The prescription drug Ozempic was designed to help people with Type 2 diabetes manage their disease, and, under the name Wegovy, to treat obesity. But it has been embraced recently as a tool for weight loss, and many celebrities are rumored to use it in order to shed pounds. Known generically as semaglutide, the drug gives users the feeling of satiation—even to the point of uncomfortable fullness. “One doctor I spoke to compared it to a turkey dinner in a pen,” the staff writer Jia Tolentino tells David Remnick. Tolentino recently reported on the use and misuse of the drug, and what its prominence among celebrities says about our relationship to thinness today. After some years in which body culture seemed to become more accepting, Tolentino fears the drug will wind the clock back to the brutal insistence on thinness of decades past. “Like any technology, it’s very complicated,” she says. “For some people, this drug might save their lives. For others, it does not make sense to be used in any casual way.”

It’s the end of a week in which former President Donald Trump said that he would be indicted by the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, for a hundred-and-thirty-thousand-dollar hush-money payment to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels—and still no charge. But just the prospect of an indictment has created a furor among Trump’s Republican allies in the House, who called Bragg’s investigation a “sham” and the District Attorney “radical.” Jim Jordan, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, led an inquiry into the Manhattan D.A.’s office—a move that the D.A.’s general counsel called an “unlawful incursion into New York’s sovereignty.” In this week’s political roundtable, the New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos look at the political ramifications of the still-looming indictment, the terrifying threat of political violence, and what a Trump “perp walk” could mean.

This week, reports circulated that the former President Donald Trump would be indicted for paying hush money to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels in 2016. But on Wednesday—the day that the indictment was expected—the New York grand jury declined to meet. Still, whatever the outcome of the Stormy Daniels case, Trump faces significant legal trouble. Investigations are under way into his alleged attempt to overturn the election in Georgia, his role in the January 6th attack, and classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago. Will any of these actually hurt him? Or will they help fuel another highly unorthodox Presidential campaign? Amy Davidson Sorkin joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the gambit of Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan District Attorney, who could charge Trump in the Stormy Daniels case, and the broader attempts to hold the former President accountable.

In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority appears likely to strike down affirmative action, in a decision expected by this summer. The practice of considering race as a tool to counteract discrimination has been in place at many colleges and universities, and in some workplaces, since the civil-rights era. But a long-running legal campaign has threatened the practice for decades. David Remnick talks with two academics who have had a front-row seat in this fight. Ruth Simmons tells him, “For me, it’s quite simply the question of what will become of us as a nation if we go into our separate enclaves without the opportunity to interact and to learn from each other.” Simmons was the Ivy League’s first Black president, and more recently led Prairie View A. & M., in Texas. Lee Bollinger, while leading the University of Michigan, was the defendant in Grutter v. Bollinger, a landmark case twenty years ago in which the Supreme Court upheld affirmative action. The Court’s current conservative majority is likely to overturn that precedent.

Remnick also speaks with Femi Ogundele, the dean of undergraduate admissions at the University of California,Berkeley. Consideration of race in admissions at California state schools has been banned for nearly thirty years. “A lot of us are being kind of tapped on the shoulder and asked, ‘How are you doing what you’re doing in this new reality?’ ” he says. “I want to be very clear: I do not think there is any race-neutral alternative to creating diversity on a college campus,” Ogundele tells Remnick. “However, I do think we can do better than what we’ve done.”

Reverberations of the global “war on terror”—launched by the Bush Administration following the attacks of September 11, 2001—have rippled throughout the world, taking hundreds of thousands of lives and costing trillions of U.S. dollars. This week marks the twentieth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, conducted on the false pretext that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos all spent time writing and reporting on the Iraq War and its aftermath—including from within Iraq. In our weekly roundtable, they look at the profound consequences of the war and how it has impacted today’s politics—through, for example, the rise of Donald Trump, debates over America’s role in the war in Ukraine, and widespread distrust of experts and the mainstream media. We are living in a world the Iraq War created, and Glasser, Mayer, and Osnos explain how.

Masha Gessen has long written about Russia, and recently the war in Ukraine. But Gessen also has a deep background reporting on L.G.B.T.Q. rights. A dual citizen of Russia and the U.S., Gessen fled Russia when they were targeted by government repression of L.GB.T. people. Some of the same rhetoric that Vladimir Putin used is now appearing in bills that aim to criminalize transitioning. “All of these bills are about signalling, and what they’re signalling is the essence of past-oriented politics,” Gessen told David Remnick. “A message that says, ‘We are going to return you to a time when you were comfortable, when things weren’t scary … when you didn’t fear that your kid was going to come home from school and tell you that they’re trans.’ … Promising to take that anxiety away is truly powerful.” Gessen looks at the rapid escalation of laws in the United States that ban medical treatment for trans youth, and aspects of trans identity. “When I see that transgender care … for kids … is already illegal in some states,” Gessen says, “and for adults is likely to become illegal in some states, I know that my testosterone in New York is probably not as safe as I think it is.”

Gessen also discusses how the embattled political climate and clear dangers for trans people make nuanced conversations difficult. For instance, Gessen feels that at least some of Dave Chappelle’s jokes about trans people could be seen as sophisticated, “next-level trans accepting.” Gessen also discusses the recent backlash against mainstream media outlets for coverage of issues like detransitioning. Detransitioning has received too much of a focus, Gessen says, and focussing on it plays into a narrative that transitioning young should be discouraged. Yet the possibility of regret on the part of trans people shouldn’t necessarily be denied; better, Gessen said, to accept that regret may accompany any major life change. “We normalize regret in all other areas of life,” Gessen told Remnick. “Kids and their parents, especially teen-agers, make a huge number of decisions that have lifelong implications.”

We’re pleased to announce that “In The Dark,” the acclaimed investigative podcast from American Public Media, is joining The New Yorker and Condé Nast Entertainment. In its first two seasons, “In The Dark,” hosted by the reporter Madeleine Baran, has taken a close look at the criminal-justice system in America. The first season examined the abduction and murder, in 1989, of eleven-year-old Jacob Wetterling, and exposed devastating failures on the part of law enforcement. The second season focussed on Curtis Flowers, a Black man from Winona, Mississippi, who was tried six times for the same crime. When the show’s reporters began looking into the case, Flowers was on death row. After their reporting, the Supreme Court reversed Flowers’s conviction. Today, he is a free man. 

A third season of “In The Dark,” which will be the show’s most ambitious one yet, is on its way. David Remnick recently sat down with Baran and the show’s managing producer, Samara Freemark, to talk about the remarkable first two seasons of the show, and what to expect in the future. To listen to the entirety of the “In The Dark” catalogue, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

James Sweet, a professor of African history and the former president of the American Historical Association, wrote an essay last year that sparked a significant clash in the world of academia about the role of politics in history and vice versa. He argued that historians have become compromised by politics—that they begin not with the evidence but with the contemporary social-justice concern that they want to speak to, in order to go viral on Twitter. This discussion may seem niche, but it is in dialogue with a national one as politicians such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis vow to remove all traces of “wokeness” from school curricula and exert control over how history is understood. Emma Green joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss her piece “The Right Side of History,” about Sweet’s essay and how historians should respond to the current political moment.

Well before launching the horrifying campaign against Ukraine a year ago, Vladimir Putin had been undermining Russia as well: normalizing corruption on a massive scale, and suppressing dissent and democracy.  One of the darkest moments on that trajectory was the poisoning of the opposition leader Alexey Navalny with the nerve agent novichok.  Navalny and a team of investigators had illustrated the corruption of Putin and his circle in startling detail, and Navalny began travelling the country to launch a bid for the Presidency.  “Every time when I heard Navalny giving an interview, I don’t think there was one interview where he wasn’t asked, ‘How come you’re still alive? How come they still haven’t they killed you?,’ ” recalls the Russian activist Maria Pevchikh, the head of investigations and media for Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. “And Navalny is rolling his eyes saying, ‘I don’t know, I’m tired of this question, stop asking. I don’t know why I’m still alive and why they haven’t tried to assassinate me.’ ”  Pevchikh was travelling with Navalny when he was poisoned, and helped uncover the involvement of the F.S.B. security services.  After surviving the assassination and recuperating abroad, Navalny returned to Russia only to be arrested and then detained in a penal colony. “I think Putin wants him to suffer a lot and then die in prison,” Pevchikh tells David Remnick. Still, she maintains hope. “The situation is so chaotic, specifically because of the war,” she says. “Is the likelihood of Navalny being released when the war ends high? I think it is almost certain.” Pevchikh also served as an executive producer of the documentary “Navalny,” which is nominated for an Academy Award.

The Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox News stems from the 2020 election and Donald Trump’s refusal to accept defeat. At stake is nearly $1.6 billion in damages. Filings released in the case contain a trove of e-mails and text messages from Fox hosts and executives. The documents reveal that many of the top decision-makers at the company didn’t seem to believe what their own network was saying about the 2020 election. Fox’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, admitted as much, in a deposition released this week. In our weekly roundtable, the New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos look at what the filings tell us about how Fox News operates, the current state of Republican politics, and the 2024 election. 

In November, Open AI introduced ChatGPT, a large language model that can generate text that gives the impression of human intelligence, spontaneity, and surprise. Users of ChatGPT have described it as a revolutionary technology that will change every aspect of how we interact with text and with one another. Joshua Rothman, the ideas editor of newyorker.com, joins Tyler Foggatt to talk about the many ways that ChatGPT may be deployed in the realm of politics—from campaigning and lobbying to governance. American political life has already been profoundly altered by the Internet, and the effects of ChatGPT, Rothman says, could be even more profound.

As the COVID-19 pandemic approaches its fourth year, we can begin to gain some clarity on which countries, and which U.S. states, had the best outcomes over time. In a conversation with David Remnick, Dhruv Khullar, a contributing writer and a practicing physician in New York, explains some of the key factors. Robust testing was key for public-health authorities to make good decisions, unsurprisingly. What also seems clear from a distance, Khullar says, is that social cohesion was a decisive underlying condition. This helps explain why the United States did poorly in its pandemic response, despite a technologically advanced health-care system. Peer pressure, in other words, trumped mandates. Khullar also speaks to Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about how misinformation and political polarization inhibit our country’s efforts on public health.

This week, Joe Biden visited Kyiv to mark the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion, and promised more American support for Ukraine. Although the United States has approved tens of billions of dollars of aid for Ukraine, largely with bipartisan support, the war is increasingly a focus in U.S. domestic politics, with some congressional Republicans and the Florida governor Ron DeSantis raising objections. The staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos gather for their weekly conversation, discussing how the war has upended expectations and may also upend American politics, as the far right and far left appear to be coming together in opposition to U.S. support for Ukraine.

In the past fifty years, a movement has formed to unite native and aboriginal peoples around the world under one umbrella term: Indigenous. But “indigeneity” is a slippery concept. Some groups qualify because they were the first people in their nation; some qualify even though they weren’t. Some have lost sovereignty over their land; some have regained it. As tribes face a variety of political crises, does this diverse global coalition create solidarity, or does it flatten complex problems? Manvir Singh, a writer and anthropology research fellow, raises these questions in an essay in this week’s New Yorker, “It’s Time to Rethink the Idea of the ‘Indigenous.’ ” He joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the trade-offs of embracing a complex identity label.

In the year since Russia’s invasion, Ukrainians have shown incredible fortitude on the battlefield. Yet an end to the conflict seems nowhere in sight. “Putin’s strategy could be defined as ‘I can’t have it—nobody can have it.’ And, sadly, that’s where the tragedy is right now,” Stephen Kotkin, a fellow at the Hoover Institution and a scholar of Russian history, tells David Remnick. “Ukraine is winning in the sense that [it] didn’t allow Russia to take that whole country. But it’s losing in the sense that its country is being destroyed.” Kotkin says that the standards for a victory laid out by President Volodymyr Zelensky set an impossibly high bar, and that Ukraine—however distasteful the prospect—may be forced to cut its losses. He suggests it could accept its loss of control over some of its territory while aiming to secure expedited accession to the European Union, and still consider this a victory.

Remnick also speaks with Sevgil Musaieva, the thirty-five-year-old editor-in-chief of Ukrainska Pravda, an online publication based in Kyiv, about the toll that the war is taking on her and her peers. “We have to destroy the Soviet Empire and the ghosts of the Soviet Empire, and this is the goal of our generation,” Musaieva says. “People of my generation, they don’t have family. They don’t have kids. They just dedicate their lives—the best years of their lives—to country.”

Kotkin says that the standards for a victory laid out by President Volodymyr Zelensky set an impossibly high bar, and that Ukraine—however distasteful the prospect—may be forced to cut its losses. He suggests it might need to accept its loss of control over some of its territory while aiming to secure expedited accession to the European Union, and still consider this a victory.

The California senator Dianne Feinstein announced her retirement this week. First elected in 1992, she became one of the most powerful senators in the chamber and was often spoken of as a possible Presidential contender, although she never ran. Also this week, Nikki Haley announced her bid to challenge Donald Trump for the Republican Presidential nomination. In Democratic circles, there have been new reports of hand-wringing over Vice-President Kamala Harris’s political prospects. That got the staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos thinking about 1992—the Year of the Woman, as it was known—and about what has and hasn’t changed for women in politics in the three decades since.

More than forty thousand people are dead after back-to-back earthquakes in Turkey and Syria last week. It’s a new level of disaster in a region that has been pummelled by violence and terrorism. As a Syrian refugee in Turkey told The New Yorker, “We’ve had eleven years of war in Syria . . . . But what happened in eleven years there happened in forty seconds here.” Meanwhile, a mysterious tale of espionage has been unfolding. After a Chinese spy balloon was seen over Montana, the United States identified several more floating bodies in its airspace. Are they proliferating, or have they been there for far longer than we realize?

Ben Taub, a New Yorker staff writer, has reported extensively from the Turkish-Syrian border, but his most recent piece for the magazine was about a man who travelled around the world in a balloon. He joins Tyler Foggatt to unravel two of the biggest stories in the news.

Thirty-four years ago, the Ayatollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, issued a fatwa calling for the assassination of the novelist Salman Rushdie, whose book “The Satanic Verses” Khomeini declared blasphemous. It caused a worldwide uproar. Rushdie lived in hiding in London for a decade before moving to New York, where he began to let his guard down. “I had come to feel that it was a very long time ago and, and that the world moves on,” he tells David Remnick. “That’s what I had agreed with myself was the case. And then it wasn’t.” In August of last year, a man named Hadi Matar attacked Rushdie onstage before a public event, stabbing him about a dozen times. Rushdie barely survived. Now, in his first interview since the assassination attempt, Rushdie discusses the long shadow of the fatwa; his recovery from extensive injuries; and his writing. It was “just a piece of fortune, given what happened,” that Rushdie had finished work on a new novel, “Victory City,” weeks before the attack. The book is being published this week. “I’ve always thought that my books are more interesting than my life,” he remarks. “Unfortunately, the world appears to disagree.” 

David Remnick’s Profile of Rushdie appears in the February 13th & 20th issue of The New Yorker.

President Biden gave a boisterous second State of the Union address earlier this week, sparring with Republicans over Social Security and Medicare. Designed to advance the President’s agenda, a State of the Union address is always overstuffed. But there were several hot-button issues that Biden hardly discussed, including abortion rights, the United States’ relationship with China, and the war in Ukraine. The staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos gather for their weekly conversation and consider what barely got a mention, and what that tells us about the current balance of power in Washington and the 2024 campaign. 

This week, the Democratic Party upended its primary schedule for 2024. Instead of the Iowa caucuses, South Carolina will now go first, giving more deciding power to Black voters. Is this an attempt to realign the Democratic Party’s priorities—or a token of gratitude for the state that pushed Biden to the Presidency in 2020? Benjamin Wallace-Wells, a New Yorker staff writer and reporter who has spent a lot of time in Iowa, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the influence of the early primaries, and the political calculations that went into changing them.

Forty years ago, Chuck D showed listeners how exciting, radical, and unpredictable hip-hop could be. His song “Fight the Power” became a protest anthem for a generation, and a Greek chorus in Spike Lee’s film “Do the Right Thing.” The Public Enemy front man talks with the staff writer Kelefa Sanneh about his life in music. “I wanted to curate, present, navigate, teach, and lead the hip-hop art, making it something that people would revere,” he says. Now, at sixty-two, Chuck D is an elder statesman of his genre, and also a critic of it and some of its more commercial impulses. His latest project is a four-part documentary, “Fight the Power: How Hip-Hop Changed the World,” which is airing now on PBS. “I’ve been to one hundred sixteen countries over thirty-eight years, so I’ve seen the changes,” he says. “People have made their way to me to say, ‘Chuck, this is what this art form has meant to me,’ in all continents except for Antarctica.”

The Republican Nikki Haley is widely expected to announce a Presidential run later this month. As a former U.N. Ambassador and South Carolina governor, Haley brings strong credentials to a sparse Republican field. The defeated former President Donald Trump is making his third bid for the White House. Governor Ron DeSantis, of Florida, is expected to run, but is so far waiting in the wings. Mikes Pence and Pompeo, Trump’s former Vice-President and Secretary of State, respectively, are also rumored to be contemplating bids. What can these nascent campaigns tell us about the state of the G.O.P.?  The staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos gather for their weekly conversation to explore the 2024 race for the Republican nomination, and what it might take to dislodge Trump as the front-runner.

Last Thursday, the Memphis Police Department announced that it was firing five police officers who beat a man named Tyre Nichols to death during a traffic stop. Shortly afterward, all five officers were jailed and charged with murder. Then the police department released body-camera and surveillance-camera footage of the incident. In the days that followed, the footage, and the question of whether or not to watch it, became the object of public preoccupation, superseding the violence it captured. Doreen St. Félix is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss police-brutality videos as cultural objects—and the police as a storytelling apparatus.

For years, many on the right have been lambasting a certain kind of progressive sensibility denoted with the term “political correctness”—endless fodder for Rush Limbaugh and others in the nineteen-nineties. But those semi-comic tirades were nothing compared with the serious political fight against “woke.” Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, for example, recently signed a so-called Stop Woke Act into law, and made the issue the center of his midterm victory speech. In Washington, there has been talk in the House of forming an “anti-woke caucus.” “I think ‘woke’ is a very interesting term right now, because I think it’s an unusable word—although it is used all the time—because it doesn’t actually mean anything,” the linguist and lexicographer Tony Thorne, the author of “Dictionary of Contemporary Slang,” tells David Remnick. “The references to ‘woke’ before 2016, 2017, 2018, were kind of straightforward. It means ‘socially aware,’ ‘empathetic,’ ” Thorne says. “Then the right, the conservative right, seizes hold of this word,” to heap blame on it for everything from deadly mass shootings to lower military recruitment.

The White House chief of staff is the second most powerful but 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; effective ones get nicknamed the Velvet Hammer. On Friday, the Biden Administration announced that Ron Klain will depart as chief of staff, after two long years in the job. The staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos gather for their weekly conversation to look at what Klain accomplished and what to expect from his replacement, Jeffrey Zients.

Last weekend, a man shot and killed eleven people at a ballroom-dance studio in Monterey Park, California, an Asian enclave outside of Los Angeles. Then, less than forty-eight hours later, in Half Moon Bay, California, another man shot and killed seven Chinese farmworkers. Notably, both alleged killers were older men with Asian backgrounds. While mass shootings take place with mind-boggling regularity in America, these attacks also happened amid an alarming rise in hate crimes targeting people of Asian descent. Jay Caspian Kang, a New Yorker staff writer and the author of “The Loneliest Americans,” joins Michael Luo, the editor of newyorker.com, to discuss how these two types of American violence shape our understanding of such disturbing events.

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 the North Shore Leader was sounding the alarm months before. The New Yorker staff writer Clare Malone took a trip to Long Island to speak with the Leader’s publisher, Grant Lally, and its managing editor, Maureen Daly, to find out how the story began. “We heard story after story after story about him doing bizarre things,” Lally told her. “He was so well known, at least in the more active political circles, to be a liar, that by early summer he was already being called George Scamtos.” Lally explains how redistricting drama in New York State turned Santos from a “sacrificial” candidate—to whom no one was paying attention—to a front-runner. At the same time, Malone thinks, “the oddly permissive structure that the Republican Party has created for candidates on a gamut of issues” enabled his penchant for fabrication. “[There’s] lots of crazy stuff that’s popped up in politics over the past few years. I think maybe Santos thought, Eh, who’s gonna check?”

President Biden has faced remarkable challenges in his first two years in office, from the overturning of the national right to abortion and the management of the U.S.’s COVID response, to the invasion of Ukraine. The staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos gather for their weekly conversation to look at what the Biden White House has accomplished in the past two years, and what the forty-sixth President can hope to achieve before 2024. Plus, the roundtable talks about the political implications of “The Getty Family’s Trust Issues,” Osnos’s latest article which explores how the ultra-wealthy avoid paying taxes. 

A few days before Christmas, the New York City pastor Lamor Whitehead—known to some as the “Bling Bishop”—was federally indicted for a number of alleged crimes. Among the charges was that Whitehead, a close friend of New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, tried to extort a businessman by claiming he had pull with City Hall. This is not the first time that friends of the Mayor have found themselves in legal trouble, or that Adams has faced questions about potential corruption. Eric Lach writes a regular column about New York City politics, and over the weekend he published a bombshell report on the long history between the Mayor and Whitehead. He joins Tyler Foggatt to talk about the persistent questions surrounding their relationship.  

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 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 to public-health experts. Woodward has released audio recordings of some of their interviews in a new audiobook called “The Trump Tapes,” which documents details of Trump’s state of mind, and also of Woodward’s process and craft. Despite having written critically of Trump in 2018, Woodward found his access unprecedented. “I could call him anytime, [and] he would call me,” Woodward tells David Remnick. His wife, Elsa Walsh, “used to joke [that] there’s three of us in the marriage.”

The House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government was launched on Tuesday, with Representative Jim Jordan, a combative ally of Donald Trump and a co-founder of the far-right Freedom Caucus, at the helm. This powerful new committee has the authority to investigate the federal government and how it has collected, analyzed, and used information about American citizens. Its mandate includes access to sensitive documents and details about covert actions, all of which fall under Congress’s typical oversight authority. But the new committee also provides a way for Republicans to advance the narrative that conservatives are systematically under attack. The staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos gather for their weekly conversation to look at historical parallels of this new committee, and how it will likely handle issues such as Hunter Biden’s laptop and the recent revelation that Joe Biden had a number of classified documents in his possession.

On Sunday, a mob of protesters ransacked Brazil’s capital, claiming that the recent Presidential election had been rigged. The riots, eerily reminiscent of the United States Capitol attack, were carried out in the name of Brazil’s former President, Jair Bolsonaro, a political figure who has been described as the “Trump of the Tropics.” Andrew Marantz, a New Yorker staff writer, was in Brazil during November’s election, when another former President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, defeated Bolsonaro. He joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the contagiousness of far-right political movements in the age of social media.

By Thursday evening, Kevin McCarthy had lost eleven votes for Speaker of the House, the longest series of inconclusive ballots for the role since 1859. Until the next Speaker is selected, nothing can happen in the House of Representatives: no new legislation, no top-secret briefings, not even paychecks for lawmakers. McCarthy’s fate remained unclear when the staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos gathered for their weekly conversation, on Friday morning. Whatever the outcome, they say, the entire saga is instructive about the current state of the Republican Party—who wields true power, what the role of big money is, and even what the next two years of divided government might look like.

Luke Mogelson, a contributing writer at The New Yorker, is one of the rare reporters who has seen the war in Ukraine from the front lines. He recently spent two weeks embedded with a group of fighters from around the world who had chosen to travel to Ukraine and join the war against Russia. In a new story in the magazine, he writes about the sophisticated and incessant violence of the war, and the mentality that keeps these volunteer soldiers there, fighting on behalf of a country that is not their own. He joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss what he witnessed.

During the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd, Broadway theatres were among the many institutions to announce a commitment to equity and protecting Black lives. But for many Black performers, the promise rang hollow. Frustrated by what he perceived to be a lack of accountability, the actor Britton Smith and colleagues at Broadway Advocacy Coalition organized events that pointed to the industry’s failures and called for genuine change. BAC won a Tony Award for its work. But two years later, “the fire [has] crumbled into ashes, and now the ashes are starting to settle,” Smith tells Ngofeen Mputubwele. “You have to go through a process of (finding) peace. … Some people are horrible. Some people want to learn, some people don’t. Some people want to keep their power, some people don’t.”

2022 was the year that the contours of the post-pandemic world started to heave into view. Critical aspects of domestic and international politics were reordered. The staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos gather for their weekly conversation to consider the most important stories of 2022. They talk through the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, changing perceptions in Washington of the U.S.-China relationship, and the immense toll of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Plus, they offer some year-end reading and watching recommendations.

In 2022, three hundred and forty pieces of legislation in twenty-three states targeted L.G.B.T.Q. rights. The most high-profile was Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill—officially the Parental Rights in Education Act—introduced by Governor Ron DeSantis. The law limits the discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in grade-school classrooms, including through the removal of books and other educational materials. DeSantis, of course, won a landslide reëlection contest in November, with parental rights a central part of his platform. In July, when the “Don’t Say Gay” law was newly implemented, Jessica Winter joined Tyler Foggatt to discuss the history of queer children’s literature, why the right finds it so dangerous, and how its banning will affect the lives and education of young people.

This episode was originally released on July 14, 2022.

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 collection called “American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time.” Then she hit the road, visiting community centers, senior centers, prisons, and colleges, and reading poems written by herself and others for groups small and large. “It was exhausting, and exhilarating, and it was probably the best thing I could have done as an American,” she told The New Yorker’s poetry editor, Kevin Young. 

This segment originally aired July 5, 2019.

On Monday, the House select committee investigating January 6th voted unanimously to refer Donald Trump to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation over the attack on the Capitol, including a charge of insurrection. The staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos gather for their weekly conversation to talk about the committee’s eighteen-month probe and what’s next for the forty-fifth President.

After a nearly eighteen-month investigation, which included televised hearings and more than a thousand interviews, the January 6th Committee is set to release its final report. As indicated by the executive summary, the report will lay bare who is to blame for the Capitol attack: Donald Trump, unambiguously. The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, authored the foreword to a publication of the full report being co-issued by the magazine and Celadon Books. He joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the committee’s exhaustive work, the historic nature of its criminal referral, and the possible outcomes ahead for Trump.

Nancy Pelosi has been one of the most powerful people in Washington for decades. As the first woman to serve as Speaker of the House, she shaped and passed monumental pieces of legislation—from Obamacare to the Inflation Reduction Act—often with slim majorities. She learned lessons as part of a powerful Baltimore political family and then went on to navigate sexism in Washington politics and stand up to Donald Trump. The staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos gather for their weekly conversation to discuss the secret to Pelosi’s effectiveness. Plus: what the next two years might hold for Kevin McCarthy as he takes over the role and navigates narrow Republican control.

Last week, the Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema announced that she would be leaving the Democratic Party and registering as an Independent—a decision that seems especially dramatic given the Democrats’ slim majority. Yet Sinema is joining a growing bloc of about forty per cent of the electorate that does not identify with either party. Amy Davidson Sorkin joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the causes of this widespread dissatisfaction, and whether an Independent movement could energize electoral politics in our highly partisan moment. “In theory, a third party would be great, and yet it’s so worrisome because there’s all of these real threats to democracy in the last few years,” Sorkin says. “But another threat to democracy is people feeling deeply alienated from politics and like there is no home for them.”

For Washington insiders and people in the media, Politico publishes some of the wonkiest reporting inside the Beltway. It’s not what you’d call a mass-market publication, but it’s highly influential—it was Politico that obtained and published Samuel Alito’s draft opinion of the Supreme Court decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade. The German news publisher Axel Springer, led by the C.E.O. Mathias Döpfner, acquired Politico last year for more than a billion dollars. “I believe that journalism has a very bright future if we get some things right,” Döpfner tells David Remnick. The C.E.O. relishes taking provocative stances, but he has been a vocal critic of media outlets that he says increasingly cater to partisan audiences; he cites as an example the resignation of a New York Times editor over the publication of a right-wing opinion piece. “It is not about objectivity or neutrality,” he tells Remnick. “It is about plurality.” Politico, Döpfner says, is taking “a kind of contrarian bet: if everybody polarizes, the few who do differently may have the better future.”

It’s been a busy week in national politics: Raphael Warnock triumphed over Herschel Walker in the Georgia runoff, Kyrsten Sinema left the Democratic caucus in the Senate, and the Democrats proposed a new calendar for the 2024 Presidential primaries. There are also the myriad investigations into Donald Trump, and criminal convictions of Trump Organization companies for tax fraud. The staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos gather for their weekly conversation, starting with Donald Trump’s recent call to “terminate” the Constitution, so that he can be reinstated as President or have the 2020 election be “redone.” 

Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, won reëlection by a stunning nineteen-point margin. With that kind of popularity—in a state with twenty-nine electoral votes—he seems well positioned to run for President. To do so, he must win supporters away from Donald Trump, who has already announced a 2024 run, in a speech delivered from Mar-a-Lago. DeSantis has questioned the “huge underperformance” of Trump-endorsed Republicans in the midterms, while touting his own brand of politics. Could he be the next leader of the G.O.P.? Dexter Filkins, who profiled the Governor earlier this year, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss how Florida became ground zero of the new Republican Party.

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 Mike Pence’s then-lawyer asking Luttig to publicly back Pence’s decision not to attempt to overturn the election the next day. Luttig tweeted that the Vice-President had no constitutional authority to stop the election, and suddenly the judge was thrust into the center of the crisis.

Now Luttig is siding with Democrats as co-counsel on the Supreme Court case Moore v. Harper, which he tells David Remnick is “the most important case, since the founding, for American democracy.” At the heart of the debate is the independent-state-legislature theory, a once-fringe legal concept that Donald Trump and his allies believe should have allowed Pence to reject the popular vote in 2020. If the court adopts the theory, it could grant legislatures essentially unfettered authority to run national elections; they could not be challenged even if the election violated the state constitution. Such power, in the hands of a gerrymandered legislature, could be used to bypass the popular vote and appoint a new slate of electors, effectively empowering state lawmakers to choose a winner. The court will hear the case on December 7th.

All week, Washington, D.C., has been talking about Donald Trump’s dinner with Nick Fuentes, a notorious white supremacist and Holocaust denier. A wave of prominent Republicans have repudiated the dinner and anti-Semitism, including Senators Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney. Trump’s former Vice-President, Mike Pence, condemned the meeting as well, with the caveat that he didn’t think his former boss was a bigot or an anti-Semite. But the issue goes beyond a single meal. The staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos gather for their weekly conversation, to look at the modern history of the far right in Republican politics.

Anger over China’s “Zero-COVID” policy erupted in protests this week. It’s a startling and nearly unheard-of challenge to President Xi’s power, a short time after he secured a third term in office. The anger over Zero COVID is unique, the staff writer Jiayang Fan tells the host Tyler Foggatt, because it has united disparate groups across China that transcend class and geography. But Fan cautions about concluding this moment is the start of a revolution: “These political wobbles are something that the Communist Party is accustomed to, to a certain degree, despite trying to prevent it at all costs.” A clampdown seems to be already under way.  

The protests also arrive at a delicate moment in U.S.-China relations. Tensions over trade and Taiwan have flared. The Biden Administration has even criticized China’s Zero-COVID restrictions and lockdowns. “I can see Beijing using Biden’s words as a piece of evidence that the protests in China are not organic but somehow seeded by hostile foreign agents,” Fan says. “Even though clearly not many foreigners are getting into China these days.”

Many of the most important and powerful people in Washington, D.C., are on the older side. Joe Biden turned eighty last week. Mitch McConnell is also eighty. Nancy Pelosi, who recently stepped away from a leadership position in her party, is eighty-two. All three of these leaders have delivered big victories for their respective parties. But there is a question of whether America is becoming a gerontocracy—a country ruled by the elderly. The staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos gather for their weekly roundtable conversation to ask: Do age and experience impart wisdom for troubled times, or can they create an inability to confront new ways of thinking?

Supposedly, things in Hollywood have been changing for women and people of color. After the #MeToo, #OscarsSoWhite, and Black Lives Matter movements, leaders in the entertainment industry promised a lot: new kinds of stories were going to be told, by newly diverse writers, showrunners, and casts. In short, Hollywood’s long history of sexism and discrimination was going to be “reckoned” with. But, as studios have shifted with changing social expectations, there’s been talk of a backlash within Hollywood. Actors and studio execs, who were previously worried about getting “cancelled” by their progressive fans, have expressed feelings of “fatigue.” In a wide-ranging conversation about politics, entertainment, and social media, Doreen St. Félix, a staff writer who was previously The New Yorker’s television critic, offers some perspective on the current mood in Hollywood and what makes for good art. 

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 led to indictments and arrests on charges of wire fraud, racketeering, and money laundering around the globe. Headlines have been filled with reports of the deaths of workers who constructed the facilities. “People are normally careful enough not to leave a paper trail,” the contributor Heidi Blake notes. But she says, of investigating FIFA, “I’ve never seen graft and corruption documented in this kind of detail.” Blake speaks with David Remnick about “The Ugly Game,” which she co-authored with Jonathan Calvert, and how Qatar came to host the World Cup.

Donald Trump announced his third bid for the White House this week. But the landscape is very different from when he glided down the Trump Tower escalator in 2015. He has lost the popular vote twice. He has been impeached twice. He is facing numerous criminal investigations, including for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election. Many of his hand-picked candidates lost key midterm races. The staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos draw on their deep political reporting to break down the significance of this week’s announcement, along with the news that Nancy Pelosi is stepping down as the leader of the House Democrats.

**This conversation was recorded hours before Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the appointment of a special counsel in the investigations of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and the discovery of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

​​Nearly four hundred election deniers ran in the midterms, and not only did the highest-profile among them lose their races, they even willingly conceded. Does this mean that Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement has run out of political steam? Or is it merely shapeshifting for a new era? Rachel Monroe, who has been reporting from conspiracy-ridden Maricopa County, Arizona, and Sue Halpern, who has written extensively about the fragility of our voting machines, join Tyler Foggatt to discuss the challenges of building public trust in our elections.

Today we’re unveiling The Political Scene, an expanded and reimagined version of our flagship politics podcast, showcasing the great political journalism of The New Yorker. We’re thrilled to announce four new hosts and a new weekly show. Tyler Foggatt, a senior editor at the magazine, is now the permanent host of in-depth conversations about the most pressing story of the week, featuring The New Yorker’s deep bench of writers and thinkers. New episodes will be released on Wednesdays. On Fridays, the staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos will anchor a new weekly roundtable. They’ll bring their vast expertise to bear on the biggest issues facing the country, providing an insider’s take on this perilous moment in American politics. And on Mondays, we’ll continue to bring you a politics-focussed segment from The New Yorker Radio Hour, presented by the magazine’s editor, David Remnick. As always, thank you for listening.

On Tuesday, as results from the midterms came in, Democrats were pleased to see that a predicted red wave had not come to pass. That is, with one exception: in the bright blue state of New York. So far, Republicans have taken ten of New York’s twenty-six congressional districts, flipping four seats away from Democrats. The significance of this number can’t be overstated in an election where Republicans only needed to flip five seats, nationwide, in order to take control of the House of Representatives. Eric Lach, a staff writer at The New Yorker, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the legacy of Andrew Cuomo, the state’s redistricting saga, and how the Republicans secured this unlikely electoral victory.

Until recently, the Reverend Russell Moore held a leading position—president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission—in the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the country. He left the S.B.C. last year after criticizing the Church’s response to scandals around sexual abuse and ongoing racism, which Moore describes as a sin. Moore, who now serves as the editor of Christianity Today, sits down with David Remnick to reflect on his connection with his faith, as well as the current state of Christianity in American politics. He has written that Christian nationalism is “liberation theology for white people,” and it is a danger to Christians—another form of secularization that makes religion an instrument. “Jesus always refused to have his gospel used as a means to an end,” he tells Remnick. “People who settle for Christianity or any other religion as politics are really making a pitiful deal.”

This week, the Supreme Court heard two cases—against Harvard and U.N.C.—that may very well 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 conservative John Roberts court is reëvaluating what “equal protection” really means, raising the idea that current methods of affirmative action are actually a thinly veiled form of racism. Jeannie Suk Gersen, a New Yorker contributing writer and a professor at Harvard Law School, was in attendance for Monday’s oral arguments. She joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss whether a more holistic admissions process is the best way to create diversity, and whether diversity is really the best ideal for universities to aspire to.

We are two weeks from the midterms, and things aren’t looking good for the Democrats. It’s a difficult political environment to campaign in; inflation and gas prices are high, and President Biden’s approval rating is low. Far-right candidates are polling better than expected in races at every level of the government. Because the Democrats’ majority in Congress was already narrow, even a few flipped seats could dictate the future of reproductive choice, and of public trust in the electoral system—as many Republican candidates still deny Biden’s victory in 2020. Some of the most crucial races are extremely tight, with the leading candidates ahead by a percentage point or less. Benjamin Wallace-Wells, who has been covering the midterms for The New Yorker, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss a few key races and what’s at stake in November.

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 Donald Trump supporters that the election was somehow stolen by President Joe Biden. J. Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, has been studying voting machines and software for more than a decade. “We made a number of discoveries, including that [voting machines] had vulnerabilities that basically anyone could exploit to inject malicious software and change votes,” he tells the staff writer Sue Halpern. Conspiracy theories aside, he says, we must address those vulnerabilities in computerized voting. But hand counting ballots, advocated by some election skeptics, is not a plausible solution. “Perhaps as time goes on we’ll get Republicans and Democrats to agree that there are some real problems in election security that we would all benefit from addressing. ”

Earlier this month, the House G.O.P. account tweeted, “Kanye. Elon. Trump.”—a declaration of the Party’s new mascots. Since then, Kanye West has cemented this role, with a series of bizarre publicity stunts. First, he appeared at Paris Fashion Week wearing a T-shirt that read “White Lives Matter.” Then he started making incendiary comments on social media and in interviews. On one podcast, West alleged that George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose—a claim that prompted the Floyd family to announce a $250-million lawsuit against him. On “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” West made anti-Semitic comments, some of which were so explicit that they were cut from the interview before it aired. When his social-media accounts were frozen, West, who now goes by the name Ye, declared his intention to buy Parler, a conservative alternative to Twitter. In a statement, Parler said that West’s support would help the platform “create a truly non-cancelable environment.” Andrew Marantz, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a tortured Kanye fan, joins the guest host Tyler Foggatt to discuss the radicalization of a hip-hop icon, which he wrote about this week, and the dilemmas of free speech online.

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 group has its roots in Mexico, where some medications used for at-home abortions are available at a lower cost over the counter. Volunteers—they call themselves “pill fairies”—are sourcing the medications at Mexican pharmacies and bringing them over the border. The work is increasingly perilous: in states like Texas, abetting an abortion is considered a felony, carrying long prison sentences. But, to Taladrid’s sources, the work is imperative. “I mean, there’s nothing else to do, right?” one woman in Texas, who had an abortion using the medication she received from a pill fairy, said. “You can’t just lie down and accept it. You can’t.”

Note: The interview excerpts featured in this story (with the exception of Verónica Cruz’s) are not the actual voices of Taladrid’s subjects. To protect their anonymity, the excerpts were re-recorded by actors.

Read Stephania Taladrid’s full reporting here.

Tomorrow marks the last expected public hearing of the Congressional January 6th Committee. The eight previous hearings have already revealed extraordinary information about just how close American democracy came to being overturned during the insurrection. But what has yet to be revealed? Will we learn what Trump was doing while the Capitol was stormed? Will action be taken? The New Yorker’s Washington bureau—Evan Osnos, Jane Mayer, and Susan B. Glasser—are joined at the New Yorker Festival by Representative Jamie Raskin, who is both a congressman and a constitutional scholar, to discuss the legal theory of the many possible cases against Donald Trump. “Trump is a one-man crime wave,” Raskin says. “Like, he personally affects the crime rate.”

In its last term, the Supreme Court dropped bombshell after bombshell. We saw 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 contributor Jeannie Suk Gersen wrote in July. She joins David Remnick to preview the Court’s fall term, highlighting the likely end of affirmative action and a notable case on gerrymandering.

Herschel Walker, the Trump-endorsed Republican Senate candidate in Georgia, encountered not one but two “October surprises” this week, after an ex-girlfriend of his claimed that Walker quietly paid for her to get an abortion in 2009. Walker, who has called for a national ban on abortions, called his ex-girlfriend’s claim a “flat-out lie,” even though she provided both a receipt from the clinic and a personal check that Walker issued to her. Meanwhile, Walker’s son, Christian Walker, denounced his father in two viral video rants. The Senate race in Georgia—between Walker and the incumbent, Raphael Warnock—is widely seen as one of the most important in the midterms, and in the aftermath of the allegations the Republican Party stood by its candidate. The New Yorker staff writer Charles Bethea joins the guest host Tyler Foggatt to discuss the scandal, the state of the race, and what it could mean for the balance of power in Washington.

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 attack and reports of political upheaval—has been treated with near-indifference. “Ukraine has been in the fight for its survival since the end of February, fully aware that Russia is ready to throw any and all resources at the attempted subjugation of the Ukrainian state,” he says. “And after things like the massacre in Bucha and other areas outside of Kyiv, earlier this spring, there’s not much that can surprise or shock or scare the Ukrainian public about what Russia is ready to do.”

Nearly two years into his Presidency, Joe Biden, with an executive order, announced a plan to forgive up to twenty thousand dollars in student debt for millions of borrowers. This plan, the first mass student-debt cancellation of its kind, will come at a big cost: an estimated four hundred billion dollars. This figure, released by the Congressional Budget Office, has fired up opponents, and, earlier this week, the first legal challenge to the policy was filed: a suit from a conservative law firm representing a plaintiff who claims that the plan will force borrowers in some states to pay undue taxes on the forgiven amount. And that may only be the beginning. Republican lawmakers have pledged to keep the challenges coming, to chip away at the policy, and perhaps even take it to the Supreme Court. The New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz has written about the politics of debt cancellation for newyorker.com. He speaks with the guest host Tyler Foggatt about populism in a polarized political environment, the triumphs of Occupy Wall Street, and the practical challenges of enacting centrist Democrats’ watered-down progressive reforms.

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 elected. Borowitz, the author of the long-running satirical column The Borowitz Report, examines this phenomenon in his new book, “Profiles of Ignorance: How America’s Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber.” “When Trump was elected, a lot of us supposedly knowledgeable people were taken by surprise,” he tells David Remnick. “But the more I researched the past fifty years, the more likely and plausible—and maybe even inevitable—his election was, because he actually had a great deal in common with his forebears.”

Last week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis flew roughly fifty migrants from San Antonio, Texas, to Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. Some of these migrants said that they were actively misled about where they were being sent and what would await them when they arrived. They have since filed a lawsuit, accusing DeSantis and other state officials of executing “a premeditated, fraudulent, and illegal scheme” in which vulnerable people were used as political props. The New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer has written extensively about the politics and policy of the southern border. He speaks with the guest host Tyler Foggatt about the rogue practices of Border Patrol, the surge of asylum seekers from Venezuela, and why Republican governors are “calling the shots” on the Biden immigration agenda.

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 Marc Elias, who has made the fight for voting rights his mission. The Supreme Court will hear two of his cases in its upcoming term, which starts next month. Earlier this year, the staff writer Sue Halpern profiled Elias for The New Yorker, and she spoke with him again recently about the legal fight ahead. “I really believe that when the history books are written,” says Elias, “what they write about our generation will be whether or not we were able to preserve democracy.”

Three quarters of a million people are expected to file past Queen Elizabeth II’s casket this week. After seven decades on the throne she was the only monarch most Britons have ever known. In that time she saw tremendous change within the United Kingdom and great turmoil within her own family. And yet, support for her among the British public barely wavered. In decades of polling, opposition to the monarchy in the U.K. has not risen above twenty per cent. The Queen accomplished something few political figures ever have: consistent, sustained popularity. But will King Charles III enjoy similar goodwill? John Cassidy is a New Yorker staff writer and a British expatriate. He joins the guest host Tyler Foggatt to discuss what the death of Queen Elizabeth II means for the U.K. and what he thinks the British public can expect from their new royal figurehead.

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, change has long seemed impossible. But now those schools are putting their hopes in an unlikely place: sports.

The John Jay Educational Campus in Park Slope, Brooklyn, houses four public high schools. Three of them have a student body with a Black-and-Latino majority; the fourth is disproportionately white and Asian. For a decade, students from all four schools shared a cafeteria and a gym but played on two separate sports teams—sometimes even competing against one other. Last year, the athletics programs merged, and the hope is that this change will break down some of the divisions between students. Angelina Sharifi, a student who plays volleyball, said that a team has to mesh in order to win. “And meshing is, like, the best feeling ever—having a pass, set, swing, that fits perfectly with one another,” she said. “That kind of unspoken connection that comes with volleyball is super-satisfying for me.

This is a story of how students and adults grapple with enduring inequities, and how the merger is playing out on the girls’ varsity volleyball team. “I want this to work. I really do,” the student Mariah Morgan said, “because it has the potential to be incredibly anti-racist.”

This reporting originally aired as part of the podcast “Keeping Score,” a co-production of WNYC Studios and The Bell.

This week, Liz Truss became the United Kingdom’s newest Prime Minister. She comes into office following a string of scandals in the Conservative Party under her predecessor, Boris Johnson, and faces a nation in the midst of a bleak economic forecast, including talk of a recession. Although she has proven popular with her party’s most loyal members, that doesn’t insure success with the wider British public. Sam Knight joined the guest host Susan B. Glasser on Wednesday—before Queen Elizabeth II passed, intensifying the mood of alarm in the United Kingdom—to discuss Johnson’s legacy, Truss’s political style, and how she might address the state of the economy.

Joe Biden has had a remarkable reversal of fortune this summer. He signed three bi-partisan bills, and the Inflation Reduction Act, a multi-billion-dollar combination of climate and healthcare legislation, was surprisingly revived and passed by Congress. That was accompanied by a drop in gas prices and a slowdown in inflation.  Suddenly it seems like the Democrats could hold onto the Senate, and even the House, in the upcoming midterms. But, according to the Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore, these successes do not make Biden the equivalent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Lyndon Baines Johnson, as some—the President among them—have suggested. Lepore speaks with the guest host Evan Osnos about this turning point in the Biden Administration, and about the inextricability of a President and their historical moment. The two also discuss the looming question of whether the Justice Department should prosecute Donald Trump, whether over the hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago or the insurrection. Of January 6th, Lepore says: “the crime is much more dire than Watergate, which just looks goofy and low rent compared to this.”

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 an internal warning that detailed specific calls for assassinating the judge and the agents involved in authorizing and carrying out the search. Where could this all be headed? David Remnick talks with Barbara F. Walter, the author of the new book “How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them.” Walter is a political scientist and a professor at the University of California, San Diego, and a co-director of the online magazine Political Violence at a Glance. She has studied countries that slide into civil war for the C.I.A., and she says that the United States meets many of the criteria her group identified. In particular, anti-democratic trends such as increased voting restrictions point to a nation on the brink. “Full democracies rarely have civil wars. Full autocracies rarely have civil wars,” she says. “It’s the ones that are in between that are particularly at risk.”

This segment was originally aired January 7, 2022.

This August marks the one year anniversary of American military withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s swift return to power in Kabul. It has been an excruciating year for the war-torn nation, marked by economic collapse, famine, and drought. Yet much of the aid that Afghanistan used to depend on has been blocked by sanctions aimed at pressuring the Taliban into a less repressive rule. As a result, nearly half of the country is at risk of going hungry. The journalist Rozina Ali travelled to Kabul in the spring, and spent time wicth former clients and staff of the largest network of women’s shelters in the country, which shut down so as not to legitimize the new régime. Ali joins the guest host Susan B. Glasser, who also reported from Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002, on the other end of the American intervention, to discuss the lives of the vulnerable women she met and the dilemma of negotiating with the Taliban. “We have to think about the very real scenario here, and actually the very real fact that girls can’t go to school and women can’t go to jobs if they are starving,” she says. 

The Republican Party is clearly no place for Black activism as most of us know it. Members of the Party inveigh against what they call critical race theory, and oppose efforts to redress racial discrimination in everything from school admissions to policing and public safety; in some quarters, simply acknowledging that racism exists is considered unpatriotic. And yet 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 Wright Rigueur tells David Remnick, “they are endorsing more Black candidates than they have in the past twenty-five years.” Wright Rigueur is a historian at Johns Hopkins University and the author of “The Loneliness of the Black Republican,” which covers the period from the New Deal through the Reagan Administration. The G.O.P., she argues, is exploiting a moment when the long-standing relationship between Black Americans and the Democratic Party is weakening, and it aims to capitalize on an “everyday conservatism” among voters. “It actually makes sense that in the aftermath of Barack Obama—with Black people’s levels of support and warmth for the Democratic Party in decline and the belief among a small sect of African Americans that [it] is just as racist as the Republican Party—that actually frees some people up to actually vote Republican.”

President Joe Biden’s political talents are inseparable from his folksy persona. In speeches, he emphasizes his modest upbringing and quotes aphorisms from his car-salesman father about dignity and honest labor. But this rendition of Biden’s upbringing, as Adam Entous puts it in this week’s magazine, is “woefully incomplete.” Entous has done a deep and groundbreaking investigation into the President’s family history, uncovering a previously untold rags-to-riches-to-rags story of how the Bidens landed in Scranton. It’s a very different story from the one that Biden usually shares with the public, complete with mansions, yachts, and war profiteering. Entous joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the Biden family’s finances, its history with addiction and scandal, and its influence on the President.

Last week, after more than a year of drama and deal-cutting, the Senate passed a complicated piece of legislation called the Inflation Reduction Act. Its name notwithstanding,  it’s being celebrated as the most important piece of climate legislation in the history of this country. And that is “a pretty low bar,” the staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert tells David Remnick, “because they’ve never really passed a piece of legislation on climate change.” While far smaller than the proposed Build Back Better legislation, Kolbert says, the bill includes significant tax credits that will incentivize the adoption of lower-carbon technologies. But the name of the bill, which seems to recognize that the mass of voters care more about the price of oil than a habitable planet, suggests that the political headwinds have not slackened. “George Bush famously said back in the early nineties [that] our way of life is not up for negotiation,” Kolbert notes. “Well… our way of life may not be compatible with dealing with climate change.” She mentions the recent devastating floods in Kentucky, a red state; “Is Kentucky now going to go vote for people who are firmly committed to climate action? I sadly don’t expect that to happen.”  

Kolbert is the author of books including “The Sixth Extinction” and “Under a White Sky.”

The Senate’s passage of the Inflation Reduction Act this week marks a turning point in the Biden Presidency. After more than a year of negotiations, the Democratic caucus agreed on a sweeping package, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, which includes many of the Party’s long-sought climate and healthcare initiatives. This was followed by the news that the F.B.I. executed a search warrant to look for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s primary residence. The staff writer Evan Osnos and Michael Luo, the editor of newyorker.com, break down these two momentous stories. They’re also joined by staff writer Susan B. Glasser, who along with Peter Baker, published a major story about Trump’s antagonism toward the military in the waning days of his Administration. “Were they contemplating using the military in the effort to overturn the election results?” Glasser says. “Your rational self wants to say, ‘No way, that’s crazy.’ But, in fact, the record that’s still being assembled suggests that they were considering doing so.”

Last month, the story of a 10-year-old rape victim captured national headlines. The young girl was forced to travel out of state because of Ohio’s draconian abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest, which would have been nearly unthinkable until very recently. Jane Mayer took a deep dive into statehouse politics to learn how a longtime swing state—Ohio voted twice for President Barack Obama—ended up legislating like a radically conservative one. Its laws, she says, are increasingly out of step with the state’s voters, and this is owing to a sweeping Republican effort at gerrymandering. While familiar, gerrymandering “has become much more of a dark art,” Mayer tells David Remnick, “thanks to computers and digital mapping. They have figured out ways now to do it that are so extreme, you can create districts [in which the incumbent] cannot be knocked out by someone from another party.” Mayer also speaks with David Pepper, an Ohio politician and the author of “Laboratories of Autocracy,” who explains how, when a district is firmly controlled by one party, the representative is driven by the primary process inexorably toward extremism, until you have “a complete meltdown of democracy.”

Gun manufacturers are the only industry explicitly protected by federal statute from liability lawsuits. Carmakers and cigarette companies can be taken to court if their products or marketing endanger the public. But a 2005 law called the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (P.L.C.A.A.) has made it very difficult to sue a gunmaker. Jonathan Lowy has. He’s the chief counsel and vice-president of legal at Brady, one of the country’s oldest advocacy groups against gun violence. Faced with a hostile Supreme Court and a Senate filibuster, Lowy believes civil litigation is a path forward for gun-control advocates. Speaking with Michael Luo, who is this week’s guest host and the editor of newyorker.com, Lowy explains his strategy of slowly chipping away at the P.L.C.A.A. to change how guns are made, marketed, and sold. 

The World Health Organization has declared the monkeypox outbreak a global health emergency. There have been nearly twenty thousand cases worldwide and nearly thirty-five hundred in the United States, with New York City a major hot spot. As cases continue to rise, there are questions about whether the Biden Administration has missed a critical window to contain the virus. The New York Times recently reported that shipments of more than three hundred thousand vaccine doses were delayed for weeks in the early days of the outbreak because of the government’s “wait and see” approach. (After this conversation was recorded, on Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration announced that eight hundred thousand more doses of monkeypox vaccine had been cleared for distribution.) The New Yorker contributing writer and practicing physician Dhruv Khullar joins the Political Scene guest host Michael Luo to talk about the monkeypox virus and what can be done to stem the exponential rise in cases. “The level of urgency and rapidity with which we should have addressed this outbreak did not seem to be there,” Khullar says. “[But] I don’t think we should give up hope. It’s still early days. . . . We eradicated monkeypox’s cousin smallpox. We know that we can do this with a forceful response.”

In New Mexico, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham has declared the state a “reproductive safe haven” between Arizona to the west, and Texas to the east. Already, she says, New Mexico’s few abortion clinics are seeing an influx of patients from outside its borders. “When you are a safe-haven state,” she says, “you put real stress on [the] current provider system.” Lujan Grisham speaks with David Remnick about her executive order—issued days after the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs—to prevent the extradition of abortion providers, a request that she expects to see from Texas law enforcement. Dobbs puts states at odds over one of the contentious issues of our time. “They’ve invited states now to fight with each other, sue each other,” she says; this is “the most despicable and horrible aspect, frankly, of this particular decision.”

On Thursday evening, the committee charged with investigating the January 6th attack on the Capitol presented what it has learned so far about President Trump’s behavior on that eventful day. As members of the President’s staff and family urged him to do something about the rioters, he watched television in the White House dining room. “He chose not to act,” as Representative Adam Kinzinger, a member of the committee, put it. The hearing featured testimony from military and security officials and the President’s legal counsel, and it included an outtake from an address on January 7th in which Trump admitted, “I don’t want to say the election’s over.” In the fourth installment of a special series for the Politics and More podcast, three members of The New Yorker’s Washington bureau—Evan Osnos, Susan B. Glasser, and Jane Mayer—take us through the revelations from this week’s hearing, the last of the summer.

The past few weeks have been full of unsettling indicators of the fragile state of our democracy. The January 6th committee has assembled a frightening account of how near the 2020 election came to being violently overturned. The Supreme Court has lurched rightward, striking down the constitutional right to abortion and issuing a series of momentous decisions on guns, environmental regulation, and the separation of church and state. Researchers have begun to view these  disparate political currents as part of a broader cultural, religious, and political phenomenon—one that is rooted in a specific reading of American history and, in particular, Christianity’s role in it. They call this concept “white Christian nationalism.” Samuel Perry, an associate professor at the University of Oklahoma and the co-author of “The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy,” joins the guest host Michael Luo to discuss the contours of this belief system, and the roles that guns and voting restrictions play in its implementation in U.S. politics 

Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill took effect this month. Signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis, it limits the discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity in grade school classrooms, in some cases banning it completely. It threatens the ability of teachers to affirm of the existence of LGBTQ students, and to share materials, including books, that depict or discuss queer lives. The legislation has inspired a number of copycat laws across the country, including in Texas, South Dakota, Indiana, Tennessee, and Alabama. For a special digital-only issue about the notion of family, Jessica Winter, a New Yorker writer and editor, has taken an in-depth look at the history of queer children’s literature, and the threats it faces in today’s political climate. She joins guest host Tyler Foggatt to discuss what these books mean to LGBTQ families, why the right finds them so dangerous, and how their banning will affect the lives and education of young people.

Justice Clarence Thomas once was an outlier for his legal views. But Thomas is now the heart of the Court’s conservative bloc, and his concurring opinion in the recent abortion ruling calls out some other precedents the Court might overturn. Jeannie Suk Gersen teaches constitutional law at Harvard Law School and clerked for former Justice David Souter on the Supreme Court; she has been covering the end of Roe v. Wade for The New Yorker, and she spoke with David Remnick about Thomas’s concurrence. It articulates a view more extreme than Justice Alito’s majority opinion, saying that other rights derived from privacy—such as contraception and same-sex intimacy—are not constitutional rights at all. “We have to remember he’s been saying it out loud for quite some time,” Suk Gersen says. “This is not a new thing from Justice Thomas. It’s just that we normally—over decades—didn’t pay that much attention to him, because he was alone in his dissents and concurrences.”

Last week, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark decision that established a constitutional right to abortion. Although this outcome had been anticipated for months—for years, even—it has had an immediate, visceral effect on abortion providers, those seeking abortions, and the nation at large. In some states, abortions stopped overnight; in others, there’s widespread confusion over what qualifies as legally acceptable circumstances for having an abortion. As states move to either outlaw abortion or codify it, the larger political question of “What next?” looms. The New Yorker contributing writer Stephania Taladrid and staff writer Jia Tolentino have both reported extensively on abortion access in the United States. They join the New Yorker senior editor and Politics and More guest host Tyler Foggatt. “Flat out, women will die in the course of ordinary pregnancy because of physician fears of doing anything that might make them liable for felony changes of performing an abortion,” Tolentino says. “It will make pregnancy significantly more dangerous for many, many people.”

When the New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz first heard that the Conservative Political Action Conference, the flagship event of the American conservative movement, was being held in Hungary, he thought it might be a joke. “A lot of people have worried for a few years now that the Republican Party is becoming more ambivalent about certain bedrock norms of American democracy,” Marantz told David Remnick. “To openly state, ‘We’re going to this semi-authoritarian country’ . . .  I thought it was maybe a troll.” But C.P.A.C. Hungary was very real, and the event demonstrated an increasingly close relationship between American conservatives and authoritarians abroad. Viktor Orbán wins elections and claims a democratic mandate, but his legislative maneuvers and rewrites to the constitution have rendered political opposition increasingly powerless. Marantz finds the admiration for him by many in America unsettling. “I couldn’t really imagine a Putin-style takeover” of power in America, Marantz says; but “this kind of technical, legalistic Orbán model” seems all too plausible.

Two hearings this week laid out the stark implications of President Trump’s efforts to stay in office. On Tuesday, members of the House Select Committee on January 6th heard testimony about attempts to deliver “fake” slates of electors to Congress. State election officials and poll workers spoke, in powerful terms, about the intense vitriol and harassment they were subjected to by Trump supporters, simply for doing their jobs. On Thursday, the Committee explored President Trump’s pressure campaign at the Justice Department to get top officials to go along with false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election. As Evan Osnos wrote for The New Yorker, “Trump’s political formula has rested on a dark genius at leveraging the powerful against the vulnerable, a tribe against a dissenter, the mob against the foe—and he nearly succeeded in using that recipe to overturn the election that he lost.” In the third installment of a special series for the Politics and More podcast, three members of The New Yorker’s Washington bureau—Osnos, Susan B. Glasser, and Jane Mayer—take us through the big developments at the hearings this week.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has shown himself uniquely skilled at attracting attention beyond the borders of his home state. Just this month, DeSantis blocked state funds for the Tampa Bay Rays’ stadium after players voiced support for gun control in the wake of the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas. He’s also continuing a fight to punish the Disney corporation for criticizing Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law. An Ivy League-educated anti-élitist firebrand, he is willing to pick a fight with anyone—reporters, health officials, teachers, Mickey Mouse—to grab a headline. DeSantis “practically radiates ambition,” the staff writer Dexter Filkins tells David Remnick. “He sounds like Trump, except that he speaks in complete sentences. . . . He’s very good at staking out a position and pounding the table and saying, I’m not giving in to the liberals in the Northeast.” Yet, despite having been anointed by Donald Trump in his primary election, DeSantis has refused to “kiss the ring,” and many see DeSantis as a possible opponent to Trump in a 2024 Republican primary.

This week, the House select committee held two more hearings to review its astonishing findings on the events of January 6, 2021, featuring testimony from onetime enablers of President Donald Trump: Bill Barr, the former Attorney General, and Bill Stepien, Trump’s former campaign manager. These hearings are revealing the extraordinary drama that was unfolding that day, not just on the Capitol lawn but also in the top ranks of the government, where Vice-President Mike Pence was being coerced to overturn the election. As Susan B. Glasser put it in her column for newyorker.com this week, “On Thursday, the House committee devoted its hearing to attempting to explain Trump’s scheme to pressure Pence—which unfolded in a series of inflammatory Presidential tweets, angry phone calls, and bizarre White House meetings that were a mix of constitutional-law seminars and live reënactments of ‘The Godfather.’ ” In the second installment of a special series for the Politics and More podcast, three members of The New Yorker’s Washington bureau—Glasser, Evan Osnos, and Jane Mayer—take us through the big developments at the hearings this week.

A widespread view that cities have become less safe in recent months is transforming local politics. Eric Adams became Mayor of New York City on a tough-on-crime platform. Anxiety about public safety has also played a significant role in the ongoing Los Angeles mayoral race. In San Francisco, Chesa Boudin—a reform-minded district attorney—was recalled by voters by a significant margin last week. Boudin had instituted a number of progressive reforms, from liberalizing bail policies to reducing jail populations through diversion programs. But those changes were buried by the perception that the city had descended into a state of chaos. His recall has been cast as a referendum on crime and on the public’s attitudes toward progressive criminal-justice policies. What were the voters in San Francisco blaming on Boudin? The New Yorker staff writer Benjamin Wallace-Wells recently wrote about Boudin’s recall. He speaks with the New Yorker senior editor Tyler Foggatt.

For months, the House Select Committee on January 6th has examined Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and cling to power. Roughly a thousand witnesses have been interviewed—including Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. Tens of thousands of documents have also been reviewed, such as text messages from the former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. The committee held its first public hearing last night and presented some of what it has learned. Representative Jamie Raskin had promised that the findings would “blow the roof off the House.” The New Yorker’s Washington correspondents Jane Mayer and Evan Osnos join guest host Susan Glasser to discuss the revelations.

Before the pandemic, Sara Nelson had emerged as one of the most visible leaders in the labor movement. The Association of Flight Attendants represents some fifty thousand workers and nearly twenty airlines, and, as the union’s international president, Nelson made regular appearances on CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, and Fox Business. During the pandemic, she became a critical voice amid reports of unruly and abusive passengers, urging Congress to pass greater protections for airline staff and pushing for restrictions on the sale of alcohol in airport terminals. “We’ve got a lot more work to do to get things under control,” Nelson tells Jennifer Gonnerman, who profiled her last month, “and make sure that people don’t think that when you get on a plane you get to punch the flight crew.” Organized labor is newly resurgent, with recent drives at Amazon making headlines. Nelson speaks about the push to unionize flight attendants of Delta Air Lines, which—if successful—would be one of the largest union wins in recent history, covering almost twenty-four thousand workers.

The National Rifle Association has been one of the most feared groups in Washington, D.C., for decades. It profoundly reshaped the conversation around guns in America through a combination of financial prowess, lockstep messaging, and an ability to motivate its membership. But, in recent years, multiple lawsuits—including one from the New York State attorney general—have drained the organization's finances, and membership and revenue have declined precipitously. In light of this, and in the wake of several horrific mass shootings, the guest host and New Yorker staff writer Susan B. Glasser seeks out the root of our political gridlock on gun violence. She talks with Mike Spies, a reporter for The Trace and a contributor to The New Yorker who has reported extensively on the N.R.A. He argues that it’s time to stop attributing the Republican Party’s stance on the Second Amendment to the gun lobby. “I don’t think there is anything the N.R.A. can do to any federal lawmaker right now,” Spies says. “They don’t have the money to spend, they don’t have the contractors who are responsible for the messaging to help them carry out the rhetoric and campaigns that would have previously resonated with voters.”

In America, unthinkable violence has become routine.  In the wake of the Buffalo and Uvalde mass shootings, David Remnick speaks with the researchers Jillian Peterson and James Densley, whose book “The Violence Project” is the most in-depth study of mass shooters. Pro-gun politicians may continue to block any measures to reduce violence, but we can understand better a different side of the equation: what motivates these crimes. David Remnick speaks with two criminal-justice researchers who have studied mass killers, James Densley, of Metropolitan State University, and Jillian Peterson, of Hamline University. They point out that mass shootings have risen alongside deaths of despair, including overdoses and suicide.  “The perpetrator goes in with no escape plan,” Peterson points out.  “What we can learn from suicide prevention can teach us how to prevent some of these mass shootings.  We haven’t connected these two things.” We also hear from a 70-year-old resident of Uvalde, Texas, about the aftermath of the killings in a tight-knit community.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine grinds on into its third brutal month, with no end in sight. But, in ways large and small, the conflict has shifted. At the start of the war, the Russian military hoped to seize Kyiv and decapitate the Ukrainian government—but then quickly retreated in the face of sustained resistance. The fiercest fighting is now in the eastern Donbas region, but Russian troops have also occupied the southern Ukrainian city of Melitopol since February, upending civilian life in other ways. The New Yorker contributing writer Joshua Yaffa, formerly the magazine’s Moscow correspondent, has been reporting from Ukraine throughout the war. He spoke to the guest host Susan Glasser from Kyiv about the state of the conflict. “This is a war against the totality of a country, against the totality of a people, and, even if there is a moment of relative peace in the capital, that doesn’t mean that Russia’s aims have in any way narrowed in their ambition, narrowed in their scope,” Yaffa says. “And if Russia is able to cleave off the Donbas, as seems to be its major or central military goal at the moment, that doesn’t mean the war ends there.”

Across the United States, conservative politicians are leading a backlash against L.G.B.T.Q. identity, framing legal restrictions as protection of children. Several states have introduced laws to ban medical treatments known as gender-affirming care—including hormones and puberty blockers—prescribed to adolescents. Major medical organizations have approved the treatments, but Rachel Monroe, who has been following efforts to ban gender-affirming care in Texas, found that doctors wouldn’t speak out about the political furor because the resulting attention could endanger themselves, their clinics, and their patients. One specialist, however, was willing to go on the record: Dr. Gina Sequeira, a co-director of the Gender Clinic at Seattle Children’s. “I was growing so frustrated seeing the narrative around gender-affirming care provision for youth so full of misinformation and so full of blatant falsehoods that I couldn't in good conscience continue to stay quiet,” Sequeira told her. Doctors cite a body of data that gender-affirming care reduces the risk of suicide, which is high among trans youth. Sequeira’s Seattle clinic has been fielding calls from Texas families looking to relocate if the proposed ban in Texas prevents their children from accessing care. “If we were to stop care, I would be afraid that our child wouldn’t survive,” the mother of a trans girl told Monroe. “There’s no question that she’s not safe to herself.”

Last weekend, an eighteen-year-old white man killed ten people and injured three in a Tops grocery store located in Buffalo’s majority-Black East End. It was a deliberately planned attack, motivated by white-supremacist ideology; the gunman searched by Zip Code to find the highest concentration of Black people in his area, and then he drove two hundred miles to reach them. This segregation of Black people in an underserved neighborhood, in the third poorest city in the nation, is reflective of a more commonplace and more pervasive form of American racism. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and a professor of African American Studies at Princeton. She joins the guest host Evan Osnos to discuss the politics of housing, policing, and education in Buffalo, and how these structural forces relate to the rise of violent right-wing extremism. “We are so enamored with the idea of racism as explicit, as you most certainly know it when you see it,” Taylor says. “But these other manifestations—that mean that forty per cent of Black children in Buffalo live under the poverty line, that thirty-eight per cent of Black adults live under the poverty line, that the quality of housing on the East Side of Buffalo is wood-based and deteriorating compared to the brick houses of the West Side of the city—these kinds of insidious forms of racism are allowed to continue unaddressed for decades.”

Assuming that Justice Samuel Alito’s final opinion in the Mississippi abortion case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization gets majority support, there will be profound social, political, and health-care implications across the United States. Margaret Talbot, Peter Slevin and Jia Tolentino assess the world after Roe. Opponents will surely not stop by leaving abortion at the state level but will try to ban it under federal law. Tolentino discusses fetal personhood, the legal concept that a fertilized egg is entitled to full legal rights, which severely compromises the bodily autonomy of a pregnant woman. There is already speculation that access to birth control and same-sex marriage could be challenged. “If people feel panicked about all those things, I wouldn’t invalidate that,” Tolentino says. But focussing on the immediate post-Roe future, she says, presents enough to worry about. “This is a universe of panic on its own.”

China’s “zero COVID” strategy has brought the bustling metropolis of Shanghai to a standstill, with many of its twenty-five million residents sealed in their homes. These exceptionally strict measures are being met with some public resistance, but Xi Jinping’s government has largely doubled down on its approach. Peter Hessler has been in and out of China for twenty-five years. He recently returned from two years of teaching and writing in Sichuan Province. His experience led him to a conclusion that may surprise some Americans: that, for many young people in China, the experience of the pandemic has reinforced “a general idea that the benefits of the Chinese system greatly outweigh its flaws.” And, even if people resent heavy-handed government control, they also bristle when outsiders criticize it. Hessler joins guest host Evan Osnos to talk about teaching in China and how the pandemic has reshaped the public’s views about the government.

Last week, a draft opinion was leaked which suggests that a majority of Supreme Court Justices are ready to overturn the precedents of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey—the decisions that have guaranteed a right to abortion at the federal level.  The case in question is Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which Mississippi officials seek to close the state’s last remaining abortion clinic under a law that bans performing an abortion after the fifteenth week of pregnancy—a point well before the time of fetal viability.  In November, Rachel Monroe visited the Jackson abortion clinic, speaking to its director, Shannon Brewer; a physician who asked to remain anonymous, describing the risks to abortion providers; and a patient, who had driven all night from Texas, where she was not able to obtain an abortion. “Somebody else is telling me what I should do with my body, and it’s not right,” she said. “It’s my body. It’s my decision. It’s my choice. It’s my life. It’s my soul, if it’s going to Hell.”

Produced with assistance from Ezekiel Bandy and Kim Green. 

This segment originally aired November 19, 2021.  

For nearly fifty years, conservative groups have been laser focused on overturning Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision which legalized abortion. In that time, they’ve made significant inroads, chipping away at access to abortion in a number of states. But now they seem on the cusp of near total victory. The recent leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, indicates that a majority of the justices seem ready to overturn Roe completely. It would be the biggest reversal of personal rights in the United States in more than a generation, and access to abortion in nearly two dozen states would end overnight. Other rights—from access to contraception to gay marriage, could face serious legal challenges. Guest host Evan Osnos speaks with the New Yorker contributing writer and Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen about what the draft ruling means for reproductive rights in America, and about just how far this Supreme Court might go in the future. “That is what I see in this opinion: that there is a roadmap for litigants immediately after this case comes down to try to pursue a constitutional right to fetal life,” Gersen says. “A right to fetal life, protected by the Constitution as a fundamental right, could have the effect of making abortion illegal in every state.”

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine enters a third month, prospects of ending the conflict are still nowhere in sight, and there seems to be no end to the destruction that Vladimir Putin is willing to inflict. Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, tells David Remnick that he expects Russia to continue escalating its attack leading up to May 9th, a day of military celebration in Russia commemorating the German surrender in the Second World War. “They will escalate attacks by missiles from the sky to terrorize Ukraine in general,” he predicts, “and to make the government more susceptible to surrender.”

In contrast to President Volodymyr Zelensky—who was a political rookie when he took office, in 2019—Kyslytsya has spent his career in Ukraine’s foreign service. In the years after the Soviet breakup, he says, Ukraine wanted to both placate its neighbor and ally itself with Western institutions. This created a “cognitive dissonance,” he says, that prevented Ukraine from recognizing the extent of Russian aggression. Having watched as diplomacy failed, Kyslytsya still has to separate his work from the personal toll of Russia’s invasion on his family and friends. “I try not to engage emotionally because if I engage emotionally too much, I am not operational,” he says. “And if I am not operational . . . I’m of very little use for my government.”

The past fifteen years have been among the most tumultuous in our history. The tumult is driven by a question whose answer could determine our future: What kind of country do we live in? A buffeted but resilient democracy, or a nation increasingly known among its own citizens for its divisions rather than for its shared commitment to tolerance, equality, and freedom? Evan Osnos, Susan B. Glasser, and Jane Mayer join Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the past, present, and future of the democratic ideal worldwide.

Ronan Farrow has published an investigation into a software called Pegasus and its maker, NSO Group. Pegasus is one of the most invasive spywares known; it allows users—including law-enforcement officials or government authorities—to hack into a target’s smartphone, gaining access to photos, messages, and the feeds from a camera or microphone. NSO markets Pegasus as a tool to catch terrorists and other violent criminals, but once a surveillance tool is on the market it can be very difficult to control. Farrow finds that Pegasus is being used to suppress political opposition in democratic nations, including Spain. The largest known cluster of Pegasus attacks has targeted people in Catalonia who support the independence movement, which the Spanish government views as a threat. “This is not just an information-gathering tool,” Farrow tells David Remnick; “It’s an intimidation tactic, and it works.”

In a few weeks, primary elections for the midterm races will be fully under way. The electoral map is stacked against Democrats, and the country is as divided than ever. But a new generation of progressive organizers and activists, spurning the advice of expensive consultants and the fund-raising tactics of seasoned politicians, are developing strategies to encourage accord within the Party, and to win over Independents and work with Republicans, from the ground up. Chloe Maxmin is a state senator in Maine, and the author, with her former campaign manager, Canyon Woodward, of the forthcoming book “Dirt Road Revival.” Maxmin and Woodward join Dorothy Wickenden to discuss how the Democratic Party lost touch with rural voters, and what Democrats must do to recapture their loyalty.

The Internet can be a scary place in real life, and far more so in Jane Schoenbrun’s film “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,” which premièred at the Sundance Film Festival last year and is being released in theatres and streaming. It’s a horror movie centered on a lonely and bored teen-age girl named Casey, who spends most of her time being online and trying to figure out who she is. She undertakes a ritual that she’s read about—the so-called World’s Fair Challenge—which is said to cause unknown and possibly dire changes. “Everyone wants to know, ‘Do you think the Internet is good or the Internet is bad?’ ” Schoenbrun told the Radio Hour’s Alex Barron. “That’s like asking, ‘Do you think that people are good or bad?’ There’s not a simple answer.” They spoke about the forty-year history of movies depicting the online world.

This month, the C.D.C. announced plans to end Title 42, a public-health order, issued by the Trump Administration at the start of the pandemic, that gives the federal government broad authority to turn away migrants and asylum seekers at the southern border. Public-health experts and some Democrats have pressured President Biden to repeal the order, but others, including several of his own top advisers, argue that the repeal will substantially increase the number of migrants at the southern border, further straining a chaotic immigration system, and hand Republicans a campaign issue for the midterms: a “migrant surge” approved by the Administration. Jonathan Blitzer joins Dorothy Wickenden to talk about how immigration is becoming another political liability for the Biden Administration.

Ketanji Brown Jackson has been voted in as a Supreme Court Justice—the first Black woman to serve in that role. But, to reach this milestone, Jackson has faced enormous hurdles at every turn, including confirmation hearings that featured blatant political grandstanding and barely disguised race-baiting. Nominations have become so partisan that, on both the left and the right, the Court itself is commonly viewed as merely a tool of the party that picked its members, and several polls report a decline in public confidence in the Court. “The real political end” of the attacks on Brown Jackson, Hill believes, “is to denigrate her personally, honestly, but also to really reduce the validity of any opinions that she ultimately writes. Even though . . . many of her opinions will be dissenting opinions, dissenting opinions can carry a lot of weight.” Meanwhile, Justice Clarence Thomas’s decision not to recuse himself from cases related to the January 6th insurrection, even after it came to light that his wife Ginni Thomas actively sought to influence Trump Administration officials to try to overturn the Presidential election, also undercuts the court’s impartiality. It seems that the reputation and independence of the Court is in serious trouble. 

Anita Hill, a professor of social policy, law, and women’s studies at Brandeis University, spoke with David Remnick about the Ketanji Brown Jackson hearings, along with the staff writer Jane Mayer, who is reporting on the Ginni Thomas controversy. (Hill, who testified in the 1991 Thomas nomination hearings, has declined to speak about his stance on recusal.)

Last week, Russian troops withdrew from Bucha, a suburb of the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. Ukrainians returning to the city discovered the horrific aftermath. According to President Volodymyr Zelensky, more than three hundred civilians in the city were killed. Investigators have found evidence of torture, rape, beheading, dismemberment, and the intentional burning of corpses. A mass grave was dug to accommodate the bodies. Zelensky has referred to the massacre as evidence of genocide. Philip Gourevitch, a New Yorker staff writer, has written for the magazine about the genocides in Rwanda and Cambodia. He joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss his past reporting, why the “never again” discourse around genocides has failed to prevent them, and whether further war crimes in Ukraine are inevitable.

With a judge declaring that Donald Trump “more likely than not” committed a felony in his attempt to overturn the Presidential election, the congressional committee investigating January 6th is racing to finish its work before the looming midterm elections. Amy Davidson Sorkin and the legal scholar Jeannie Suk Gersen talk with David Remnick about the law and the politics of holding Trump accountable. But criminal conviction, they agree, does not equal accountability—and might only have inflammatory effects on a drastically divided nation. “There’ve been ideas thrown around about … conviction, [that] maybe we could just disqualify him from running again,” Davidson Sorkin says. “I strongly believe that that’s not the answer.  This has to be accomplished by democratic means. And, ultimately, it has to be done on Election Day.”

Mackenzie Fierceton grew up in a middle-class suburb of St. Louis. Her mother was a doctor, and she attended a prep school. But she was allegedly abused at home, and she ended up in foster care, with no financial support from her family. She won a full scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, and a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford. Then the father of one of Fierceton's high school peers contacted Penn, saying that the news coverage of Fierceton's past was inaccurate. Rachel Aviv, a New Yorker staff writer, joins me to discuss how Fierceton lost her Rhodes Scholarship, and what her story tells us about the internal politics of universities as they seek to diversify their student bodies.

A wave of book bannings sweeping the country, along with conservative fury over titles like “Antiracist Baby,” seems like a backlash against the heightened racial consciousness of the post-George Floyd era. The historian and staff writer Jill Lepore sees these conflicts as the continuation of an old dynamic. She relates today’s “anti-anti-racism” movement to the anti-evolution campaign of the nineteen-twenties, which included the prosecution of a Tennessee teacher for teaching Darwin’s theory in a high-school class. Lepore tells David Remnick that what links these battles over biology and history is the argument that parents have the right to determine their children’s education in public schools.

Historically, the high cost of renewables has been one of the greatest hurdles in breaking our dependency on oil and gas. But recent research indicates that advances in renewable-energy production have made it cheaper than fossil fuels. Bill McKibben, a contributing writer to The New Yorker and the founder of the environmental group 350.org, joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the new economic realities of renewable energy, and how they could affect the global battle against climate change.

Kraina FM is a radio station that broadcasts in Kyiv and more than twenty other cities, playing Ukrainian-language rock and pop. When Russia invaded Ukraine, it took on the mantle of “the station of national resistance,” airing news bulletins and logistical information like requests for supplies. The radio hosts began adding jokes about the invading Russians, and advice from a psychologist about talking to children about the war; a writer told fairy tales on air to occupy those kids during the stressful nights of wartime. The station staff has dispersed, with Bogdan Bolkhovetsky, the general manager, and Roman Davydov, the program director, holed up in a town in the Carpathians, keeping production moving over unreliable Internet and communicating with listeners by text. They don’t know how many of their broadcasting stations are still functioning, and their tower in Kyiv could be destroyed at any time. But “we are not doing anything heroic,” Bolkhovetsky told Nicolas Niarchos, who visited their makeshift studio. “We are still in a lot of luck, having what we have right now. Thousands of people were not so lucky as we are. . . . We’re just doing what we can under these unusual circumstances.”

In 2019, Franklin Tao, a professor of chemistry at the University of Kansas, was arrested on suspicion of spying for the Chinese government. Tao’s case was the first under a program called the China Initiative, a collaboration between the Justice Department, the F.B.I., and other federal agencies to combat what was perceived as a growing vulnerability to Chinese espionage, particularly in the realms of economics, technology, and academia. But Tao was never charged with espionage, and his became one of many controversial cases undertaken by the China Initiative, whose critics accuse it over pursuing unsubstantiated and overblown cases, and of stoking anti-Asian sentiment. Gideon Lewis-Kraus joins the guest host Evan Osnos to discuss Tao’s case, the origins and impacts of the China Initiative, and the complexities of battling international espionage.

It’s impossible to understand the destruction and death that Vladimir Putin is unleashing in Ukraine without understanding his most basic conviction: that the breakup of the Soviet empire was a catastrophe from which Russia has yet to recover. Some experts, including John Mearsheimer, have blamed NATO expansion for the invasion of Ukraine, arguing that it has provoked Vladimir Putin to defend his sphere of influence. Stephen Kotkin, a professor of history and international affairs at Princeton University, and a research scholar at the Hoover Institution, respectfully disagrees. Putin’s aggression is “not some kind of deviation from the historical pattern,” he tells David Remnick. Russia in the nineteenth century looked much as it does today, he says. “It had an autocrat. It had repression. It had militarism. It had suspicion of foreigners and the West.” Kotkin describes how and why the Putin regime has evolved toward despotism, and he speculates that the strategic blunders in invading Ukraine likely resulted from the biases of authoritarian rulers like Putin, and the lack of good information available to them. Kotkin is the author of an authoritative biography of Joseph Stalin, two volumes of which have been published; a third is in the making.

Facing enormous pressure to respond to Russian aggression in Ukraine but fearing the consequences of a hot war between Russia and the West, the European Union, the United States, and several other nations have levied heavy sanctions. These have caused the ruble to lose forty per cent of its value against the U.S. dollar and forced the closure of the Moscow stock exchange. But will the sanctions have any effect on Putin’s war? John Cassidy joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the Russian President’s economic miscalculations, the effects of sanctions on Russia’s economy, and the political and environmental opportunities for the Biden Administration.

The Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has emerged as a potent and savvy communicator during the Russian invasion of his country. His emotional appeal to a recent E.U. meeting—videoconferencing from the battlefield—has been credited with spurring European leaders to impose tougher sanctions on Russia, such as banning Russian financial institutions from the international SWIFT banking system. Ukraine seems to be winning the information war, despite the Russian government’s previous focus on and success in propaganda and disinformation campaigns. Igor Novikov is an Internet researcher and entrepreneur who served as an adviser to President Zelensky. He spoke with David Remnick on March 2nd about how Zelensky’s background as an actor and a comedian has given him an advantage in the West’s “attention economy.” Ukraine “will only survive if people pay attention,” Novikov notes, and must “make sure people understand who the perpetrator and who the victim is in this situation.”

In the week since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States and the European Union have effectively cut off Russia from the international banking system, frozen Russian assets abroad, and cancelled partnerships with Russian companies. The ruble is in free fall, and inside the country, opposition to the war is reportedly increasing. Chinese President Xi Jinping is a well-known admirer of Putin, and China and Russia share an autocratic world view, but China has neither condemned Russia’s actions nor rushed to its defense. Evan Osnos joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the history of Russia-China relations, China’s current economic and diplomatic calculations, and what the war in Ukraine may tell us about the changing international balance of power.

There has been an explosion of popular and acclaimed work from Black creators on film and television in recent years. This is no fluke—it’s the latest instance in a pattern that has repeated across film history. As the film scholar Aymar Jean Christian tells the Radio Hour’s Ngofeen Mputubwele, industry players “always use the Black audience to draw people back into theaters when they’ve lost the audience in some other way.” Christian points to Blaxploitation films, which in the nineteen-seventies pulled the industry out of a viewership slump, and to the so-called ghetto pictures, which brought audiences back into movie theaters, despite the growing appeal of television. So what accounts for the current surge of Black stories coming out of Hollywood? “I really think it was ‘Django Unchained,’ ” Christian says. After studio consolidation limited opportunities for Black creators in the early two-thousands, Christian believes, Tarantino’s film reminded Hollywood that “Black people like movies, that we deserve movies.” But, for as much progress as there has been, Christian argues that there is something missing in today’s film landscape: stories about the Black experience beyond trauma. “I think we also need stories about solidarity, about how to love each other, about how to heal,” Christian says. “And I just don’t think that this hyper-capitalist, hypercompetitive environment is really incentivizing that kind of storytelling.”

Since last summer, Russian troops have been amassing on the Ukrainian border, and, in recent weeks, President Vladimir Putin warned that he intended a military takeover of Ukraine. This week, Russia began the war, with widespread attacks, including in the capital, Kyiv, aimed at crippling the Ukrainian military. The Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, has called on civilians to enlist in the military to fight the invaders. The U.S. and nato are levying heavy sanctions against the Russians, but there are disagreements within the U.S. and among Western allies about exactly how to proceed. Susan B. Glasser, a New Yorker staff writer, joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the war, as well as the choices faced by the Biden Administration and NATO.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is one of the most prominent progressives in Washington. Her political ascent began with her shocking 2018 defeat of a longtime incumbent in a New York district that includes parts of Queens and the Bronx. She is a strong advocate of the Green New Deal and Medicare for All. With her party’s razor-thin majorities now in peril, many of her priorities seem out of reach. Can the agenda she was elected to advance survive? 

Ocasio-Cortez reflects on her time in Washington with David Remnick, painting a portrait of a dysfunctional Congress. “Honestly, it is a shit show,” she says. “It’s scandalizing, every single day. What is surprising to me is how it never stops being scandalizing.”

This conversation is part of The New Yorker’s first digital-only issue, a special collection of New Yorker Interviews.

Since last summer, Russia has been heavily building up its military forces on Ukraine’s border. In the past few weeks, several countries have attempted to forestall military action, but U.S. officials have warned that a Russian invasion is imminent and have accused the Russian government of lying about its claim that it is drawing down its troops. Masha Gessen, a New Yorker staff writer, joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the recent history of Russian-Ukrainian relations, and what the Western media gets wrong about Vladimir Putin, Ukraine, and the current conflict.

The 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing are often referred to as China’s “coming-out party”—presenting China to foreign visitors as a political, economic, and cultural superpower, committed to the rule of law and human rights. Fourteen years later, Xi Jinping, China’s paramount leader, is using the Winter Olympics to make a different statement. Last week’s opening ceremonies projected a message of Chinese unity and strength at a time when the country’s relationship with the West is more antagonistic than it’s been in decades. Several Western nations, including the U.S., staged diplomatic boycotts to protest China’s human-rights violations, citing its persecution of Uyghurs in the province of Xinjiang. Evan Osnos joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss what the 2022 Beijing Olympics tell us about China’s rising authoritarianism and its vision of the future.

Tariq Trotter, best known in music as Black Thought, the emcee of the Roots, is regarded by many hip-hop fans as one of the best freestyle rappers ever. His work changed shape when the Roots became the house band for Jimmy Fallon’s late-night show, and again when he began performing standup comedy. “I’ve spent most of my career with my sunglasses and my hat pulled down low, very many layers of defense,” he tells Jelani Cobb. “You’re up there as a comedian, it’s just you and your ideas and a microphone, no light show, no band. . . . After having done this for over thirty years, what else can I do, how can I become a better storyteller?” Trotter’s latest endeavor has been writing the music and lyrics for “Black No More,” a musical-theatre production based on the eponymous novel, by George Schuyler;  the script is by John Ridley, with direction by Scott Elliott. Schuyler’s book is a dark satire, written during the Harlem Renaissance, that describes the development of a “cure” for Blackness; Trotter stars as Dr. Junius Crookman, who believes that this remedy will solve America’s problems with race. “My focus became almost rapping as little as possible” in the show, Trotter says; “I wanted this to be above and beyond folks’ expectations.” 

“Black No More” is in previews at the Pershing Square Signature Center. It opens February 15th.

Earlier this week, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and other artists removed their work from Spotify, protesting the company’s relationship with Joe Rogan, a podcaster who has broadcast misinformation about COVID-19. Spotify paid Rogan one hundred million dollars in 2020 for exclusive rights to his podcast. The boycott has also highlighted another serious complaint by musicians: the company's low royalties, which are fractions of a penny for each stream of a song. Will these protests make any difference? Alex Ross joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the influence of big tech on culture, and the future of music, for artists and listeners.

“They push buttons,” says Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale. “What button of ours are they pushing here? What are they trying to get us to do?” Vladimir Putin is posturing toward a costly invasion of Ukraine, on the false pretext of protecting Russian-language speakers in the country. Why? In a wide-ranging conversation, Snyder talks with David Remnick about how to understand Russia’s aggression, the idea advanced by Putin that Ukraine historically and rightfully belongs to Russia, and the dictator’s far-reaching goal of destabilizing NATO. Snyder is the author of the Second World War history “Bloodlands,” as well as “The Road to Unfreedom” and “On Tyranny”—which warn of the dangers that imperil American democracy. Running an oligarchy in which corruption is universal, Putin “is basically stuck with spectacle, distractions—the old bread and circuses idea,” Snyder says, “but also is working from a situation where you want to bring other countries down to your level. . . . With that, you can understand their intervention in our elections, or the way they talk about us: they want to bring out the elements of us, both rhetorically and in reality, that are most like the way they run the country.” Putin’s governance of Russia and his foreign policy, in other words, are intricately entangled. “I tend to think [the threat of invasion] is about the Biden Administration, in a pretty fundamental way,” Snyder believes. “If your goal is to undermine NATO—let’s accept that that is their sincere goal—who do you want to be President? Trump.” The crisis, he says, “puts Biden in a very bad position. It’s very hard for Biden to look strong. . . . Insofar as there is a strategy here, it’s about dividing NATO members and putting pressure on the Biden Administration.”

Supreme Court Justices often portray themselves as beyond the reach of partisan politics, but it’s increasingly hard to make that argument: recall the fights over the nominations of Merrick Garland and Brett Kavanaugh, and recent rulings in cases involving abortion access and vaccine mandates. Justice Stephen Breyer’s decision to retire this year is itself a political move, and the Biden Administration is preparing for strong Republican resistance to whomever the President nominates. Jane Mayer, The New Yorker’s chief Washington correspondent, wrote recently about Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, Virginia Thomas, who is deeply involved in right-wing groups and causes that have had, or will likely have, business before the Court. Mayer joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss Ginni Thomas’s career and the dwindling public trust in the impartiality of the Court.

Much has changed since China last hosted the Olympics, during the 2008 Summer Games. Those Games were widely seen as greatly improving China’s international reputation. But the 2022 Winter Games have put a spotlight on its human-rights abuses, most notably the genocide taking place against Uyghurs and Kazakhs. The U.S. government and other nations are boycotting the games in a limited way, leaving government officials home while allowing their athletes to compete, to avoid a bitter disappointment like that in 1980, when America didn’t compete in Moscow. The effect of these actions on China may be limited, but the tensions may be very difficult for athletes to navigate. Peter Hessler, for many years The New Yorker’s China correspondent, asks David Remnick, “When an athlete says something about the internment camps in Xinjiang, and the oppression of Muslim people in China, what is the Chinese response going to be?” “The I.O.C. has really left them out there. The I.O.C. … basically just washed their hands of it. It’s really up to the athletes,” he notes. “A lot of people I’ve talked to are very concerned about this.” At the same time, the sports reporter Louisa Thomas notes that these Games may garner little American support or attention. The delayed Tokyo Games last year “were already the least-watched Games in history,” and there are few big-name American athletes for NBC to promote. “I even have a lot of friends who have no idea there’s about to be an Olympics,” Thomas says. “Which is extraordinary.”

Late last year, the British press reported that, at the height of the COVID lockdowns in the U.K., Prime Minister Boris Johnson and members of his staff hosted a series of parties and gatherings at 10 Downing Street, defying the strict protocols instigated by Johnson’s own government. What seemed at first like a tabloid story has erupted into a crisis of confidence in Johnson’s leadership, and some believe that he could be ousted by his party and removed from power. Rebecca Mead, a New Yorker staff writer based in London, joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the turmoil in the British government, the future of Boris Johnson’s political career, and how the pandemic has changed the way we think about our elected leaders.

President Biden took the oath of office in a moment of deep crisis—the pandemic in full swing and just weeks after an unprecedented attempt to overturn the election by violence. Merely a return to normalcy would have been a tall order. But Biden was promising something more: a transformational agenda that would realign American economics and life on a scale rivalling Franklin Roosevelt’s long Presidency. Yet Biden never commanded Roosevelt’s indomitable popularity and electoral advantages. A year into the Administration, Evan Osnos takes stock of its successes, failures, and ongoing challenges, along with four New Yorker colleagues: Susan B. Glasser on legislation, Jonathan Blitzer on immigration, Elizabeth Kolbert on climate, and John Cassidy on the economy.

Since the 2020 election and the January 6th insurrection, nineteen states have passed laws that restrict access to voting. Two bills currently before Congress could overturn some of those laws, but neither seems likely to make it through a divided Senate. Earlier this week, President Biden and Vice President Harris travelled to Atlanta to speak about the urgency of protecting voting rights. Jelani Cobb joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the urgent threats to American democracy.

When rioters, encouraged by the President, stormed the Capitol, one year ago, to overturn the results of the election, the idea that such a thing could play out in America was stunning. But the attack may have been just the beginning of an ongoing insurrection, not a failed attempt at a coup. David Remnick talks with Barbara F. Walter, the author of the new book “How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them.” Walter is a political scientist and a professor at the University of California, San Diego, and a co-director of the online magazine Political Violence at a Glance. She has studied countries that slide into civil war for the C.I.A., and she says that the United States meets many of the criteria her group identified. In particular, anti-democratic trends such as increased voting restrictions point to a nation on the brink. “Full democracies rarely have civil wars. Full autocracies rarely have civil wars,” she says. “It’s the ones that are in between that are particularly at risk.” 

This week, the U.S. Labor Department reported that 4.5 million people left their jobs in November—the most since the government began collecting data, two decades ago. A major reason is the COVID-19 pandemic, which has changed the relationship between office workers and their workplaces, and exacerbated challenges faced by workers in health, hospitality, education, and other sectors. Some also argue that the Great Resignation is part of a larger movement against employers who ask more of their employees while providing less in terms of work satisfaction. Cal Newport, a New Yorker contributing writer, joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the Great Resignation, the future of work across professions, and how employees and managers can ease burnout.

One year ago, Amanda Gorman delivered the inaugural poem on the day that Joe Biden became President. Gorman was just twenty-two years old, and it was just two weeks after Trump supporters had assaulted the Capitol in an effort to stop Congress from certifying the election. At the ceremony, Gorman herself seemed to cast light on a dark situation. Her poem “The Hill We Climb” reads, “When day comes, we ask ourselves: / Where can we find light / In this never-ending shade? / The loss we carry, a sea we must wade. / We’ve braved the belly of the beast.” The New Yorker’s poetry editor, Kevin Young, wrote that her poem was “as vibrant and elegant as her yellow coat against the cold.” After that very public début, Gorman found the stakes of writing the poems for her new collection, “Call Us What We Carry,” to be impossibly high. (It was excerpted in The New Yorker with readings by Gorman.) She spoke with Young about being an inaugural poet—following in the footsteps of Maya Angelou and Elizabeth Alexander—in a conversation from The New Yorker’s Poetry Podcast.

The year 2021 has seemed like a cavalcade of disasters, from the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th through the resurgence of COVID-19. Calamities are catnip for the media, but the year has shown some signs of promise. This week, four New Yorker writers discuss the political stories that give them hope. Jane Mayer explores the Biden Administration’s accomplishments, and why they might be undervalued. John Cassidy makes a case for a strong economy in 2022. Bill McKibben explains how the excitement over increasingly inexpensive renewable energy crosses party lines. And Evan Osnos, examining how pessimism can skew political reporting, offers a way for combating toxic political polarization.

For several years in the early nineteen-fifties, Puerto Rico received snow, right around Christmas. Children in San Juan rode a sled and had a giant snowball fight in the tropical weather. It wasn’t a miracle, or a meteorological outlier. The snow was a gift from San Juan’s longtime mayor, Felisa Rincón de Gautier, who had fallen in love with snow during her years in New York. It was delivered by Eastern Airlines, which milked the publicity for all it was worth. A young New Hampshire girl escorted one delivery, wearing a hat and a cable-knit sweater. The snow didn’t cost Puerto Rico anything, but it certainly came with strings attached. At a time when the independence movement was being harshly suppressed, in favor of a continued colonial relationship with the United States, the fetishization of the northern “white Christmas” reads to some as a gesture of cultural imperialism that has never quite ended. And even recently—as the island still faces routine blackouts of its electrical grid, years after Hurricane Maria—the mayor of a small town proposed building an ice-skating rink. WNYC’s Alana Casanova-Burgess reports on why the snow came, and what it meant to Puerto Ricans. 

Our story was produced in collaboration with “La Brega,” from WNYC Studios and Futuro Studios.

On January 6th, as rioters attacked the United States Capitol, many people attempted to communicate with the President through his Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows. Some of those messages are among the thousands of documents that Meadows handed over to the House select committee investigating the events of January 6th. They reveal that Meadows was in touch with the organizers of the Stop the Steal Rally—which precipitated the riot—as well as with several Fox News personalities, conservative activists, and Donald Trump, Jr, who told Meadows that his father “has to lead now.” After surrendering the documents, Meadows suddenly announced that he would not testify before the panel. On Tuesday night, the House voted to recommend holding Meadows in criminal contempt of Congress, and referred his case to the Justice Department for prosecution. Susan B. Glasser, a New Yorker staff writer, joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss what we’ve learned in recent weeks about the involvement of President Trump and his inner circle in the events of January 6th, and what those revelations might tell us about the future of Trump’s relationship with his party.

The eldest millennials turned forty this year, and the producer Ngofeen Mputubwele comments on a sense of despair he finds in his generation, having to do with the state of the planet, the nation, the Internet, intolerance, and more. He set out to explore why millennials feel hopeless and how they can live with that feeling, in conversations with five writers: Kaveh Akbar, the author of “Pilgrim Bell”; Carlos Maza, the creator of the video essay “How to Be Hopeless”; Shauna McGarry, a writer on “BoJack Horseman”; Patrick Nathan, the author of “Image Control: Art, Facism, and the Right to Resist”; and the climate activist Daniel Sherrell, whose recent memoir is “Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World.”

Lina Khan first became known for a 2017 article she wrote for the Yale Law Journal, called "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox." Then a twenty-seven-year-old law student, she made strong arguments in favor of regulating big tech companies. The article established Khan as a central figure in a new generation of antitrust activists, who charge the government with complicity in corporate consolidation, and see the lack of regulation as contributing to social and economic disparities. Earlier this year, President Biden appointed Khan to be chair of the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces federal antitrust law. Sheelah Kolhatkar joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the history of monopolies in the U.S., how Lina Khan is aggressively pursuing malefactors in Silicon Valley, and the challenges she faces.

Growing up, Rachel Held Evans was a fiercely enthusiastic evangelizer for her faith, the kind of kid who relished the chance to sit next to an atheist. But when she experienced doubt, that sense of certainty began to crumble. “We went to all these conferences about how to defend your faith, how to have an answer for what you believe,” her sister Amanda Held told Eliza Griswold. “That’s why it was particularly unsettling to have questions, because we were taught to have answers.” Held Evans began to blog and then wrote a string of best-sellers about her faith, beginning with “Evolving in Monkey Town,” in which she separated the Jesus she believed in from the conservative doctrine she was raised with. Her work spoke to the millions of Christians who have left evangelical churches since 2006. “There’s this common misperception that either you are a conservative evangelical Christian or . . . you become agnostic or atheist,” Griswold explains, but many Christians were turning away from politics and still retaining their faith. She calls Held Evans “the patron saint of this emerging movement.” After Held Evans died, at thirty-seven, after a sudden illness, her final, incomplete manuscript was finished by a friend, Jeff Chu. Griswold travelled to Held Evans’s home town of Dayton, Tennessee, to meet with her widower, Dan Evans, as well as Chu and others. “I think people resonate so much with her work [because] she was giving words that people couldn’t say themselves,” Evans says. “It’s not going to stop for them just because Rachel died. There’s going to be one less traveller. One less person to translate for them. But there’s more people born every day.”

Mexico is a deeply Catholic nation where abortion was, for a long time, criminalized in many states; just a few years ago, Coahuila, near the U.S. border, imposed jail time on women who underwent the procedure. But, this year, as Stephania Taladrid reported, Mexico’s ten-member Supreme Court voted unanimously to decriminalize abortion throughout the country—a decision that shocked even longtime activists. Before Mexican pro-choice advocates had finished celebrating, though, they turned their attention north to Texas, which has, with Senate Bill 8, essentially banned most abortions. (The law is currently being reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court.) Texans may now find themselves crossing the border to obtain legal abortions. Taladrid spoke to activists who are sending medications that induce abortion—which are available over the counter in Mexico—across the border into Texas. As the legal scholar Jeannie Suk Gersen explains, however, a new Texas law criminalizes delivering those medications to pregnant women, potentially placing these activists at risk.

This month, Britney Spears was released from the conservatorship that had overseen her finances, communications, and professional and personal life for more than thirteen years. The details of the arrangement were shrouded in mystery and poorly covered by the media. But over the past two years, things started to change, as the #FreeBritney movement, as it was known, increasingly advocated for her autonomy, publicizing such restrictions as Spears’s inability to choose her own lawyer. Journalists and documentarians began to look into such abuses, and chronicled Spears’s attempts to get out from under the conservatorship’s control. In September, Spears’s father, Jamie, was removed, and this month the conservatorship was dissolved. Jia Tolentino, a New Yorker staff writer, joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss how the media shaped Spears’s life and the role of online movements in effecting change.