The New Yorker Radio Hour

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Emilia Clarke on a Near-Death Experience Scarier than “Game of Thrones” Mar 22, 2019

Show notes

Emilia Clarke was an unknown young actor when she landed the part of Daenerys, of the House of Targaryen, on a show called “Game of Thrones.” After an eventful first season—capped by her walk into a funeral pyre and rebirth as the Mother of Dragons—Clarke’s future looked bright. But after filming wrapped, Clarke faced a crisis more frightening than anything on the show: a life-threatening stroke called a subarachnoid hemorrhage. In the aftermath of an emergency surgery, she experienced verbal aphasia and was unable to say her name. “It was the scariest thing I’ve ever experienced,” she told David Remnick. “It wasn’t that I didn’t think I was going to make it, it was that I wasn’t prepared to make it.” She feared that the impairment was permanent and would end her life as an actor. “It was in that moment I asked them to just let me die.” Clarke was still recovering from the aftermath of the stroke and the surgery when she began doing a press tour—lying down between appearances and sipping from a morphine bottle, and keeping the crisis a secret. “No one knows who the hell I am,” she recalls thinking. “I was a young girl who was given a huge opportunity. I did not for any reason want to give anyone a reason to think I was anything other than capable of fulfilling the duties they had given me. And I didn’t know what the show was at that moment. All I knew was I had a job.”

Emilia Clarke wrote about her experience for the first time in an essay for newyorker.com.

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The Hot Fashion Trends in Silicon Valley, and the Top Chef Niki Nakayama Mar 19, 2019

Show notes

Silicon Valley has a reputation for being a place where young geniuses are too busy disrupting the world to buy clothes; jeans and a hoodie generally qualify as business attire. But that is changing, the New Yorker fashion correspondent Rachel Syme notes. Tech moguls have become more conscious of appearances, and a distinctive look—based on optimized, streamlined garments, like trendy Allbirds sneakers—is emerging. Tech moguls have become more conscious of appearances, for better or worse; Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of Theranos, raised hundreds of millions of dollars partly on the image she cultivated with a turtleneck à la Steve Jobs. Syme spoke with the professional stylist Victoria Hitchcock, who runs a thriving practice in Silicon Valley showing the powerful how to project “powerful” for the digital age—without looking like a bunch of bankers. Plus, Helen Rosner talks with Niki Nakayama, one of Los Angeles’s top chefs, about setting up a kitchen that is hospitable to women, and about the impossibility of creating authentically Japanese cuisine in America.

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Getting Detained by ICE—on Purpose Mar 15, 2019

Show notes

In 2012, two young activists from the National Immigrant Youth Alliance went on an undercover mission to infiltrate the Broward Transitional Center, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Florida. NIYA had been contacted by the son of a man named Claudio Rojas, who was taken from his home by immigration agents and brought to Broward. NIYA has been compared to ACT UP; its members try to force confrontations with authorities over immigration policy. The two activists, who are themselves undocumented, pretended to be newly arrived, confused immigrants who spoke little English. They got themselves arrested by somewhat perplexed Border Patrol agents.

The story of those activists is told in a new film called “The Infiltrators,” which recently showed at the Sundance Festival and South by Southwest. It is a kind of quasi-documentary, the directors Cristina Ibarra and Alex Rivera tell David Remnick; because they were not able to film inside the ICE facility, they staged a reënactment of the events inside a decommissioned mental hospital. Rojas, who had been released from detention after staging a hunger strike, advised the production for verisimilitude. But after the movie’s release, Rojas was suddenly re-detained during a routine check-in with ICE, which he attended with his lawyer. “For eight years I presented myself for supervision visits,” Rojas tells The New Yorker’s Camila Osorio, speaking on the phone from detention. “Why didn’t they detain me before? . . . I am completely sure that this is a reprisal against me, that they want to deport me no matter what.”

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American Exiles in East Africa (Part 2) Mar 12, 2019

Show notes

Pete O’Neal was a street hustler and small-time pimp who gave up crime to fight oppression, founding the Kansas City chapter of the Black Panther Party. Charlotte Hill was a high-school student who gave up a college scholarship to join the Panthers and do community service. Their love affair seemed charmed. But, after O’Neal was convicted, in 1970, on a firearms charge that he considered trumped up, he jumped bail and the couple fled the United States. Since then, O’Neal has never been able to return. After spending time in Sweden and then Algeria, the couple moved to Tanzania, where President Julius Nyerere was welcoming people of the African diaspora to join in the nation-building that followed decolonization. In a village called Imbasseni, not far from Mount Kilimanjaro, Pete and Charlotte O’Neal resumed the community service that had brought them together as Panthers. They founded the United African Alliance Community Center, a combination children’s home, school, library, and Y.M.C.A.—work that they might never have been able to accomplish in their home country. As well documented as the nineteen-sixties were, the staff writer Jelani Cobb notes, the stories of radicals forced into exile are hardly known. The producer KalaLea reports from Tanzania. (Part 2 of a two-part story.)

Tshidi Matale, Kiva, and L. D. Brown of Grey Reverend contributed music for this story.

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American Exiles in East Africa Mar 08, 2019

Show notes

Pete O’Neal was a street hustler and small-time pimp who gave up crime to struggle against oppression, founding the Kansas City chapter of the Black Panther Party. Charlotte Hill was a high-school student who gave up a college scholarship to join the Panthers and do community service. Their love affair seemed like a charmed one. But the Black Panthers became targets of intimidation and disruption by the F.B.I. and other law enforcement, and a climate of paranoia set in. After Pete was convicted on a firearms charge that he considered trumped up, he jumped bail, and he and Charlotte fled the United State with false passports. Since 1970, Pete has never been able to return. Living in Africa, they began to think about how to resume the work they had commenced as Black Panthers. As well documented as the nineteen-sixties were, the staff writer Jelani Cobb notes, the story of radicals forced into exile is hardly known. The producer KalaLea reported from Tanzania, with additional reporting by Andrea Tudhope in Kansas City. (Part 1 of a two-part story.)

Tshidi Matale, Kiva, and L. D. Brown of Grey Reverend contributed music for this story.

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Jane Mayer on the Revolving Door Between Fox News and the White House Mar 05, 2019

Show notes

Donald Trump has made no secret of his great admiration for Fox News -- which he praises by tweet nearly constantly -- and his disdain for other, “fake news” outlets that he regards as “enemies of the people.” But the closeness of the relationship between Fox News and the White House is unprecedented in modern times, Jane Mayer tells David Remnick. In a recent article, Mayer, a staff writer since 1995, analyzes a symbiotic relationship that boosts both Trump’s poll numbers and Rupert Murdoch’s bottom line. “I was trying to figure out who sets the tune that everybody plays during the course of the day. If the news on Fox is all about some kind of caravan of immigrants supposedly invading America, whose idea is that? It turns out that it is this continual feedback loop,” Mayer says. She pays particular attention to the role of Bill Shine, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications and a former Fox News executive, who has helped create a revolving door where those who create the Administration’s political messaging and those who broadcast it regularly trade places. Jane also discovered that Shine was linked to the intimidation of employees who were sexually harassed at Fox News.

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A Moderate Republican Wants to Primary Donald Trump in 2020 Mar 01, 2019

Show notes

The former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld is launching what looks like a political suicide mission. He recently announced an exploratory committee to challenge Trump in the primary. He sees a pathway to victory that runs through his neighboring state of New Hampshire, to other blue-leaning states where Republican voters might be open to a moderate candidate for the nomination. He says that some “billionaires” will back his long-shot bid, and he’s betting that the damage from investigations may end Trump’s charmed political life. Plus, Evan Osnos on the news from Washington this week, and Rachel Syme with three fashion tips for David Remnick.

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A Writer Solves a Mystery, and Ruth E. Carter Steps into the Spotlight Feb 22, 2019

Show notes

Committed during a period filled with bombings, killings, and disappearances, the murder of Jean McConville remains one of the most infamous unsolved crimes of the Troubles. The writer Patrick Radden Keefe may have discovered who killed her. Plus, the costume designer Ruth E. Carter, best known for her work on the movie “Black Panther,” talks about her decades-long career. And The New Yorker presents the second year of the Brody Awards.

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What Are We Talking About When We Talk about Socialism? Feb 19, 2019

Show notes

With the election to the House of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, following up on the surprising Presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, socialism is on the rise, after a long decline in America. But the Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore says there is a great deal of ambiguity about what socialism even means. Americans have always danced around the term, and the actual policies advanced under the banner of socialism may look very similar to liberalism, or social democracy, or even the historical movement known as “good government.” Sanders declared that the hero of his brand of socialism is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who insisted that he was not a socialist. Lepore tells David Remnick, “The way our politics works is to discredit not the idea or the policy but the label.” Plus, the actor Richard E. Grant has just been nominated for his first Oscar, for “Can You Ever Forgive Me,” after thirty-plus years in the movies. And, as an Oscar nominee, he finally got Barbra Streisand, his all-time idol, to reply to a fan letter he sent her nearly fifty years ago.

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Teju Cole on Blackface and Valeria Luiselli on the Border Crisis Feb 15, 2019

Show notes

When depictions of Virginia politicians in blackface surfaced this month, the New Yorker contributor Teju Cole was unsurprised. “A white man of a certain age in the U.S.,” he reflects, “is found to have done something racist in his past; well, yes.” As a photographer and photo critic, he is acutely aware that a photograph captures the thinnest sliver of time, half a second or much less. So any photograph of a man in blackface—or in any other offensive image—always indicates that “there’s a lot more where that came from.” And Valeria Luiselli, a writer born in Mexico, struggles to depict the experiences of children arriving alone at the southern border, in circumstances unimaginably different from her own border crossings as the daughter of a diplomat.

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