The New Yorker Radio Hour The New Yorker

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.