Catherine Mayer puts it, ‘The world is against him—even inanimate objects are against him. That is absolutely central to his personality.’ ” Mead—a subject of the king, as well as a staff writer—talks with David Remnick about Charles III’s coronation, the problem of Harry and Meghan, and the future of the British monarchy itself.