The New Yorker Radio Hour

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How Alpha Kappa Alpha Shaped Kamala Harris; Plus, Bill T. Jones Oct 29, 2024

Show notes

One aspect of the Vice-President’s background that’s relatively overlooked, and yet critical to understanding her, is her membership in the sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha. “In one of the bylaws,” the writer Jazmine Hughes tells David Remnick, “it says that the mission of the organization, among many, is to uplift the social status of the Negro.” Far from a Greek party club, A.K.A. "is an identity” to its members. When Donald Trump insinuated that Kamala Harris had “turned Black,” in his words, for political advantage, “a lot of people pointed to her time at Howard, and her membership in A.K.A., [as] a very specific Black American experience that they did not see from someone like Barack Obama.”

Jazmine Hughes’s reporting on “The Tight-Knit World of Kamala Harris’s Sorority” was published in the October 21, 2024, issue ofThe New Yorker.

Plus, Kai Wright, who hosts WNYC’s “Notes from America,” speaks with the choreographer Bill T. Jones. This week, the Brooklyn Academy of Music is re-mounting Jones’s work “Still/Here,” which caused a stir when it débuted at BAM, thirty years ago: The New Yorker’s own dance critic at the time, Arlene Croce, declared that she wasn’t going to review it. Now “Still/Here” is considered a landmark in contemporary dance, and Jones a towering figure.

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Charlamagne tha God Has Some Advice for Kamala Harris and the Democrats Oct 25, 2024

Show notes

In these final days of the Presidential campaign, Vice-President Kamala Harris has been getting in front of voters as much as she can. Given the polls showing shaky support among Black men, one man she absolutely had to talk to was Lenard McKelvey, much better known as Charlamagne tha God. As a co-host of the syndicated “Breakfast Club” morning radio show, Charlamagne has interviewed Presidential candidates such as Harris, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden, as well as New York City’s embattled Mayor Eric Adams and many more. He tells David Remnick that he received death threats just for speaking with Harris—“legitimate threats, not … somebody talking crazy on social media. That’s just me having a conversation with her about the state of our society. So imagine what she actually gets.” Charlamagne believes firmly that the narrative of Harris losing Black support is overstated, or a polling fiction, but he agrees that the Democrats have a messaging problem. The author of a book titled “Get Honest or Die Lying,” Charlamagne says that the Party has shied away from widespread concerns about immigration and the economy, to its detriment. “I just want to see more honesty from Democrats. Like I always say, Republicans are more sincere about their lies than Democrats are about their truth!”

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The Stakes for Abortion Rights, from the Head of Planned Parenthood Oct 22, 2024

Show notes

If Vice-President Kamala Harris wins in November, it will likely be on the strength of the pro-choice vote, which has been turning out strongly in recent elections. Her statements and choices on the campaign trail couldn’t stand in starker relief against those of Donald Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, who recently called for defunding Planned Parenthood. Meanwhile, Harris “is the first sitting Vice-President or President to come to a Planned Parenthood health center, to come to an abortion clinic, and really understand the conversations that have been happening on the ground,” Alexis McGill Johnson, Planned Parenthood’s president and C.E.O., told David Remnick. The organization is spending upward of $40 million in this election to try to secure abortion rights in Congress and in the White House. A second Trump term, she speculates, could bring a ban on mifepristone and a “pregnancy czar” overseeing women in a federal Department of Life. “Is that scary enough for you?” Johnson asks.

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With “The Warriors,” Lin-Manuel Miranda Takes on Another New York Story Oct 18, 2024

Show notes

Since the blockbuster success of his musical “Hamilton,” Lin-Manuel Miranda has been busy: acting, directing, and composing for Disney projects, including the upcoming movie “Mufasa: The Lion King.” But his new project is more personal, and a throwback in the best sense. Working with the playwright Eisa Davis, he has reimagined a movie from his childhood as a concept album. “The Warriors” is a cult classic released in 1979. “The Warriors are a gang from Coney Island, and they have to fight their way from the Bronx all the way back down to Coney Island in the course of the film,” Miranda tells David Remnick. The film reads as a nineteen-seventies period piece, but Miranda and Davis find a classical dimension to it. “The tale is an old tale. Sol Yurick, who wrote the novel the movie is based on, based it on the Anabasis, which is a soldier’s account of trying to get back home from war” in ancient Greece. “It’s this mythic story. . . . It doesn’t get more clear than that as a plotline.” To tell that story in song and rap, Miranda brought together a cast of legends including Lauryn Hill, Nas, Marc Anthony, members of the Wu-Tang Clan, and more. If releasing a concept album, meant to be listened to straight through, seems like a stretch for 2024 audiences, Miranda is unfazed. “What’s interesting about “Hamilton” is that no one I talked to thought it was a good idea when I was writing it. But I could see it. And it was the idea that wouldn’t leave me alone.”

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Bon Iver on “SABLE,” His First New Record in Five Years Oct 16, 2024

Show notes

Bon Iver is the alias of Justin Vernon, who holds an unusual place in music as both a singer-songwriter in an acoustic idiom and a collaborator with the biggest stars in pop, including Taylor Swift, Charli XCX, and Kanye West. Bon Iver’s new three-song EP, titled “SABLE,” is his first record of his own songs in more than five years. Vernon rarely gives interviews, so this is an extended version of his conversation with the staff writer Amanda Petrusich. They touched on the meaning of “sable,” a word that can refer to mourning and darkness. Vernon is not altogether comfortable with the acclaim he has received. “I’m not, like, famous on the street, People-magazine famous, but . . . there’s been a lot of accolades,” he tells Petrusich. “I was getting a lot of positive feedback for being heartbroken and having heartache and I’ve wondered . . . [if] maybe I’m pressing the bruise.”

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The Astonishing Rise—and Uncertain Odds—of Kamala Harris’s Presidential Campaign Oct 11, 2024

Show notes

Since July 21st, when Joe Biden endorsed her in the Presidential race, all eyes have been on Vice-President Kamala Harris. The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos has been reporting on Harris for months, speaking with dozens of people close to her from her childhood to her days as a California prosecutor, right up to this lightning-round campaign for the Presidency. “What’s interesting is that some of those people . . . were asking her, ‘Do you think there should be a process? Some town halls or conventions?,’ ” Osnos tells David Remnick. “And her answer is revealing. . . . ‘I’m happy to join a process like that, but I’m not gonna wait around. I’m not gonna wait around.’ ” But if Harris’s surge in popularity was remarkable, her lead in most polls is razor-thin. “If she wins [the popular vote] and loses the Electoral College, that’ll be the third time since the year 2000 that Democrats have suffered that experience,” he notes. “You can’t underestimate how seismic a shock and a trauma—that’s not an overstatement—it will be, particularly for young Americans who have tried to say, ‘We’re going to put our support behind somebody and see if we can change this country.’ ”

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Brian Jordan Alvarez on “English Teacher” Oct 08, 2024

Show notes

Between book bans, the movement for parental rights, the fight over cellphones, and budgets being slashed, life in a public school is stressful—and a fertile ground for comedy. Brian Jordan Alvarez created and stars in “English Teacher,” débuting this season on FX. Alvarez has been an actor for many years, with a role on the reboot of “Will & Grace,” among many others, but he burst into viral fame on TikTok with a goofy song about the virtues of sitting, sung in a strange accent. Suddenly everybody was talking about him—including the staff writer Vinson Cunningham, who spoke with Alvarez recently. The new show is a much more conventional kind of social comedy, focussed on a gay Latino English teacher in Texas. “Evan wants to be, and is, in so many ways, essentially an out, proud gay guy,” Alvarez explained to Cunningham. “But how does that feel in this school with all these different forces coming at him?”

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Newt Gingrich on What Trump Could Accomplish in a Second Term Oct 04, 2024

Show notes

Long before Donald Trump got serious about politics, Newt Gingrich saw himself as the revolutionary in Washington, introducing a combative style of party politics that helped his party become a dominating force in Congress. Setting the template for Trump, Gingrich described Democrats not as an opposing team with whom to make alliances but as an alien force—a “cultural élite”—out to destroy America. Gingrich has written no less than five admiring books about Trump, and he was involved with pushing the lie of the stolen election of 2020. Like many in the Party, he balks at some of Trump’s tactics, but always finds an excuse. “I would probably not have used the language Trump used,” for example in calling Vice-President Kamala Harris “mentally disabled,” Gingrich says. “Partly because I think that it doesn’t further his cause. . . . I would simply say that he is a very intense personality . . . and occasionally he has to explode.” But he sees Trump as seasoned and improved with age, and his potential in a second term far greater. “It’s almost providential: he’s had four years [out of office] to think about what he’s learned . . . and he has a much deeper grasp of what has to be done and how to do it.”

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Could the War in Gaza Cost Kamala Harris the Election? Oct 01, 2024

Show notes

In Michigan, many voters—particularly Arab American and Muslim voters—remain deeply upset by the Biden Administration’s support for the Israeli military, in the face of the enormous death toll in Gaza. In her Presidential campaign, Kamala Harris has not articulated any major shift in policy. Earlier in the year, during the primary elections, activists urged Democrats to check the box for “Uncommitted,” as a rebuke to Biden. But now, just weeks away from the general election, these disaffected Democrats could cost Harris the election. Andrew Marantz, who has reported on the Uncommitted Movement, talks with one of the its founders, Abbas Alawieh, about the difficult moral calculus facing Muslim Democrats, and why the Party spurned overtures from pro-Palestinian groups. The antiwar candidate Jill Stein, of the Green Party, is now polling very well with Muslim voters, and Donald Trump’s campaign is claiming that he can stop the war; however, Uncommitted leaders feel they cannot endorse Harris. In conversation with David Remnick, Marantz recalls that Hillary Clinton lost Michigan by around ten thousand votes; more than one hundred thousand people checked “Uncommitted.”

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Young Donald Trump, Roy Cohn, and the Dark Arts of Power Sep 27, 2024

Show notes

Actors and comedians have usually played Donald Trump as larger than life, almost as a cartoon. In the new film “The Apprentice,” Sebastian Stan doesn’t play for laughs. He stars as a very young Trump falling under the sway of Roy Cohn (played by Jeremy Strong)— the notorious, amoral lawyer and fixer. “Cohn took Donald Trump under his wing when Donald was a nobody from the outer boroughs,” the film’s writer and executive producer Gabriel Sherman tells David Remnick. He “taught him the dark arts of power brokering … [and] introduced him to New York society.” Sherman, a special correspondent at Vanity Fair, also chronicled Roger Ailes’s rise to power at Fox News in “The Loudest Voice in the Room.” Sherman insists, though, that the film is not anti-Trump—or not exactly. “The movie got cast into this political left-right schema, and it’s not that. It’s a humanist work of drama,” in which the protégé eventually betrays his mentor. It almost goes without saying that Donald Trump has threatened to sue the producers of the film, and the major Hollywood studios wouldn’t touch it. Sherman talks with Remnick about how the film, which opens October 11th, came to be.

Plus, Jill Lepore is a New Yorker staff writer, a professor of history at Harvard University, and the author of the best-seller “These Truths” as well as many other works of history. While her professional life is absorbed in the uniqueness of the American experience, she finds her relaxation across the pond, watching police procedurals from Britain. “There’s not a lot of gun action,” she notes, “not the same kind of swagger.” She talks with David Remnick about three favorites: “Annika” and “The Magpie Murders,” on PBS Masterpiece; and “Karen Pirie,” on BritBox. And Remnick can’t resist a digression to bring up their shared reverence for “Slow Horses,” a spy series on Apple TV+ that’s based on books by Mick Herron, whom Lepore profiled for The New Yorker.

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