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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An Alternative Oscars Cerem...

01.24.2020

It’s time for the most anticipated of all awards shows: the Brodys, in which The New Yorker’s Richard Brody shares the best films of the year, according to Richard Brody. And the political commentator Ezra Klein explains why he thinks ...

The New Yorker Radio Hour episodes:

01.24.2020 An Alternative Oscars Ceremony, and Ezra Klein on Why We’re Polarized It’s time for the most anticipated of all awards shows: the Brodys, in which The New Yorker’s Richard Brody shares the best films of the year, according to Richard Brody. And the political commentator Ezra Klein explains why he thinks ...
01.24.2020 What Would a World Without Prisons Be Like? Mass incarceration is now widely regarded as a prejudiced and deeply harmful set of policies. Bipartisan support exists for some degree of criminal-justice reform, and, in some circles, the idea of prison abolition is also gaining traction. Kai Wright, the ...
01.17.2020 Mass Incarceration, Then and Now The U.S. has the highest rate of incarceration in the world; although the country makes up about five per cent of the global population, it holds nearly a quarter of the world’s prisoners. David Remnick is joined by WNYC’s Kai ...
01.10.2020 The Democratic Candidates Respond to the Conflict with Iran Next week’s debate, in Des Moines, was likely going to focus on health care and other domestic issues, but the agenda will probably be dominated by the Trump Administration’s killing of Iran’s General Qassem Suleimani and America’s history of war ...
01.03.2020 Terry Gross Talks with David Remnick David Remnick has appeared as the guest of Terry Gross on “Fresh Air” a number of times over the years, talking about Russia, Muhammad Ali, and other subjects. Hosting “Fresh Air” for nearly forty-five years, Gross is a defining voice ...
01.03.2020 Dexter Filkins on the Air Strike that Killed Qassem Suleimani Qassem Suleimani was Iran’s most powerful military and intelligence leader, and his killing, in a U.S. air strike in Baghdad on Thursday night, will likely be taken as an act of war by Tehran. Dexter Filkins, who wrote the definitive ...
12.27.2019 Kelly Slater’s Perfect Wave Brings Surfing to a Crossroads In December of 2015, a video appeared on the Internet that stunned surfers worldwide. Titled “Kelly’s Wave,” it showed Kelly Slater—arguably the best pro surfer in history—unveiling a secret project he had been working on for more than a decade. ...
12.27.2019 Patty Marx Conducts an Orchestra Patricia Marx is a staff writer at The New Yorker, and has contributed pieces for thirty years. Still, it might not be too late to try out a new career. “There are some jobs and endeavors that look impossibly hard,” ...
12.20.2019 The Hyperpartisan State North Carolina is a relatively purple state, where voting between the two major parties tends to be close. That might suggest a place of common ground and compromise, but it’s quite the opposite. “A couple of years before the rest ...
12.20.2019 Peter Dinklage on Cyrano, and Life After “Thrones” In the classic play “Cyrano de Bergerac,” a romantic with an exceptionally large and ugly nose pines after an unattainable woman. “As a person who looks like me, whenever I would watch a version of ‘Cyrano,’ I would just think, ...
12.17.2019 Helen Rosner Takes the Office-Fridge Challenge Helen Rosner is known for her high degree of resourcefulness in the kitchen: she once broke the Internet with an article about the ingenious use of a hair dryer to help roast a chicken. So the staff of Radio Hour ...
12.16.2019 Lena Waithe on Police Violence and “Queen & Slim” Lena Waithe is the screenwriter and creator of the Showtime series “The Chi,” about the South Side of Chicago, but she tells Jelani Cobb, “Getting your own TV show is like getting beaten to death by your own dream.” Her ...
12.13.2019 Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women,” and Damon Lindelof’s “Watchmen” Greta Gerwig tells David Remnick that her adaptation of the novel “Little Women” didn’t need much updating for 2019: the world hasn’t changed as much as we might think, she says. Isaac Chotiner talks with Jack Goldsmith, the conservative legal ...
12.12.2019 A Worldwide #MeToo Protest that Began in Chile Three weeks ago, members of a Chilean feminist collective called Las Tesis put on blindfolds and party dresses and took to the streets. The festive atmosphere put their purpose in stark relief: the song they sang was “Un Violador En ...
12.10.2019 The March Toward Impeachment It’s been a busy week, and it’s only Tuesday. The chair of the House Judiciary Committee unveiled two articles of impeachment against the President, which are nearly certain to be adopted by the House of Representatives. The same day, Congressional ...
12.09.2019 How Channel One Keeps the News Safe for Putin Joshua Yaffa recently profiled a Russian media mogul named Konstantin Ernst. Ernst is the C.E.O. of Russia’s largest state-controlled media network, Channel One, and his personal evolution from idealistic independent journalist to cynical mogul is a cautionary tale for the ...
12.06.2019 Jamie Lee Curtis, the Original Scream Queen Jamie Lee Curtis comes from Hollywood royalty as the daughter of Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis. She credits her mother’s role in “Psycho” for helping her land her first feature role, as the lead in “Halloween,” in 1978. “I’m never ...
12.05.2019 This Is William Cohen’s Third Impeachment The current impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump are only the fourth in American history, and William Cohen has been near the center of power for three of them. First, he was a Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee in ...
12.04.2019 Kamala Harris’s Campaign Ends in a Fizzle Senator Kamala Harris had a lot going for her campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination: national name recognition, strong fund-raising, an association with Barack Obama, and a way of commanding the spotlight both on television and on Twitter. She promised ...
12.03.2019 Robin Wright on the Eruption of Violence in Iran In November, Iran announced new fuel rationing and price hikes, just at a time when U.S. sanctions are crippling the economy and especially the middle class. Protests broke out immediately, and the government responded by shutting down access to the ...
12.02.2019 Rana Ayyub on India’s Crackdown on Muslims In August, India suspended the autonomy of the state of Kashmir, putting soldiers in its streets and banning foreign journalists from entering. Dexter Filkins, who was working on a story about Narendra Modi, would not be deterred from going. To ...
11.29.2019 Bon Iver Live at The New Yorker Festival In the winter of 2007, a songwriter by the name of Justin Vernon returned to the Wisconsin woods, not far from where he grew up. Just a few months later, he emerged with “For Emma, Forever Ago”—his first album produced ...
11.29.2019 Billy Porter Wears Many Hats Billy Porter’s résumé is as impressive as it is difficult to categorize. His performance in the musical “Kinky Boots” won him a Tony Award and a Grammy, and, recently, he won an Emmy for his character on Ryan Murphy’s FX ...
11.22.2019 Jenny Slate Gets Dressed Jenny Slate is on tour for her new book “Little Weirds.” It comprises short, strange essays, many of which involve clothing and how we present ourselves to the world. While Slate was in New York, the fashion columnist Rachel Syme ...
11.22.2019 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 ...
11.15.2019 Thomas Mallon on Impeachment, and Philip Pullman on “His Dark Materials” As he opened public impeachment proceedings last week, Representative Adam Schiff invoked Watergate—which, after all, ended well for Democrats. To understand how that history applies, or doesn’t, to the current proceedings, The New Yorker’s Dorothy Wickenden spoke with Thomas Mallon, ...
11.12.2019 A Progressive Evangelical, and Charlamagne Tha God Eliza Griswold spoke recently with Doug Pagitt, a pastor from Minneapolis who is a politically progressive evangelical Christian. Pagitt left his church to found an organization called Vote Common Good, which aims to move at least some religious voters away ...
11.08.2019 The Supreme Court Weighs the End of DACA Jeff Sessions, then the Attorney General, announced in 2017 the cancellation of the Obama-era policy known as DACA—Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. A number of plaintiffs sued, and their case goes to the Supreme Court next week. The New Yorker’s ...
11.05.2019 How the Irish Border Keeps Derailing Brexit One of the almost unsolvable problems with the U.K.’s exit from the E.U. is that it would necessitate a “hard border” between Northern Ireland, which is part of the U.K., and the Republic of Ireland, which would remain a member ...
11.01.2019 Can Mayor Pete Be a Democratic Front-Runner? Six months ago, David Remnick interviewed a politician named Pete Buttigieg, who was just beginning his campaign for the Democratic nomination for President. Buttigieg was an unlikely candidate: the youngest person to run in decades, he was a small-town mayor ...
10.25.2019 Horror with a Real-Life Message The director Sophia Takal is working on a remake of “Black Christmas,” an early slasher flick from Canada, in which sorority girls are picked off by a gruesome killer. Takal brought a very 2019 sensibility to the remake, reflecting on ...
10.22.2019 Roomful of Teeth Redefines Vocal Music for the Future For a new music ensemble, Roomful of Teeth has made an extraordinary impression in a short time. Caroline Shaw, one of its vocalists, received the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for “Partita for 8 Voices,” which was written for the group. Then, ...
10.18.2019 Ronan Farrow on a Campaign of Silence Farrow’s reporting on Harvey Weinstein and other accused perpetrators of sexual assault helped opened the floodgates of the #MeToo movement. In his new book, “Catch and Kill,” and in “The Black Cube Chronicles” published on newyorker.com, Farrow details the measures ...
10.14.2019 Nancy Pelosi: “Timing Is Everything” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has a lot of fights on her hands. After she led the Democrats to victory in the 2018 midterm elections, her legislative agenda hit a number of roadblocks, including the Republican-controlled Senate. But it is Pelosi’s ...
10.11.2019 New Yorker Writers on Hong Kong, and Nixon After Tiananmen Square The months of protests in Hong Kong may be the biggest political crisis facing Chinese leadership since the Tiananmen Square massacre a generation ago. What began as objections to a proposed extradition law has morphed into a broad-based protest movement. ...
10.04.2019 Adam Gopnik on Aging, and a Visit to Maine with Elizabeth Strout In fifteen years, people of retirement age will outnumber children for the first time in U.S. history. But, the staff writer Adam Gopnik finds, the elderly are poorly served by the field of design, whether it’s a screw-top plastic bottle ...
10.04.2019 New Yorker Reporters on Impeachment David Remnick asks five New Yorker contributors about the nascent impeachment proceedings against the President. Susan Glasser, the magazine’s Washington correspondent, notes that Republicans have attacked the inquiry but have not exactly defended the substance of Trump’s phone call to ...
09.27.2019 Cory Booker on How to Defeat Donald Trump Senator Cory Booker burst onto the national scene about a decade ago, after serving as the mayor of the notoriously impoverished and dangerous city of Newark, New Jersey. To get that job, Booker challenged an entrenched establishment. “My political training ...
09.20.2019 The Green Rush It was just seven years ago that Washington and Colorado became the first states to legalize the recreational use of marijuana. Today the drug is legal in eleven states and counting, with polls showing that sixty per cent of Americans ...
09.17.2019 Brittany Howard, of Alabama Shakes, Talks with David Remnick Alabama Shakes started out playing covers at local gigs but quickly found a unique personal voice rooted in rock and soul. The band came to national attention, found a wide and devoted public, and soon earned four Grammys, for the ...
09.13.2019 A Texas Republican Exits the House An exodus is under way in the House of Representatives: not even halfway into the congressional term, fifteen Republicans have announced that they will not run in 2020. One of the exiting members is Will Hurd, a former C.I.A. officer ...
09.10.2019 For a French Burglar, Stealing Masterpieces Is Easier Than Selling Them Vjeran Tomic has been stealing since he was a small child, when he used a ladder to break into a library in his home town, in Bosnia. After moving to Paris, he graduated to lucrative apartment burglaries, living off the ...
09.06.2019 Salman Rushdie’s Fantastical American Quest Novel The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, talks with Salman Rushdie about “Quichotte,” his apocalyptic quest novel. A few years ago, when the four hundredth anniversary of “Don Quixote” was being celebrated, Rushdie reread Cervantes’s book and found himself newly ...
09.03.2019 The New Norms of Affirmative Consent Mischele Lewis learned that her fiancé was a con man and a convicted pedophile. By lying about who he was, did he violate her consent, and commit assault? Lewis’s story raises a larger question: What is consent, and how do ...
08.30.2019 Marianne Williamson Would Like to Clarify Marianne Williamson, the self-help author associated with the New Age movement, has never held political office. But the race for the Presidency, she thinks, is less a battle of politics than a battle of souls. In her appearance in the ...
08.27.2019 Kate Walbert Reads "To Do" Kate Walbert reads her story from the September 2, 2019, issue of the magazine. Walbert's novels include "Our Kind," "A Short History of Women," and "His Favorites." A new story collection, "She Was Like That," will be published in October.
08.27.2019 Jia Tolentino on the Rise and Fall of the Internet Jia Tolentino writes for The New Yorker about an extremely wide range of topics, but a central concern is what it has meant to her to have grown up alongside the Internet. In her new, best-selling collection of essays, “Trick ...
08.23.2019 Roger Federer Opens Up The winner of twenty Grand Slam titles and the top-ranked men’s player for three hundred and ten weeks, Roger Federer remains a dominant force in tennis. On the eve of playing in his nineteenth U.S. Open, Federer spoke with David ...
08.20.2019 Derren Brown’s Big Secret Derren Brown wants you to know that he is not a magician. The term he prefers to use is “psychological illusionist,” and his acts mix psychology, misdirection, and showmanship. When he performs, he’s explicit about engaging with audiences’ minds and ...
08.16.2019 Maggie Gyllenhaal on “The Deuce” and #MeToo Maggie Gyllenhaal’s first starring role was in the 2002 movie “Secretary,” a distriburbing romantic comedy about a troubled woman in a sadomasochistic relationship with her boss. Since then, Gyllenhaal has continued to push the boundaries of how sex is depicted ...

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