The New Yorker Radio Hour

By WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Arts

What's The New Yorker Radio Hour about?

David Remnick is joined by The New Yorker’s award-winning writers, editors and artists to present a weekly mix of profiles, storytelling, and insightful conversations about the issues that matter — plus an occasional blast of comic genius from the magazine’s legendary Shouts and Murmurs page. The New Yorker has set a standard in journalism for generations and The New Yorker Radio Hour gives it a voice on public radio for the first time. Produced by The New Yorker and WNYC Studios.
WNYC Studios is a listener-supported producer of other leading podcasts including Radiolab, On the Media, Snap Judgment, Death, Sex & Money, Here’s the Thing with Alec Baldwin, Nancy and many more.
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LAST EPISODE

Unearthing Entombed

01.26.2021

Now that we are some sixty years into the digital era, the early days of modern computers are growing distant and mysterious to us. The field of game archeology seeks to uncover the origins and uses of these technological artifacts, ...

The New Yorker Radio Hour episodes:

01.26.2021 Unearthing Entombed Now that we are some sixty years into the digital era, the early days of modern computers are growing distant and mysterious to us. The field of game archeology seeks to uncover the origins and uses of these technological artifacts, ...
01.22.2021 Jane Mayer and Evan Osnos on the Balance of Power at the Start of the Biden Administration With Donald Trump rated the least popular President in the span of modern polling, President Biden might feel confident in claiming a mandate to advance his progressive agenda. Yet Democratic majorities in Congress are slim in the House of Representatives, ...
01.18.2021 How Far Has the F.B.I. Gone to Protect White Supremacy? Today, Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s work on civil rights is celebrated as bringing about one of the turning points of the twentieth century in America. But, in his own time, King was a divisive figure, unloved by millions of Americans—many ...
01.15.2021 Donald Trump’s American Carnage Comes to Washington Luke Mogelson and Susan B. Glasser report on the convulsions of Donald Trump’s final days in office, an unprecedented second impeachment of a President, and the threat of insurrectionary violence hovering over the entire nation. And a game designer offers ...
01.12.2021 Questions about the Variant Virus, and Posthumous Albums by Pop Smoke and others A new variant of SARS-CoV-2 is making its way around the world; in the U.S., it has been found in at least three states: California, Colorado, and New York. Joe Osmundson, an assistant professor of biology at New York University, ...
01.08.2021 Democrats Take the Senate, and a Mob Storms the Capitol On January 6th, pro-Trump fanatics stormed the Capitol, galvanized by the President’s claims that the 2020 election had been stolen. That day, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff were declared the victors of their respective Senate runoff races against Kelly Loeffler ...
01.01.2021 Bruce Springsteen Talks with David Remnick Bruce Springsteen, an American music legend for more than four decades, published his autobiography, “Born to Run,” in 2016. David Remnick called it “as vivid as his songs, with that same pedal-to-the-floor quality, and just as honest about the struggles ...
12.29.2020 Atul Gawande and Andrew Bird Discuss the Art and Science of Cancer Atul Gawande is a New Yorker staff writer, a practicing surgeon, and an indie-music fan, and he loves the work of the songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and whistling virtuoso Andrew Bird; Gawande has included Bird’s songs in playlists he uses in the ...
12.28.2020 Lawrence Wright on How the Pandemic Response Went So Wrong The first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine mark what we hope will be the beginning of the end of the global pandemic. The speed of vaccine development has been truly unprecedented, but this breakthrough is taking place at a moment ...
12.25.2020 Looking Back at an Unimaginable Year It’s a cliché now, but by no means an overstatement, that the past twelve months have been unimaginable. This week, we’ll hear four short reflections on the events of 2020. Dhruv Khullar describes the early days of the pandemic, when ...
12.22.2020 Bryant Terry “Blackifies” Fennel, and Ian Frazier Says Goodbye to 2020, in Verse Bryant Terry is a chef, educator, food-justice activist, and cookbook author. He joined Helen Rosner virtually to cook a dish from his recent book, “Vegetable Kingdom”: citrus and garlic-herb braised fennel. The dish calls for marinating the bulb in mojo, ...
12.18.2020 The Republican Rift in Georgia, and the Protests Sweeping Nigeria In the past month, a fracture has opened up in the G.O.P. between those who grudgingly accept Joe Biden’s win and those who falsely claim that the election was rigged. In Georgia, supporters of Donald Trump have turned on Republican ...
12.15.2020 The “Times Square Two” Fight to Clear Their Names As teens, in the nineteen-eighties, Eric Smokes and David Warren were arrested for the robbery and murder of a tourist near Times Square on New Years Eve; an acquaintance had accused them, receving a lighter sentence for an unrelated crime ...
12.11.2020 Ayanna Pressley and Abigail Spanberger on the Rift in the Democratic Party In November, when the Democratic Party lost seats in the House and a hoped-for victory in the Senate fizzled, centrist Democrats were quick to blame left-leaning progressives. Rhetoric about democratic socialism and defunding the police, they said, had scared away ...
12.08.2020 Steve McQueen Comes Home Steve McQueen is the director of four feature films, including the Oscar-winning “12 Years a Slave.” His new series, “Small Axe,” which is streaming on Amazon, consists of five portraits of the West Indian community in London from the late ...
12.04.2020 Atul Gawande on Taming the Coronavirus Can a vaccine be distributed fairly? What will be the impact if a large number of people don’t take it—as they say they won’t? Atul Gawande, a New Yorker staff writer who was recently appointed to President-elect Joe Biden’s COVID-19 ...
12.01.2020 Live at Home Part II: Phoebe Bridgers Phoebe Bridgers’s tour dates were cancelled—she was booked at Madison Square Garden, among other venues—so she performs songs from her recent album, “Punisher,” from home. The critic Amanda Petrusich talks about the joys of Folkways records, and the novelist Donald ...
11.27.2020 Live at Home Part I: John Legend Like everyone in the United States, John Legend has spent much of the past year in lockdown. He has been recording new music (via Zoom), performing on Instagram, and promoting his upcoming album. Though many artists have delayed releasing records ...
11.24.2020 A Novel About a Secret Family, and Adam Gopnik on Being Old Sanaë Lemoine’s début novel, “The Margot Affair,” is about a seventeen-year-old high-school student whose father, a high-ranking official, does not acknowledge her or her mother publicly. In telling Margot’s story, Lemoine drew upon her own complex family history: when she ...
11.20.2020 The Fight to Turn Georgia Blue This month, Georgia flipped: its voters picked a Democrat for President for the first time since Bill Clinton’s first-term election. To a significant degree, Charles Bethea says, this was owing to political organizing among Black voters; after all, Donald Trump ...
11.17.2020 Steve Martin and Jerry Seinfeld, and Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax Between the two of them, Jerry Seinfeld and Steve Martin have nearly a century of experience in the delicate art of telling jokes. In a conversation with Susan Morrison during the 2020 New Yorker Festival, they discussed their long careers, ...
11.13.2020 Jane Mayer on the G.O.P.’s Post-Trump Game The President’s fantastical allegations about “illegal ballots” are being indulged by quite a number of prominent Republicans in Washington, who have declined to acknowledge Joe Biden as President-elect. If Republicans in some key state legislatures go further and appoint electors ...
11.10.2020 Jill Lepore on Democracy in Peril, Then and Now In the nineteen-thirties, authoritarian regimes were on the rise around the world—as they are again today—and democratic governments that came into existence after the First World War were toppling. “American democracy, too, staggered,” Jill Lepore wrote in The New Yorker, ...
11.06.2020 A Chaotic Election Ends—Maybe? No matter the vote count, legal challenges and resistance in Washington continue to make this election historically fraught. David Remnick speaks about the state of the race with some of The New Yorker’s political thinkers: Evan Osnos on Biden’s candidacy, ...
10.30.2020 Trump in Review The Presidency of Donald Trump has been unlike any other in America’s history. While many of his core promises remain unfulfilled, he managed to reshape our politics in just four years. On the cusp of the 2020 election, David Remnick ...
10.27.2020 Driving Through the Pandemic It feels like a lifetime since the coronavirus pandemic transformed Americans’ daily lives, seven months ago, and fatigue is setting in even as the disease ravages new regions. The staff writer Jennifer Gonnerman talked with one of the people who ...
10.23.2020 The Future of Trumpism Nicholas Lemann’s “The Republican Identity Crisis After Trump” explores what will happen to the movement Donald Trump created among Republicans. In his 2016 campaign, he ran as a populist insurgent against Wall Street, “élites,” and the Republican Party itself—mobilizing voters ...
10.20.2020 Elvis Costello Talks with David Remnick Elvis Costello’s thirty-first studio album, “Hey Clockface,” will be released this month. Recorded largely before the pandemic, it features an unusual combination of winds, cello, piano, and drums. David Remnick talks with Costello about the influence of his father’s career ...
10.16.2020 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren on the State of Our Democracy At the 2020 New Yorker Festival, earlier this month, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Elizabeth Warren joined Andrew Marantz to talk about the Presidential race, and how Joe Biden should lead if he wins the election. Plus, Dexter Filkins on ...
10.13.2020 The Battle Over Portland During the Presidential debate in September, Donald Trump was asked to denounce the white supremacists who were battling anti-racism protesters in Portland; instead, he blamed leftists for the violence and told the Proud Boys to “stand by.” The Pacific Northwest ...
10.09.2020 Anthony Fauci Then and Now, and the Writer-Director Radha Blank At the moment that Donald Trump was leaving Walter Reed Hospital, not yet recovered from a case of COVID-19, Dr. Anthony Fauci sat down with Michael Specter to discuss the coronavirus and its impact on America. For the President—and all ...
10.06.2020 Marilynne Robinson on Faith, Love, and Politics Marilynne Robinson’s new novel, “Jack,” is the fourth to be set among the world and people of a fictional town called Gilead, Iowa. The novelist grew up in Idaho, and, when she moved to the flatter country of Iowa, she ...
10.02.2020 The Election, as Seen from Swing States Joe Biden leads the Presidential race in Pennsylvania by around ten per cent, according to most polls, but Eliza Griswold says you wouldn’t know it on the ground. Republicans in the state have organized a huge registration drive in recent ...
09.29.2020 Keith Knight of “Woke,” and Jia Tolentino Picks Three “Woke,” a new comedy on Hulu, is inspired by the life of its creator, Keith Knight. The show, which blends reality and animated fantasy, follows Keef, a Black cartoonist who is on the cusp of mainstream success when an ugly ...
09.25.2020 Can a Newcomer Unseat Lindsey Graham? Plus, Carlos Lozada on “What Were We Thinking” Jaime Harrison may seem like a long shot to become a South Carolina senator: he is a Black Democrat who grew up on food stamps in public housing, and he has never held elected public office. But a Quinnipiac poll ...
09.22.2020 Miranda July’s Uncomfortable Comedies, and a Toast to Roger Angell Miranda July’s third feature film is “Kajillionaire,” a heist movie centered on a dysfunctional family, and her first with a Hollywood star like Evan Rachel Wood. Like most of her work, it can be classified as a comedy, but just ...
09.18.2020 An Election in Peril This Presidential race is a battle for the soul and the future of the country—on this much, both parties agree—and yet the pitfalls in the election process itself are vast. David Remnick runs through some of the risks to your ...
09.15.2020 The Composer Richard Wagner and the Birth of the Movies The German composer Richard Wagner had an enormous influence not only on modern music but on artists of all stripes, and on political culture as well. His use of folkloric material to create modern epics won him the admiration of ...
09.11.2020 What to Do with a Confederate Monument? Across the South and well beyond, cities and states have been removing their Confederate monuments, recognizing their power as symbols of America’s foundational racism. In the town of Easton, Maryland, in front of the picturesque courthouse, there’s a statue known ...
09.08.2020 N. K. Jemisin on H. P. Lovecraft, and Jill Lepore on the End of a Pandemic N. K. Jemisin has faced down a racist backlash to her success in the science-fiction community. But white supremacy in the genre is nothing new, she tells Raffi Khatchadourian. Her recent novel “The City We Became” explicitly addresses the legacy ...
09.04.2020 Bette Midler and the Screenwriter Paul Rudnick on “Coastal Elites” This segment contains adult language. In the new film “Coastal Elites,” Bette Midler plays a New Yorker of a certain type: a retired teacher who lives on the Upper West Side, reads the New York Times with Talmudic attention, and ...
08.28.2020 Rick Perlstein on Goldwater, Reagan, and Trump “Reaganland” is the new volume in Rick Perlstein’s long chronicle of the American conservative movement; the four books, which he began publishing in 2001, run some 3,000 pages in total. While the author is left of center politically, the series ...
08.25.2020 Everyone Knew Who Shot Ahmaud Arbery. Why Did the Killers Walk Free? It has been six months since Ahmaud Arbery, a young Black man, was shot by three white men while he was out for a Sunday jog near his childhood home. The video of the killing, taken by one of the ...
08.23.2020 Will This Be Joe Biden’s F.D.R. Moment? Joe Biden has been playing it safe during the coronavirus pandemic, but Evan Osnos got the chance to sit down with the nominee in person. It was too hot to sit outside, but the campaign staff didn’t want an outsider ...
08.21.2020 Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross on HBO’s “Watchmen” HBO’s “Watchmen” was nominated for twenty-six Emmy Awards—more than any other show this year—including two for the music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (who are also the members of the industrial-rock band Nine Inch Nails). The music negotiates the ...
08.18.2020 Sarah Paulson, the Star of Netflix’s “Ratched” The actor Sarah Paulson has appeared in “12 Years a Slave,” “The People v. O. J. Simpson,” and eight seasons of Ryan Murphy’s “American Horror Story.” Now she’s starring in a new Murphy production—the series “Ratched,” which premieres on Netflix ...
08.14.2020 Samantha’s Journey into the Alt-Right, and Back Since 2016, Andrew Marantz has been reporting on how the extremist right has harnessed the Internet and social media to gain a startling prominence in American politics. One day, he was contacted by a woman named Samantha, who was in ...
08.11.2020 Isabel Wilkerson on America’s Caste System In this moment of historical reckoning, many Americans are being introduced to concepts like intersectionality, white fragility, and anti-racism. But Isabel Wilkerson would like to incorporate a little-discussed concept into our national conversation: caste. Wilkerson is a writer and historian ...
08.07.2020 The Documentary ICE Doesn’t Want You to See Immigrations and Customs Enforcement has been given a broad mandate to round up undocumented immigrants. The agency is infamously unwelcoming to journalists, but two filmmakers managed to get unprecedented access to its employees and detention facilities. Christina Clusiau and Shaul ...
08.07.2020 Isabel Wilkerson on America’s Caste System In this moment of historical reckoning, many Americans are being introduced to concepts like intersectionality, white fragility, and anti-racism. Isabel Wilkerson, the author of the best-selling book “The Warmth of Other Suns,” is introducing a little-discussed concept into our national ...

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