The New Yorker Radio Hour

By WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

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Profiles, storytelling and insightful conversations, hosted by David Remnick.

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What Exactly Does “Woke” Me...

01.27.2023

Many on the right blame “wokeness” for all of America’s ills—everything from deadly mass shootings to lower military recruitment. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, recently signed a so-called Stop WOKE Act into law, and made the issue the center of his ...

The New Yorker Radio Hour episodes:

01.27.2023 What Exactly Does “Woke” Mean, and How Did It Become so Powerful? Many on the right blame “wokeness” for all of America’s ills—everything from deadly mass shootings to lower military recruitment. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, recently signed a so-called Stop WOKE Act into law, and made the issue the center of his ...
01.24.2023 Michael Schulman on Oscars History, and a Visit with “Annie” Composer Charles Strouse Despite years of controversy, the Academy Awards and the other awards shows remain must-watch television for many Americans. The awards may be “unreliable as a pure measure of cinematic worth,” Schulman tells David Remnick. “But I would argue that the ...
01.20.2023 A Local Paper First Sounded the Alarm on George Santos. Nobody Listened. George Santos is hardly the first scammer elected to office—but his lies, David Remnick says, are “extra.” Most Americans learned of Santos’s extraordinary fabrications from a New York Times report published after the midterm election, but a local newspaper called ...
01.17.2023 Deepti Kapoor Discusses “Age of Vice” with Parul Sehgal Deepti Kapoor describes New Delhi, the setting of her novel “Age of Vice” as “extremely beautiful, but also violent. . . . It’s a place where you think you’re gonna get cheated and robbed until someone does something incredibly kind ...
01.13.2023 In Politics, How Old Is Too Old? It wasn’t so long ago that Ronald Reagan was considered over the hill, too old to govern. Now a sitting President has turned eighty in office, and a Presidential contest between Joe Biden and Donald Trump would put two near-eighty-year-olds ...
01.10.2023 The Photographer Who Documented a Long-Forgotten Pan-African Festival Forty-six years ago, a young photographer named Marilyn Nance got the opportunity of a lifetime. A student at the Pratt Institute, an art school in Brooklyn, Nance had never left the country. But she became one of the official photographers ...
01.06.2023 Bob Woodward on His Trump Tapes Bob Woodward is not one to editorialize. But, during his interviews with Donald Trump at the time of the COVID-19 crisis, Woodward found himself shouting at the President—explaining how to make a decision and trying to browbeat him into listening ...
01.03.2023 “Giselle,” and What to Do with the Problematic Past – Part II When the renowned choreographer Akram Khan was commissioned to update the classic “Giselle” for the English National Ballet, he couldn’t simply put new steps to a Romantic-era plot. Beautiful as it is, “Giselle” has a view of ideal womanhood that ...
12.30.2022 What to Do with the Problematic Past, Part I We draw meaning and comfort from traditions, but when the world changes, traditions can stop reflecting our values and cause us pain. This episode features three people struggling against traditions that have become problematic. The producer Ngofeen Mputubwele talks with ...
12.27.2022 As Poet Laureate, Tracy K. Smith Hit the Road Tracy K. Smith was named Poet Laureate in 2017, at the beginning of the fierce partisan divide of the Trump era. She quickly turned to her craft to address the deep political divisions the election laid bare, putting together a ...
12.23.2022 Kirk Douglas, the Guitarist for the Roots, Revamps the Holiday Classics As the guitarist for the Roots, the band for “The Tonight Show,” Kirk Douglas plays anything and everything. So David Remnick put him to the test on some holiday classics. And two longtime New Yorker staffers, Patricia Marx and Roz ...
12.20.2022 An Audiobook Master on the Secrets of Her Craft You’ve probably never heard of Robin Miles, but you may well have heard her—possibly at some length. Miles is an actor who’s cultivated a particular specialty in recording audiobooks, a booming segment of the publishing industry. She has lent her ...
12.16.2022 Ina Garten: Cooking Is Hard; Plus an Essay from Susan Orlean With the Food Network program “Barefoot Contessa,” Ina Garten became a beloved household name. Although she is a gregarious teacher and presence on television, Garten prefers to do her actual cooking alone. “Cooking’s hard for me. I mean, I do ...
12.13.2022 The poet John Lee Clark Translates the DeafBlind Experience to the Page Although many hearing and sighted people imagine DeafBlind life in tragic terms, as an experience of isolation and darkness, the poet John Lee Clark’s writing is full of joy. It’s funny and surprising, mapping the contours of a regular life ...
12.09.2022 Politico’s Mathias Döpfner, and Sam Knight Reports from Qatar The staff writer Sam Knight was in Qatar recently, reporting on the World Cup, where, despite years of controversy, a familiar rhythm of upsets, triumphs, and defeats has taken hold. But he finds that the geographical shift toward an Arab ...
12.06.2022 Is Our Democracy Safe? This year’s midterm elections were widely seen as a victory for democracy in the United States. Election deniers were defeated in many closely watched races and voting proceeded smoothly, even in areas where the Big Lie has taken a firm ...
12.02.2022 The Supreme Court Case That Could Upend Elections J. Michael Luttig is a retired judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals and a prominent legal mind in conservative circles, close with figures including Clarence Thomas and William Barr. On January 5, 2020, he got a call from Vice-President ...
11.29.2022 Why Christine Baranski Fought the Good Fight The veteran stage and screen actress Christine Baranski first became a household name thanks to her Emmy-winning turn on the nineties sitcom “Cybill,” and her Tony-award winning work on Broadway. But “The Good Fight” took her to another level. As ...
11.25.2022 Quinta Brunson, a “Child of the Internet,” Revives the Sitcom Quinta Brunson made a name for herself as a master of meme comedy and is a self-described “child of the Internet,” yet her ABC mockumentary series “Abbott Elementary” is an unabashed throwback to the sitcoms of her youth. Doreen St. ...
11.22.2022 Unpacking the Latino Vote, and Susan Orlean on the Queen of Tigers In the lead-up to this year’s midterm elections, many pundits expected Republicans to make significant gains among Latino voters, further eroding a base of support that Democrats have arguably taken for granted for decades. “What happened instead, as you know, ...
11.21.2022 The Stories of #MeToo Five years ago, reporting on the film producer Harvey Weinstein’s history of assault and misconduct opened the floodgates of the national reckoning with gender and power known as #MeToo. Three New Yorker critics—Alexandra Schwartz, Naomi Fry, and Vinson Cunningham—recently gathered ...
11.18.2022 How Qatar Took the World Cup No self-respecting sports fan is naïve about the role that money plays in pro sports. But, by any standard, the greed and cynicism behind the World Cup are extraordinary. The cloud of scandal surrounding FIFA, the international soccer organization, has ...
11.15.2022 Safia Elhillo on Vulnerability and Anger in “Girls That Never Die” The poet Safia Elhillo first found her voice onstage, performing in youth poetry slams in Washington, D.C., where she grew up, the child of Sudanese immigrants. She published her first collection in 2017, and in 2021 her novel in verse, ...
11.11.2022 The Man Who Escaped from Auschwitz to Warn the World Rudolf Vrba was sent to Auschwitz at the age of seventeen, and, because he was young and in good health, he was not killed immediately but put to labor in the camp. Vrba (originally named Walter Rosenberg) quickly discovered that ...
11.08.2022 Mike White on the New Season of “The White Lotus” in Sicily The first season of “The White Lotus” won ten Emmy Awards and was a critics’ favorite. A dark satire of the privileged, the show chronicled the visit to a luxurious Hawaiian resort of a tech mogul and her family, a ...
11.04.2022 Russell Moore on Christian Nationalism Russell Moore, a prominent figure in the Southern Baptist Convention, resigned over the church’s response to racism—which Moore considers a sin—and documented sexual abuse allegations. The theologian sits down with David Remnick to reflect on the intersection of Christianity and ...
11.01.2022 Mayor Francis Suarez’s View from Miami Francis Suarez, the Republican mayor of Miami, is popular in the city he governs, and increasingly prominent beyond it. Conservative voices as disparate as Kanye West and George Will have floated him as a 2024 Presidential candidate. Suarez is a ...
10.28.2022 U2’s Bono Talks with David Remnick—Live Last month, The New Yorker published a Personal History about growing up in Ireland during the nineteen-sixties and seventies. It covers the interfaith marriage of the author’s parents, which was unusual in Dublin; his mother’s early death; and finding his ...
10.25.2022 The Playwrights Suzan-Lori Parks and Martin McDonagh, Live at The New Yorker Festival This year’s New Yorker Festival featured two conversations with renowned playwrights: Suzan-Lori Parks and Martin McDonagh. Parks, the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for drama, sat down with the staff writer Vinson Cunningham. “The marketplace is ...
10.21.2022 The Vulnerabilities of our Voting Machines, and How to Secure Them The security of voting has become a huge topic of concern. That’s especially true after 2020, when it became an article of faith for Trump supporters that the election was somehow stolen by President Joe Biden. Alex Halderman, a professor ...
10.14.2022 In Defense of the Comic Novel: Andrew Sean Greer Talks “Less is Lost” Arthur Less is a novelist—a “minor American novelist,” to be precise. He’s a man whose biggest talent seems to be taking a problem and making it five times worse. And he’s the hero of Andrew Sean Greer’s novel “Less,” which ...
10.12.2022 Tom Stoppard on “Leopoldstadt,” and Geena Davis talks with Michael Schulman Tom Stoppard has been a fixture on Broadway since his famous early play, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” travelled there in 1967. Stoppard is eighty-five years old, and has largely resisted the autobiographical element in his work. But now, in ...
10.10.2022 The New Abortion Underground Since the reversal of Roe v. Wade, the contributor Stephania Taladrid has been following a network of women who are secretly distributing abortion pills across the United States. The network has its roots in Mexico, where some medications used for ...
10.07.2022 Major Decisions Ahead for the Supreme Court In its last term, the Supreme Court dropped bombshell after bombshell—marking major conservative advances on gun rights, separation of church and state, environmental protection, and reproductive rights. “The Court is not behaving as an institution invested in social stability,” the ...
10.03.2022 Joshua Yaffa on What’s Next for Ukraine The contributor Joshua Yaffa, who was based in Moscow for years and has been reporting from Ukraine since the start of the war, speaks to David Remnick from Kyiv. There, Yaffa says, the latest news from Russia—including threats of nuclear ...
09.30.2022 Billy Eichner on “Bros” and Joyce Carol Oates on “Blonde” One of the first queer rom-coms released in cinemas by a major studio, “Bros” is making movie history. But the film’s co-writer and star, the comedian Billy Eichner, tells David Remnick that the milestone has taken too long to achieve. ...
09.27.2022 Why Play Music: A Conversation with Questlove and Maggie Rogers Earlier this month, two acclaimed musicians—Questlove and Maggie Rogers—joined The New Yorker’s Kelefa Sanneh live onstage for a conversation that probed at an essential question for musicians and music lovers alike: How can music provide a spiritual experience, and how ...
09.23.2022 Roger Federer on Retirement and His Evolution in Tennis Roger Federer is playing the last professional tennis match of his career this week. It’s the end of an incredible run. Over two decades, he has demonstrated an unmatchable court intelligence and temperament, winning twenty Grand Slam titles and spending ...
09.20.2022 Will Voter Suppression Become the Law? Now seven weeks away, the midterms are often cast as a referendum on the President and his party. But, this year, some see democracy itself on the ballot. One of those people is the attorney Mark Elias, who has made ...
09.16.2022 Andy Borowitz, and the Hunt for Invasive Lionfish Not only are we living in a time where people are proud of their ignorance, argues the writer and comedian Andy Borowitz, but some of our most educated politicians are now playing down their intelligence as a strategy to get ...
09.13.2022 How Sheryl Lee Ralph Is Reshaping Hollywood Sheryl Lee Ralph has been a staple of Black entertainment for decades. She played Deena Jones in the original Broadway production of “Dreamgirls,” and was in “Sister Act 2” alongside Lauryn Hill and Whoopi Goldberg. She’s currently starring in the ...
09.09.2022 Keeping Score: A Year Inside a Divided Brooklyn High School Nearly seventy years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, our public schools effectively remain segregated. And, by some measures, New York City has the most segregated system in the country. For a group of high schools in Brooklyn, ...
09.06.2022 Aimee Mann Live, with Atul Gawande Aimee Mann, the celebrated Los Angeles singer and songwriter, recently released an album called “Queens of the Summer Hotel.” It was inspired in part by Susanna Kaysen’s best-selling memoir “Girl, Interrupted,” about Kaysen’s time in a psychiatric hospital. Mann sat ...
09.02.2022 Dave Grohl’s Tales of Life and Music At The New Yorker Festival, Dave Grohl talked with Kelefa Sanneh about Grohl’s recent book, “The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music.” Grohl, who was the drummer for Nirvana before becoming the front man of the Foo Fighters, recalled one ...
08.30.2022 A New Civil War in America? Since the F.B.I. raid on former President Donald Trump’s home, Mar-A-Lago, the phrases “civil war” and “lock and load” have trended on right-wing social media. The F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security are taking the threats seriously, and issued ...
08.26.2022 The Actor Jenifer Lewis: Mother, Activist, Hurricane Jenifer Lewis is known as the “Mother of Black Hollywood” for good reason; her screen progeny have included Whitney Houston, Angela Bassett, and Tupac Shakur. In her latest turn, she’s playing the alpha boss of a home-shopping network on the ...
08.23.2022 What’s Driving Black Candidates to the Republican Party? The Republican Party has recently attracted an almost unprecedented number of Black candidates to its fold—more than at any time since the Reconstruction era. “In a moment where the Party . . . has really wholeheartedly embraced white-grievance politics,” Leah ...
08.19.2022 Neil Gaiman on the Power of Fantasy in our Lives Neil Gaiman, one of the great fantasy writers of our time, first started writing his comic series “The Sandman” in the nineteen-eightiess. Decades later, a TV adaptation is a huge hit on Netflix, topping the platform’s charts in countries across ...
08.16.2022 Designing a Soundscape for the Cars of the Future Electric cars, compared to cars with internal-combustion engines, are nearly silent, which can present a danger to cyclists and pedestrians. So car companies are turning to sound engineers to craft artificial soundtracks for things like backing up, or starting the ...
08.12.2022 Elizabeth Kolbert on a Historic Climate Bill, Plus a Lesson from Kansas The Inflation Reduction Act now before Congress is being celebrated as the most important piece of climate legislation in the history of this country—which is “a pretty low bar,” the staff writer and Pulitzer Prize-winner Elizabeth Kolbert tells David Remnick, ...

Older episodes

The New Yorker Radio Hour

What's The New Yorker Radio Hour about?

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The New Yorker Radio Hour episodes:

What Exactly Does “Woke” Mean, and How Did It Become so Powerful?

Michael Schulman on Oscars History, and a Visit with “Annie” Composer Charles Strouse

A Local Paper First Sounded the Alarm on George Santos. Nobody Listened.

Deepti Kapoor Discusses “Age of Vice” with Parul Sehgal

In Politics, How Old Is Too Old?

The Photographer Who Documented a Long-Forgotten Pan-African Festival

Bob Woodward on His Trump Tapes

“Giselle,” and What to Do with the Problematic Past – Part II

What to Do with the Problematic Past, Part I

As Poet Laureate, Tracy K. Smith Hit the Road

Kirk Douglas, the Guitarist for the Roots, Revamps the Holiday Classics

An Audiobook Master on the Secrets of Her Craft

Ina Garten: Cooking Is Hard; Plus an Essay from Susan Orlean

The poet John Lee Clark Translates the DeafBlind Experience to the Page

Politico’s Mathias Döpfner, and Sam Knight Reports from Qatar

Is Our Democracy Safe?

The Supreme Court Case That Could Upend Elections

Why Christine Baranski Fought the Good Fight

Quinta Brunson, a “Child of the Internet,” Revives the Sitcom

Unpacking the Latino Vote, and Susan Orlean on the Queen of Tigers

The Stories of #MeToo

How Qatar Took the World Cup

Safia Elhillo on Vulnerability and Anger in “Girls That Never Die”

The Man Who Escaped from Auschwitz to Warn the World

Mike White on the New Season of “The White Lotus” in Sicily

Russell Moore on Christian Nationalism

Mayor Francis Suarez’s View from Miami

U2’s Bono Talks with David Remnick—Live

The Playwrights Suzan-Lori Parks and Martin McDonagh, Live at The New Yorker Festival

The Vulnerabilities of our Voting Machines, and How to Secure Them

In Defense of the Comic Novel: Andrew Sean Greer Talks “Less is Lost”

Tom Stoppard on “Leopoldstadt,” and Geena Davis talks with Michael Schulman

The New Abortion Underground

Major Decisions Ahead for the Supreme Court

Joshua Yaffa on What’s Next for Ukraine

Billy Eichner on “Bros” and Joyce Carol Oates on “Blonde”

Why Play Music: A Conversation with Questlove and Maggie Rogers

Roger Federer on Retirement and His Evolution in Tennis

Will Voter Suppression Become the Law?

Andy Borowitz, and the Hunt for Invasive Lionfish

How Sheryl Lee Ralph Is Reshaping Hollywood

Keeping Score: A Year Inside a Divided Brooklyn High School

Aimee Mann Live, with Atul Gawande

Dave Grohl’s Tales of Life and Music

A New Civil War in America?

The Actor Jenifer Lewis: Mother, Activist, Hurricane

What’s Driving Black Candidates to the Republican Party?

Neil Gaiman on the Power of Fantasy in our Lives

Designing a Soundscape for the Cars of the Future

Elizabeth Kolbert on a Historic Climate Bill, Plus a Lesson from Kansas

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