The Brian Lehrer Show

Nicholas Enrich, former civil servant who worked at USAID under four administrations and the author of Into The Wood Chipper: A Whistleblower’s Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID (Summit Books, 2026), talks about the effects of DOGE cuts on USAID, and of his efforts to publicize them and what the cuts meant for countries receiving U.S. assistance.

Photo courtesy of United States Coast Guard via Wikimedia Commons: USAID packages being delivered by United States Coast Guard personnel. 

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Halle Newman, writer, talks about her recent piece for Slate, "My Dad Used to Have All the Answers. Now He Asks ChatGPT," and the people who outsource their advice-giving to generative AI.

Photo: close-up of a man using a laptop. Credit: SHVETS via Pexels.

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Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf, co-chief executive officer of PEN America, and Dinaw Mengestu, novelist and writer and president of PEN America, talk about free expression around the world and the World Voices Festival underway.

Photo: A shelf of books. (Credit: Desnathas via Wikimedia Commons BY CC 4.0)

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Listeners call in to share about an interesting or out of the box job they are hiring for, or a job they recently got that they'd like to talk about.

Photo: Help wanted sign spotted at Gaudalupe in Austin, Texas, (Credit: Andreas Klinke Johannsen, Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0)

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Emily Bazelon, staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, co-host of Slate's "Political Gabfest" podcast, Truman Capote fellow for creative writing and law at Yale Law School and author of Charged (Random House, 2019), offers legal analysis of today's arguments before the Supreme Court over Temporary Protected Status for certain refugees, plus reacts to the Louisiana redistricting decision.

Photo: United States Supreme Court Building in Washington D.C., (Marielam1, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

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Dana Kaplan, criminal justice reform expert, talks about her new role as Mayor Mamdani's Close Rikers Czar, leading NYC's efforts to close Rikers in favor of borough-based jails as required by law.

Photo: An aerial image of Rikers Island. (Credit: U.S. Geological Survey via Wikimedia Commons)

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Listeners call in to talk about what they feel unsure about in this age of certainty and political polarization.

Photo: A person sits at a restaurant in New Orleans on Feb. 5, 2008. (Credit: Bridget Coila via Wikimedia Commons)

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Elisabeth Rosenthal, senior contributing editor at KFF Health News, former ER physician, and author of An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back (Penguin Press (hardcover, 2017)), discusses her latest reporting on how patients in emergency department are getting stuck waiting for days to be transferred into an inpatient ward.

Photo: Rooms in the emergency department are made up at the new UCI Health hospital in Irvine, CA on Thursday, November 6, 2025. (Photo by Paul Bersebach/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images)

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Cory Booker, U.S. Senator (D, NJ) and the author of Stand (St. Martin’s Press, 2026), talks about his efforts to gain support for a war powers resolution to stop the war in Iran, and other national news.

Photo: U.S. Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) speaks at the National Action Network's annual convention on April 11, 2026 in New York City. A horde of 2028 Democratic presidential hopefuls will descend on a Sheraton Hotel in Midtown Manhattan this week for Al Sharpton's National Action Network conference, nearly two years before the first primary votes will be cast (by David Dee Delgado/Getty Images).

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Gideon Levy, Haaretz columnist, talks about the current state of violence and settlements in the West Bank.

Photo: US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee (C) and the Palestinian mayor of the village of Taybeh, Suleiman Khourieh (C-L), tour the fifth-century Church of St George in the Palestinian Christian village of Taybeh, northeast of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, on July 19, 2025. In the villages and communities around Taybeh, Palestinian authorities have reported that settlers had killed three people and damaged or destroyed multiple water sources in the past two weeks alone. The July 7 arson attack on the remains of the Church of Saint George, which date back to the 5th century, was the last straw for many villagers, who blame Israeli settlers for a spate of recent attacks. (Photo by JAAFAR ASHTIYEH / AFP via Getty Images)

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