The director Spike Lee looked back at the length and breadth of his career so far during a sit-down with David Remnick at the New Yorker Festival. Although Lee’s storied filmography may be familiar to movie buffs, few are likely to know as much about his humble beginnings as the scion of a celebrated, but often unemployed, musician—the late Bill Lee. The young Spike Lee bore some resentment toward his father, an upright-bass player who eschewed countless gigs because he refused to play an electric bass guitar. “[I]t wasn’t until later that I saw that, yo, this is his life. He was not going to play music that he didn’t want to play.” As an artist in his own right, Lee has taken a similar approach to filmmaking. He has tackled a myriad of genres and difficult subject matter, without sacrificing his unique voice and social consciousness to satisfy Hollywood. “Some things you just can’t compromise,” he told Remnick. Now in his fourth decade as a filmmaker, Lee hopes to one day make a long-gestating bio-pic about Joe Louis and have his career last as long as that of one of his idols. “Kurosawa was eighty-six!” the sixty-six-year-old Lee said, of the Japanese filmmaker’s retirement age. “I got to at least get to Kurosawa.” In this interview, Lee mentions the influence of Kurosawa and several other notable filmmakers. For further reading, here is a list of ninety-five films he has deemed essential for any cinephile.

The Washington Roundtable: President Biden embraced the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in Tel Aviv this week, reiterating America’s support for Israel amid its war with Hamas. The President brokered a deal to allow humanitarian aid to enter Gaza and warned Israelis not to be “consumed” by rage as they respond to Hamas’s October 7th massacre of civilians in the country. “It’s not clear yet what really has been accomplished by this extraordinary amount of personal diplomacy,” the New Yorker staff writer Susan B. Glasser said. Senior Israeli officials are allegedly predicting several years or even a decade of war. Meanwhile, the Biden Administration is seeking more than a hundred billion dollars in federal funding, including assistance for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan. But, because the raucous battle to elect a Speaker of the House is ongoing, the question of when this package might pass remains open. As the staff writer Evan Osnos noted, the events of the past two weeks underscore the challenges that democracy is facing both at home and abroad. The staff writer Jane Mayer joins Glasser and Osnos in conversation about it all.

The Washington Roundtable: President Biden embraced the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in Tel Aviv this week, reiterating America’s support for Israel amid its war with Hamas. The President brokered a deal to allow humanitarian aid to enter Gaza and warned Israelis not to be “consumed” by rage as they respond to Hamas’s October 7th massacre of civilians in the country. “It’s not clear yet what really has been accomplished by this extraordinary amount of personal diplomacy,” the New Yorker staff writer Susan B. Glasser said. Senior Israeli officials are allegedly predicting several years or even a decade of war. Meanwhile, the Biden Administration is seeking more than a hundred billion dollars in federal funding, including assistance for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan. But, because the raucous battle to elect a Speaker of the House is ongoing, the question of when this package might pass remains open. As the staff writer Evan Osnos noted, the events of the past two weeks underscore the challenges that democracy is facing both at home and abroad. The staff writer Jane Mayer joins Glasser and Osnos in conversation about it all.

Earlier this week,The New Yorkerpublished aninterviewwith a senior Hamas political official, Mousa Abu Marzouk, about the group’s rationale behind the October 7th massacre in Israel. How did Hamas militants determine that now was the time for violence? And, given that Netanyahu’s deadly response was a sure thing, how did they weigh the cost of Palestinian lives? (This podcast episode was recorded on Monday afternoon, and since then civilian deaths in Gaza have continued to rise as Israeli airstrikes bombard the strip.) TheNew Yorkerreporters David Kirkpatrick and Adam Rasgon join Tyler Foggatt to discuss what they learned from speaking with Abu Marzouk, and how this conflict differs from what they have each seen in their many years of reporting on the region.

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When Rodrigo Duterte ran for the presidency of the Philippines and won, in 2016, the Western press noted the similarities between this unconventional candidate and Donald Trump—who also liked to casually espouse violence on the campaign trail and beyond.  Duterte used provocative and obscene language to tap into the country’s fears about a real, albeit overstated, drug problem. “Every drug addict was a schizophrenic, hallucinatory, will rape your mother and butcher your father,” as reporter Patricia Evangelista puts it, “and if he can’t find a child to rape, he’ll rape a goat.” But, unlike Donald Trump, Duterte made good on his promise of death. More than twenty thousand extrajudicial killings took place over the course of his six-year term in office, according to human-rights groups—and Duterte remained quite popular as bodies piled up in the streets. Reporting for the news site Rappler, Evangelista confronted the collateral damage when Durterte started to enact his “kill them all” policies. “I had to take accountability,” she tells David Remnick. Her book, “Some People Need Killing,” is published in the U.S. this week, and Evangelista has left the Philippines because of the danger it puts her in. “I own the guilt,” Evangelista says. “How can I sit in New York, when the people whose stories I told, who took the risk to tell me their stories, are sitting in shanties across the country and might be at risk because of things they told me.”

In this bonus episode, the hosts of Critics at Large dissect Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk, asking how it reflects ideas about power, money, and cults of personality—from “Batman” to “The Social Network.” The critics examine how, in recent years, the idea of the unimpeachable Silicon Valley founder has lost its sheen. Narratives, such as the 2022 series “WeCrashed,” tell the story of startup founders who make lofty promises, only to watch their empires crumble when those promises are shown to be empty. “It dovetails for me with the disillusionment of millennials,” Naomi Fry says, pointing to the dark mood that the 2007-08 financial crisis and the 2016 election brought to the country. “There’s no longer this blind belief that the tech founder is a genius who should be wholly admired with no reservations.” 

This is a preview of The New Yorker’s new Critics at Large podcast. Episodes drop every Thursday.

On Saturday morning, Ruth Margalit, a contributor to The New Yorker who lives in Tel Aviv, awoke to air-raid sirens. It was a familiar sound, but as the day unfolded, it became apparent that Hamas’s latest attack on Israel was more severe than she had realized. “I mean, I’ve certainly never seen anything like this. My entire generation hasn’t,” Margalit says. Since then, she has been reporting on the incursion from Gaza—including a massacre of civilians at a music festival—and on its aftermath. She joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the political backdrop, both global and regional, to this catastrophe; the history of hostage negotiations in Israel; and the response that the Israeli public expects from Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in the coming days and weeks.

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Despite months of discouraging news about extreme weather conditions, the former Vice-President Al Gore still believes that there is a solution to the climate crisis clearly in sight. “We have a switch we can flip,” he tells David Remnick. The problem, as Gore sees it, is that a powerful legacy network of political and financial spheres of influence are stubbornly standing in the way. “When ExxonMobil or Chevron put their ads on the air, the purpose is not for a husband and wife to say, ‘Oh, let’s go down to the store and buy some motor oil.’ The purpose is to condition the political space so that they have a continued license to keep producing and selling more and more fossil fuels,” Gore says. But it’s also what he describes as our ongoing “democracy crisis” that’s playing a factor as well. He believes lawmakers who know better are turning a blind eye to incontrovertible data for short-term political gain. “The average congressman spends an average of five hours a day on the telephone, and at cocktail parties and dinners begging lobbyists for money to finance their campaigns,” Gore says. Still, Gore says he is cautiously optimistic. “What Joe Biden did last year in passing the so-called Inflation Reduction Act . . . was the most extraordinary legislative achievement of any head of state of any country in history,” Gore says, adding that temperatures will stop going up “almost immediately” if we reach a true net zero in fossil-fuel emissions. “Half of all the human-caused greenhouse-gas pollution will have fallen out of the atmosphere in as little as twenty-five to thirty years.”

The Washington Roundtable: The removal of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was a first in the history of the United States Congress. His tenure was so brief and attenuated that the staff writer Jane Mayer refers to him as “kind of the Scaramucci of Speakers.” This week’s chaos—and McCarthy’s humiliation—was instigated by Representative Matt Gaetz, of Florida. Gaetz, who comes from a family of politicians, joined the House in 2017 with an anti-establishment mentality. “He is sort of a TV monger with a pompadour, but he also has real aspirations,” the staff writer Susan B. Glasser notes. But now Republicans in Congress are struggling to elect a new Speaker. Donald Trump has apparently been floated as a contender. Can the Party escape the “doom loop” of constantly toppling its leadership? The staff writer Evan Osnos joins Mayer and Glasser to weigh in.

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The Washington Roundtable: The removal of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was a first in the history of the United States Congress. His tenure was so brief and attenuated that the staff writer Jane Mayer refers to him as “kind of the Scaramucci of Speakers.” This week’s chaos—and McCarthy’s humiliation—was instigated by Representative Matt Gaetz, of Florida. Gaetz, who comes from a family of politicians, joined the House in 2017 with an anti-establishment mentality. “He is sort of a TV monger with a pompadour, but he also has real aspirations,” the staff writer Susan B. Glasser notes. But now Republicans in Congress are struggling to elect a new Speaker. Donald Trump has apparently been floated as a contender. Can the Party escape the “doom loop” of constantly toppling its leadership? The staff writer Evan Osnos joins Mayer and Glasser to weigh in.

Share your thoughts on The Political Scene.