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The New Yorker Radio Hour

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

Copyright: © WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Latest Episodes:

Bill Gates on His New Memoir and Dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago Jan 31, 2025

Show notes

In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, Bill Gates was the best known of a new breed: the tech mogul—a coder who had figured out how to run a business, and who then seemed to be running the world. Gates was ranked the richest person in the world for many years. In a new memoir, “Source Code,” he explains how he got there. The book focusses on Gates’s early life, and just through the founding of Microsoft. Since stepping away from the company, Gates has devoted himself to his foundation, which is one of the largest nonprofits working on public health around the globe. That has made him the target of conspiracy theories by anti-vaxxers, including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has asserted that Gates and Anthony Fauci are together responsible for millions of deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gates views the rise of conspiracy thinking as symptomatic of larger trends in American society exacerbated by technology. “The fact that outrage is rewarded because it’s more engaging, that’s kind of a human weakness,” he tells David Remnick. “And the fact that I thought everybody would be doing deep analysis of facts and seeking out the actual studies on vaccine safety—boy, was that naïve. When the pandemic came, people wanted some evil genius to be behind it. Not some bat biology.”

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Returning to a Home Consumed by the Wildfires Jan 28, 2025

Show notes

The staff writer Dana Goodyear has reported on California extensively: the entertainment industry; a deadly crime spree in Malibu; Kamala Harris’s rise in politics; and the ever more fragile environment. She covered the destructive Woolsey Fire, in Los Angeles, in 2018. Recently, Goodyear found her own life very much in the center of the story. Living in Pacific Palisades, she had to evacuate early this month, and she documented her return days later to a scene of devastation in this audio story. “The house just is an idea of a house, or the aftermath of a house,” she said. “You can walk through the arched door at the front and the back, but there’s just pretty much nothing in between.”

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How “Saturday Night Live” Reinvented Television, Fifty Years Ago Jan 24, 2025

Show notes

“Saturday Night Live” turns fifty this year. Profiling its executive producer, Lorne Michaels, the New Yorker editor Susan Morrison sheds light on one of the most important people in show business. Morrison spent years talking to Michaels for her new book, “Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live,” and she includes recordings of those interviews in a conversation with David Remnick. “Lorne was a real student of what I call sort of the hinges between eras,” Morrison says. To keep the show current, Michaels “paid attention to replenishing the casts in a sort of seamless way, so that it would never seem like an old guy trying to do an entertainment for young people.” Plus, one of the show’s most notable alumni, Tina Fey—rumored to be a possible successor to Michaels, who is now eighty—reads an excerpt from the magazine’s review of the show’s first season, back in 1975.

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The Political Scene: Big Money and Trump’s New Cabinet Jan 21, 2025

Show notes

The Washington Roundtable—with the staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos—discusses this week’s confirmation hearings for Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense and Pam Bondi as Attorney General, and the potential for a “shock and awe” campaign in the first days of Donald Trump’s second term. Plus, as billionaires from many industries gather around the dais on Inauguration Day, what should we make of President Biden’s warning, in the waning days of his Administration, about “an oligarchy taking shape in America”?

This segment was originally published January 17, 2025, in The New Yorker’s Political Scene podcast.

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Antony Blinken’s Exit Interview Jan 17, 2025

Show notes

As President Biden took office in 2021, he aimed to rebuild alliances that Donald Trump had threatened during his first term. That effort was challenged by an onslaught of international crises, from Ukraine to Gaza. The person tasked with trying to restore the old order was Secretary of State Antony Blinken. He spoke with David Remnick days before leaving the White House, and shortly before the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas was announced this week. “I’ve been laboring to try to get to a better place in Gaza and particularly to get a ceasefire that brings the hostages home, that stops the firing in both directions, that surges humanitarian assistance, that also creates space to get something permanent,” Blinken said. “We are, I hope, finally, belatedly on the brink of getting that.” Blinken expressed cautious optimism that a long-term resolution remains possible. “I’ve had many opportunities to meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu. When the conversation comes to normalization with Saudi Arabia, that’s the point at which he sits up, leans forward, leans in. He knows that for Israel, too, that would be an absolute game changer.” The hope is that normalization might induce Israelis to reconsider the question of Palestinian statehood. But Blinken recognized the limits of American influence on its ally. “Israeli society will have to choose. They’ll have to decide if that’s the path that they’re ready and willing and able to travel in order to get to normalization.”

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One Environmental Journalist Thinks that the U.S. Needs More Mining Jan 14, 2025

Show notes

Donald Trump loves mining, and he would like to expand that effort in the U.S. At least one environmentalist agrees with him, to some extent: the journalist Vince Beiser. Beiser’s recent book is called “Power Metal,” and it’s about the rare-earth metals that power almost every electronic device and sustainable technology we use today. “A lot of people really hate it when I say this, a lot of environmentally minded folks, but I do believe we should be open to allowing more mining to happen in the United States,” he tells Elizabeth Kolbert, herself an environmental journalist of great renown. “Mining is inherently destructive, there’s no getting around it, but . . . we have absolutely got to get our hands on more of these metals in order to pull off the energy transition. There’s just no way to build all the E.V.s and solar panels and all the rest of it without some amount of mining.” At least in the U.S. or Canada, Beiser says, there are higher standards of safety than in many other countries.

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Representative Ro Khanna on Elon Musk and the Tech Oligarchy Jan 10, 2025

Show notes

Representative Ro Khanna of California is in the Democrats’ Congressional Progressive Caucus. And although his district is in the heart of Silicon Valley—and he once worked as a lawyer for tech companies—Khanna is focussed on how Democrats can regain the trust of working-class voters. He knows tech moguls, he talks with them regularly, and he thinks that they are forming a dangerous oligarchy, to the detriment of everyone else. “This is more dangerous than petty corruption. This is more dangerous than, ‘Hey, they just want to maximize their corporation's wealth,’ ”he tells David Remnick. “This is an ideology amongst some that rejects the role of the state.” Although he’s an ally of Bernie Sanders, such as advocating for Medicare for All and free public college, Khanna is not a democratic socialist. He calls himself a progressive capitalist. Real economic growth, he says, requires “a belief in entrepreneurship and technology and in business leaders being part of the solution.”

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Sara Bareilles Talks with Rachel Syme Jan 07, 2025

Show notes

Sara Bareilles broke out as a pop-music star in the late two-thousands. But she’s gone on to have a very different kind of career, writing music for Broadway and eventually performing as an actor on stage and on television. At the New Yorker Festival, in 2024, she played her early hit “Gravity,” and spoke with staff writer Rachel Syme about the pressures of fame, aging, and why she prefers working in theatre. “There’s so much competition in the music industry. I’m not a competitive person; I don’t understand it. It’s not that theatre isn’t competitive, but there’s this feeling—everybody’s so happy to be there. Like, ‘We got a show, guys, and we don’t know how long it’s going to last!’ ”

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Rachel Aviv on Alice Munro’s Family Secrets Jan 03, 2025

Show notes

Rachel Aviv reports on the terrible conundrum of Alice Munro for The New Yorker. Munro was a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and perhaps the most acclaimed writer of short stories of our time, but her legacy darkened after her death when her youngest daughter, Andrea Skinner, revealed that Munro’s partner had sexually abused her beginning when she was nine years old. The crime was known in the family, but even after a criminal conviction of Gerald Fremlin, Munro stood by him, at the expense of her relationship with Skinner. In her piece, Aviv explores how, and why, a writer of such astonishing powers of empathy could betray her own child, and discusses the ways that Munro touched on this family trauma in fiction. “Her writing makes you think about art at what expense,” she tells David Remnick. “That’s probably a question that is relevant for many artists, but Alice Munro makes it visible on the page. It felt so literal—like trading your daughter for art.”

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Julianne Moore Explains What She Needs in a Film Director Dec 31, 2024

Show notes

Introducing Julianne Moore at the New Yorker Festival, in October, the staff writer Michael Schulman recited “only a partial list” of the directors Moore has worked with, including Robert Altman, Louis Malle, Todd Haynes, Paul Thomas Anderson, Lisa Cholodenko, Steven Spielberg, the Coen brothers, and many more legends. It seems almost obvious that Moore co-stars (alongside Tilda Swinton) in Pedro Almodóvar’s first feature in English, “The Room Next Door,” which comes out in December. Moore has a particular knack with unremarkable characters. “I don't know that I seek out things in the domestic space, but I do think I’m really drawn to ordinary lives,” she tells Schulman. “I’ve never been, like, I’m going to play an astronaut next. . . . A lot of these stories [are] domestic stories—well, that’s the biggest story of our lives, right? How do we live? Who do we love? . . . Those are the things that we all know about.”

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

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