The Brian Lehrer Show

Jeffery Mays, New York Times reporter covering politics with a focus on New York City Hall, talks about the new worker and vendor protections passed by the City Council, overriding Mayor Adams' vetoes.

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A recent Washington Post article explained how most families have a secret language that only they understand, or a "familect" as some linguists call it. Listeners call in to share the words in their family that only they use, which are often conjured in the minds of small children and then used for years down the road.

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Ari Berman, voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones and author of Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), talks about his latest article on the "rapidly escalating" threats to America’s election system, including how the Trump administration is making it harder to vote, the DOJ's civil rights division has dropped cases investigating gerrymandered maps in states such as Arizona, Georgia, and Texas and more.

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Three of our favorite segments from the week, in case you missed them.

Lawmakers Attempt to Improve the Ticket-Buying Experience  (First) | The City's Rat Czar Shares Progress and Challenges (Starts at 23:40) | Helping Monarch Butterflies Thrive in NYC (Starts at 44:44)

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As the US economy and consumer preferences fluctuate, listeners in the restaurant industry and their customers share how they're adapting to tariffs, slowed job growth, widespread use of GLP-1 medications altering appetites, and other trends.

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Zack Beauchamp, senior correspondent at Vox and the author of The Reactionary Spirit: How America's Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World (PublicAffairs, 2024), talks about the debate among Democrats over whether to go along with the Republican plan to fund the government or withhold their votes, resulting in a shutdown.

=> "The Democrats’ shutdown debate is about something much bigger" (Vox, Sept. 10, 2025)

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This week, the French government lost a confidence vote in the National Assembly, forcing the prime minister François Bayrou and his cabinet to resign. Sophie Pedder, Paris bureau chief at The Economist, breaks down the latest and what's on the table for President Emmanuel Macron to remedy what's being called a "collapse" of his government.

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James Skoufis, New York State Senator (D - 42nd District), talks about his bill that would regulate the live events ticketing industry, plus shares why he agrees with Zohran Mamdani's petition to FIFA to improve consumers' ticket-buying experience for the men's World Cup, which will be in the US next year.

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Kelly Drane, research director at Giffords Law Center, Ned Parker, investigative reporter at Thomson Reuters, and McKay Coppins, staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Romney: A Reckoning (Simon & Schuster, 2023), talk about guns and the state of political violence in America after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at an event on a Utah college campus.

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Benji Jones, senior environmental correspondent at Vox, shares his reporting on how cities like New York can nurture threatened species, including monarch butterflies.

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