The New Yorker Radio Hour

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Julián Castro Is Not Afraid Apr 26, 2019

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In a crowded Democratic field, the candidate Julián Castro is eager to stand out. One way he’s tried to do that is by taking on the issue of immigration—a favorite topic of President Donald Trump, and one that’s important to his base. In a wide-ranging conversation with the New Yorker editor David Remnick, Castro lays out his plan. And Taylor Mac, a performance artist and playwright who made a name for himself in New York City’s downtown theater scene, makes the leap to Broadway.

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The Green New Deal, and an Unusual Night at the Orchestra Apr 23, 2019

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The Green New Deal is coming to the table during the one of the most divisive periods Washington has ever seen. Two advocates of the environmental plan—a young activist championing the cause, and a veteran of climate politics in Washington—consider what it would take to actually pass such legislation. And The New Yorker’s Patty Marx learns firsthand that conducting an orchestra can’t be mastered overnight.

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The N.R.A.’s Financial Mess Apr 19, 2019

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Last March, Wayne LaPierre sent a fund-raising letter to his members—an urgent plea for money. LaPierre described an attack on the Second Amendment that is unprecedented in the history of the country. But, in reality, what is endangering the N.R.A. isn’t constitutional law; it’s destructive business relationships that have damaged the organization financially, and have put it in legal jeopardy.

Searching through N.R.A. tax forms, charity records, contracts, and internal communications, the reporter Mike Spies discovered that “a small group of N.R.A executives, contractors, and venders have extracted hundreds of millions of dollars from the nonprofit’s budget, enriching themselves in the process.” While the organization is quick to lay blame on its political opponents, Spies says, it’s its questionable financial practices that have weakened it from the inside.

Central to the story of the N.R.A’s financial problems is an Oklahoma-based P.R. firm called Ackerman McQueen. Ack-Mac didn’t just write press releases: for decades, it has steered the N.R.A.’s imaging on all platforms, and its executives routinely took positions within the N.R.A. In 2017, the N.R.A. paid Ackerman and affiliates almost forty-one million dollars, which totalled about twelve per cent of the N.R.A.’s total expenses that year. Ostensibly just a contractor, Ackerman influenced N.R.A. decision-making from inside, and the for-profit company seems to have used the nonprofit company as a vast source of funds to enrich itself.

Spies interviewed Aaron Davis, who worked in the N.R.A.’s fund-raising operation for a decade. “I think there is an inherent conflict of interest,” Davis says. “And it just doesn’t seem like N.R.A. leadership is all that concerned about this.”

(After this interview took place, the N.R.A. sued Ackerman McQueen, claiming that the contractor had hidden important documentation from it that detailed the business relationships.)

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The actor Christine Baranski on “The Good Fight,” and Kurt Vile on Songwriting Apr 16, 2019

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Christine Baranski was a successful theatre actor who would never stoop to do television in the old days. But when she got the pilot script for “Cybill,” and had two daughters to put through school, she took the role of Marianne, the tough-talking best friend of Cybill Shepherd’s character. “Who goes to Hollywood at forty-two and becomes an overnight star?” Baranski asks the critic Emily Nussbaum. What made her such a sensation? “No one had seen that woman on American television” before, she notes, of her character, a badass with a Martini and an attitude. “Sex and the City” came later. Playing strong women seems to come naturally to Baranski; since 2009, she’s portrayed the capable, elegant Diane Lockhart, in “The Good Wife” and then “The Good Fight.” She talked with Nussbaum in a live conversation at the 2018 New Yorker Festival. Plus, Amanda Petrusich talks with the musician Kurt Vile, who performs his song “Pretty Pimpin” live.

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Masha Gessen and Keith Gessen Debate Russian and American Politics Apr 12, 2019

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Masha Gessen and Keith Gessen have, taken together, written more than a dozen books and a thousand articles. Keith Gessen is a founder of n+1, an influential literary journal; Masha has written for major newspapers and journals as well as, since 2014, The New Yorker. Their parents emigrated from the Soviet Union in its latter days. Keith has spent most of his life in America, but Masha, who is older, returned to Russia as an adult and worked there as a reporter. In a conversation at the 2018 New Yorker Festival, the siblings discussed their different perspectives on the U.S.-Russia relationship. All through the Mueller investigation, Masha warned people not to expect a smoking gun to prove collusion between Putin and Trump, and then, somehow, this fierce critic of Putin was branded an apologist for his regime. Masha’s most recent book is “The Future Is History”; Keith’s is a novel, called “A Terrible Country.”

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The Neurology of Bias, and a Visit with Thundercat Apr 09, 2019

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Most of us have biases and prejudices we don’t acknowledge—or aren’t even aware of. Admitting those biases is a baseline of political “wokeness.” But measuring and proving bias, and showing how it works, is another matter. Jennifer Eberhardt is a social psychologist at Stanford University who studies these issues through neuroimaging and other experiments. Bias, in her view, is not merely a learned phenomenon but one that involves neurological patterns that are “tuned” by cultural experience. And it may operate most prominently in situations where people have the least time for reflection. Eberhardt says that intervening on a policy level to reduce the consequences of bias involves slowing down decision-making in critical situations such as policing. She spoke with David Remnick about her new book, “Biased.” Plus, Briana Younger, a music editor at The New Yorker, visits with the bassist and producer who helped make Kendrick Lamar’s album “To Pimp a Butterfly.” He goes by Thundercat.

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The Presidential Candidate Pete Buttigieg on Coming Out: “I Realized I Couldn’t Go On Like That Forever” Apr 05, 2019

Show notes

During an exit interview with President Barack Obama in November, 2016, just weeks after the election, David Remnick asked who would be the leaders of the Democratic Party and the contenders to oppose Trump in 2020. Obama mentioned people like Kamala Harris, of California, and Tim Kaine, of Virginia, along with a very surprising figure: Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who was only thirty-five at the time. In recent weeks, Buttigieg has been raising his profile dramatically, and raising money at a surprising clip, considering that he lacks the national profile of a senator or a governor. In a huge field of candidates, the mayor stands out. He’s a Navy veteran, and was born and raised in South Bend, so he brings heartland credibility to his campaign. But he’s also the youngest candidate in the field, and the first openly gay person with a real shot at the nomination. Buttigieg had not yet come out when he took office and when he joined the Navy Reserves, but deployment in Afghanistan changed his perspective. “I realized I couldn’t go on like that forever. . . . Something about that really clarified my awareness of the extent to which you only get to live one life and be one person,” Buttigieg tells Remnick. “Part of it was the exposure to danger,” he notes, but there was more to it: “I began to feel a little bit humiliated about the idea that my life could come to an end and I could be a visible public official and a grown man and a homeowner and have no idea what it was like to be in love.”

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How OxyContin Was Sold to the Masses Apr 02, 2019

Show notes

Patrick Radden Keefe has reported on the Sackler family and their control of Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin. Among the sources for his article “Empire of Pain” was a whistle-blower named Steven May, a former sales rep who joined Purdue during the heyday of OxyContin. In an interview for the New Yorker Radio Hour, May details how the company flooded the market with a powerful painkiller that it deceptively touted as being nearly as safe as Tylenol. Plus, two beloved cartoonists—Roz Chast and Liana Finck—talk shop.

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Has the Mueller Report Changed Anything? Mar 29, 2019

Show notes

The Mueller investigation has been a two-year obsession for nearly everyone who cares about politics in America. For one side, the special counsel was a bête noire, a leader of a witch hunt; for the other, Mueller was a deus ex machina who would end the political disruptions of Trumpism. But the report received by Attorney General William Barr was highly ambivalent, neither indicting nor exonerating the President, and leaving to the A.G. to decide the crucial question of obstruction of justice.

To weigh the consequences of the Mueller report, David Remnick sat down with the staff writers Masha Gessen and Susan Glasser. “Any other political figure of course would be glad that an investigation like this is over, and would want to move on as quickly as possible,” Glasser notes. “True to form, [Trump] is already talking about various vindictive moves, and ‘investigating the investigators.’ . . . It’s a strategy compatible with his overall approach of appealing to his supporters, and maximum divisiveness.”

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U.K. Edges Closer to the Cliff of a No-Deal Brexit Mar 26, 2019

Show notes

Since the minute that British citizens voted, in a 2016 referendum, to leave the European Union, confusion and disorganization has consumed the U.K. Three years later, little has changed: confusion and disorganization may carry the U.K. over the cliff of a no-deal Brexit with devastating economic consequences.

While we can’t predict what will happen on the deadline of March 29th, we continue to learn about what brought the U.K. to this precarious position. Like the 2016 presidential election in the U.S., the campaign for Brexit employed divisive social media campaigns, mysterious sources of financing, Cambridge Analytica, and questionable meetings with Russians. At the center of it was a man named Arron Banks, an insurance magnate who is happy to take credit for his efforts to promote Brexit by whatever means necessary. Ed Caesar has reported on Banks’s outsized role in the referendum, and found that Banks is had been under investigation in Britain and in South Africa, where he has business interests in diamonds, as well as a person of interest in the Mueller investigation. Caesar spoke with David Remnick about the shady past and the uncertain future of Brexit.

Plus, a visit with Roomful of Teeth, the Grammy-winning vocal octet that’s building a unique repertoire and redefining classical singing for the future.

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