The New Yorker Radio Hour

The city of Los Angeles has declared itself a sanctuary city, where local authorities do not share information with federal immigration enforcement. But L.A.—where nearly forty per cent of residents are foreign-born—became ground zero for controversial arrests and deportations by ICE. The Trump Administration deployed marines and the National Guard to the city, purportedly to quell protests agains...

“I’m personally desperate for art that at least attempts to grapple with whatever the hell is going on right now,” the writer-director Ari Aster tells Adam Howard, a senior producer of the Radio Hour. “ ‘Eddington’ is a film about a bunch of people who . . .  know that something’s wrong. They just—nobody can agree on what that thing is.” Many of us would prefer to forget a fearful time like the sp...

The sense that the White House is covering something up about Jeffrey Epstein has led to backlash from some of Trump’s most ardent supporters. Even after the financier was convicted for hiring an underage prostitute, for which he served a brief and extraordinarily lenient sentence, Epstein remained a playboy, a top political donor, and a very good friend of the very powerful—“a sybarite,” in the w...

For The New Yorker’s series Takes , Carrie Brownstein—the co-creator of Sleater-Kinney and “Portlandia”—writes about an iconic rock-and-roll image. In the summer of 2003, the musician Chan Marshall, better known as Cat Power, was transitioning from an indie darling to a major rock artist, and the staff writer Hilton Als wrote a Profile of her in The New Yorker . Facing his piece was a full-page po...

In conservative economics, cuts to social services are often seen as necessary to shrink the expanding deficit. Donald Trump’s budget bill is something altogether different: it cuts Medicaid while slashing tax rates for the wealthiest Americans, adding $6 trillion to the national debt, according to the Cato Institute. Janet Yellen, a former Treasury Secretary and former chair of the Federal Reserv...

Kalief Browder was jailed at Rikers Island at the age of sixteen; he spent three years locked up without ever being convicted of a crime, and much of that time was spent in solitary confinement. In 2014, the New Yorker staff writer Jennifer Gonnerman wrote about Browder and the failings of the criminal-justice system that his case exposed: unconscionable delays in the courts, excessive use of soli...

In 2022, The New Yorker published a personal history about growing up in Ireland during the nineteen-sixties and seventies. It covers the interfaith marriage of the author’s parents, which was unusual in Dublin; his mother’s early death; and finding his calling in music. The author was Bono, for more than forty years the lyricist and lead singer of one of the biggest rock bands on the planet. As U...

In 2024, Harvard University offered a course on Taylor Swift. It was popular, to say the least. That course was taught by a professor and literary critic named Stephanie Burt. In The New Yorker , Burt has written seriously about comics and science fiction, but she’s also considered great poets such as Seamus Heaney and Mary Oliver. Now, Burt has put together an anthology titled, “ Super Gay Poems...

The relationship between Fox News and Donald Trump is not just close; it can be profoundly influential. Trump frequently responds to segments in real time online—even to complain about a poll he doesn’t like. He has tapped the network for nearly two dozen roles within his Administration—including the current Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth , a former Fox News host. The network is also seen as h...

A mega-donor to the Republican Presidential campaign, Elon Musk got something no other titan of industry has ever received: an office in the White House and a government department tailor-made for him, with incalculable influence in shaping the Administration. But even with Musk out of Washington, it remains a fact that the influence of wealth in America has never been greater. As one case in poin...

The Ayatollahs who have ruled Iran since 1979 have long promised to destroy the Jewish state, and even set a deadline for it.  While arming proxies to fight Israel—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and more—Iran is believed to have sought to develop nuclear weapons for itself. “The big question about Iran was always how significant is its apocalyptic theology,” Yossi Klein...

The New Yorker recently published a report from Sudan, headlined “ Escape from Khartoum .” The contributor Nicolas Niarchos journeyed for days through a conflict to reach a refugee camp in the Nuba Mountains, where members of the country’s minority Black ethnic groups are seeking safety, but remain imperilled by hunger. The territory is “very significant to the Nuba people,” Niarchos explains to D...

Barbra Streisand has been a huge presence in American entertainment—music, film, and stage—for more than sixty years. She was the youngest person ever to achieve the EGOT, winning Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards by the age of twenty-seven. At eighty-three years old, Streisand is releasing a new album, “The Secret of Life: Partners, Volume 2.” It’s a collection of duets featuring Paul McCartne...

John Seabrook ’s new book is about a family business—not a mom-and-pop store, but a huge operation run by a ruthless patriarch. The patriarch is aging, and he cannot stand to lose his hold on power, nor let his children take over the enterprise. This might sound like the plot of HBO’s drama “Succession,” but the story John tells in “ The Spinach King ” is about a real family: the Seabrooks, of Sea...

When Donald Trump made an alliance with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., he brought vaccine skepticism and the debunked link between vaccines and autism into the center of the MAGA agenda. Though the scientific establishment has long disproven that link, as many as one in four Americans today believe that vaccines may cause autism. In April, Kennedy, now the Secretary of Health and Human Services, shocked...

In the music business, Brian Eno is a name to conjure with. He’s been the producer of tremendous hits by U2, Talking Heads, David Bowie, Grace Jones, Coldplay, and many other top artists. But he’s also a conceptualist, nicknamed Professor Eno in the British music press, and a foundational figure in ambient music—a genre whose very name Eno coined. Amanda Petrusich speaks with Eno about his two new...

Lesley Stahl, a linchpin of CBS News, began at the network in 1971, covering major events such as Watergate, and for many years has been a correspondent on “60 Minutes.” But right now it’s a perilous time for CBS News, which has been sued by Donald Trump for twenty billion dollars over the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris during the 2024 Presidential campaign. Its owner, Para...

In honor of The New Yorker’s centennial this year, the magazine’s staff writers are pulling out some classics from the long history of the publication. Louisa Thomas , The New Yorker’s sports correspondent, naturally gravitated to a story about baseball with a title only comprehensible to baseball aficionados: “ Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu .” The essay was by no less a writer than the author John Updik...

When the jazz singer Cécile McLorin Salvant was profiled in The New Yorker , Wynton Marsalis described her as the kind of talent who comes along only “once in a generation or two.” Salvant’s work is rooted in jazz—in the tradition of Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan and Abbey Lincoln—and she has won three Grammy Awards for Best Jazz Vocal Album. But her interests and her repertoire reach across e...

This special episode comes from “On the Media” ’s Peabody-winning series “The Divided Dial,” reported by Katie Thornton. You know A.M. and F.M. radio. But did you know that there is a whole other world of radio surrounding us at all times? It’s called shortwave—and, thanks to a quirk of science that lets broadcasters bounce radio waves off the ionosphere, it can reach thousands of miles, penetrati...

Nearly a year ago, a Presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, moderated by Jake Tapper and Dana Bash of CNN, began the end of Biden’s bid for a second term. The President struggled to make points, complete sentences, and remember facts; he spoke in a raspy whisper. This was not the first time voters expressed concern about Biden’s age, but his decline was shocking to many, and sudde...

A year ago, Percival Everett published his twenty-fourth novel, “ James ,” and it became a literary phenomenon. It won the National Book Award, and, just this week, was announced as the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. “James” offers a radically different perspective on the classic Mark Twain novel “ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ”: Everett centers his story on the character of Jim,...

When Elissa Slotkin narrowly won her Senate seat in Michigan last fall, she was one of only four Democratic senators to claim victory in a state that voted for Donald Trump. It made other Democrats take note: since then, the Party has turned to her as someone who can bridge the red state–blue state divide. In March, Slotkin delivered the Democrats’ rebuttal to Trump’s speech before Congress , and...

For a long time, Republicans and many Democrats espoused some version of free-trade economics that would have been familiar to Adam Smith. But Donald Trump breaks radically with that tradition, embracing a form of protectionism that resulted in his extremely broad and chaotic tariff proposals, which tanked markets and deepened the fear of a global recession. John Cassidy writes The New Yorker’s Th...

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, has been undermining public trust in vaccines and overseeing crippling cuts to research across American science. And yet his “make America healthy again” highlights themes more familiar in liberal circles: toxins in the environment, biodiversity, healthy eating. Kennedy has put junk food at the center of the political conversation...