The Political Scene | The New Yorker

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Join The New Yorker’s writers and editors for reporting, insight, and analysis of the most pressing political issues of our time. On Mondays, David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, presents conversations and feature stories about current events. On Wednesdays, the senior editor Tyler Foggatt goes deep on a consequential political story via far-reaching interviews with staff writers and outside experts. And, on Fridays, the staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss the latest developments in Washington and beyond, offering an encompassing understanding of this moment in American politics.

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Which War Does Washington W...

09.23.2023

The Washington Roundtable: Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, travelled to New York City and Washington, D.C., this week to request more support for his country. Before the United Nations General Assembly, Zelensky called Russia’s war an act of “genocide.” In Washington, ...

The Political Scene | The New Yorker episodes:

09.23.2023 Which War Does Washington Want? The Washington Roundtable: Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, travelled to New York City and Washington, D.C., this week to request more support for his country. Before the United Nations General Assembly, Zelensky called Russia’s war an act of “genocide.” In Washington, ...
09.20.2023 How New York, a City of Immigrants, Became Home to a Migrant Crisis In the past year, more than a hundred thousand migrants have arrived in New York City. This particular chapter in the city’s immigration history began last August, when Governor Greg Abbott of Texas sent buses of Venezuelan asylum seekers north. ...
09.18.2023 Jennifer Egan Discusses a Solution for the Chronically Homeless About 1.4 million people in the United States end up in homeless shelters every year, with many thousands more living on the street. You could fill the city of San Diego with the unhoused. The problem seems gigantic, tragic, and ...
09.16.2023 A Week of Chaos in Kevin McCarthy’s Washington The Washington Roundtable: Congress has returned from summer recess to a hectic month of business. This week, as Kevin McCarthy sought to avoid a government shutdown, the House Speaker announced that he plans to initiate an impeachment inquiry into President ...
09.11.2023 A Master Class with David Grann David Grann is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of two nonfiction books that topped the best-seller list this summer: “The Wager” and “Killers of the Flower Moon,” from 2017, which Martin Scorsese has adapted into ...
09.08.2023 From “Amicus”: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas The New Yorker presents a special conversation from Slate’s “Amicus” podcast, hosted by Dahlia Lithwick. Lithwick talks with Judge Margaret M. McKeown, of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, about McKeown’s new book, “Citizen Justice: The ...
09.06.2023 Washington’s Age-Old Problem In January, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell passed a career milestone: he became the Senate’s longest-serving party leader. Since then, McConnell has suffered a number of health setbacks. This includes a fall and subsequent concussion in March and, most recently, ...
09.04.2023 Bob Woodward Discusses His Trump Tapes Bob Woodward has been writing about the White House for more than fifty years, going toe to toe with nearly every President after Richard Nixon. Woodward is every inch the reporter, not one to editorialize. But, during his interviews with ...
09.02.2023 Mark Meadows and the “Congeniality of Evil” The Washington Roundtable: Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s former right-hand man, took the stand in Georgia this week to argue that his actions in the election-racketeering case—in which he was indicted two weeks ago, alongside eighteen co-conspirators, including Trump—were taken in ...
08.31.2023 Does Diplomacy Have a Chance of Ending War in Ukraine? It’s been eighteen months since Russia invaded Ukraine. In that time, Russia has annexed four Ukrainian territories; the mercenary Wagner Group staged a coup against Putin, and then its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, died in a mysterious plane explosion; Ukraine mounted ...
08.28.2023 How Does Extreme Heat Affect the Body? The Korey Stringer Institute at the University of Connecticut was named after an N.F.L. player who died of exertional heatstroke. The lab’s main research subjects have been athletes, members of the military, and laborers. But, with climate change, even mild ...
08.26.2023 At a Trumpless G.O.P. Debate, Trumpism Dominates The Washington Roundtable: In the first debate of the Republican Presidential primary, which took place in Milwaukee on Wednesday night, six of the eight potential nominees onstage raised their hands to indicate that, if Donald Trump is their party’s choice, ...
08.23.2023 Ronan Farrow on the Rule of Elon Musk In this week’s magazine, Ronan Farrow has published a major story about the business practices of Elon Musk. Farrow, who has reported extensively on abuses of power for The New Yorker, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss how Musk has become ...
08.21.2023 Talking to Conservatives About Climate Change: The Congressional Climate Caucus Even in a summer of record-breaking heat and disasters, Republican Presidential candidates have ignored or mocked climate change. But some conservative legislators in Congress recognize that action is necessary. Their ideas about how to tackle the problem, however, depart from ...
08.18.2023 Will the Summer of Trump Indictments Shake Up the Election? The Washington Roundtable: It has been a summer of history-making indictments against Donald Trump. This week, he received his fourth—this one from Georgia, where the former President and eighteen co-defendants are accused of conducting a “criminal enterprise” to reverse his ...
08.14.2023 Will the End of Affirmative Action Lead to the End of Legacy Admissions? The practice of legacy admissions—preferential consideration of the children of alumni—has emerged as a national flash point since the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in June. Even some prominent Republicans are joining the Biden Administration in calling for its end. ...
08.09.2023 The One-Per-centers Pushing Democrats to the Left Andrew Marantz, in the August 14th, 2023, issue of The New Yorker, wrote about Leah Hunt-Hendrix, a major donor to progressive causes whose grandfather was a politically conservative oil tycoon. Hunt-Hendrix’s use of her money and influence to support progressive ...
08.07.2023 Emily Nussbaum on Country Music’s Culture Wars The New Yorker Radio Hour: Last month, the country singer Jason Aldean released a music video for “Try That in a Small Town,” a song that initially received little attention. But the video cast the song’s lyrics in a new ...
08.05.2023 “This is The Big One”: The Third Trump Indictment The Washington Roundtable: This week, in a federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., former President Donald Trump pleaded not guilty to four charges in relation to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his role in the January 6th insurrection. ...
08.02.2023 How the Wagner Group Became Too Powerful for Putin to Punish On June 23, 2023, tanks rolled into Moscow and into the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, and troops surrounded military and government buildings. They were fighters from the Wagner Group, a private battalion. The group’s leader is Yevgeny Prigozhin, who ...
07.31.2023 How to Buy Forgiveness from Medical Debt Nearly one in ten Americans owe significant medical debt, a burden that can become crippling as living costs and interest rates rise. Over the past decade, a nonprofit called RIP Medical Debt has designed a novel approach to chip away ...
07.28.2023 Hunter Biden and the Mechanics of the “Scandal Industrial Complex” The Washington Roundtable: This week, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy moved one step closer to calling for Congress to begin impeachment proceedings against President Biden, on the grounds that Biden has used the “weaponization of government to benefit his family.” For ...
07.27.2023 The Historic Battles of “Hot Labor Summer” This summer, the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild are on strike together for the first time in sixty-three years. At the same time, hotel workers across Southern California are organizing coordinated rolling work stoppages. The Teamsters ...
07.24.2023 Adapting Oppenheimer’s Life Story to Film, with Biographer Kai Bird In making “Oppenheimer,” which opens in theatres this weekend, the director Christopher Nolan relied on a Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography of the father of the atomic bomb, “American Prometheus,” by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin. Bird is ...
07.22.2023 What Happens if Trump Is Elected While on Trial? The Washington Roundtable: The midsummer Presidential campaign is full of surprises, including a deluge of upcoming legal battles for the G.O.P. front-runner, former President Donald Trump. Recent federal disclosures have painted a preliminary picture of the race to raise money ...
07.19.2023 The Family Heritage That Led to Hunter Biden Many Americans have been fascinated by the story of Hunter Biden, who has allegedly leveraged his father’s prominence for his own financial gain. Hunter’s spiral into alcoholism and drug addiction has been chronicled by the press. Recently, federal prosecutors announced ...
07.17.2023 A Mysterious Third Party Enters the 2024 Presidential Race No Labels, which pitches itself as a centrist movement to appeal to disaffected voters, has secured a considerable amount of funding and is working behind the scenes to get on Presidential ballots across the country. The group has yet to ...
07.12.2023 Will Record Temperatures Finally Force Political Change? On Tuesday, July 4th, it was the hottest day ever recorded on Earth. That is just one of many heat-related records that have been broken this summer. Historically high temperatures have been recorded around the planet, causing fires, floods, and ...
07.10.2023 The Conspiracy Theories of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the son of a former Attorney General and the nephew of President John F. Kennedy, has announced that he’s running for the Democratic Presidential nomination. He is nearly seventy years old, and has never held public ...
07.07.2023 What It Takes to Be White House Chief of Staff The White House chief-of-staff role is the hardest gig in Washington, D.C. Dick Cheney blamed the job for giving him his first heart attack, during the Ford Administration. A hapless chief of staff can break a Presidency; an effective one ...
07.03.2023 Russia’s Accidental No-Good, Very Failed Coup Yevgeny Prigozhin’s march on Moscow last weekend, which killed more than a dozen Russian soldiers, fizzled as quickly as it began, but its repercussions are just beginning. The Wagner Group commander issued a video from Belarus claiming that he did ...
07.01.2023 The Dark Money Supreme Court The New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos take a look at the political and financial forces behind the U.S. Supreme Court’s hard right turn. This term saw significant rulings on affirmative action in college ...
06.28.2023 What Comes After Affirmative Action In October, the Supreme Court heard two cases—against Harvard and U.N.C.—that are expected to bring about the end of affirmative action at American colleges and universities. The practice rests on the Fourteenth Amendment: equal protection under the law. But the ...
06.26.2023 A Year of Change for a North Dakota Abortion Clinic A year ago, the staff writer Emily Witt visited Fargo, North Dakota, to report on the Red River Women’s Clinic—the only abortion provider in the state. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision had just come down, and the clinic was scrambling ...
06.21.2023 Why Ukrainians Targeted the Author of “Eat, Pray, Love” Earlier this month, the writer Elizabeth Gilbert announced her next book. Readers who know her only as the author of “Eat, Pray, Love” might have been surprised by its subject: a group of Russians who hide in the Siberian wilderness ...
06.19.2023 Dexter Filkins on the Dilemma at the Border Dexter Filkins has reported on conflict situations around the world, and recently spent months reporting on the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border. In a recent piece, Filkins tries to untangle how conditions around the globe, an abrupt change in executive ...
06.17.2023 Donald Trump’s Dangerous War on the Justice Department The New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos look at former President Donald Trump’s arraignment in Miami on thirty-seven federal charges, including obstruction of justice and the willful retention of national-security material. In a speech ...
06.14.2023 The Battle Over Presidential Records, from Nixon to Trump In November of 2020, days after Joe Biden won the election, Jill Lepore examined how Presidential documents have historically been preserved, in a New Yorker essay titled “Will Trump Burn the Evidence?” The piece anticipated that, when Trump left the ...
06.12.2023 In a Divided Era, the New York Times’s Publisher Makes a Stand Over the past several years, as democratic institutions come under attack and authoritarians try to destabilize factual truth, some journalists have argued that the traditional principles of neutrality, or independence, are no longer adequate: they believe reporters need to state ...
06.10.2023 Trump’s Latest Indictment Is Also About the Future of the Country On Friday, federal prosecutors unsealed the indictment against Donald Trump, revealing their case that the former President mishandled classified documents after leaving the White House. The indictment is Trump’s second in recent months, after the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, ...
06.07.2023 The Flimsy Legal Theory That Could Upend American Elections There’s a connection between Bush v. Gore, gerrymandering in North Carolina, and Donald Trump’s legal challenges to the 2020 election: they’ve all been justified by a dubious legal idea called the “independent-state-legislature theory,” or I.S.L.T. Its proponents argue that the ...
06.05.2023 The Creator of ChatGPT on the Rise of Artificial Intelligence David Remnick sits down with Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, which created ChatGPT, GPT-4, and other artificial-intelligence programs. A.I. is a tool, Altman emphasizes, that streamlines human work and quickens the pace of scientific advancement. But he claims to ...
06.02.2023 Is the Debt-Ceiling Deal a Template to Fix Washington, or a Mere Blip? Policymakers have avoided a financial catastrophe just days before the “X-Date,” when the U.S. Treasury would have run out of money to pay its bills. Despite some opposition from members of both parties, the House and Senate chambers passed the ...
05.31.2023 How “Succession” Captured the Trump-Era Hangover On Sunday, after four seasons, the HBO series “Succession” came to a close. More than good TV, it was an artifact of Donald Trump’s Presidency, and of the lingering feelings that have extended into the Biden era. Within the structure ...
05.29.2023 E. Jean Carroll and Roberta Kaplan on Defamatory Trump Earlier this month, E. Jean Carroll won an unprecedented legal victory: in a civil suit, Donald Trump was found liable for sexual abuse against her in the mid-nineteen-nineties, and for defamation in later accusing her of a hoax. But no ...
05.25.2023 How Do You Interview Donald Trump? Donald Trump has always presented a problem for journalists. His years as a reality-television star taught him to outmaneuver facts and control narratives. Now as Trump’s second Presidential run gets under way, these skills are proving useful yet again. At ...
05.22.2023 How Climate Change Is Impacting Our Mental Health In June, a first-of-its-kind lawsuit will go to trial in Montana. The case, Held v. Montana, centers on the climate crisis. Sixteen young plaintiffs allege their state government has failed in its obligation, spelled out in the state constitution, to ...
05.20.2023 What Washington Doesn't Understand about China President Joe Biden was set to make a historic tour through the Indo-Pacific over the next week, becoming the first sitting U.S. President to visit Papua New Guinea, an island state that declared a national holiday for his arrival. But ...
05.18.2023 Jia Tolentino and Stephania Taladrid on a Year Without Roe v. Wade Last June, after the Supreme Court reversed nearly half a century of legal precedent by overturning Roe v. Wade, the New Yorker writers Jia Tolentino and Stephania Taladrid joined Tyler Foggatt on The Political Scene to talk about the potential ...
05.15.2023 Have State Legislatures Gone Rogue? Just over a month ago, the story of two lawmakers expelled from the Tennessee legislature captured headlines across the country. Their offense wasn’t corruption or criminal activity—instead, they had joined a protest at the statehouse in favor of gun control, ...

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