The New Yorker Radio Hour

The New Yorker

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NEWS COMMENTARY
UPDATED SEMIWEEKLY

Profiles, storytelling and insightful conversations, hosted by David Remnick.

2D AGO

Kalief Browder: A Decade Later

Kalief Browder was jailed at Rikers Island at the age of sixteen; he spent three years locked up without ever being convicted of a crime, and much of that time was spent in solitary confinement. In 2014, the New Yorker staff writer Jennifer Gonnerman wrote about Browder and the failings of the criminal-justice system that his case exposed: unconscionable delays in the courts, excessive use of solitary confinement, teen-agers being charged for crimes as adults, brutality on the part of correction officers. Ten years ago, on June 6, 2015, Browder died by suicide. On The New Yorker Radio Hour, Gonnerman shares excerpts from the interviews she recorded with Browder, in which he described the psychological toll of spending years in a twelve-by-seven cell. This segment originally aired on June 3, 2016.

18 min
6D AGO

U2’s Bono on the Power of Music

In 2022, The New Yorker published a personal history about growing up in Ireland during the nineteen-sixties and seventies. It covers the interfaith marriage of the author’s parents, which was unusual in Dublin; his mother’s early death; and finding his calling in music. The author was Bono, for more than forty years the lyricist and lead singer of one of the biggest rock bands on the planet. As U2 sold out arenas and stadiums, Bono held forth on a range of social causes; he became “the definitive rock star of the modern era,” as Kelefa Sanneh puts it. Bono joined David Remnick at the 2022 New Yorker Festival to talk about his new memoir, “Surrender.” “When I sang in U2, something got a hold of me,” Bono said. “And it made sense of me.” They discussed how the band almost ended because of the members’ religious faith, and how they navigated the Troubles as a bunch of young men from Dublin suddenly on the world stage. Bono shared a life lesson from Paul McCartney, and he opened up about the early death of his mother. “This wound in me just turned into this opening where I had to fill the hole with music,” Bono said. In the loss of a loved one, “there’s sometimes a gift. The opening up of music came from my mother.” This segment originally aired on October 28, 2022.

32 min
JUL 1

“Super Gay Poems”

In 2024, Harvard University offered a course on Taylor Swift. It was popular, to say the least. That course was taught by a professor and literary critic named Stephanie Burt. In The New Yorker, Burt has written seriously about comics and science fiction, but she’s also considered great poets such as Seamus Heaney and Mary Oliver. Now, Burt has put together an anthology titled, “Super Gay Poems.” It’s a collection of L.G.B.T.Q. poetry, whose contents begin after the Stonewall uprising, in 1969. When describing the collection, Burt tells the New Yorker Radio Hour producer Jeffrey Masters, “ There are poems where we read it and we say, Wow, that’s me. And there are poems where we read it and we say, Wow, I didn’t know that can happen; that’s not me; that’s new to me; that’s different. And there are poems where we read them and we just say, That’s beautiful. That is elegant. That is funny. That is sexy. That is hot. That is so sad that I don’t know why I like it, but I do. And I like making those experiences available to readers.”

15 min
JUN 27

Bret Baier On Trump’s Love-Hate Relationship with Fox News

The relationship between Fox News and Donald Trump is not just close; it can be profoundly influential. Trump frequently responds to segments in real time online—even to complain about a poll he doesn’t like. He has tapped the network for nearly two dozen roles within his Administration—including the current Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host. The network is also seen as having an outsized impact on his relationship with his base, and even on his agenda. Most recently, it’s been reported that Fox News’ coverage of the Iran-Israel conflict played a role in Trump’s decision to enter that fight. And while the network’s right-wing commentators—from Sean Hannity to Laura Ingraham to Mark Levin—tend to grab the most headlines and stand as the ideological coloring of the network, “Special Report,” Fox’s 6 P.M. broadcast, anchored by Bret Baier, is essential to the conservative-media complex. Baier draws more than three million viewers a night, at times surpassing legacy brands like “CBS Evening News,” despite being available in half as many homes. Baier insists on his impartiality, but his network’s reputation as an outlet for the right and its connection to President Trump himself can make his job representing the news arm of the network more challenging. And, when it comes to Trump and his relationship to the media, Baier tells David Remnick, “I think it is this cat-and-mouse game. You know, for all of the things he says about the media . . . he’s reaching out and doing interviews with the same people he says are nasty.”

35 min
JUN 24

America’s Oligarch Problem

A mega-donor to the Republican Presidential campaign, Elon Musk got something no other titan of industry has ever received: an office in the White House and a government department tailor-made for him, with incalculable influence in shaping the Administration. But even with Musk out of Washington, it remains a fact that the influence of wealth in America has never been greater. As one case in point, Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” is estimated to raise or leave flat the taxes of about 57 million households, while the top five per cent of earners will have their taxes cut by more than $1.5 trillion. From his perch in Washington, Evan Osnos has for years been looking at the politics of hyper-wealth. While the wealthy have always held outsized influence, Osnos explains how tech tycoons, in particular, sought far greater influence under Donald Trump’s second Administration. “These are guys who really believed that they were the greatest example of entrepreneurship,” he tells David Remnick, “and that all of a sudden they found that, no, they were being called monopolists, that they were being accused of invading people's privacy, that in fact they had been blamed for the degradation of democracy, of our children’s emotional health, of our attention spans. They suddenly saw that there was a new President who would not only forgive any of those kinds of mistakes and patterns of abuse but would in fact celebrate them, and would roll back any of the regulation that was in their way.” Osnos’s new book, collected from his reporting in The New Yorker, is “The Haves and Have-Yachts: Dispatches on the Ultrarich.”

15 min
JUN 20

Why Israel Struck Iran First

The Ayatollahs who have ruled Iran since 1979 have long promised to destroy the Jewish state, and even set a deadline for it. While arming proxies to fight Israel—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and more—Iran is believed to have sought to develop nuclear weapons for itself. “The big question about Iran was always how significant is its apocalyptic theology,” Yossi Klein Halevi explains to David Remnick. “How central is that end-times vision to the Iranian regime? And is there a possibility that the regime would see a nuclear weapon as the way of furthering their messianic vision?” Halevi is a journalist and senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, and he co-hosts the podcast “For Heaven’s Sake.” He is a fierce critic of Benjamin Netanyahu, saying “I have no doubt that he is capable of starting a war for his own political needs.” And yet Netanyahu was right to strike Iran, Halevi asserts, no matter the consequences. “The Israeli perspective is not … the American war in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s our own experience.”

43 min
JUN 17

The Unfolding Genocide in Sudan

The New Yorker recently published a report from Sudan, headlined “Escape from Khartoum.” The contributor Nicolas Niarchos journeyed for days through a conflict to reach a refugee camp in the Nuba Mountains, where members of the country’s minority Black ethnic groups are seeking safety, but remain imperilled by hunger. The territory is “very significant to the Nuba people,” Niarchos explains to David Remnick. “They feel safe being there because they have managed to resist genocide before by hiding in these mountains. And then you start seeing the children with their distended bellies, and you start hearing the stories of the people who fled.” The civil war pits the Sudanese Army against a militia group called the Rapid Support Forces. Once allies in ousting Sudan’s former President, the Army and the R.S.F. now occupy different parts of the country, destroying infrastructure in the opposing group’s territory, and committing atrocities against civilians: killing, starvation, and widespread, systematic sexual violence. The warring parties are dominated by Sudan’s Arabic-speaking majority, and “there’s this very, very toxic combination of both supremacist ideology,” Niarchos says, and “giving ‘spoils’ to troops instead of paying them.” One of Niarchos’s sources, a man named Wanis, recalls an R.S.F. soldier telling him, “If you go to the Nuba Mountains, we’ll reach you there. You Nuba, we’re supposed to kill you like dogs.”

20 min
JUN 13

Barbra Streisand on “The Secret of Life”

Barbra Streisand has been a huge presence in American entertainment—music, film, and stage—for more than sixty years. She was the youngest person ever to achieve the EGOT, winning Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards by the age of twenty-seven. At eighty-three years old, Streisand is releasing a new album, “The Secret of Life: Partners, Volume 2.” It’s a collection of duets featuring Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, and Seal, along with younger artists including Hozier, Sam Smith, and Ariana Grande. Streisand sat down with David Remnick to talk about the record and the history behind it. Bob Dylan, for one, apparently had a crush on the singer from afar. “We were both nineteen years old in Greenwich Village, never met each other,” Streisand says. “I remember him sending me flowers and writing me a card in different color pencils, like a child’s writing, you know. And ‘Would you sing with me?’ And I thought, What would I sing with him?” Streisand talks with Remnick about her complicated childhood with her mother, who was jealous of her talent; her dislike of live performance; and the classy way to rebuff a come-on from Marlon Brando.

26 min

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David Remnick

Host
Cécile McLorin Salvant

Guest

4.2

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5,511 Ratings

A Historical Epic of the Chinese in America

May 22

Talk to consumers first

Very interesting. I want to mention that the writer Lisa See has been for years writing about the Asian American experience. Much of this is historical fiction based on events in Asia and in the USA. Her work is astoundingly well researched and explains the immigrant experience and Asian American cultures today.
Biased interview.

Jun 24

cassidy525

Remnick cannot contain his contempt for the state of Israel. Can you find a more neutral interviewer please. Tedious.
More Israeli propaganda

Jun 22

Penny Hughes

The magazine isn’t like this so why is the podcast?
What I wanted to hear

Jun 21

LBS301

With regard to the conversation re Israel waging war agst Iran, what I would have mentioned/asked: 1. US attacked Iraq using the excuse that it had weapons of mass destruction, which the Bush admin knew wasn’t true; One consequence iresulted in stopping the war btwn Iraq & Iran that had worked to occupy both and limit their threat elsewhere’ 2) regime change thru war doesn’t work. If anything it would radicalize and turn Iranian’s that don’t like the current regime to support any action agst the intruding foe 3) isn’t the devastation of Gaza and its people just radicalizing those who may have opposed Hamas to join the fight agst Israel. It makes sense that Israel is just creating more Hamas-like radicals 4) wasn’t the detente btwn Russia & US precedent that enemies with nuclear capabilities can stave off use of them through negotiations ? “Trust but verify”