Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share The Brian Lehrer Show
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
The Brian Lehrer Show
The Brian Lehrer Show episodes
- Back to School Rituals
Listeners call in to share how heading back to school is going, including any preparatory rituals they observe and kids’ attitudes about going back if they’re old enough to remember lockdown.
Photo: Students arrive at PS 36 on Amsterdam Avenue on the first day back to school for New York City public school students September 8, 2003 in New York City. (Photo by Monika Graff/Getty Images)
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
12 min - Tuesday Morning Politics: State of Iran War; Home Stretch to Midterms
Jonathan Lemire, co-host of Morning Joe on MS NOW, writer for MS NOW and staff writer for The Atlantic, talks about the latest developments in national politics, including the state of the Iran war and the midterms.
Photo: US Democratic Senate candidate from Michigan Abdul El-Sayed attends the Labor Day parade in Detroit, Michigan on September 7, 2026. (Photo by Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images)
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
45 min - The CDC and Measles Deaths
New York Times science and global health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli talks about the new CDC director's challenge of Pennsylvania's report of two measles deaths in the state.
Photo: The exterior of CDC′s Tom Harkin Global Communications Center in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by: James Gathany, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention via Wikimedia Commons)
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
28 min - History of the War on Terror
As we approach the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Peter Bergen, national security analyst for CNN, a vice president at the New America Foundation and the author of All the Presidents' Wars: Twenty-Five Years of America's War on Terror (WW Norton, 2026), reviews the history of the U.S. War on Terror.
Photo: UAF 175 crashes into the south tower of the World Trade Center complex in New York City during the September 11 attacks. Photo by: Flickr user TheMachineStops (Robert J. Fisch) via Wikimedia Commons.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
37 min - Labor Day: Working Class; White Collar Unions; Supermarkets; Summer Songs
For Labor Day, we've put together some of our favorite recent interviews, including:
- As the Democratic Socialists of America rack up electoral wins during primary season, the group is pushing an expansive definition of who counts as working-class. Gothamist and WNYC reporter Elizabeth Kim and Christopher Maisano, editor of New Labor Forum, a labor journal from the Murphy Institute at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, discuss who counts as working class and why the definition matters.
- Noam Scheiber, New York Times reporter focusing on white-collar workers and the author of Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026), talks about the conditions leading young college-educated workers to lead unionization efforts.
- Ann Larson, a fellow with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and the author of Cleanup on Aisle Five: Essential Work, Poverty Wages, and the View from Behind the Supermarket Register (One Signal/Atria, 2026), talks about what she learned about the economy and workers when she went from reporting on low-wage work to taking a job during the pandemic at a local supermarket
- On Labor Day, listeners weigh in to answer what is 2026's "song of the summer."
These interviews were lightly polished up and edited for time, the original versions are available here:
Who Counts as Working-Class? (July 23)
White-Collar Workers Unite! (April 15)
What's Unseen at the Grocery Store (July 13)
Song of the Summer 2026 (July 20)
Photo: Thousands of New Yorkers and laborers march during the New York City Labor Day parade, America's oldest Labor Day Parade, along with members of more than 200 unions and organizations, on Saturday, September 6, 2025, in New York City, USA (Photo by Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
1 hr 50 min - Brian Lehrer Weekend: El Niño; NYC Schools & AI; Jeff Spurgeon
Three of our favorite segments from the week, in case you missed them.
Extreme Weather and El Niño (First) | Back to School Report (Starts at :30) | Goodbye, WQXR's Jeff Spurgeon (Starts at 1:03)
If you don't subscribe to the Brian Lehrer Show on iTunes, you can do that here.
Photo: Higher-than-normal sea surfaces (red) are visible in the central and eastern Pacific on June 8, 2026, a few days before El Niño was declared. (NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
1 hr 18 min - Summer Friday: Right's Women; West's Mistake; Culture Wars; Post-Literate; Wildflowers
On this Summer Friday, we've put together some of our favorite recent interviews, including:
- Katie Gaddini, sociologist, a visiting scholar at Stanford University, an associate professor of sociology at the Social Research Institute, University College London (UCL) and a research associate at the University of Johannesburg department of sociology, and the author of Esther's Army: The Christian Women Who Power the American Right (WW Norton, 2026), talks about her research into the activism of right-wing Christian women and their leadership of the political evangelical movement.
- Ian Shapiro, professor of political science and global affairs at Yale University, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of After the Fall: From the End of History to the Crisis of Democracy, How Politicians Broke Our World (Basic Books, 2026), traces the breakdown in democratic institutions to missteps by Western leaders following the fall of the Soviet Union.
- Isaac Butler, culture historian, critic, podcaster and the author of The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America's Culture Wars (Bloomsbury, 2026), revisits the late 1980s start of the culture wars as the religious right took on the contemporary art world.
- As the number of adults who report reading books has declined, Rose Horowitch, staff writer for The Atlantic, argues that we're living in a "post-literate world" and talks about what that means for society.
- As part of the yearlong series "Wild NYC," Marielle Anzelone, urban botanist and ecologist and the founder of NYC Wildflower Week, and Clara Holmes, plant ecologist at New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, talk about the challenges facing local wildflowers and native plants and how to preserve them.
These interviews were lightly polished up and edited for time, the original versions are available here:
The Political Power of Christian Right Women (July 22)
Where Western Leaders Went Wrong (May 8)
Where the Culture Wars Began (June 23)
Our 'Post-Literate World' (July 8)
Wild NYC - Wildflowers (June 10)
Photo: Narrow-leaved Blue-eyed Grass - native wildflower with grasslike leaves and small blue-violet flowers. Grows in open sandy meadows in low wet spots. Uncommon in NYC and locally rare. {Marielle Anzelone)
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
1 hr 50 min - Back to School Report
Jessica Gould, education reporter for WNYC and Gothamist, talks about the newly announced NYC AI policy for schools, plus other back-to-school issues.
Photo: Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani and Schools Chancellor Kamar H. Samuels announce a moratorium on student-facing generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) use in schools. Brooklyn STEAM Center. Wednesday, September 2, 2026. Credit: Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
36 min - The Life and Legacy of Feminist Icon Gloria Steinem
Gloria Steinem died yesterday at age 92. Carolyn Maloney, former Manhattan congresswoman, president of the NYS chapter of the National Organization for Women and founder of Sign4ERA reflects on the feminist icon's life and legacy, and talks about the work they did together on the Equal Rights Amendment.
photo: Gloria Steinem attends Equality Now 30th Anniversary Gala at Guastavino's on November 15, 2022 in New York City. (Photo by John Lamparski/Getty Images)
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
16 min - What Rising Global Bond Yields Mean for the Economy, and Your Money
Amidst rising inflation, ongoing wars in Iran and Israel, and the U.S. national debt climbing to a record $40 trillion, the global bond market is rattled. Mary Childs, host of the talk show podcast Mary in America, author of The Bond King, and former co-host of Planet Money, explains why bond yields are so high right now and what it all means for the global economy, and for your wallet.
c/o: Blue Arauz, via Pexels
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
24 min
About The Brian Lehrer Show
From the publisher's feed
Brian Lehrer leads the conversation about what matters most now in local and national politics, our own communities and our lives.
Best of The Brian Lehrer Show
Ranked by our users in the last 21 days
- Number 4: City Hall News32 min