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The New Yorker Radio Hour — Games & Hobbies
The New Yorker Radio Hour

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

Copyright: © WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Latest Episodes:

The Trump Children Were Investigated for Fraud, But Avoided Indictment Oct 06, 2017

Show notes

The Trump SoHo was supposed to be a splash for the Trump Organization and for Ivanka and Donald Trump, Jr., who were leading the project. Instead, they were stuck trying to market very small units to buyers as the financial crisis hit. That they lied in selling the building isn’t in question, and the Manhattan District Attorney's office began investigating; but, after a meeting between the D.A. and Marc Kasowitz, a Trump lawyer, the government never filed charges. What happened? Andrea Bernstein, of WNYC, and the Pulitzer Prize-winner Jesse Eisinger, of ProPublica, jointly reported on the Trump SoHo; they spoke to The New Yorker’s Adam Davidson, who has reported extensively on the Trump Organization. Plus, the staff writer Doreen St. Félix tells David Remnick why Cardi B, the first female rapper since Lauryn Hill to hit the Billboard No. 1—is shaking up the music industry.

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Karl Ove Knausgaard on Near-Death Experiences, Raising Kids, Puberty, Brain Surgery, and Turtles Oct 03, 2017

Show notes

A crime reporter and a business writer try to figure out how the government can charge a bank a sixteen-billion-dollar fine for wrongdoing yet fail to prosecute any individual at that bank for a crime. Plus, a long walk with Karl Ove Knausgaard. Knausgaard’s monumental autobiographical novel in six volumes, “My Struggle,” describes the events of his life in immense detail over thousands of pages—a most unlikely literary hit. His new project is only a bit less ambitious. It’s a four-part series named after the seasons, one book per season, which he wrote for his daughter while awaiting her birth. Each book consists of dozens of short essays, reflections on the most common things, tangible and intangible. The first book in the series, “Autumn,” was just published in the U.S. When Karl Ove Knausgaard was in New York recently, he met up with The New Yorker’s Joshua Rothman, and they covered all the basics: near-death experiences, raising kids, puberty, brain surgery, and turtles.

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David Simon’s “The Deuce” Charts the Rise of Pornography Sep 29, 2017

Show notes

David Simon believes in the dignity of labor, “even when it’s undignified.” What “The Wire” (which he created) did for the drug trade in Baltimore, “The Deuce,” also on HBO, does for sex work and the beginnings of the pornography industry in New York, in the seventies. Critics have compared Simon not so much to other television showrunners as to novelists like Dickens; Simon’s work is similarly wide in scope, with large casts, and aims to create a picture of a whole world. At bottom, he wants to follow the money from the street to the bosses to the politicians. But while Simon is sympathetic to the sex workers he depicts in “The Deuce,” and even to some of the pimps and mobsters who exploit them, he is unambiguously critical of porn’s effect on America. He tells David Remnick that porn—universally available on the Internet in its most extreme forms—has warped a whole culture toward misogyny. Plus, Ellie Kemper as a character with pathological delusions of gracefulness; and the rapper Wiki grows up.

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Julia Louis-Dreyfus Wins Again Sep 26, 2017

Show notes

Julia Louis-Dreyfus recently won her sixth consecutive Emmy for Best Actress in a Comedy for the role of Selina Meyer, the hapless Vice-President turned President, in HBO’s “Veep.” The show has been on for six seasons so her record is perfect. In 2016, Louis-Dreyfus spoke with David Remnick as the Presidential race was growing more outrageous by the day, and “Veep,” which began as a satire of Washington, had come to seem like “a somber documentary” about the political process. They also spoke about Louis-Dreyfus’s early days on “Saturday Night Live,” and her fight to be taken seriously as a woman in Hollywood.

Plus, another, earlier fight for women’s rights: the 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs is the subject of the new film starring Emma Stone and Steve Carrell called “Battle of the Sexes.” The composer Nicholas Britell wrote the score, and talks with The New Yorker editor Henry Finder about how a piano concerto is like a tennis match.

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At the Brink with North Korea Sep 22, 2017

Show notes

Donald Trump mocked Kim Jong Un by calling him “rocket man,” and threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea if the U.S. or its allies were attacked. Kim, in turn, dismissed Trump as a “barking dog Evan Osnos recently reported from Washington and Pyongyang on the tensions between the United States and North Korea. Osnos tells David Remnick that North Korea will never give up its nuclear weapons; they are no longer a bargaining chip but a source of national identity and security. Despite the forceful rhetoric and threats, Osnos found little appetite for war in either government, concluding that North Korea is not “a suicidal cult.” And he predicts that Trump will contain the risk, rather than eliminate it. Plus, critic Amanda Petrusich picks a book, a T.V. show, and an album for the end of summer.

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For Teen Activists, What Good Is a Protest Song? Sep 19, 2017

Show notes

Since the Inauguration, in January, there’s been a kind of protest renaissance for those on the left and some in the center of American politics; at rallies and marches, they’ve dusted off chants and songs that became symbols of resistance during the civil-rights and Vietnam eras. But many of these protesters weren’t alive in the sixties, and the songs of their parents’ or grandparents’ generations may not resonate for them. “Primer for a Failed Superpower” was a concert performance, organized by the theatre company the Team, that mixed classic protest songs with contemporary anthems, all sung by a cast that spanned generational lines from boomers to teens. The New Yorker’s Vinson Cunningham talked to two young performers, Maxwell Vice and Logan Rozos, about how that generational divide played out, and what public protest is worth in the age of social media.

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Hillary Clinton on the “Clear and Present Danger” of Collusion with Russia Sep 13, 2017

Show notes

Hillary Clinton harbors no doubts, she tells David Remnick in a long interview, that political allies of Donald Trump astutely “guided” the release of hacked e-mails by WikiLeaks and the planting of fake news in order to sabotage her. In a new book, “What Happened,” Clinton is by turns angry, accusatory, and apologetic about the 2016 election and its outcome. She describes the infiltration by Russia as a “clear and present danger” to the electoral process that Republicans should take as seriously as Democrats; Putin could, she points out, just as easily turn on Trump. She also tells Remnick that the media failed voters by focussing coverage on scandals rather than policies; she analyzes how sexism affected voters as they judged a woman who sought the highest office in the land; she wishes that President Obama had acted more forcefully on what was known about Russian involvement; and she lays out a plan for diplomatic efforts to address the North Korea nuclear crisis. A resolution is possible, she believes, but she worries that “nobody’s home at the State Department. There isn’t anybody to really guide a strategic approach to North Korea, as opposed to tweeting and speechifying.”

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What Was It Like Before the Internet? Sep 12, 2017

Show notes

A magical time of unfettered creativity but zero productivity, the days before the Internet were so strange that it’s hard to believe they were real. Clearly no one got anything done, ever. Jenny Slate performs Emma Rathbone’s “Before the Internet,” from The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs. Plus: Ten years ago, Susan Orlean, a staff writer at The New Yorker, wrote about a former laser physicist who had given up a successful career to become an origami artist. In time, Robert Lang became one of the world’s top practitioners,and origami became a surprising area of scientific activity, with government grants encouraging research into how materials fold. Orlean caught up with Lang at the OrigamiUSA convention recently, where she tried her hand at Lang’s popular goldfish—which has a hinged jaw and fins—and talked with him about the life lessons of folding paper.

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After Charlottesville, the Limits of Free Speech Sep 08, 2017

Show notes

When is speech no longer just speech? David Remnick looks at how leftist protests at Berkeley, right-wing violence in Charlottesville, and open-carry laws around the country are testing the traditional liberal consensus on freedom of expression. He speaks with Mark Bray, the author of a new and sympathetic book about Antifa; Melissa Murray, a law-school professor at U.C. Berkeley; and Dahlia Lithwick, a legal analyst for Slate.

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Neil Gorsuch and the Uses of History Sep 05, 2017

Show notes

We have yet to learn just how closely the views of the Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch resemble those of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, a staunch conservative and a standard-bearer for the legal philosophy known as originalism. Originalists claim to interpret the Constitution by relying on its words and on the contemporary writings of the Constitution's framers. The New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore, a professor of history, says that Gorsuch has been candid about the limitations of historical thinking. But she also notes that liberal jurists, for their part, have become more engaged in historical research to bolster their decisions, and thus are “out-originalizing originalists.” Plus: Alexa is the voice-recognition program in Echo, Amazon’s speaker device. It sits in your house, always on, listening for commands to look up information, play media on your computer, or order stuff from Amazon. The New Yorker’s Sarah Larson tests out Alexa, and finds it to be like “2001: A Space Odyssey” crossed with “The Golden Girls.”

This episode originally aired on September 30, 2016

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