The New Yorker Radio Hour

The staff writer Rebecca Mead recently observed the seven-hour surgery of woman she calls Abby. (To protect her privacy, Abby’s real name was not used, and her voice has been altered in the audio of our story.) Abby, who is trans, had undergone hormone therapy, but her strong facial features still led people to refer to her as male, which caused her severe emotional pain. She decided to undergo a reconstructive procedure called facial feminization surgery, in which a specialist would break and reshape her bones. Mead spoke with Abby before and after the surgery about what it would mean for the world to see her as she sees herself. Plus: The poet Ada Limón moved to Kentucky and fell in love with horses all over again.

As a conservative columnist at the New York Times, Ross Douthat fills the post once held by no less a figure than William Kristol. A devout Catholic, Douthat opposes the progressive direction in which Pope Francis is leading the Church—to prioritize caring for poor people and migrants over opposing abortion and the culture of sexual revolution—even though he acknowledges to David Remnick that this puts him at odds with the Church’s emphasis on mercy. In his new book, “To Change the Church: Pope Francis of the Future of Catholicism,” Douthat provocatively compares Francis to Donald Trump, painting him as a disruptive figure who is determined to bring change fast and damn the consequences. Plus: a lawyer and former baseball player explains why a new federal law targets the wages of minor league players.

Frank Oz was a teenager when he started working with Jim Henson, the puppeteer and filmmaker behind the Muppets. Oz went on to create characters like Bert, Cookie Monster, Miss Piggy, and Yoda from “Star Wars.” Michael Schulman is a contributor to The New Yorker and the magazine’s foremost authority on all things Muppet. He takes a trip uptown, to Frank Oz’s home in Manhattan, and talks with Oz about his most iconic characters, moving on after the death of Jim Henson, and what’s missing from today’s Muppets. Plus, The New Yorker’s Naomi Fry recommends three things not to miss on the Internet.

Emma González is a survivor of the Parkland attack, and a leader of the #NeverAgain movement. She talks with David Remnick about the ways her life has changed since the shooting, and why activism comes naturally to the teens spearheading the new push for gun control. And Dexter Filkins talks with David Remnick about the dynamic Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia—a young, energetic reformer who is forging close ties with the Trump White House.

Every week, a New Yorker cartoon is posted online and printed in the magazine without a caption, and thousands of people write in with their suggestions. Readers vote on a winner, and the top pick is printed in the following issue. Willy Staley and Matt Jordan submit a caption pretty much every week, working as a team. They’ve been doing it for years, but they never win—and they probably never will. Their goal isn’t to write a winning caption; it’s to write the most wrong-headed, vulgar, and hilariously inappropriate caption possible. “There’s something to the typical New Yorker cartoon,” says Jordan. “It’s succinct, it tends to be clean, it tends to be on cue. We just try to curveball around that.” Using their failings in the official contest, they’ve built an online following for their Tumblr blog “Shitty New Yorker Cartoon Captions.” They sat down with The New Yorker’s cartoon editor, Emma Allen, to discuss what separates a typical losing caption from a truly shitty one.

When police showed up to question John Thompson, he was worried that it was because he had sold drugs to an undercover cop. When he realized they were investigating a murder, he could only laugh: “Shit, for real? Murder?”Thompson was insistent on his innocence, but New Orleans prosecutors wanted a conviction for a high-profile murder, and they were not scrupulous about how they got it. Thompson quickly found himself on death row. Eighteen years later, just weeks before Thompson was due to be executed, his lawyers discovered that a prosecutor had hidden exculpatory evidence from the defense. Thompson had been set up. This was a violation of the Brady Rule, established by the Supreme Court, in 1963, to ensure fair trials. Ultimately, he was exonerated of both crimes, but his attempts to get a settlement from the district attorney’s office—compensation for his time in prison—were thwarted. Though an appeals court had upheld a fourteen-million-dollar settlement, the Supreme Court reversed the decision, declining to punish the D.A. for failing to enforce the Court’s previous decision. Thompson’s case revealed fundamental imbalances that undermine the very notion of a fair trial. Under the Brady Rule, prosecutors must share with the defense any evidence that could be favorable to the defendant. But there is essentially no practical enforcement of this rule. In most states, prosecutors are the ones who hold the evidence and choose what to share, and disclosing exculpatory evidence makes their cases harder to win. We have absolutely no idea how many criminal trials are flawed by these violations.The staff writer Andrew Marantz, his wife, Sarah Lustbader, of the Fair Punishment Project, and the producer Katherine Wells reported on John Thompson’s story and its implications. They spoke with the late John Thompson (who died in 2017), with his lawyers, and with Harry Connick, Sr., the retired New Orleans D.A. who, despite having tried very hard to have Thompson killed, remains unrepentant. This episode contains explicit language and may not be suitable for children.

Abdulqader Hilal Al-Dabab was the mayor of Sana’a, a politician with a long record of mediating disputes in a notoriously fractious and dangerous country. Earlier in his career, he accepted a position at which his two predecessors had been assassinated; Hilal, as he was known, served in that post for seven years. By 2015, Yemen was at war and Sana’a had become the center of a brutally destructive bombing campaign by a coalition led by Saudi Arabia—with planes, arms, and logistical support from the United States. Hilal was trying to hold the city together, keeping the ambulances running and convincing parents to send their children to school. At the same time, he was trying to broker a ceasefire, using the skills he had cultivated in local government at a broader level. When the Saudis bombed a funeral gathering that Hilal was attending, he was killed and the country lost a bright hope for peace. Nicolas Niarchos talks with Hilal’s son about his father’s fate and what it says about the country’s future. Plus, Jia Tolentino visits the prize-winners at the Westminster dog show and tries to come to terms with the badly behaved mutt who’s wrecking her home.

As the Attorney General of Oklahoma, Scott Pruitt sued the Environmental Protection Agency fourteen times, claiming that the Obama Administration had overreached with policies intended to curtail climate change—a phenomenon which Pruitt views skeptically. Then Donald Trump appointed him to run it. The New Yorker’s Margaret Talbot, who wrote about Pruitt’s first year at the E.P.A., notes that Pruitt has cast his hostility to environmental protection as a form of populist resistance, even as it has gained him close allies in the fossil-fuel industry. Pruitt calls his approach at the E.P.A. “originalism”: he’s directed the agency to focus on dirty pollution, as it did back in the nineteen-seventies. Yet, as Talbot tells David Remnick, Pruitt is still quick to overrule regulation if it inconveniences polluting industries. Plus, The New Yorker’s critic of pop music, Carrie Battan, plays three tracks that have grabbed her attention lately.

Tens of thousands of refugees from the civil war in Yemen have fled across the narrow Mandeb Strait to Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa. Nicolas Niarchos reported for The New Yorker from Djibouti, where Yemeni refugees cross paths with Ethiopians escaping a devastating drought. In one camp, he met a man whom aid workers described as a kind of Peter Pan. Abdillahi Bashraheel was once a road surveyor in Yemen, and lost everything in the war. From the camp, he walks miles in the desert each day to pick up broken toys, electronics, wood, stone, and other bits and bobs. He arranges these objects in his tent to create what he calls his museum—a place of beauty and respite under desperate circumstances. Plus, Tracy K. Smith, the poet laureate says that “green space has fed the inner silence that I think most writers are seeking.”

As the fourth season of “Veep” came to an end, director Armando Iannucci turned from chronicling the foibles of cynical western democracy to something darker still: life under dictatorship. He found his source material in the French graphic novel “The Death of Stalin.” David Remnick compares Iannucci’s new film to “Get Out”—a real horror story that is also a comedy of terror. “I wanted to take myself out of my comfort zone by taking on these themes that involved death, destruction, and paranoia,” Iannucci tells him. As the brutal dictatorships of the twentieth century fade into history, Iannucci wants to remind people—especially those frustrated with democracy—just how horrific totalitarianism really is. Plus, Svetlana Alexievich, who won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature for her oral histories about life in the U.S.S.R.

Bandi is the pen name of a North Korean writer. He is believed to be a propaganda writer for the government who began to write, secretly, fiction and poems critical of the regime. (Details of his biography cannot be verified, because identifying him publically would put his life in jeopardy.) His work was smuggled out of the country in circumstances that resemble a spy novel, and has recently been published in the West. The New Yorker Radio Hour’s Mythili Rao has written about Bandi’s fiction and poetry. She spoke with the translator of the poems, a scholar of Korean culture named Heinz Insu Fenkl. Fenkl says the poems reflect a sophisticated approach that turns literary devices familiar to North Korean readers to subversive purposes. Plus, Curtis Sittenfeld talks with Joshua Rothman on why men should read romance novels.

The dossier—a secret report alleging various corrupt dealings between Donald Trump, his campaign, and the government of Russia, made public after the 2016 election—is one of the most hotly debated documents in Washington. The dossier’s author, Christopher Steele, is a former British spy working on contract, and went into hiding after its publication. “The Man Behind the Dossier,” Jane Mayer’s report on Steele, was just published in The New Yorker. She reports that Steele is in the "unenviable predicament" of being hated by both Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin—and that he documented more evidence than he put in the dossier.

Henry Worsley was a husband, father, and an officer of an élite British commando unit; also a tapestry weaver, amateur boxer, photographer, and collector of rare books, maps, and fossils. But his true obsession was exploration. Worsley revered the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton and he had led a 2009 expedition to the South Pole. But Worsley planned an even greater challenge. At fifty-five, he set out to trek alone to ski from one side of the Antarctic continent to the other, hauling more than three hundred pounds of gear and posting an audio diary by satellite phone. The New Yorker staff writer David Grann wrote about Worsley’s quest, and spoke with his widow, Joanna Worsley, about the painful choice she made to support her husband in a mortally dangerous endeavor.

Jennifer Lawrence was nominated for her first Oscar at twenty, and since then she has balanced the biggest of big-budget franchises, like the “Hunger Games” and the “X-Men” series, with smaller, prestige films, including “Silver Linings Playbook” and “mother!” That has made her perhaps the most famous and the most celebrated actor of her generation. Lawrence has tended to shy away from nudity and sex on film, but in the new “Red Sparrow,” directed by Francis Lawrence, she tackles a role that combines two of today’s most critical issues: Russian espionage and sexual coercion at work. As a frequent target of tabloid journalists, trolls, and hackers, Lawrence is frustrated that so many people still want to punish successful women, but, she tells David Remnick, Hollywood itself is changing; and, despite the likely cost to her career, she intends to spend the next year off the set and working as an activist, speaking to young people about the importance of political engagement.Plus, a look at the lobbyist who helped make Florida one of the most gun-friendly states in America.

Richard Brody hosts an alternative Oscars show — “The Brodies” — and recommends some of his favorite films from the past year, and the writer Chang-rae Lee takes us to a sprawling international supermarket in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Masha Gessen was born in the Soviet Union and has written extensively about Russian politics. She talks with David Remnick about the similarities between Putin’s Russia and Trump’s America. The New Yorker’s Sarah Stillman talks with a former Border Patrol officer, whose years on the job left him emotionally and physically depleted. And in a Shouts and Murmurs piece by Seth Reiss, the comedian Bill Hader plays a disgruntled server who’s got some strong feelings about the house-made ketchup.

No film adaptation of “A Wrinkle In Time,” Madeleine L’Engle’s beloved, and often banned, children’s book, published in 1962, has ever made it to American movie theaters. It finally comes to the screen next month, with a cast that includes Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon,. The director is Ava DuVernay, who wasn’t the obvious choice for a metaphysical fantasy epic. Best known for “Selma,” about the 1965 civil-rights march, DuVernay also made the documentary “13,” about the prison system, and the TV series “Queen Sugar.” But DuVernay tells the staff writer Jelani Cobb that she relished the opportunity to create a fantasy film. “You’re seeing worlds built through the point of view of a black woman from Compton,” she says. “So when I’m told, ‘Create a planet,’ my planet’s going to look different from my white male counterpart’s planet”—which is what Hollywood shows us “ninety-seven per cent of the time.” DuVernay and Cobb spoke at The New Yorker Festival in October, 2017.

We now know that Russian operatives exploited Facebook and other social media to sow division and undermine the election of 2016, and special counsel Robert Mueller recently indicted Russian nationals and Russian entities for this activity. During that period, however, Facebook executives kept their heads down, and the C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, denied and underplayed the extent of the damage. Now Zuckerberg is in a process of soul-searching, attempting to right Facebook’s missteps—even if it means less traffic to the site. Nicholas Thompson, the editor in chief of Wired (formerly the editor of NewYorker.com), interviewed fifty-one current and former employees of Facebook for a Wired cover story, co-written with Fred Vogelstein, called “Inside the Two Years that Shook Facebook—and the World.” He tells David Remnick that the effort is not just lip service: for a business like Facebook, reputation really is everything. Plus, The New Yorker’s Director of Photography, Joanna Milter, on her true passion: the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Ian Frazier, who has chronicled American life for The New Yorker for more than forty years, recently travelled to a house in Fort Collins, Colorado, where three roommates build, fly, and race drones. Jordan Temkin, Zachry Thayer, and Travis McIntyre are three of perhaps only fifty professional drone racers in the world, piloting the tiny devices through complex courses at upward of eighty miles an hour. Drones have had enormous impact on military strategy and the commercial applications seem limitless, but to these pilots drones exist in the strange overlap between pure adrenaline and big money that defines pro sports. Plus, the novelist T. Coraghessan Boyle grapples with the devastation wreaked by wildfires and mudslides, which took the lives of his neighbors and transformed swaths of his town into mud flats.

The 2016 Presidential primaries were a rebuke to moderates in both parties. Bernie Sanders, a sometime Democratic Socialist, built a grassroots movement that bitterly rejected the centrist Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump, whose conservative credentials were deeply suspect, defeated sixteen Republican stalwarts. As the 2018 midterms approach, both parties are wrestling with the question of whether to rise with the tide of extremist sentiment, or run moderates to regain the center. Andrew Hall, an assistant professor of political science at Stanford, studies the effect of extremist candidates on elections. He tells The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson Sorkin that we may be asking the wrong question. Plus, the Pulitzer Prize winner Steve Coll on how the repeated failures of American intelligence and policy led to the nation’s longest and most intractable war.

As a congressman from Montana, Ryan Zinke was considered a moderate—he resisted radical suggestions, for example, to turn over federal land to the states. But, as Secretary of the Interior, he is at the forefront of the Trump Administration’s push to rapidly roll back environmental regulations and expand mining, drilling, and commercial exploitation of all kinds. Zinke was instrumental in the recent decision to shrink Bears Ears National Monument, opening up enormous tracts of land to uranium mining. He has acted in seemingly petty ways, as well, including increasing litter by reintroducing the sale of plastic water bottles in national parks. Elizabeth Kolbert recently wrote about Zinke's tenure at the Interior Department. In assessing Zinke's and Trump's motives, she tells David Remnick, the most cynical interpretation is likely the right one. Plus, a short primer that will finally explain bitcoin (not); and a food editor investigates a new veggie burger that supposedly looks, feels, and tastes like beef.

Laura Kipnis is a professor at Northwestern University and a provocative feminist critic. Her book “Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus” states, “If this is feminism, it’s feminism hijacked by melodrama.” She has been accused of violating Title IX by creating a hostile environment for students to report harassment. Kipnis, who supports the movement, tells the staff writer Alexandra Schwartz that the grassroots power of public revelations is being hijacked by institutions in a power grab to control the lives of employees and students. The real feminist lesson of cases like Aziz Ansari’s much-discussed bad date, Kipnis thinks, is that that women as well as men need to reflect on how they conduct themselves in heterosexual relationships.

The novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has had commercial and critical success: Her best-seller “Americanah” won a National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, and a speech she gave on feminism was sampled by Beyoncé. But Adichie is skeptical of fame, and not afraid to voice controversial opinions. At The New Yorker Festival in October, 2017, she spoke with David Remnick about how the left in this country seems “cannibalistic,” and how, as a Nigerian immigrant to America, she at first distanced herself from our country’s conception of blackness. America was complicated for Adichie: she appreciated the freedom from the social hierarchies back home, but she had imagined everything would be newer and shinier than it really was. Plus, the British folk musician Laura Marling tells John Seabrook about living in Los Angeles alongside the spirits of her musical idols, and performs her song “The Valley.”

Nathan Lane may be best known for supplying the voice of the fun-loving meerkat in “The Lion King,” but in recent years he’s turned his focus to more serious roles. Now he’s playing the villain, Roy Cohn, in a new production of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America.” Lane sat down with Michael Schulman at The New Yorker Festival in October, 2017, to talk about the real-life Cohn. A conservative attorney who denied that he was gay to the end of his life, Cohn served as Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel during the crusade against Communism, as an adviser to Richard Nixon, and as a mentor to the young Donald Trump. Lane went to great lengths to understand the contradictions of Cohn’s life. “It’s easy to find people who hated him,” Lane tells Schulman. “But there were people who loved Roy Cohn.” “Angels in America” opens on Broadway in February.

The Ku Klux Klan was originally focused on maintaining the old racial order in the postwar South, chiefly through the violent suppression of African-Americans. But, in the nineteen-twenties, the Klan was reborn as a nationwide movement, targeting not only African-Americans but Jews, Catholics, Muslims, Mexican-Americans, and Asian immigrants. In the jingoistic years following the First World War, the Klan made discrimination the new patriotism. The Bancroft Prize-winning historian Linda Gordon charts this rebirth in “The Second Coming of the KKK.” She writes that millions of people joined the Klan in the span of just a few years, among them mayors, congressmen, senators, and governors; three Presidents were members of the Klan at some point before taking the office. Gordon tells David Remnick that the lessons for our current political moment are sobering. The writer Andrew Marantz, who covers media and politics for The New Yorker, explains how today’s alt-right manipulates something called the Overton Window to bring fringe ideas into the mainstream. Plus, the staff writer Troy Patterson shares three recent picks with David Remnick.

David Attenborough’s films for the BBC—impeccably researched, ambitiously filmed, and executed with style and imagination—have set a high bar for nature documentaries in our time. Over sixty years, his films have taught generations of us about the extraordinary diversity of life on the planet. His latest project is a seven-part survey of the world’s oceans, called “Planet Earth: Blue Planet II,” which débuts this week on BBC America. The series uses every technological advance, including drone-mounted and submersible cameras, to bring us closer to nature’s extremities. Attenborough talks with David Remnick about breaking precedent to give the film an overtly environmental message; about his determination at age ninety-one to keep working; and about the only creatures he really can’t stand. Plus, a look at how the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver finds spiritual meaning in the natural world.

A tougher stance on immigration is the signature position of the Trump Administration, and the President’s first year in office has been marked by sharply increased arrests of unauthorized immigrants. In this hour we explore immigration and deportation from the perspective of a Wisconsin dairy farm, a conservative Washington think tank, and the mother of a deportee, as well as a sanctuary church where a woman is hiding in plain sight from immigration enforcement.

Tracee Ellis Ross, who plays Dr. Rainbow Johnson on ABC’s “Black-ish,” joins Doreen St. Félix for a conversation about television, race, and self-acceptance. “Black-ish” has a reputation for breaking boundaries and tackling political and racial questions rarely discussed in prime time. But Ellis has found room to push back on the show’s treatment of her character as the wife on a family sitcom. And Jon Hamm won audiences over in “Mad Men” as Don Draper, the quintessential man’s man. “Navigating what the show became and navigating the success is the trickiest part of it,” he tells Susan Morrison. So he flexed his comedic muscles as often as possible, with roles in “Bridesmaids” as one of Kristen Wiig’s love interests (for which she wrote them a very long sex scene) and on “30 Rock” as Tina Fey’s too-handsome-for-real-life boyfriend. And his sensitive side is no put-on: as a young man, Hamm worked at a day-care center called Kids Depot, remembering that as a young child he had lacked male role models. “It felt nice to be that person I didn’t have in my life.”

Jerry Seinfeld talks with David Remnick about his Netflix special “Jerry Before Seinfeld,” which is part standup show, part memoir. They discuss his “coming out” to his parents as a funny person, the labor that goes into an effortless joke, how cursing undercuts comedic craft; why George Carlin in a suit and tie was just as good as George Carlin the hippie; and why he thinks we esteem actors and writers too highly. Seinfeld compares his work as a comedian to that of John McPhee, The New Yorker’s elder statesman of long-form reporting. “He makes things out of ordinary life moments and making you see them in a different way,” Seinfeld says. “When he does it, it’s an art, because it’s the goddam New Yorker. When I do it it’s just an airlines peanuts joke.”

Lucian Wintrich, a young blogger, was recently appointed as the White House correspondent for the conservative political site Gateway Pundit. He has no professional experience as a reporter and doesn’t claim any interest in landing big stories. His goal is to attack media outlets that he regards as leftist, and he doesn’t shy away from name-calling. The New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz questions Wintrich about trolling as a form of journalism. Originally aired on April 7, 2017.

In the years after September 11th, Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” made political satire a central part of the media landscape. This hour, we hear from some of today’s leading practitioners: The New Yorker’s Andy Borowitz; Trevor Noah, of “The Daily Show”; Bassem Youssef, and the founders of Reductress. Plus, cartoonists Emily Flake and Drew Dernavich try out an escape room, along with the Radio Hour’s Sara Nics. Originally aired on April 7, 2017.

Leonard Cohen was one of the world’s greatest songwriters, and a figure of almost cult-like devotion for generations of fans, including Bob Dylan. David Remnick sat down with Cohen in the summer of 2016, at the musician’s home in Los Angeles to discuss Cohen’s career, his spiritual influences, his triumphant final tours, and what he was doing to prepare for his end. “I am ready to die,” Cohen said. He was already suffering from a number of health problems at the time and died in November 2016. “At a certain point, if you still have your marbles and are not faced with serious financial challenges, you have a chance to put your house in order. It’s a cliché, but it’s underestimated as an analgesic on all levels. Putting your house in order, if you can do it, is one of the most comforting activities, and the benefits of it are incalculable.” Plus, a 1952 poem by E.B. White brings Christmas greetings to misfits and oddballs the world over.

For decades, The New Yorker has published a poem on or around Christmas -- a look back at the events and people that have shaped the past year, generally light and fun; but in more difficult years it touches on quite serious themes as well. The humorist Frank Sullivan wrote the first "Greetings, Friends" back in 1935. Roger Angell wrote the poem for many years. And staff writer Ian Frazier has been writing it since 2012. Frazier reads his 2017 "Greetings, Friends" in this podcast bonus of the New Yorker Radio Hour.

Every year, countless poor spellers accidentally address their Santa letters to Satan. Satan—played by Kathleen Turner—always replies Matt Passet’s Daily Shouts piece is performed by Kathleen Turner, in the role of Satan. On January first, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, who goes by A. G., will succeed his father Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., as the publisher of the New York Times. At 37, A. G. is young for the job and he’s taking over one of the world’s most important news institutions at an extremely complicated time for the business of journalism. But he is not afraid of the future: his 2014 internal report to the Times’ leadership, which Buzzfeed leaked to the world, is credited with jump-starting the paper’s transition into a digital-first news platform. David Remnick talks with Sulzberger about his apprenticeship at a small-town reporter, the “Trump bump,” and how long we can expect the print edition of the Times to remain.

Nicolás Maduro was an unlikely successor to Venezuela’s popular and charismatic Hugo Chavez. And, since his election, the country has been wracked with devastating food shortages, a breakdown of ordinary services and medical care, and rampant violence. But, as Maduro sees it, the real problem is his political opponents, and he has taken steps to secure control over all the branches of government, in order to establish a de-facto dictatorship. The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson was recently granted a rare interview with the Venezuelan President, who told him of his country’s economic relationships with Russia and China. Anderson tells Dorothy Wickenden that he came away from the conversation with a renewed sense of the need for greater American engagement in Venezuela. “It is going through the sewer on our watch,” Anderson says. Plus, a visit to the library with Cristina Henriquez.

Roy Moore was a classic Trumpian candidate: a political outsider of extreme positions, rejected by the establishment and plagued by accusations of scandal. He eventually garnered the full support of Donald Trump, but Moore was finally too much for voters. A significant number of Republicans wrote other names on their ballots, and Democratic-leaning black voters turned out in force—a combination that gave Alabama its first Democrat to go to Washington in twenty years. David Remnick and the staff writer Amy Davidson Sorkin discuss what the outcome says about the President’s power and about voters’ feelings on sexual misconduct. With the recent calls for Al Franken’s resignation, congressional Democrats are trying to lay claim to the moral high ground, but Sorkin notes that the Party has yet to put the sins of Bill Clinton entirely behind it. Plus, an interview with Louise Erdrich, who says that she was inspired by Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and by P. D. James’s “Children of Men”—works that put literature in the service of imagining the worst.

The business reporter Sheelah Kolhatkar has recently written for The New Yorker about a wave of advances in robotic technology that will have dangerous implications for our economy and political stability. As more and more factories automate, many workers have found employment in warehouses, performing jobs where human dexterity and brains still hold a strong edge over clumsy robots that can’t recognize unfamiliar objects very well. But as robots advance in gripping skills, visual recognition, and problem solving, a dangerous wave of unemployment may loom. Kolhatkar speaks with a roboticist, an economist, and the C.E.O. of a robotics company, Symbotic, which is taking the people out of warehouses. Symbotic’s robots don’t earn pay, they don’t need health insurance—they don’t even need lights or heating to operate. Plus, Fabio Bertoni, The New Yorker’s lawyer, reveals what he does on the very rare occasions when he’s not at work.

When the Olympic skater Nancy Kerrigan was kneecapped in an attack by friends of her rival Tonya Harding, the scandal riveted the nation; twenty-four years later, it’s the subject of the new film “I, Tonya.” In 1994, the New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean went to Harding’s home town of Clackamas County, Oregon, to report a story that was published as “Figures in a Mall.” Orlean read from the piece and talked with David Remnick about the enduring relevance of the story at a time of rising class resentment in American culture. Plus, Nicholas Thompson, the editor-in-chief of Wired, explains the imminent vote by the F.C.C. that will likely end government regulations on net neutrality. Internet service providers hold near-monopolies in many areas. If the F.C.C. ends its net-neutrality regulations, what will I.S.P.s do to consumers?

Barry Blitt wasn’t into politics—music and hockey were more his things—but as an artist he’s become one of the keenest observers of American politicians. Blitt has contributed more than eighty covers to The New Yorker, many of which are collected in his new book, “Blitt.” His style features watercolors and soft edges, but the satire is sharp. “It’s nice to have an image that is sort of quiet in itself, but is jabbing someone,” Blitt tells David Remnick. They talk about Blitt’s most controversial cover, from July, 2008, which reimagines the infamous fist-bump between Barack and Michelle Obama, and which provoked a backlash from liberal readers who worried that the satire would be lost on some. But nothing, Blitt says, beats drawing Donald Trump. Plus, Hilton Als talks with the indie film producer Christine Vachon about women in Hollywood and how to deal with the suits; and we have some helpful tips about your new avocado.

Residents of Tangier Island, in the Chesapeake Bay, live through each hurricane season in fear of a major storm that would decimate their land. With its highest point only four feet above sea level, the island loses ground to erosion every year, and its residents may be among the first climate-change refugees of the United States. “I do believe in climate change,” Trenna Moore, a schoolteacher, says. “But I believe in what it says: centimetres a year. We’re losing feet.” The New Yorker’s Carolyn Kormann and the Radio Hour’s Sara Nics travelled to the island, and spent time with James Eskridge, a commercial crabber and mayor of the town of Tangier, Virginia. A stalwart supporter of Donald Trump, Eskridge told the President of the residents’ desire for a seawall around the entire island. Based on his own observations, Eskridge disputes the entire scientific community that sea-level rise is a threat, but he sees that the danger is real: “If we were to get a hurricane to come in, it would wipe out the whole harbor here, and probably a good chunk of the island.”

In October, 2016, Bruce Springsteen appeared at The New Yorker Festival for an intimate conversation with David Remnick. (The event sold out in six seconds.) This entire episode is dedicated to that conversation.

In his review of “The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected),” the New Yorker critic Anthony Lane paraphrased no less an author than Leo Tolstoy. “All happy families are alike,” Lane wrote, but “every unhappy family, in its own way, belongs in a Noah Baumbach movie.” In films like “The Squid and the Whale” and “Margot at the Wedding,” Baumbach shows a particular feel for family dynamics, and for characters who are messed up and exasperating but feel as real as the people around you. “The Meyerowitz Stories” stars Dustin Hoffman as an artist long past his prime, and Adam Sandler as one of his sons. Sandler’s character has moved back home to his father’s house, and, though the world might judge him a failure, his relationship with his own daughter redeems him. Noah Baumbach talked with The New Yorker’s Susan Morrison about how families judge success and failure. Plus, Erica Jong talks about her relationship with her grandfather, their visits to the American Museum of Natural History (across the street from their apartment building), and how his devotion to her in her childhood gave her the confidence to succeed as a writer.

The allegations against Harvey Weinstein have opened the floodgates for women in other industries and walks of life to go public with claims of sexual misconduct—and to be heard instead of dismissed. Ronan Farrow, who broke the Weinstein story for The New Yorker, shares his perspective on the fallout with the staff writer Alexandra Schwartz. And David Remnick talks with the feminist thinker bell hooks, who sees the roots of male violence in patriarchal culture and the way that boys are raised into it. If we don’t understand the male psyche and how we deform it, hooks argues, we will never solve the problem.

When Adam Davidson was a reporter in Baghdad during the Iraq War, he started dating a fellow-reporter, Jen Banbury, of Salon. On a holiday break, they left the war zone and traveled to Aleppo, Syria—then a beautiful, ancient, bustling city—and, while there, they ate the best sandwiches that they had ever had. They were shockingly good, so much so that Adam and Jen never quite registered what was in them or where they came from. The couple, now married, told this story to many friends over the years, but none was more interested than Dan Pashman, the host of the food podcast “The Sporkful.” Fascinated by the mystery, Pashman set out on a quest to find and re-create the sandwiches. He talked to Syrian emigrés, a political refugee, and finally to Imad Serjieh, the owner of the family sandwich shop that bears his last name. Pashman found that the Serjieh sandwiches—preferably the one made with boiled, spiced lamb brain—aren’t just a local favorite; they capture the essence of the city, and, as long as they are still being made, Pashman thinks, Aleppo lives. Plus, the writer and monologuist Jenny Allen has something she’d like to say to you—or, rather, some things she’d like you to stop saying.

Tina Brown is a legend in New York publishing. She was barely thirty years old when she was recruited from London to take over a foundering Vanity Fair. Take over she did, becoming one of the power centers of New York culture by bringing together the intellectual world and the celebrity world of entertainment. She later brought enormous change to The New Yorker (including, for the first time, photographs); she launched Talk magazine with Harvey Weinstein; and she helped launch the Daily Beast. Her new book, “The Vanity Fair Diaries, 1983-1992” is a kind of coming-of-age story about a pre-Internet era of unruffled ambition, unlimited budgets, big shoulders, big hair, and fabulous parties. Tina Brown tells David Remnick that her experience with Weinstein, as unpleasant as it was—she found the mogul “bullying [and] duplicitous,” profane and erratic—did not prepare her for the revelations of brutality and intimidation that have been published in The New Yorker and elsewhere. The experience has shaken her. “I have friends who’ve been accused of things who I want instinctively to defend, but I’ve held back,” Brown says. “Because I don’t know what’s coming next. The truth is, you realize you don’t really know anybody.” Plus, the cartoonist Emily Flake on the joys of Rudy’s Bar, where the combo of a shot and a beer costs five bucks. The sense of history and ritual, and the troubles confessed across generations, remind her of church—but at church, Flake points out, “they’re not going to let you sit around for six hours and drink.”

Donald Trump memorably claimed, without a shred of evidence, that millions of votes cast by undocumented immigrants had given Hillary Clinton the popular vote in the 2016 election. More circumspect conservatives argue that voter fraud is a real problem requiring more stringent checks on voting—which their opponents see as thinly disguised voter suppression. Here, three views on voter fraud: a Kansas lawyer who defended a woman charged with fraud; the columnist John Fund, who argues that voter fraud may exist widely, whether we see it or not; and Lorraine Minnite, a political-science professor who researched the topic exhaustively, and who tells the staff writer Jelani Cobb that purposeful fraud in the electoral system essentially does not exist.

Jeffrey Toobin tells David Remnick that, despite the mounting indictments against members of Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign, Trump is almost certainly safe from impeachment. Republican House members, Toobin says, have no incentive to moderate their support of the President—despite his low national poll numbers—because the only competition these representatives face is from the right flank of their own party. Gerrymandering, assisted by the latest computer modelling, has allowed the party in power in each state to lock itself into a nearly unassailable majority of votes. The Supreme Court could conceivably change that in a redistricting case called Gill v. Whitford, which Toobin has written about; he tells David Remnick that it is “the most important Supreme Court case in decades.” Hinging on the swing vote of Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Court will decide whether it can act as a check on gerrymandering, or whether a functioning two-party system can fade into history. Plus, the fiction writer George Saunders talks about the inspiration for his recent novel, which is set on one very dark night in the soul of Abraham Lincoln.

In “Slut: The Play,” Katie Cappiello captures the trauma of sexual assault, based on the stories of teen-agers in her theatre company. (Hilton Als wrote about the play for the magazine.) A member of the cast, Mary Miller, tells David Remnick that the play inspired her to tell her own story for the first time outside a therapist’s office. Cappiello, the artistic director of the Arts Effect NYC, asks, “Who better to speak this truth than those who face it day in and day out?” In a conversation with Remnick, she explains what she’s learned from working with teen-age boys on a play about sexual aggression and violence. Also, Ian Frazier visits the farm of the future, in an industrial building in New Jersey; Siri has some special instructions for when you’ve had a few too many to navigate safely. These segments originally aired on March 4, 2016, and January 13, 2017.

When OxyContin came on the market, in 1995, physicians were understandably wary of the addictive potential of a powerful new opioid. As Patrick Radden Keefe reports, the manufacturer, Purdue Pharma, aggressively marketed OxyContin to physicians, claiming that the drug’s delayed-release mechanism could limit the risk of addiction. Instead, OxyContin led to many new addictions, and many addicted patients eventually sought street drugs like heroin. Steven May started at Purdue Pharma as a sales rep in 1999, and years later went on to allege fraud against Purdue as a participant in a whistle-blower lawsuit (which was dismissed on procedural grounds). May tells Keefe that he was trained to market the drug as one “to start with and to stay with,” despite seeing early on its addictive potential. Purdue Pharma is a privately held company controlled by members of the Sackler family, who have a net worth of thirteen billion dollars. The Sacklers have donated handsomely to cancer research, medical schools, art museums, and universities. But Keefe tells David Remnick that the Sacklers have donated “nothing for the opioid crisis. Nothing for addiction treatment. If there is any sense in that family that they bear any moral culpability for where we are today, they’re not acting on it.”

The British writer, activist, and rapper Riz Ahmed has had a very public life since leaving drama school to star in “The Road to Guantánamo.” He won an Emmy for playing the lead in “The Night Of,” appeared in the Star Wars film “Rogue One,” and played Hannah Horvath’s baby daddy on “Girls.” He has continued his music career as Riz MC and was featured on the song “Immigrants (We Get the Job Done)” from “The Hamilton Mixtape.” Riz has been an outspoken activist for immigrants in the U.S. and Britain, and, at this year’s New Yorker Festival, he spoke to Alexis Okeowo about how his past has shaped who he is and steered his career choices. Ahmed’s work is often political, but he resents the category of political art, which he sees as a way to marginalize viewpoints that the mainstream views with suspicion.