The Political Scene | The New Yorker

In a relatively short period of time, Amazon has exerted an enormous amount of influence over a broad spectrum of American life. From the groceries we buy to the movies and television shows we watch, Amazon has been setting the prices and driving potential competition out of business. Its prices may seem low, but “Amazon has actually quietly been hiking prices for consumers in ways that are not always clearly visible,” the Federal Trade Commission chair, Lina Khan, tells David Remnick, but “can result in consumers paying billions of dollars more than they would if there was actually competition in the market.” Khan, who is thirty-four, published an influential paper about applying antitrust law to Amazon before she was even out of law school; now she is putting those ideas into practice in a suit against the company. “Amazon’s own documents reveal that it recognizes that these merchants live in constant fear of Amazon’s punishments and punitive tactics,” Khan said. “Ultimately, our antitrust laws are about preserving open markets but also making sure people have the economic liberty to not be susceptible to the dictates of a single company.” (The company’s response says that the F.T.C.’s argument is “wrong on the facts and the law.”)

The Washington Roundtable: In this past week’s off-cycle elections, Ohioans voted to enshrine the right to abortion access in their state constitution; Virginia Democrats took full control of their General Assembly blue; and deep-red Kentucky reëlected Democratic Governor Andy Beshear. Abortion is “an incredibly powerful issue that has the possibility to realign the parties,” the New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer says, and could make a big difference in 2024. Democrats who have made reproductive rights a part of their platform have secured victories in local and statewide elections since Roe v. Wade was overturned last year. Yet a new poll, out this week, shows President Biden trailing Donald Trump in five of six key battleground states—all of which Biden won in 2020. The New Yorker staff writers Evan Osnos and Susan B. Glasser join Mayer to weigh in on the role that abortion might play in the politics of 2024 as well as the current disconnect between the facts and public mood on the economy, Trump’s civil trial, and the presumed Biden-Trump rematch in 2024.

Andrew Marantz, who has reported extensively on the far right and far left of American politics, recently wrote a piece about how the different wings of the Democratic Party have responded to Hamas’s terror attack and to Israel’s war on Gaza. Whereas the majority of Congress joined on to a resolution to support Israel with no preconditions, members of the left-wing Squad introduced a bill demanding a ceasefire. The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, called its advocates “repugnant” and “disgraceful,” and, after the recording of this podcast, Representative Rashida Tlaib was censured by the House for her rhetoric about Palestine. Still, Marantz argues that it’s a testament to the pressures exerted by progressives—and by groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow—that the Biden Administration has asked for a humanitarian pause in Gaza. He joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the state of the Democratic coalition, and how political norms change.

Sybrina Fulton was thrust into the national spotlight more than a decade ago for the worst possible reason: her son, Trayvon Martin—an unarmed teen-age boy returning from the store—was shot. Her son’s body was tested for drugs and alcohol, but not the self-appointed neighborhood watchman, George Zimmerman, who killed him, claimed self-defense, and was acquitted. “Trayvon Martin could have been anybody’s son at seventeen,” Fulton tells David Remnick. He was an affectionate “mama’s boy” who wound up inspiring a landmark civil-rights movement: Black Lives Matter. B.L.M. became a cultural touchstone and a political lightning rod, but all its efforts can’t make Fulton whole again. “I think I’m going to be recovering from his death the rest of my life,” she says. “It’s so unnatural to bury a child,” she says. Fulton has become an activist and founded Circle of Mothers, which hosts a gathering for mothers who have lost children or other family members to gun violence.

The Washington Roundtable: Justice Clarence Thomas is once again under the spotlight—this time, for a forgiven R.V. loan. In the nineties, a wealthy friend loaned Thomas more than a quarter of a million dollars to purchase a forty-foot motor coach. A Senate inquiry has now found that Thomas’s loan was later forgiven, raising questions about the ethics of the deal. Over the years, the conduct of Justices appointed by both Democratic and Republican Presidents has been in question, the staff writer Jane Mayer explains, “but there is nothing that comes near the magnitude of goodies that have been taken by Clarence Thomas”: if Thomas “were in any other branch of government, he’d never be able to stay in that job.” Senate Democrats on the Judiciary Committee are looking to subpoena three conservative donors and activists tied to gifts and trips involving Supreme Court Justices. Why has the judicial branch been allowed to regulate itself for so long, and who has the responsibility to clean it up? The New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser and Evan Osnos join Mayer to weigh in on how the Supreme Court’s unchecked power has affected American politics.

The South Carolina senator Tim Scott likes to point to himself as an example of racial progress in America. But in a recent story for The New Yorker, Robert Samuels looked into Scott’s personal story—in many ways a messier tale than the one he tells—and into the ways that the “​​concave mirror shaped by his own experience” distorts Scott’s view of politics. Samuels joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss Scott’s Presidential run, and what he reveals about the Republican Party’s relationship to race and racism.

After returning from a week of reporting in Israel, David Remnick has two important conversations about the conflict between Israelis and Arabs both in and outside of Gaza. First, he speaks with Yonit Levi, a veteran news anchor on Israeli television, about how her country is both reeling from the October 7th terrorist attacks perpetrated by Hamas, and grappling with how to strike at Hamas as the country prepares for an invasion that would be catastrophic for Palestinians. Meanwhile, the Palestinian academic Sari Nusseibeh maintains that peace is possible, if the influence of Hamas and the Israeli far right can be curtailed.

David Remnick’s Letter from Israel appears in The New Yorker, along with extensive coverage of the conflict.

The Washington Roundtable: It’s been a major week for the unfounded idea that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. First, House Republicans elevated Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who was formerly almost unknown on the national level, to be Speaker of the House. Johnson is a creationist and a climate-change denier, and he was a key figure in the effort to keep Trump in power—which certainly helped in his bid for leadership this week. On the other hand, as some of the former President’s most loyal associates have faced the threat of jail time in Georgia, they have renounced their false election theories. “You have to lie about the election to rise in power if you’re a Republican in the House,” the staff writer Jane Mayer says, “but when you face potential sentencing in a court yourself, the truth finally comes out.” Mayer joins the New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser and Evan Osnos to look at the current dynamics of election denialism in Republican politics.

Jim Jordan may have failed to become the Republican Speaker of the House, but he still remains the Party’s most influential insurgent. The former wrestling champion and current Ohio congressman first took office in 2007. Since then, he has not sponsored a single bill that has become law. Instead, he has made it his mission to expose what he calls “big-tech censorship” against conservatives, and to undermine the institutions that are investigating Donald Trump. Jonathan Blitzer, who wrote a piece on Jordan’s conspiratorial quest for power for this week’s New Yorker, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss why this man is still key to understanding the contemporary Republican Party.

The director Spike Lee looked back at the length and breadth of his career so far during a sit-down with David Remnick at the New Yorker Festival. Although Lee’s storied filmography may be familiar to movie buffs, few are likely to know as much about his humble beginnings as the scion of a celebrated, but often unemployed, musician—the late Bill Lee. The young Spike Lee bore some resentment toward his father, an upright-bass player who eschewed countless gigs because he refused to play an electric bass guitar. “[I]t wasn’t until later that I saw that, yo, this is his life. He was not going to play music that he didn’t want to play.” As an artist in his own right, Lee has taken a similar approach to filmmaking. He has tackled a myriad of genres and difficult subject matter, without sacrificing his unique voice and social consciousness to satisfy Hollywood. “Some things you just can’t compromise,” he told Remnick. Now in his fourth decade as a filmmaker, Lee hopes to one day make a long-gestating bio-pic about Joe Louis and have his career last as long as that of one of his idols. “Kurosawa was eighty-six!” the sixty-six-year-old Lee said, of the Japanese filmmaker’s retirement age. “I got to at least get to Kurosawa.” In this interview, Lee mentions the influence of Kurosawa and several other notable filmmakers. For further reading, here is a list of ninety-five films he has deemed essential for any cinephile.

The Washington Roundtable: President Biden embraced the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in Tel Aviv this week, reiterating America’s support for Israel amid its war with Hamas. The President brokered a deal to allow humanitarian aid to enter Gaza and warned Israelis not to be “consumed” by rage as they respond to Hamas’s October 7th massacre of civilians in the country. “It’s not clear yet what really has been accomplished by this extraordinary amount of personal diplomacy,” the New Yorker staff writer Susan B. Glasser said. Senior Israeli officials are allegedly predicting several years or even a decade of war. Meanwhile, the Biden Administration is seeking more than a hundred billion dollars in federal funding, including assistance for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan. But, because the raucous battle to elect a Speaker of the House is ongoing, the question of when this package might pass remains open. As the staff writer Evan Osnos noted, the events of the past two weeks underscore the challenges that democracy is facing both at home and abroad. The staff writer Jane Mayer joins Glasser and Osnos in conversation about it all.

Earlier this week,The New Yorkerpublished aninterviewwith a senior Hamas political official, Mousa Abu Marzouk, about the group’s rationale behind the October 7th massacre in Israel. How did Hamas militants determine that now was the time for violence? And, given that Netanyahu’s deadly response was a sure thing, how did they weigh the cost of Palestinian lives? (This podcast episode was recorded on Monday afternoon, and since then civilian deaths in Gaza have continued to rise as Israeli airstrikes bombard the strip.) TheNew Yorkerreporters David Kirkpatrick and Adam Rasgon join Tyler Foggatt to discuss what they learned from speaking with Abu Marzouk, and how this conflict differs from what they have each seen in their many years of reporting on the region.

Share your thoughts on The Political Scene.

When Rodrigo Duterte ran for the presidency of the Philippines and won, in 2016, the Western press noted the similarities between this unconventional candidate and Donald Trump—who also liked to casually espouse violence on the campaign trail and beyond. Duterte used provocative and obscene language to tap into the country’s fears about a real, albeit overstated, drug problem. “Every drug addict was a schizophrenic, hallucinatory, will rape your mother and butcher your father,” as reporter Patricia Evangelista puts it, “and if he can’t find a child to rape, he’ll rape a goat.” But, unlike Donald Trump, Duterte made good on his promise of death. More than twenty thousand extrajudicial killings took place over the course of his six-year term in office, according to human-rights groups—and Duterte remained quite popular as bodies piled up in the streets. Reporting for the news site Rappler, Evangelista confronted the collateral damage when Durterte started to enact his “kill them all” policies. “I had to take accountability,” she tells David Remnick. Her book, “Some People Need Killing,” is published in the U.S. this week, and Evangelista has left the Philippines because of the danger it puts her in. “I own the guilt,” Evangelista says. “How can I sit in New York, when the people whose stories I told, who took the risk to tell me their stories, are sitting in shanties across the country and might be at risk because of things they told me.”

On Saturday morning, Ruth Margalit, a contributor to The New Yorker who lives in Tel Aviv, awoke to air-raid sirens. It was a familiar sound, but as the day unfolded, it became apparent that Hamas’s latest attack on Israel was more severe than she had realized. “I mean, I’ve certainly never seen anything like this. My entire generation hasn’t,” Margalit says. Since then, she has been reporting on the incursion from Gaza—including a massacre of civilians at a music festival—and on its aftermath. She joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the political backdrop, both global and regional, to this catastrophe; the history of hostage negotiations in Israel; and the response that the Israeli public expects from Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in the coming days and weeks.

Share your thoughts on The Political Scene to be eligible to enter a prize drawing of up to $1,000.

Despite months of discouraging news about extreme weather conditions, the former Vice-President Al Gore still believes that there is a solution to the climate crisis clearly in sight. “We have a switch we can flip,” he tells David Remnick. The problem, as Gore sees it, is that a powerful legacy network of political and financial spheres of influence are stubbornly standing in the way. “When ExxonMobil or Chevron put their ads on the air, the purpose is not for a husband and wife to say, ‘Oh, let’s go down to the store and buy some motor oil.’ The purpose is to condition the political space so that they have a continued license to keep producing and selling more and more fossil fuels,” Gore says. But it’s also what he describes as our ongoing “democracy crisis” that’s playing a factor as well. He believes lawmakers who know better are turning a blind eye to incontrovertible data for short-term political gain. “The average congressman spends an average of five hours a day on the telephone, and at cocktail parties and dinners begging lobbyists for money to finance their campaigns,” Gore says. Still, Gore says he is cautiously optimistic. “What Joe Biden did last year in passing the so-called Inflation Reduction Act . . . was the most extraordinary legislative achievement of any head of state of any country in history,” Gore says, adding that temperatures will stop going up “almost immediately” if we reach a true net zero in fossil-fuel emissions. “Half of all the human-caused greenhouse-gas pollution will have fallen out of the atmosphere in as little as twenty-five to thirty years.”

The Washington Roundtable: The removal of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was a first in the history of the United States Congress. His tenure was so brief and attenuated that the staff writer Jane Mayer refers to him as “kind of the Scaramucci of Speakers.” This week’s chaos—and McCarthy’s humiliation—was instigated by Representative Matt Gaetz, of Florida. Gaetz, who comes from a family of politicians, joined the House in 2017 with an anti-establishment mentality. “He is sort of a TV monger with a pompadour, but he also has real aspirations,” the staff writer Susan B. Glasser notes. But now Republicans in Congress are struggling to elect a new Speaker. Donald Trump has apparently been floated as a contender. Can the Party escape the “doom loop” of constantly toppling its leadership? The staff writer Evan Osnos joins Mayer and Glasser to weigh in.

Share your thoughts on The Political Scene.

Throughout the Russian invasion of Ukraine, David Remnick has talked with Stephen Kotkin, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution who is deeply informed on U.S.-Russia relations, and a biographer of Stalin. With the Ukrainian counter-offensive proceeding very slowly, Kotkin says that Ukraine is unlikely to “win the peace” on the battlefield; an armistice on Zelensky’s terms—although they may be morally correct—would require the defeat of Russia itself. Realistically, he thinks, Ukraine must come to accept some loss of territory in exchange for security guarantees. And, without heavy political pressure from the U.S., Kotkin tells David Remnick, no amount of military aid would be sufficient. “We took regime change off the table,” Kotkin notes regretfully. “That’s so much bigger than the F-16s or the tanks or the long-range missiles because that’s the variable . . . .When he’s scared that his regime could go down, he’ll cut and run. And if he’s not scared about his regime,he'll do the sanctions busting. He’ll do everything he’s doing because it’s with impunity.”

Share your thoughts on The Political Scene.

The Washington Roundtable: Dianne Feinstein, who was the longest-serving female senator in U.S. history, died on Thursday, at the age of ninety. The New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos remember the Democrat from San Francisco, who leaves a legacy as an advocate for gun control and against the torture of detainees after 9/11. She fought to enable the release of the sixty-seven-hundred-page report of the C.I.A.’s interrogation program, though she worried about the effect on national security of criticizing the program, Jane Mayer recalls on this week’s episode. “But she went with it on her own instincts,” says Mayer, “and then commissioned a study that laid out the guts of that program in a way that was incredible.”

Also this week, President Biden, speaking at Arizona State University, called MAGA Republicans “a threat to the brick and mortar of our democratic institutions” and to the “character of our nation.” “I don’t think I’ve ever heard a President feel the need to say in the course of a speech, ‘I stand for the peaceful transfer of power,’ ” Evan Osnos says. “But that’s actually what’s required at the moment.”

Share your thoughts on The Political Scene.

Last week, Benjamin Wallace-Wells, who writes about politics for The New Yorker, went to Dubuque, Iowa, to attend a Trump rally. Wallace-Wells is now covering his third Trump campaign for President. This time, what stood out to him most was how much the rhetoric of the G.O.P. has shifted in the course of those three cycles. The former President, once an insurgent and inflammatory voice, now just sounds like an ordinary Republican. Wallace-Wells joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss what he heard from voters in Iowa, what he has observed in the broader Republican field, and why Donald Trump’s 2024 lead has been so significant.

The Washington Roundtable: Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, travelled to New York City and Washington, D.C., this week to request more support for his country. Before the United Nations General Assembly, Zelensky called Russia’s war an act of “genocide.” In Washington, the Ukrainian President met with senators, House members, President Biden, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy rejected Zelensky’s request to address Congress, saying that there wasn’t enough time, given the ongoing battle over funding the government. Meanwhile, some Republicans are arguing that attention should be turned away from Russia’s invasion and toward the threat that China poses to the U.S. How will the country’s foreign policy respond to these pressures? The New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos weigh in.

In the past year, more than a hundred thousand migrants have arrived in New York City. This particular chapter in the city’s immigration history began last August, when Governor Greg Abbott of Texas sent buses of Venezuelan asylum seekers north. The city welcomed these new arrivals, who used social media to encourage more migrants to make New York their destination, even as the city’s shelters—already overburdened by a growing homeless population—were at capacity. Eric Lach has recently published a piece in The New Yorker about the new influx of African migrants, and their difficulties navigating a social-services system that was built for Spanish speakers. He joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the political differences between calling oneself an undocumented immigrant and an asylum seeker, and the demands that Eric Adams is making for federal support.

About 1.4 million people in the United States end up in homeless shelters every year, with many thousands more living on the street. You could fill the city of San Diego with the unhoused. The problem seems gigantic, tragic, and intractable. But there are proven solutions. For the chronically homeless, a key strategy is supportive housing—providing not only a stable apartment but also services like psychiatric and medical care on-site. TheNew Yorkercontributor Jennifer Egan spent the past year following several individuals who had been homeless for long periods of timeas they transitionedinto a new supportive-housing building in New York. “Is it easy to bring people with these kinds of difficult histories into one place in the span of eight months? No,” she tells David Remnick. “Does it work? From what I have seen, the answer is yes.” By one estimate, addressing the country’s homeless problem would cost about ten billion dollars. But Egan argues that figure pales in comparison to what we’re spending on the problem in the form of emergency medical care, emergency shelter, and other piecemeal solutions. “No one wants to see that line item in a budget, but we are already spending it in all of these diffuse ways,” she says. “We are hemorrhaging money at this problem.”

The Washington Roundtable: Congress has returned from summer recess to a hectic month of business. This week, as Kevin McCarthy sought to avoid a government shutdown, the House Speaker announced that he plans to initiate an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. McCarthy is feeling pressured by hard-right Republicans who forced fifteen rounds of voting to occur in order to elect him to his post in January. Now, just weeks before the end-of-September deadline to either fund the government or shut it down, this same faction has brought the House to a standstill. What is the logic behind these disruptions? The New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos weigh in

David Grann is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of two nonfiction books that topped the best-seller list this summer: “The Wager” and “Killers of the Flower Moon,” from 2017, which Martin Scorsese has adapted into a film opening in October. Grann is among the most lauded nonfiction writers at The New Yorker; David Remnick says that “his urge to find unique stories and tell them with rigor and style is rare to the vanishing point.” Grann talks with Remnick about his beginnings as a writer, and about his almost obsessive research and writing process. “The trick is how can you tell a true story using these literary techniques and remain completely factually based,” Grann says. “What I realized as I did this more is that you are an excavator. You aren’t imagining the story—you are excavating the story.” Grann recounts travelling in rough seas to the desolate site of the eighteenth-century shipwreck at the heart of “The Wager,” his most recent book, so that he could convey the sailors’ despair more accurately. That book is also being made into a film by Scorcese. “It’s a learning curve because I’ve never been in the world of Hollywood,” Grann says. “You’re a historical resource. … Once they asked me, ‘What was the lighting in the room?’ I thought about it for a long time. That’s something I would not need to know, writing a book.” But Grann is glad to be in the hands of an expert, and keep his distance from the process. “I’m not actually interested in making a film,” he admits. “I’m really interested in these stories, and so I love that somebody else with their own vision and intellect is going to draw on these stories and add to our understanding of whatever this work is.”

The Washington Roundtable: Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s former right-hand man, took the stand in Georgia this week to argue that his actions in the election-racketeering case—in which he was indicted two weeks ago, alongside eighteen co-conspirators, including Trump—were taken in his capacity as a federal official. For that reason, he and his lawyers petitioned for the case against him to be moved from state to federal court. Meadows, who has been a significant and disruptive force in American politics since he arrived in Washington, in 2013, may be trying to have his case heard before a more sympathetic jury. “I don’t think there’s anyone I can think of in American politics,” the staff writer Jane Mayer says, “who’s put his finger to the wind more often to try to figure out which way it’s blowing.” What does Meadows’s rise—and now, potential fall—teach us about the Republican Party today? The New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos weigh in.

The New Yorker presents a special conversation from Slate’s “Amicus” podcast, hosted by Dahlia Lithwick. Lithwick talks with Judge Margaret M. McKeown, of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, about McKeown’s new book, “Citizen Justice: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas―Public Advocate and Conservation Champion.” The Washington Roundtable will return next week.

In January, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell passed a career milestone: he became the Senate’s longest-serving party leader. Since then, McConnell has suffered a number of health setbacks. This includes a fall and subsequent concussion in March and, most recently, a medical episode at a press conference in which he abruptly froze while taking questions, standing silent and motionless for more than thirty seconds. At age eighty-one, McConnell is hardly the only politician showing his years: the two leading Presidential candidates, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, are the two oldest Presidents in history. Susan B. Glasser, a staff writer and a co-host of the Political Scene’s Washington Roundtable, recently wrote a piece for The New Yorker about what she calls “America’s fragile gerontocracy.” She joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss how baby boomers continue to dominate our political system, and what this could mean for the 2024 Presidential election.

Bob Woodward has been writing about the White House for more than fifty years, going toe to toe with nearly every President after Richard Nixon. Woodward is every inch the reporter, not one to editorialize. But, during his interviews with Donald Trump at the time of the COVID-19 crisis, Woodward found himself shouting at the President—explaining how to make a decision, and trying to browbeat him into listening to public-health experts. Woodward has released audio recordings of some of their interviews in a new audiobook called “The Trump Tapes,” which documents details of Trump’s state of mind, and also of Woodward’s process and craft. Despite having written critically of Trump in 2018, Woodward found his access unprecedented. “I could call him anytime, [and] he would call me,” Woodward tells David Remnick. His wife, Elsa Walsh, “used to joke [that] there’s three of us in the marriage.”

It’s been eighteen months since Russia invaded Ukraine. In that time, Russia has annexed four Ukrainian territories; the mercenary Wagner Group staged a coup against Putin, and then its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, died in a mysterious plane explosion; Ukraine mounted a successful counter-offensive, and then a less successful one, which is currently ongoing. All the while, the U.S. has engaged in what seems like a proxy war with Russia, imposing extensive sanctions and providing thirty billion dollars in weapons, training, and intelligence to Ukraine. Some foreign-policy experts are questioning this strategy.

Keith Gessen, a contributing writer at The New Yorker, has been covering the war in Ukraine since its beginning. This week, he published a piece titled “The Case for Negotiating with Russia,” about the analysts who are pushing for diplomacy over warfare. He joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the state of the conflict, and why it’s the U.S. that could ultimately decide how it ends.

The Korey Stringer Institute at the University of Connecticut was named after an N.F.L. player who died of exertional heatstroke. The lab’s main research subjects have been athletes, members of the military, and laborers. But, with climate change, even mild exertion under extreme heat will affect more and more of us; in many parts of the United States, a heat wave and power outage could cause a substantial number of fatalities. Dhruv Khullar, a New Yorker contributor and practicing physician, visited the Stringer Institute to undergo a heat test—walking uphill for ninety minutes in a hundred-and-four-degree temperature—to better understand what’s happening. “I just feel puffy everywhere,” Khullar sighed. “You’d have to cut my finger off just to get my wedding ring off.” By the end of the test, Khullar spoke of cramps, dizziness, and a headache. He discussed the dangers of heatstroke with Douglas Casa, the lab’s head (who himself nearly died of it as a young athlete). “Climate change has taken this into the everyday world for the everyday American citizen. You don’t have to be a laborer working for twelve hours, you don’t have to be a soldier in training,” Casa tells him. “This is making it affect so many people even just during daily living.”

Although the treatment for heat-related illness is straightforward, Casa says that implementation of simple measures remains challenging—and there is much we need to do to better prepare for the global rise in temperature.

The Washington Roundtable: In the first debate of the Republican Presidential primary, which took place in Milwaukee on Wednesday night, six of the eight potential nominees onstage raised their hands to indicate that, if Donald Trump is their party’s choice, they will support him—even if he is convicted in a court of law. Trump wasn’t present. The following day, the former President had his mug shot taken in a Fulton County jail. Trump was booked on thirteen charges, among them that he, along with eighteen others, conducted a “criminal enterprise” to overturn his 2020 defeat in Georgia. The two events signal the G.O.P.’s dilemma regarding Trump, and his grip on the contest for the nomination. What motivates the Republican primary contenders to defend a man whom they are ostensibly trying to defeat? The New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos weigh in.

In this week’s magazine, Ronan Farrow has published a major story about the business practices of Elon Musk. Farrow, who has reported extensively on abuses of power for The New Yorker, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss how Musk has become an essential yet unofficial part of American governance, holding the keys to the green transition, the space race, and even the war in Ukraine. The reason for this, Farrow explains, is not Musk’s outrageous personality; it’s the structures of neoliberal capitalism that allowed a person like Musk to ascend. Read more by Ronan Farrow on Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct, Britney Spears’s conservatorship, and the Israeli surveillance agency Black Cube.

Even in a summer of record-breaking heat and disasters, Republican Presidential candidates have ignored or mocked climate change. But some conservative legislators in Congress recognize that action is necessary. Their ideas about how to tackle the problem, however, depart from the consensus that is dominant among Democrats. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, who represents Iowa’s first district, is vice-chair of the Conservative Climate Caucus and a former head of the Iowa Department of Public Health. “Where there’s difference among individuals is with what urgency people believe there needs to be change. I believe that having rapid change without having affordable, available energy is not a solution,” she tells David Remnick. Miller-Meeks extols innovation in the private sector, but feels that mandates on electric vehicles would drive up costs too much for rural consumers. With a goal of reducing fossil-fuel consumption, she says, environmentalists need to reconsider their desire to remove hydroelectric dams to restore river habitats, and their opposition to nuclear-power generation. They should expedite mining for copper, uranium, and rare earth minerals, despite the environmental risks. “You have an Inflation Reduction Act which on one hand says you need to domestically source minerals,” she notes, “yet we won’t allow permitting.” More broadly, she feels that the alarms sounded by environmental scientists have failed to convince the public. “Every time we advance that there is a crisis and there is doom, and it doesn’t materialize, scientists, and we as political leaders, and people who are advancing policy, lose credibility.”

The Washington Roundtable: It has been a summer of history-making indictments against Donald Trump. This week, he received his fourth—this one from Georgia, where the former President and eighteen co-defendants are accused of conducting a “criminal enterprise” to reverse his 2020 defeat in the battleground state. Despite all of Trump’s legal troubles, he remains the overwhelming front-runner for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2024, and a rematch with Joseph Biden appears imminent. Yet history cautions that, with fifteen months to go before Election Day, all kinds of factors could derail his campaign. How damaging are these criminal charges in Georgia? Can anything actually shake up the race? The New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos weigh in.

The practice of legacy admissions—preferential consideration of the children of alumni—has emerged as a national flash point since the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in June. Even some prominent Republicans are joining the Biden Administration in calling for its end. David Remnick speaks with the U.S. Education Secretary, Miguel Cardona, about the politics behind college admissions. Cardona sees legacy preference as part of a pattern that discourages many students from applying to selective schools, but notes that it is not the whole problem. How can access to higher education, he asks, be more equitable when the quality of K-12 education is so inequitable?

Plus, Jeannie Suk Gersen, a professor at Harvard Law School, looks at the problems facing admissions officers now that race cannot be a consideration in maintaining diversity. Gersen has been reporting for The New Yorker on the legal fight over affirmative action and the movement to end legacy admissions. She speaks with the dean of admissions at Wesleyan University, one of the schools that voluntarily announced an end to legacy preference after the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action. “So far, the responses have been overwhelmingly positive,” Amin Abdul-Malik Gonzalez tells her. “But we’re obviously some time removed from the results of the decision. . . . I think it’s both symbolic and potentially substantive in terms of signalling our value to not have individually unearned benefits.”

Andrew Marantz, in the August 14th, 2023, issue of The New Yorker, wrote about Leah Hunt-Hendrix, a major donor to progressive causes whose grandfather was a politically conservative oil tycoon. Hunt-Hendrix’s use of her money and influence to support progressive social movements is remarkable in that the goals of these projects run counter to her class interests, and even aim to put her family’s company out of business: raising taxes on the rich, pushing for more corporate regulation, and passing a Green New Deal. She funds grassroots organizations, and also co-founded the political organization Way to Win, which works to elect candidates on the left. In this episode of the Political Scene, Marantz, a guest host, invites the writer Anand Giridharadas to discuss the unexpected nexus between big money and movement politics. Giridharadas is the author of four books, including, most recently, “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World” and “The Persuaders: Winning Hearts and Minds in a Divided Age.”

The New Yorker Radio Hour: Last month, the country singer Jason Aldean released a music video for “Try That in a Small Town,” a song that initially received little attention. But the video cast the song’s lyrics in a new light. While Aldean sings, “Try that in a small town / See how far ya make it down the road / ’Round here, we take care of our own,” images of protests against police brutality are interspersed with Aldean singing outside a county courthouse where a lynching once took place. Aldean’s defenders—and there are many—say the song praises small-town values and respect for the law, rather than promoting violence and vigilantism. The controversy eventually pushed the song to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The staff writer Emily Nussbaum has been reporting from Nashville throughout the past few months on the very complicated politics of country music. On the one hand, she found a self-perpetuating culture war, fuelled by outrage; on the other, there’s a music scene that’s diversifying, with increasing numbers of women, Black artists, and L.G.B.T.Q. performers claiming country music as their own. “I set out to talk about music, but politics are inseparable from it,” Nussbaum tells David Remnick. “The narrowing of commercial country music to a form of pop country dominated by white guys singing a certain kind of cliché-ridden bro country song—it’s not like I don’t like every song like that, but the absolute domination of that keeps out all sorts of other musicians.” Nussbaum also speaks with Adeem the Artist, a nonbinary country singer and songwriter based in East Tennessee, who has found success with audiences but has not broken through on mainstream country radio. “I think that it’s important that people walk into a music experience where they expect to feel comforted in their bigotry and they are instead challenged on it and made to imagine a world where different people exist,” Adeem says. “But, as a general rule, I try really hard to connect with people even if I’m making them uncomfortable.”

The Washington Roundtable: This week, in a federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., former President Donald Trump pleaded not guilty to four charges in relation to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his role in the January 6th insurrection. Those include counts of conspiracy to defraud the United States, to obstruct an official proceeding, and to oppress citizens’ rights to vote. This third Trump criminal indictment is the most serious and far-reaching yet, going to the heart of the former President’s efforts to undermine American democracy. The trial, which will coincide with the height of campaign season, could create a number of “constitutional sci-fi” scenarios. Hosted by the New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos.

On June 23, 2023, tanks rolled into Moscow and into the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, and troops surrounded military and government buildings. They were fighters from the Wagner Group, a private battalion. The group’s leader is Yevgeny Prigozhin, who sold hot dogs and ran a restaurant on a boat where Putin liked to dine before he became the head of this mercenary outfit. On that June day, he was initiating the strongest challenge to the Kremlin since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Joshua Yaffa has written an extraordinary piece about the Wagner Group’s global reach, its brutal battlefield tactics in Ukraine, and its mysterious decision to mutiny. He joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss it, and to examine how Prigozhin became such a strange and significant player within Russia’s military apparatus.

Nearly one in ten Americans owe significant medical debt, a burden that can become crippling as living costs and interest rates rise. Over the past decade, a nonprofit called RIP Medical Debt has designed a novel approach to chip away at this problem. The organization solicits donations to purchase portfolios of medical debt on the debt market, where the debt trades at steeply discounted prices. Then, instead of attempting to collect on it as a normal buyer would, they forgive the debt. The staff writer Sheelah Kolhatkar reports on one North Carolina church that partnered with RIP Medical Debt as part of its charitable mission. Trinity Moravian Church collected around fifteen thousand dollars in contributions to acquire and forgive over four million dollars of debt in their community. “We have undertaken a number of projects in the past but there’s never been anything quite like this,” the Reverend John Jackman tells Kolhatkar. “For families that we know cannot deal with these things, we’re taking the weight off of them.” Kolhatkar also speaks with Allison Sesso, the C.E.O. of RIP Medical Debt, about the strange economics of debt that make this possible.

The Washington Roundtable: This week, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy moved one step closer to calling for Congress to begin impeachment proceedings against President Biden, on the grounds that Biden has used the “weaponization of government to benefit his family.” For years, Hunter Biden’s dealings with Ukrainian and Chinese companies have been the focus of Republicans’ efforts to undermine the President, although investigations in the House and Senate have found no evidence of wrongdoing by Biden in relation to his son’s business dealings. Also this week, the federal judge Maryellen Noreika, in Wilmington, Delaware, put the brakes on Hunter Biden’s plea deal for tax and gun-possession crimes. Hunter Biden is not the first family member of a President to cause political headaches; the brothers of Presidents Nixon, Carter, and Clinton preceded him. What should we make of the latest news about the President’s son? More broadly, how do Oval Office political scandals arise and take hold of the public’s imagination? Hosted by the New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos.

This summer, the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild are on strike together for the first time in sixty-three years. At the same time, hotel workers across Southern California are organizing coordinated rolling work stoppages. The Teamsters just successfully negotiated substantial wage increases and averted a strike for workers at UPS. But now the United Auto Workers, whose contract is up in September, are threatening to strike. What is behind all of this labor unrest? Is it a lingering effect of the pandemic, or something larger? E. Tammy Kim, a contributing writer and a former lawyer, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the forces that led to what organizers are calling “hot labor summer,” and to imagine what may come after.

In making “Oppenheimer,” which opens in theatres this weekend, the director Christopher Nolan relied on a Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography of the father of the atomic bomb, “American Prometheus,” by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin. Bird is credited as a writer of Nolan’s movie, and he spoke with David Remnick about Oppenheimer’s life story—in particular, about the ambivalence that the scientist felt, and expressed publicly, about the use of the bomb, which led to a McCarthyist show trial that destroyed his career and reputation. “He’s very complicated and he’s highly intelligent, so he’s capable of understanding and holding in his head contradictory ideas,” Bird says. On the one hand, “He feared that if [the bomb] was not used, or the war ended without the use of this weapon, the next war was going to be fought by two nuclear-armed adversaries and it would be Armageddon.” On the other hand, after Hiroshima, Oppenheimer used his status as a celebrity scientist to educate the public about the dangers of nuclear warfare, a move that landed him in the crosshairs of federal officials. “What happened to him in 1954 sent a message to several generations of scientists, here in America but [also] abroad, that scientists should keep in their narrow lane. They shouldn’t become public intellectuals. And if they dared to do this, they could be tarred and feathered,” Bird notes. “The same thing that happened to Oppenheimer in a sense happened to Tony Fauci.”

The Washington Roundtable: The midsummer Presidential campaign is full of surprises, including a deluge of upcoming legal battles for the G.O.P. front-runner, former President Donald Trump. Recent federal disclosures have painted a preliminary picture of the race to raise money taking place between Republican primary contenders. The campaign of Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, who was initially viewed as a powerful competitor to Donald Trump in the Republican primary, has spent much of its cash and been forced to lay off staff. Meanwhile, the centrist group No Labels hosted an event in New Hampshire this week co-headlined by Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a Democrat, and former Utah Governor and Republican Presidential candidate Jon Huntsman, raising concerns among Democrats of a possible third-party “unity ticket” shaking up the race. Plus, Trump may face his third indictment—this time, for his role in attempting to overturn the 2020 election. In a separate case against Trump, regarding classified documents, a federal judge in Florida has set the trial date for next May, shortly before the Republican nominee for President will be named in Milwaukee. Hosted by the New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos.

Many Americans have been fascinated by the story of Hunter Biden, who has allegedly leveraged his father’s prominence for his own financial gain. Hunter’s spiral into alcoholism and drug addiction has been chronicled by the press. Recently, federal prosecutors announced a deal in which Hunter would plead guilty to two tax charges and be sentenced to two years of probation, bringing a five-year-long investigation into his business dealings to an end.

In July, 2019, The New Yorker published a groundbreaking investigation titled “The Untold History of the Biden Family.” Its author, Adam Entous, uncovered the rags-to-riches-to-rags story behind the President’s modest upbringing in Scranton. It’s a very different tale from the one that Joe Biden has shared with the public, replete with polo matches, war profiteering, addiction, and scandal. It’s a story that, until recently, even the President and his children may not have known in full. It provides crucial context for the Hunter Biden saga, and a deeper understanding of Joe Biden himself—and the people and events that have shaped the choices he’s made during his decades-long political career.

No Labels, which pitches itself as a centrist movement to appeal to disaffected voters, has secured a considerable amount of funding and is working behind the scenes to get on Presidential ballots across the country. The group has yet to announce a candidate, but “most likely we’ll have both a Republican and Democrat on the ticket,” Pat McCrory, the former governor of North Carolina and one of the leaders of No Labels, tells David Remnick. Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are reportedly under consideration, but McCrory will not name names, nor offer any specifics on the group’s platform, including regarding critical issues such as abortion and gun rights. That opacity is by design, Sue Halpern, who has covered the group, says. “The one reason why I think they haven’t put forward a candidate is once they do that, then they are required to do all the things that political parties do,” she says. “At the moment, they’re operating like a PAC, essentially. They don’t have to say who their donors are.” Third-party campaigns have had significant consequences in American elections, and, with both Donald Trump and Joe Biden historically unpopular, a third-party candidate could peel a decisive number of moderate voters away from the Democratic Party.

On Tuesday, July 4th, it was the hottest day ever recorded on Earth. That is just one of many heat-related records that have been broken this summer. Historically high temperatures have been recorded around the planet, causing fires, floods, and other extreme weather events. In a recent article for The New Yorker, Bill McKibben explained that, even as we enter a terrifying new era for our planet, there is still a brief window in which it's possible to avoid the worst effects of climate change. Major technological strides in recent years have made green energy the cheapest form of power available. The question is how quickly this new infrastructure can be implemented. McKibben joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss what’s needed to make the necessary changes in time: an organized climate movement to break the fossil fuel industry’s grip on political power. “There's a very hopeful case for the world that we could be building,” McKibben says. “It's just we have to build it fast.”

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the son of a former Attorney General and the nephew of President John F. Kennedy, has announced that he’s running for the Democratic Presidential nomination. He is nearly seventy years old, and has never held public office. “There’s nothing in the United States Constitution that says that you have to go to Congress first and then Senate second,or be a governor before you’re elected to the Presidency,” he tells David Remnick. With no prominent elected Democrat challenging President Biden, Kennedy is polling around ten to twenty per cent among Democratic primary voters—enough to cause at least some alarm for Biden. He is best known as an influential purveyor of disinformation: that vaccines cause autism; that SSRIs and common anxiety medication might be causing the increase in school shootings; that “toxic chemicals” in the water supply might contribute to “sexual dysphoria” in children. He wrote a book accusing Anthony Fauci of helping to “orchestrate and execute 2020’s historic coup d’état against Western democracy.” He seems not at all concerned that Donald Trump, Roger Stone, Tucker Carlson, and Alex Jones—all of whom would like to see Biden bruised in a primary challenge—have praised him. “I'm trying to unite the country,” he says to Remnick. “You keep wanting to focus on why don't I hate this guy more? Why don't I hate on this person more?” Kennedy, who regularly attends recovery meetings for addiction to drugs including heroin, says that “the recovery program is an important part of my life, is an important part of keeping me mentally and physically and spiritually fit. . . . And my program tells me not to do that. I’m not supposed to be doing that.”

The White House chief-of-staff role is the hardest gig in Washington, D.C. Dick Cheney blamed the job for giving him his first heart attack, during the Ford Administration. A hapless chief of staff can break a Presidency; an effective one was nicknamed the Velvet Hammer. In January, Joe Biden’s first chief of staff, Ron Klain, was replaced by Jeffrey Zients. In a conversation from last winter, the staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos use Klain’s departure as a jumping-off point to discuss what it’s actually like to run a White House.

Yevgeny Prigozhin’s march on Moscow last weekend, which killed more than a dozen Russian soldiers, fizzled as quickly as it began, but its repercussions are just beginning. The Wagner Group commander issued a video from Belarus claiming that he did not attempt a coup against Putin but a protest against the Defense Ministry. Mutiny may be the more accurate description, but Prigozhin “was strictly staying within this mythology that Putin makes all the decisions in Russia, and if he makes bad decisions, it’s because somebody has given him bad information,” the staff writer Masha Gessen says. “He was marching to Moscow to give Putin better information.” David Remnick talks with Gessen and the contributor Joshua Yaffa, who has written on the Wagner Group, about what lies ahead in Russia. Both feel that by revealing the reality of the war to his own following—a Putin-loyal, nationalist audience—Prigozhin has seriously damaged the regime’s credibility. If an uprising removes Putin from power, “there will be chaos,” Gessen notes. “Nobody knows what happens next. There’s no succession plan.” And whatever the West may wish, Ukraine may be better off with the current regime. “Whoever comes to power after Putin, it’s not going to be anybody who articulates liberal values. It’s going to be some sort of Putin-ism without Putin.”

The New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos take a look at the political and financial forces behind the U.S. Supreme Court’s hard right turn. This term saw significant rulings on affirmative action in college admissions, election law, immigration, and environmental protection, all in the shadow of the decision just one year ago to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion. Right-wing victories in those cases owe a lot to Leonard Leo, a conservative activist and lawyer who has played a profound role in reshaping the American legal system. With public approval of the Supreme Court at an all-time low, our political roundtable takes a look at Leo’s influence, and at the recent $1.6-billion donation his new nonprofit received.

In October, the Supreme Court heard two cases—against Harvard and U.N.C.—that are expected to bring about the end of affirmative action at American colleges and universities. The practice rests on the Fourteenth Amendment: equal protection under the law. But the Court, under the conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, is reëvaluating what “equal protection” really means, raising the idea that current methods of affirmative action are actually a thinly veiled form of racism. Jeannie Suk Gersen, a New Yorker contributing writer and a professor at Harvard Law School, was in attendance for the oral arguments, and wrote this week about the anticipated decision. She joined Tyler Foggatt last fall to discuss whether a more holistic admissions process is the best way to create diversity, and whether diversity is really the best ideal for universities to aspire to.

A year ago, the staff writer Emily Witt visited Fargo, North Dakota, to report on the Red River Women’s Clinic—the only abortion provider in the state. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision had just come down, and the clinic was scrambling to move across state lines, to the adjacent city of Moorhead, Minnesota. This spring, Witt returned to talk with Tammi Kromenaker, the clinic’s director. Kromenaker says the clinic’s new home has had some notable upsides—a parking lot that shields patients from protesters, for example—but North Dakota patients are increasingly fearful as they reach out, afraid even to cross the state line into Minnesota for care. “It only takes one rogue prosecutor,” she tells Witt. “I think people know that and have it in the back of their minds.” Kromenaker herself is experiencing what she calls “survivor’s guilt,” recognizing how lucky she’s been in comparison to her peers in other conservative states. “It's just been a really hard year in a lot of ways for providers.”

Earlier this month, the writer Elizabeth Gilbert announced her next book. Readers who know her only as the author of “Eat, Pray, Love” might have been surprised by its subject: a group of Russians who hide in the Siberian wilderness as an act of resistance against the Soviet government. The announcement was met by harshly negative feedback from Ukrainian readers, who accused Gilbert of “glorifying” Russia, and she decided to halt the book’s publication. Free-speech advocates lamented the decision, with some asking whether Tolstoy would be next.

In January, the New Yorker staff writer Elif Batuman published an essay about Ukraine’s grievances against Tolstoy and his literary peers. In it, Batuman explores how great Russian novels have been used to justify military aggression in the Slavic world, and contends with the moral weight of loving these books. She joins Tyler Foggatt to talk about Gilbert’s dilemma and to consider how imperialism should change our experience of art.

Dexter Filkins has reported on conflict situations around the world, and recently spent months reporting on the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border. In a recent piece, Filkins tries to untangle how conditions around the globe, an abrupt change in executive direction from Trump to Biden, and an antiquated immigration system have created a chaotic situation. “It’s difficult to appreciate the scale and the magnitude of what’s happening there unless you see it,” Filkins tells David Remnick. Last year, during a surge at the border, local jurisdictions struggled to provide humanitarian support for thousands of migrants, leading Democratic politicians to openly criticize the Administration. While hardliners dream of a wall across the two-thousand-mile border, “they can’t build a border wall in the middle of a river,” Filkins notes. “So if you can get across the river, and you can get your foot on American soil, that’s all you need to do.” Migrants surrendering to Border Patrol and requesting asylum then enter a yearslong limbo as their claims work through an overburdened system. The last major overhaul of the immigration system took place in 1986, Filkins explains, and with Republicans and Democrats perpetually at loggerheads, there is no will to fix a system that both sides acknowledge as broken.

The New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos look at former President Donald Trump’s arraignment in Miami on thirty-seven federal charges, including obstruction of justice and the willful retention of national-security material. In a speech at his New Jersey golf club, the former President called the charges “fake and fabricated” and the prosecution “election interference” and “political persecution.” With few exceptions, congressional Republicans defended him and attacked the Justice Department and F.B.I.; perhaps more surprisingly, nearly all of his opponents for the G.O.P. Presidential nomination have done the same. As Glasser puts it, “There have been so many norms shattered by Donald Trump, sometimes we can fail to notice when yet another is happening. But I feel like this week marked another Rubicon.”

In November of 2020, days after Joe Biden won the election, Jill Lepore examined how Presidential documents have historically been preserved, in a New Yorker essay titled “Will Trump Burn the Evidence?” The piece anticipated that, when Trump left the White House and archivists came to collect his papers, official materials would be missing. Now we know for a fact that Trump took documents with him. But he’s hardly the first President to stash or destroy records. Lepore, a staff writer for this magazine and a historian at Harvard, joins Tyler Foggatt to consider a question that she heard again and again during Trump’s Presidency: Is this worse than everything we’ve seen before?

Over the past several years, as democratic institutions come under attack and authoritarians try to destabilize factual truth, some journalists have argued that the traditional principles of neutrality, or independence, are no longer adequate: they believe reporters need to state their beliefs, and defend threatened principles and peoples. “The traditionalists in the ranks have long believed that their long-standing view speaks for itself,” says A. G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times. “I became increasingly convinced that the argument doesn’t make itself.” Sulzberger tells David Remnick why he needed to make a stand in an essay for the Columbia Journalism Review. Sulzberger insists on a clear-eyed pursuit of truth in reporting, even if it leads to uncomfortable conclusions. “In this hyper-politicized, hyper-polarized moment, is society benefiting from every single player getting deeper and deeper, and louder and louder, about declaring their personal allegiances and loyalties and preferences?” Sulzberger discusses scandals that have rocked the Times’s newsroom, including an inflammatory editorial by Senator Tom Cotton, and recent public petitions on the coverage of trans issues. And he explains why he still can’t hire a Trumpist.

On Friday, federal prosecutors unsealed the indictment against Donald Trump, revealing their case that the former President mishandled classified documents after leaving the White House. The indictment is Trump’s second in recent months, after the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, charged him with thirty-four felony counts in relation to hush-money payments to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels. Trump said that he has been summoned to the Miami federal courthouse on Tuesday, just as the Republican primary race heats up. Three new contenders threw their hats into the ring this week: the former Vice-President Mike Pence, the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum. How will Trump’s legal woes affect the race for the nomination? The New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos spoke Friday morning, before the release of the indictment.

There’s a connection between Bush v. Gore, gerrymandering in North Carolina, and Donald Trump’s legal challenges to the 2020 election: they’ve all been justified by a dubious legal idea called the “independent-state-legislature theory,” or I.S.L.T. Its proponents argue that the Constitution gives state legislatures complete authority over elections, even the authority to override the popular vote. In a story by Andrew Marantz in this week’s magazine, Laurence Tribe, a law professor emeritus at Harvard, says I.S.L.T. was “pulled out of somebody’s butt.” Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan, calls it “right-wing fanfic.” But, as fringe as it may be, this theory is now before the Supreme Court, in the case Moore v. Harper. Marantz joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss how the theory took hold and what the consequences of the Supreme Court decision could be.

David Remnick sits down with Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, which created ChatGPT, GPT-4, and other artificial-intelligence programs. A.I. is a tool, Altman emphasizes, that streamlines human work and quickens the pace of scientific advancement. But he claims to empathize with concerns about the emerging technology. “Even if you don’t believe in any of the sci-fi stories,” he tells Remnick, “you could still be freaked out about the level of change that this is going to bring society and the compressed time frame in which that’s going to happen.”

Despite examples of GPT-4 declaring love or longing to escape to the real world, Altman avoids projecting sentience or goals onto it, and he describes it modestly: “What this system is is a system that takes in some text, does some complicated statistics on it, and puts out some more text.” And, though he acknowledges that the tool can be misused, he added, “I don’t believe we’re on a path to build a creature.” Altman, who testified before Congress last month, describes a recent meeting at the White House led by Vice-President Kamala Harris, and he passes the buck to the government to regulate A.I. technology to avoid monopolization and increased income inequality. The economic disruption and job losses that are certain to come could be managed through policies such as universal basic income, he feels, despite the fact that those policies are politically unpalatable.

Policymakers have avoided a financial catastrophe just days before the “X-Date,” when the U.S. Treasury would have run out of money to pay its bills. Despite some opposition from members of both parties, the House and Senate chambers passed the Fiscal Responsibility Act, a compromise by Speaker McCarthy and President Biden that will raise the debt ceiling until January of 2025. While the Hill was consumed by these negotiations, the judiciary continued to hold insurrectionists accountable for their roles in the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, was sentenced to eighteen years in prison for seditious conspiracy, which the sentencing judge called one of the most serious crimes an individual in America can commit. The sentencing was a victory for democracy, but also a reminder of the anger that still courses through the country and fuels our political system. The New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos analyze these two recent events and consider whether the political center can hold in such a rage-filled America.

On Sunday, after four seasons, the HBO series “Succession” came to a close. More than good TV, it was an artifact of Donald Trump’s Presidency, and of the lingering feelings that have extended into the Biden era. Within the structure of a family drama, the show satirized corporate power, skewered the ultra-wealthy, and critiqued the media. And, notably, it successfully fictionalized Trump—or perhaps it imagined a kind of candidate who could ascend in a world in which Trump’s views had become more widely accepted. Following the finale, Naomi Fry joined Tyler Foggatt to discuss what made the series such an effective rendering of the current political climate.

Earlier this month, E. Jean Carroll won an unprecedented legal victory: in a civil suit, Donald Trump was found liable for sexual abuse against her in the mid-nineteen-nineties, and for defamation in later accusing her of a hoax. But no sooner was that decision announced than Trump reiterated his defamatory insults against her in a controversial CNN interview. Carroll has now filed an amended complaint, in a separate suit, based on Trump’s continued barrage. But can anything make him stop? “The one thing he understands is money,” Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, tells David Remnick. “At some point he’ll understand that every time he does it, it’s going to cost him a few million dollars. And that may make a difference.” Carroll acknowledges that Trump will keep attacking her to get a laugh—“a lot of people don’t like women,” she says simply—but she is undaunted, telling Remnick, “I hate to be all positive about this, but I think we’ve made a difference.” “This is his moment of comeuppance?” Remnick asks her; “I think it just may be.”

Donald Trump has always presented a problem for journalists. His years as a reality-television star taught him to outmaneuver facts and control narratives. Now as Trump’s second Presidential run gets under way, these skills are proving useful yet again. At CNN’s recent town hall, Trump answered questions in front of a live and sympathetic audience—a situation that played directly to his strengths as a performer. For Jelani Cobb and Steve Coll, New Yorker writers and Columbia Journalism School faculty members, the town hall raised some questions: Where is the line between coverage and promotion? And what is the role of news organizations in the age of political polarization? Cobb and Coll join Tyler Foggatt to discuss the dilemmas that journalists face when reporting on the former President and his 2024 campaign.

In June, a first-of-its-kind lawsuit will go to trial in Montana. The case, Held v. Montana, centers on the climate crisis. Sixteen young plaintiffs allege their state government has failed in its obligation, spelled out in the state constitution, to provide residents with a healthful environment. The psychiatrist Dr. Lise Van Susteren is serving as an expert witness and intends to detail the emotional distress that can result from watching the environmental destruction unfolding year after year. “Kids are talking about their anger. They’re talking about their fear. They’re talking about their despair. They’re talking about feelings of abandonment,” she tells David Remnick. “And they don’t understand why the adults in the room are not taking more action.” Dr. Van Susteren is a co-founder of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance, a network of mental-health providers concerned with educating colleagues and the public about the climate crisis.

President Joe Biden was set to make a historic tour through the Indo-Pacific over the next week, becoming the first sitting U.S. President to visit Papua New Guinea, an island state that declared a national holiday for his arrival. But negotiations over the debt limit back home forced the President to cut his trip short, and he’ll return to Washington immediately after the G-7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan. Debate over the debt ceiling could not be postponed, the White House said, with as the U.S. closes in on the day it will run out of cash. Biden’s cancelled visits would have taken place at a time of growing concern about China’s expanding military and economic influence in the region, and on the heels of G-7 discussions about competition with China and the war in Ukraine. Can the U.S. reassert itself as a leader on the international stage if it can’t take care of business at home? The New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos analyze America’s global standing and the G-7 summit in this week’s roundtable discussion.

Last June, after the Supreme Court reversed nearly half a century of legal precedent by overturning Roe v. Wade, the New Yorker writers Jia Tolentino and Stephania Taladrid joined Tyler Foggatt on The Political Scene to talk about the potential fallout. This week, almost a year later, they reconvened to discuss the changes that have occurred—and what they mean for reproductive rights, maternal mortality, and public attitudes toward abortion.

In March, Tolentino won a National Magazine Award for essays and columns about the repeal of Roe; earlier this month, Taladrid was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her reporting on abortion rights and women’s health.

Just over a month ago, the story of two lawmakers expelled from the Tennessee legislature captured headlines across the country. Their offense wasn’t corruption or criminal activity—instead, they had joined a protest at the statehouse in favor of gun control, shortly after the Nashville shooting at a Christian school. Earlier this week, Representative Zooey Zephyr, of Montana, was barred from the House chamber after making a speech against a trans health-care ban. In the past few years, in Arizona, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, legislatures have worked to strip powers from state officials who happen to be Democrats in order to put those powers in Republican hands. Jacob Grumbach, a political-science professor and the author of “Laboratories Against Democracy,” talks about how state politics has become nationalized. “If you’re a politician, and you’re trying to rise in the ranks from the local or state level in your party,” he notes, “your best bet is to join the national culture wars”—even at the expense of constituents’ real concerns.

This week, Representative George Santos, the New York Republican, was indicted on thirteen counts of alleged financial crimes, including wire fraud, money laundering, theft of public funds, and making materially false statements to the House of Representatives. The congressman then took a page out of former President Donald Trump’s playbook by calling the prosecution a “witch hunt.” Trump himself was found liable this week for defamation and sexual abuse, in a Manhattan civil trial brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll; Trump was ordered to pay her five million dollars in damages. Amid those developments, the relationship between the billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow and the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas continues to spark ethics concerns, following revelations about financial and real-estate transactions involving the two men. Despite the scandals, Santos, Thomas, and Trump maintain their respective positions of power as lawmaker, Justice, and Republican front-runner in the 2024 Presidential race. The New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos look at changes in American political culture that allow leaders to survive scandals that would have ended earlier careers, and whether shamelessness is the dominant driving our politics.

Screenwriting, once a solidly middle-class vocation in Hollywood, has become akin to a kind of gig work. In the past ten years, structural changes in the film and television industries have fundamentally altered the way that writers in Hollywood earn their livelihood. The rise of streaming has changed how TV seasons are aired, how residuals are paid, and the kinds of risks that networks are willing to take on new ideas. Shows hire fewer staff writers, and employ them for less time and less money. The arrival of A.I. has made this tenuous situation even more precarious. Michael Schulman spoke to a number of writers before they went on strike, and joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the conditions that gave rise to this major labor action—and the spirit of the picket line a little more than a week in.

Joshua Yaffa first met Evan Gershkovich after Gershkovich arrived in Moscow as a young reporter in 2017. As their friendship grew, Yaffa was impressed with the energy and passion Gershkovich brought to his job. “He had a really deep and nuanced sense of Russia,” Yaffa tells David Remnick. As the regime moved toward authoritarianism and then war, “Evan was not sanguine or Pollyannaish or naïve about the context in which he was working. He understood this was a very different Russia than the one he had arrived to.” Still, Yaffa says, there was little reason to think a foreign journalist would be targeted by Putin until Gershkovich was arrested in March and charged with espionage—quite obviously a false accusation. It’s the first time the Kremlin has imprisoned an American reporter for spying since the nineteen-eighties, and a significant escalation of tensions between the countries. Yaffa, who has spoken with Gershkovich’s family, reflects on Gershkovich’s reporting and life in Moscow, and what may lie ahead. “I’ve been sending him letters,” Yaffa says. “I tell him how proud I am of him, of course how worried I am about him—but mainly how impressed I am.”

In 2018, Sheikha Latifa of Dubai made a daring attempt to escape her home country. Her plan was to hide in the trunk of a car, launch a dinghy, reach a yacht, sail to India or Sri Lanka, and then fly to the United States to claim asylum. But, in the middle of the Arabian Sea, a team of armed men stormed the boat and forced Latifa back to Dubai. The commandos had been sent at the request of her father, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates and the ruler of Dubai. The Sheikh has been praised by world leaders as a modernizer and a champion for women’s advancement in the Middle East, all while subjecting Latifa and other women in his family to confinement and abuse (charges that he has denied). Heidi Blake, a staff writer at The New Yorker, spent many months reporting on what led the princess to flee, and on the consequences that she faced. She joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the Dubai royal family’s patriarchal system of control and the women who tried to break free.

Formerly a Beltway neoconservative, Tucker Carlson came to embody a populist figure—the angry, forgotten-feeling white man, an archetype that Carlson inherited from Bill O’Reilly when he took over Fox News’s coveted eight-o’clock slot. “Unlike a lot of his colleagues at Fox News, he made news, he set the agenda,” Kelefa Sanneh, who profiled Carlson in 2017, says. “People were wondering, What is Tucker going to be saying tonight?” But though Carlson sometimes challenged Donald Trump more than other colleagues at Fox did, he overtly embraced white nationalism. He trumpeted especially the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which has inspired racist mass killings. He lavished attention on authoritarian, anti-democratic rulers like Viktor Orbán, of Hungary, and Nayib Bukele, of El Salvador. “One of the things a very talented demagogue like Tucker Carlson can do is put you on the back foot if you’re critiquing him,” Andrew Marantz, who covers extremist politics, notes, “never quite coming out and saying ‘the thing’ but coming as close as possible to saying it. So that if you’re then in the position of critiquing them, you . . . sound hysterical.” It’s unclear whether Carlson’s extremist politics contributed to his ouster from Fox. His e-mails and text messages, disclosed in Fox’s legal battle with Dominion Voting Systems, made plain that his cynicism is even larger than his ego or his ratings: in private, he hated Trump “passionately” and talked about women in terms that may cause further legal troubles for Fox. Even if Carlson initially adopted extremism cynically, as a matter of entertainment business, Sanneh says that “most of us don’t love living with that kind of cognitive dissonance. Most of us, over time, find ways to convince ourselves that the things we’re saying we really believe in.”

President Biden and Vice-President Harris are officially in the race for the Oval Office—again. For the past three years, strategists, members of the press, and voters have speculated that Biden might serve only one term in office, after he had described himself, during the 2020 campaign, as a “bridge” to future Democratic leaders. But Biden’s announcement this week of his bid for reëlection confirms that the bridge does not lead to Kamala Harris in 2024. With voters worried about Biden’s age—eighty—eyes are on his running mate, who is the first woman, the first Black person, and the first South Asian person to serve as Vice-President. The New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos look at why Biden chose to run again, whether Harris will be an asset or a drag on his campaign, and how the 2024 election will serve as a referendum on the character of America.

In theory, the Justices of the Supreme Court are immune to influence, with no campaigns to finance and no higher positions to angle for. But a cascade of revelations published by ProPublica concerning Justice Clarence Thomas—island-hopping yachting adventures underwritten by a right-wing billionaire patron, undisclosed real-estate transactions—raises questions about his proximity to power and money. Judges “are supposed to be honest, they’re supposed to be independent,” Jane Mayer tells David Remnick. “And I think it stretches common sense to think that a judge could be independent when he takes that much money from one person.” Mayer co-wrote the book “Strange Justice,” about Clarence Thomas, almost thirty years ago, and last year reported on Ginni Thomas’s influence in Washington. She notes that other Justices, including the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, have accepted large gifts from politically connected donors. A deepening public distrust in the integrity of the Supreme Court, Mayer thinks, is dangerous for democracy. “The glue that holds us together is the rule of law in this country,” she says. “People have to believe when they go in front of a court—and in particular the Supreme Court—that they’re getting a fair shake . . . that it’s justice that’s going to prevail.”

At the eleventh hour, Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems resolved a defamation suit over the network’s coverage of the 2020 election, evading weeks of trial that would have brought the network’s biggest names, including Rupert Murdoch, Tucker Carlson, and Sean Hannity, to the witness stand. Although the court found that Fox aired falsehoods about Dominion, apologizing or retracting those falsehoods on air was reportedly not part of the settlement deal. Even as Fox was able to resolve its suit with Dominion just hours after jury selection, the network still faces other legal challenges. Fox News is being sued by Smartmatic for $2.7 billion in damages for defaming the voting-technology company in its coverage of the 2020 election, and a former producer has filed a pair of lawsuits against the company alleging a hostile work environment and claiming that the network’s lawyers pushed her to give misleading testimony in the Dominion case. With its reputation—and money—on the line, what is next for Fox News and the Murdoch family’s hold on the company? And what could the various pending defamation cases portend for libel law in the United States? The New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos consider these questions, among others, in this week’s political roundtable.

On April 4th, Bob Lee, a multimillionaire tech founder, was found stabbed to death in San Francisco, at 2:30 in the morning. Even before concrete details of the crime were revealed, some residents blamed Chesa Boudin—the former D.A., who was ousted last summer—for a general sense of lawlessness in the city. Boudin was one of the more high-profile district attorneys elected in a wave of candidates running on platforms of criminal-justice reform. But he became associated with rising crime and disorder, leading to his eventual recall. Where has that left the progressive-prosecutor movement? Jay Caspian Kang, who wrote about Lee’s murder and the suspect, joins Tyler Foggatt to talk about perception versus reality in the battle over crime and homelessness, and how they affect attempts to fix a broken system.

A ban of the Chinese social-media app TikTok, first floated by the Trump Administration, is now gaining real traction in Washington. Lawmakers of both parties fear the app could be manipulated by Chinese authorities to gain insight into American users and become an effective tool for propaganda against the United States. “Tiktok arrived in Americans’ lives in about 2018 . . . and in some ways it coincided with the same period of collapse in the U.S.-China relationship,” the staff writer Evan Osnos tells David Remnick. “If you’re a member of Congress, you look at TikTok and you say, ‘This is the clearest emblem of my concern about China, and this is something I can talk about and touch.’ ” Remnick also talks with the journalist Chris Stokel-Walker—who has written extensively about TikTok and argued against a ban—regarding the global political backlash against the app. “I think we should be suspicious of all social media, but I don’t think that TikTok is the attack vector that we think it is,” he says. “This is exactly the same as any other platform.”

Ten months after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, access to abortion is once again before the United States Supreme Court, in a case that targets not only abortion medication but also the Food and Drug Administration. Last week, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, of the Northern District of Texas, invalidated the F.D.A.’s approval of the abortion medication mifepristone, which dates back to 2000, igniting a furor among pro-choice politicians and a backlash from biotech and pharmaceutical companies. The conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily narrowed Judge Kacsmaryk’s ruling, making the pill available but reducing the period of pregnancy when the drug can be taken from ten to seven weeks and barring its shipment by mail. The case is now before the Supreme Court. In this week’s political roundtable, the New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos consider what is at stake in the newest battle over abortion access and how this moment reflects the right’s larger effort to reduce the regulatory state.

Donald Trump recently staged the first major rally of his 2024 Presidential campaign in Waco, Texas. Thirty years ago, a botched federal raid on the compound of the Branch Davidians—a heavily-armed splinter group of the Seventh-day Adventist Church dominated by the charismatic David Koresh—led to a harrowing fifty-one-day siege. Just twenty miles from Waco, this standoff ended with federal tanks, tear gas, a fire, and more than seventy dead. Trump’s people claim the rally’s timing is coincidental, the location chosen for its convenient travel from four major Texas metropolitan areas. But in the past thirty years the siege of Waco has become a rallying cry for right-wing extremists from Timothy McVeigh to Alex Jones. Rachel Monroe is a contributing writer at The New Yorker, where she covers Texas and the Southwest. She joins Tyler Foggatt to talk about what happened in 1993, and how its mythology remains a galvanizing political force thirty years later.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed law changing the judiciary is described as a reform. To opponents, it’s a move to gut the independence of the Supreme Court as a check on executive power—and a move from the playbook of autocrats like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. The protests that followed are the largest in the country’s history, and are now stretching into their third month. Ruth Margalit, who is based in Tel Aviv, covered the protests for The New Yorker, and she tells David Remnick that the strength and success of the protests so far has brought a sense of hope for many who were losing faith in the country’s political future. “I think there is a sign of optimism. There is this potential for a kind of political realignment,” she says. “I do have some friends who were thinking of leaving and suddenly are saying, ‘Well, let’s just see how this plays out.’ And they suddenly feel that they have a role.” Remnick also speaks with Margalit’s father, the political philosopher Avishai Margalit, about demographic and cultural factors driving Israeli politics. The nation has been moving to the right probably since the failure of the Oslo peace accords in the nineteen-nineties, but “the new element,” Avishai thinks, “is the strong fusion of religion and nationalism,” elements that were once kept separate in Israel. “The current government is utterly dependent on the votes of the religious and the ultra-religious,” he says. The big unknown, Ruth says, is whether the popular uprising will expand beyond the judicial reforms. “Let’s say the fight over democracy is won—what happens then?” she says. “Can we branch out this fight over democracy? Can it include the West Bank and bring an end to the occupation?”

Donald Trump’s arraignment, on Tuesday, spurred a media frenzy that dominated the news. But the week also revealed a vacuum of leadership in the current Republican Party. Some G.O.P. members voiced wholehearted support for Trump. Some chose to only condemn the prosecution, in order to appease his followers. Some said nothing at all. One lawmaker who has offered no comment on the indictment so far is Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has been absent from the Senate since March 8th, when a fall sent him to the hospital with a concussion. Though the eighty-one-year-old senator has been weighing in on floor debates from rehab and his home, his absence has some colleagues worried about the future of the Party. In this week’s political roundtable, the New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos consider who is actually in charge of the Republican Party right now, and where they might be taking it.

Donald Trump made history on Tuesday as the first U.S. President to be arraigned. According to the indictment, brought by the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, Trump “repeatedly and fraudulently falsified New York business records to conceal criminal conduct that hid damaging information from the voting public during the 2016 presidential election.” The former President was charged with thirty-four felony counts—far more than many experts expected—and pleaded not guilty to all of them. Eric Lach, who writes about New York City politics for The New Yorker, reported on the arraignment and the chaotic scenes that surrounded it. He joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the mood in the courthouse and the possible outcomes that await Trump, who is now running his third Presidential campaign.

In 2018, at the midpoint of the Trump Presidency, the journalist and historian Jon Meacham wrote a book called “The Soul of America,” warning of the gravity of Trump’s threat to democracy. This was hardly a unique point of view, but Meacham’s particular way of putting things, steeped in a critical reverence for American history, hit home with one reader in particular: Joe Biden. In the years since, Meacham became an informal adviser to Biden, helping him recently with the State of the Union address. Meacham, who has written biographies of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, George H. W. Bush, John Lewis, and, now, Abraham Lincoln, reflects on the vulnerability of American democracy in the current moment, with an overt autocrat as the leading Republican contender for the next Presidential election. “Having a dictatorial figure is not new either in human experience or American history. What is new is that so many people are willing to suspend their better judgment to support him,” he says. “I am flummoxed to some extent at the durability of partisan feeling.”

A grand jury in Manhattan voted on Thursday to indict former President Donald Trump for his involvement in a hush-money payment, of a hundred and thirty thousand dollars, to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels. In the final days before the 2016 election, the payment was covered up. In the first part of this week’s political roundtable, the New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos look at what the unprecedented indictment means. “I think that banana republics are getting a bad rap right now,” says Osnos. “If you want to know what really makes a banana republic, it’s not going and prosecuting a former President. It’s allowing certain people to live above the law.”

But the Daniels case is about more than hush money. It’s also about suppressing news before an election. In the second half of the show, our roundtable explores the history of preëlection dirty tricks in the realm of foreign policy. In 1968, Richard Nixon’s campaign quietly worked to sabotage Vietnam War peace talks before voters went to the polls. More than a decade later, allies of Ronald Reagan are reported to have meddled in hostage negotiations with Iran in order to influence the results of the 1980 election—a claim resurrected by a recent New York Times report. And Donald Trump, of course, was impeached for attempting to extort the President of Ukraine during the infamous “perfect phone call.”

U.S. lawmakers have said that they are moving forward with a plan to ban TikTok, one of the most popular apps in the world. In hearings last week, Congress questioned TikTok’s C.E.O., Shou Zi Chew, about the platform’s addictive algorithm, its content, and whether it shares user data with the Chinese government. The hearings bore a resemblance to the questioning of Mark Zuckerberg over Facebook in 2018—not least because of the representatives’ incomprehension of how the technology works. This déjà vu raises questions: Why hasn’t anything been done to protect Americans’ data privacy? And is a ban the only way? Kyle Chayka, who wrote about Chew and his critics at the hearings, joins Tyler Foggatt for a conversation about what separates the real dangers of TikTok from alarmism and xenophobia.

The prescription drug Ozempic was designed to help people with Type 2 diabetes manage their disease, and, under the name Wegovy, to treat obesity. But it has been embraced recently as a tool for weight loss, and many celebrities are rumored to use it in order to shed pounds. Known generically as semaglutide, the drug gives users the feeling of satiation—even to the point of uncomfortable fullness. “One doctor I spoke to compared it to a turkey dinner in a pen,” the staff writer Jia Tolentino tells David Remnick. Tolentino recently reported on the use and misuse of the drug, and what its prominence among celebrities says about our relationship to thinness today. After some years in which body culture seemed to become more accepting, Tolentino fears the drug will wind the clock back to the brutal insistence on thinness of decades past. “Like any technology, it’s very complicated,” she says. “For some people, this drug might save their lives. For others, it does not make sense to be used in any casual way.”

It’s the end of a week in which former President Donald Trump said that he would be indicted by the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, for a hundred-and-thirty-thousand-dollar hush-money payment to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels—and still no charge. But just the prospect of an indictment has created a furor among Trump’s Republican allies in the House, who called Bragg’s investigation a “sham” and the District Attorney “radical.” Jim Jordan, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, led an inquiry into the Manhattan D.A.’s office—a move that the D.A.’s general counsel called an “unlawful incursion into New York’s sovereignty.” In this week’s political roundtable, the New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos look at the political ramifications of the still-looming indictment, the terrifying threat of political violence, and what a Trump “perp walk” could mean.

This week, reports circulated that the former President Donald Trump would be indicted for paying hush money to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels in 2016. But on Wednesday—the day that the indictment was expected—the New York grand jury declined to meet. Still, whatever the outcome of the Stormy Daniels case, Trump faces significant legal trouble. Investigations are under way into his alleged attempt to overturn the election in Georgia, his role in the January 6th attack, and classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago. Will any of these actually hurt him? Or will they help fuel another highly unorthodox Presidential campaign? Amy Davidson Sorkin joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the gambit of Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan District Attorney, who could charge Trump in the Stormy Daniels case, and the broader attempts to hold the former President accountable.

In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority appears likely to strike down affirmative action, in a decision expected by this summer. The practice of considering race as a tool to counteract discrimination has been in place at many colleges and universities, and in some workplaces, since the civil-rights era. But a long-running legal campaign has threatened the practice for decades. David Remnick talks with two academics who have had a front-row seat in this fight. Ruth Simmons tells him, “For me, it’s quite simply the question of what will become of us as a nation if we go into our separate enclaves without the opportunity to interact and to learn from each other.” Simmons was the Ivy League’s first Black president, and more recently led Prairie View A. & M., in Texas. Lee Bollinger, while leading the University of Michigan, was the defendant in Grutter v. Bollinger, a landmark case twenty years ago in which the Supreme Court upheld affirmative action. The Court’s current conservative majority is likely to overturn that precedent.

Remnick also speaks with Femi Ogundele, the dean of undergraduate admissions at the University of California,Berkeley. Consideration of race in admissions at California state schools has been banned for nearly thirty years. “A lot of us are being kind of tapped on the shoulder and asked, ‘How are you doing what you’re doing in this new reality?’ ” he says. “I want to be very clear: I do not think there is any race-neutral alternative to creating diversity on a college campus,” Ogundele tells Remnick. “However, I do think we can do better than what we’ve done.”

Reverberations of the global “war on terror”—launched by the Bush Administration following the attacks of September 11, 2001—have rippled throughout the world, taking hundreds of thousands of lives and costing trillions of U.S. dollars. This week marks the twentieth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, conducted on the false pretext that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos all spent time writing and reporting on the Iraq War and its aftermath—including from within Iraq. In our weekly roundtable, they look at the profound consequences of the war and how it has impacted today’s politics—through, for example, the rise of Donald Trump, debates over America’s role in the war in Ukraine, and widespread distrust of experts and the mainstream media. We are living in a world the Iraq War created, and Glasser, Mayer, and Osnos explain how.

Masha Gessen has long written about Russia, and recently the war in Ukraine. But Gessen also has a deep background reporting on L.G.B.T.Q. rights. A dual citizen of Russia and the U.S., Gessen fled Russia when they were targeted by government repression of L.GB.T. people. Some of the same rhetoric that Vladimir Putin used is now appearing in bills that aim to criminalize transitioning. “All of these bills are about signalling, and what they’re signalling is the essence of past-oriented politics,” Gessen told David Remnick. “A message that says, ‘We are going to return you to a time when you were comfortable, when things weren’t scary … when you didn’t fear that your kid was going to come home from school and tell you that they’re trans.’ … Promising to take that anxiety away is truly powerful.” Gessen looks at the rapid escalation of laws in the United States that ban medical treatment for trans youth, and aspects of trans identity. “When I see that transgender care … for kids … is already illegal in some states,” Gessen says, “and for adults is likely to become illegal in some states, I know that my testosterone in New York is probably not as safe as I think it is.”

Gessen also discusses how the embattled political climate and clear dangers for trans people make nuanced conversations difficult. For instance, Gessen feels that at least some of Dave Chappelle’s jokes about trans people could be seen as sophisticated, “next-level trans accepting.” Gessen also discusses the recent backlash against mainstream media outlets for coverage of issues like detransitioning. Detransitioning has received too much of a focus, Gessen says, and focussing on it plays into a narrative that transitioning young should be discouraged. Yet the possibility of regret on the part of trans people shouldn’t necessarily be denied; better, Gessen said, to accept that regret may accompany any major life change. “We normalize regret in all other areas of life,” Gessen told Remnick. “Kids and their parents, especially teen-agers, make a huge number of decisions that have lifelong implications.”

We’re pleased to announce that “In The Dark,” the acclaimed investigative podcast from American Public Media, is joining The New Yorker and Condé Nast Entertainment. In its first two seasons, “In The Dark,” hosted by the reporter Madeleine Baran, has taken a close look at the criminal-justice system in America. The first season examined the abduction and murder, in 1989, of eleven-year-old Jacob Wetterling, and exposed devastating failures on the part of law enforcement. The second season focussed on Curtis Flowers, a Black man from Winona, Mississippi, who was tried six times for the same crime. When the show’s reporters began looking into the case, Flowers was on death row. After their reporting, the Supreme Court reversed Flowers’s conviction. Today, he is a free man.

A third season of “In The Dark,” which will be the show’s most ambitious one yet, is on its way. David Remnick recently sat down with Baran and the show’s managing producer, Samara Freemark, to talk about the remarkable first two seasons of the show, and what to expect in the future. To listen to the entirety of the “In The Dark” catalogue, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

James Sweet, a professor of African history and the former president of the American Historical Association, wrote an essay last year that sparked a significant clash in the world of academia about the role of politics in history and vice versa. He argued that historians have become compromised by politics—that they begin not with the evidence but with the contemporary social-justice concern that they want to speak to, in order to go viral on Twitter. This discussion may seem niche, but it is in dialogue with a national one as politicians such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis vow to remove all traces of “wokeness” from school curricula and exert control over how history is understood. Emma Green joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss her piece “The Right Side of History,” about Sweet’s essay and how historians should respond to the current political moment.

Well before launching the horrifying campaign against Ukraine a year ago, Vladimir Putin had been undermining Russia as well: normalizing corruption on a massive scale, and suppressing dissent and democracy. One of the darkest moments on that trajectory was the poisoning of the opposition leader Alexey Navalny with the nerve agent novichok. Navalny and a team of investigators had illustrated the corruption of Putin and his circle in startling detail, and Navalny began travelling the country to launch a bid for the Presidency. “Every time when I heard Navalny giving an interview, I don’t think there was one interview where he wasn’t asked, ‘How come you’re still alive? How come they still haven’t they killed you?,’ ” recalls the Russian activist Maria Pevchikh, the head of investigations and media for Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation. “And Navalny is rolling his eyes saying, ‘I don’t know, I’m tired of this question, stop asking. I don’t know why I’m still alive and why they haven’t tried to assassinate me.’ ” Pevchikh was travelling with Navalny when he was poisoned, and helped uncover the involvement of the F.S.B. security services. After surviving the assassination and recuperating abroad, Navalny returned to Russia only to be arrested and then detained in a penal colony. “I think Putin wants him to suffer a lot and then die in prison,” Pevchikh tells David Remnick. Still, she maintains hope. “The situation is so chaotic, specifically because of the war,” she says. “Is the likelihood of Navalny being released when the war ends high? I think it is almost certain.” Pevchikh also served as an executive producer of the documentary “Navalny,” which is nominated for an Academy Award.

The Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox News stems from the 2020 election and Donald Trump’s refusal to accept defeat. At stake is nearly $1.6 billion in damages. Filings released in the case contain a trove of e-mails and text messages from Fox hosts and executives. The documents reveal that many of the top decision-makers at the company didn’t seem to believe what their own network was saying about the 2020 election. Fox’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, admitted as much, in a deposition released this week. In our weekly roundtable, the New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos look at what the filings tell us about how Fox News operates, the current state of Republican politics, and the 2024 election.

In November, Open AI introduced ChatGPT, a large language model that can generate text that gives the impression of human intelligence, spontaneity, and surprise. Users of ChatGPT have described it as a revolutionary technology that will change every aspect of how we interact with text and with one another. Joshua Rothman, the ideas editor of newyorker.com, joins Tyler Foggatt to talk about the many ways that ChatGPT may be deployed in the realm of politics—from campaigning and lobbying to governance. American political life has already been profoundly altered by the Internet, and the effects of ChatGPT, Rothman says, could be even more profound.

As the COVID-19 pandemic approaches its fourth year, we can begin to gain some clarity on which countries, and which U.S. states, had the best outcomes over time. In a conversation with David Remnick, Dhruv Khullar, a contributing writer and a practicing physician in New York, explains some of the key factors. Robust testing was key for public-health authorities to make good decisions, unsurprisingly. What also seems clear from a distance, Khullar says, is that social cohesion was a decisive underlying condition. This helps explain why the United States did poorly in its pandemic response, despite a technologically advanced health-care system. Peer pressure, in other words, trumped mandates. Khullar also speaks to Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about how misinformation and political polarization inhibit our country’s efforts on public health.

This week, Joe Biden visited Kyiv to mark the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion, and promised more American support for Ukraine. Although the United States has approved tens of billions of dollars of aid for Ukraine, largely with bipartisan support, the war is increasingly a focus in U.S. domestic politics, with some congressional Republicans and the Florida governor Ron DeSantis raising objections. The staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos gather for their weekly conversation, discussing how the war has upended expectations and may also upend American politics, as the far right and far left appear to be coming together in opposition to U.S. support for Ukraine.

In the past fifty years, a movement has formed to unite native and aboriginal peoples around the world under one umbrella term: Indigenous. But “indigeneity” is a slippery concept. Some groups qualify because they were the first people in their nation; some qualify even though they weren’t. Some have lost sovereignty over their land; some have regained it. As tribes face a variety of political crises, does this diverse global coalition create solidarity, or does it flatten complex problems? Manvir Singh, a writer and anthropology research fellow, raises these questions in an essay in this week’s New Yorker, “It’s Time to Rethink the Idea of the ‘Indigenous.’ ” He joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the trade-offs of embracing a complex identity label.

In the year since Russia’s invasion, Ukrainians have shown incredible fortitude on the battlefield. Yet an end to the conflict seems nowhere in sight. “Putin’s strategy could be defined as ‘I can’t have it—nobody can have it.’ And, sadly, that’s where the tragedy is right now,” Stephen Kotkin, a fellow at the Hoover Institution and a scholar of Russian history, tells David Remnick. “Ukraine is winning in the sense that [it] didn’t allow Russia to take that whole country. But it’s losing in the sense that its country is being destroyed.” Kotkin says that the standards for a victory laid out by President Volodymyr Zelensky set an impossibly high bar, and that Ukraine—however distasteful the prospect—may be forced to cut its losses. He suggests it could accept its loss of control over some of its territory while aiming to secure expedited accession to the European Union, and still consider this a victory.

Remnick also speaks with Sevgil Musaieva, the thirty-five-year-old editor-in-chief of Ukrainska Pravda, an online publication based in Kyiv, about the toll that the war is taking on her and her peers. “We have to destroy the Soviet Empire and the ghosts of the Soviet Empire, and this is the goal of our generation,” Musaieva says. “People of my generation, they don’t have family. They don’t have kids. They just dedicate their lives—the best years of their lives—to country.”

Kotkin says that the standards for a victory laid out by President Volodymyr Zelensky set an impossibly high bar, and that Ukraine—however distasteful the prospect—may be forced to cut its losses. He suggests it might need to accept its loss of control over some of its territory while aiming to secure expedited accession to the European Union, and still consider this a victory.

The California senator Dianne Feinstein announced her retirement this week. First elected in 1992, she became one of the most powerful senators in the chamber and was often spoken of as a possible Presidential contender, although she never ran. Also this week, Nikki Haley announced her bid to challenge Donald Trump for the Republican Presidential nomination. In Democratic circles, there have been new reports of hand-wringing over Vice-President Kamala Harris’s political prospects. That got the staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos thinking about 1992—the Year of the Woman, as it was known—and about what has and hasn’t changed for women in politics in the three decades since.

More than forty thousand people are dead after back-to-back earthquakes in Turkey and Syria last week. It’s a new level of disaster in a region that has been pummelled by violence and terrorism. As a Syrian refugee in Turkey told The New Yorker, “We’ve had eleven years of war in Syria . . . . But what happened in eleven years there happened in forty seconds here.” Meanwhile, a mysterious tale of espionage has been unfolding. After a Chinese spy balloon was seen over Montana, the United States identified several more floating bodies in its airspace. Are they proliferating, or have they been there for far longer than we realize?

Ben Taub, a New Yorker staff writer, has reported extensively from the Turkish-Syrian border, but his most recent piece for the magazine was about a man who travelled around the world in a balloon. He joins Tyler Foggatt to unravel two of the biggest stories in the news.

Thirty-four years ago, the Ayatollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, issued a fatwa calling for the assassination of the novelist Salman Rushdie, whose book “The Satanic Verses” Khomeini declared blasphemous. It caused a worldwide uproar. Rushdie lived in hiding in London for a decade before moving to New York, where he began to let his guard down. “I had come to feel that it was a very long time ago and, and that the world moves on,” he tells David Remnick. “That’s what I had agreed with myself was the case. And then it wasn’t.” In August of last year, a man named Hadi Matar attacked Rushdie onstage before a public event, stabbing him about a dozen times. Rushdie barely survived. Now, in his first interview since the assassination attempt, Rushdie discusses the long shadow of the fatwa; his recovery from extensive injuries; and his writing. It was “just a piece of fortune, given what happened,” that Rushdie had finished work on a new novel, “Victory City,” weeks before the attack. The book is being published this week. “I’ve always thought that my books are more interesting than my life,” he remarks. “Unfortunately, the world appears to disagree.”

David Remnick’s Profile of Rushdie appears in the February 13th & 20th issue of The New Yorker.

President Biden gave a boisterous second State of the Union address earlier this week, sparring with Republicans over Social Security and Medicare. Designed to advance the President’s agenda, a State of the Union address is always overstuffed. But there were several hot-button issues that Biden hardly discussed, including abortion rights, the United States’ relationship with China, and the war in Ukraine. The staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos gather for their weekly conversation and consider what barely got a mention, and what that tells us about the current balance of power in Washington and the 2024 campaign.

This week, the Democratic Party upended its primary schedule for 2024. Instead of the Iowa caucuses, South Carolina will now go first, giving more deciding power to Black voters. Is this an attempt to realign the Democratic Party’s priorities—or a token of gratitude for the state that pushed Biden to the Presidency in 2020? Benjamin Wallace-Wells, a New Yorker staff writer and reporter who has spent a lot of time in Iowa, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the influence of the early primaries, and the political calculations that went into changing them.

Forty years ago, Chuck D showed listeners how exciting, radical, and unpredictable hip-hop could be. His song “Fight the Power” became a protest anthem for a generation, and a Greek chorus in Spike Lee’s film “Do the Right Thing.” The Public Enemy front man talks with the staff writer Kelefa Sanneh about his life in music. “I wanted to curate, present, navigate, teach, and lead the hip-hop art, making it something that people would revere,” he says. Now, at sixty-two, Chuck D is an elder statesman of his genre, and also a critic of it and some of its more commercial impulses. His latest project is a four-part documentary, “Fight the Power: How Hip-Hop Changed the World,” which is airing now on PBS. “I’ve been to one hundred sixteen countries over thirty-eight years, so I’ve seen the changes,” he says. “People have made their way to me to say, ‘Chuck, this is what this art form has meant to me,’ in all continents except for Antarctica.”

The Republican Nikki Haley is widely expected to announce a Presidential run later this month. As a former U.N. Ambassador and South Carolina governor, Haley brings strong credentials to a sparse Republican field. The defeated former President Donald Trump is making his third bid for the White House. Governor Ron DeSantis, of Florida, is expected to run, but is so far waiting in the wings. Mikes Pence and Pompeo, Trump’s former Vice-President and Secretary of State, respectively, are also rumored to be contemplating bids. What can these nascent campaigns tell us about the state of the G.O.P.? The staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos gather for their weekly conversation to explore the 2024 race for the Republican nomination, and what it might take to dislodge Trump as the front-runner.

Last Thursday, the Memphis Police Department announced that it was firing five police officers who beat a man named Tyre Nichols to death during a traffic stop. Shortly afterward, all five officers were jailed and charged with murder. Then the police department released body-camera and surveillance-camera footage of the incident. In the days that followed, the footage, and the question of whether or not to watch it, became the object of public preoccupation, superseding the violence it captured. Doreen St. Félix is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss police-brutality videos as cultural objects—and the police as a storytelling apparatus.

For years, many on the right have been lambasting a certain kind of progressive sensibility denoted with the term “political correctness”—endless fodder for Rush Limbaugh and others in the nineteen-nineties. But those semi-comic tirades were nothing compared with the serious political fight against “woke.” Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, for example, recently signed a so-called Stop Woke Act into law, and made the issue the center of his midterm victory speech. In Washington, there has been talk in the House of forming an “anti-woke caucus.” “I think ‘woke’ is a very interesting term right now, because I think it’s an unusable word—although it is used all the time—because it doesn’t actually mean anything,” the linguist and lexicographer Tony Thorne, the author of “Dictionary of Contemporary Slang,” tells David Remnick. “The references to ‘woke’ before 2016, 2017, 2018, were kind of straightforward. It means ‘socially aware,’ ‘empathetic,’ ” Thorne says. “Then the right, the conservative right, seizes hold of this word,” to heap blame on it for everything from deadly mass shootings to lower military recruitment.

The White House chief of staff is the second most powerful but hardest gig in Washington, D.C. Dick Cheney blamed the job for giving him his first heart attack, during the Ford Administration. A hapless chief of staff can break a Presidency; effective ones get nicknamed the Velvet Hammer. On Friday, the Biden Administration announced that Ron Klain will depart as chief of staff, after two long years in the job. The staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos gather for their weekly conversation to look at what Klain accomplished and what to expect from his replacement, Jeffrey Zients.

Last weekend, a man shot and killed eleven people at a ballroom-dance studio in Monterey Park, California, an Asian enclave outside of Los Angeles. Then, less than forty-eight hours later, in Half Moon Bay, California, another man shot and killed seven Chinese farmworkers. Notably, both alleged killers were older men with Asian backgrounds. While mass shootings take place with mind-boggling regularity in America, these attacks also happened amid an alarming rise in hate crimes targeting people of Asian descent. Jay Caspian Kang, a New Yorker staff writer and the author of “The Loneliest Americans,” joins Michael Luo, the editor of newyorker.com, to discuss how these two types of American violence shape our understanding of such disturbing events.

George Santos is hardly the first scammer elected to office—but his lies, David Remnick says, are “extra.” Most Americans learned of Santos’s extraordinary fabrications from a New York Times report published after the midterm election, but a local newspaper called the North Shore Leader was sounding the alarm months before. The New Yorker staff writer Clare Malone took a trip to Long Island to speak with the Leader’s publisher, Grant Lally, and its managing editor, Maureen Daly, to find out how the story began. “We heard story after story after story about him doing bizarre things,” Lally told her. “He was so well known, at least in the more active political circles, to be a liar, that by early summer he was already being called George Scamtos.” Lally explains how redistricting drama in New York State turned Santos from a “sacrificial” candidate—to whom no one was paying attention—to a front-runner. At the same time, Malone thinks, “the oddly permissive structure that the Republican Party has created for candidates on a gamut of issues” enabled his penchant for fabrication. “[There’s] lots of crazy stuff that’s popped up in politics over the past few years. I think maybe Santos thought, Eh, who’s gonna check?”

President Biden has faced remarkable challenges in his first two years in office, from the overturning of the national right to abortion and the management of the U.S.’s COVID response, to the invasion of Ukraine. The staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos gather for their weekly conversation to look at what the Biden White House has accomplished in the past two years, and what the forty-sixth President can hope to achieve before 2024. Plus, the roundtable talks about the political implications of “The Getty Family’s Trust Issues,” Osnos’s latest article which explores how the ultra-wealthy avoid paying taxes.

A few days before Christmas, the New York City pastor Lamor Whitehead—known to some as the “Bling Bishop”—was federally indicted for a number of alleged crimes. Among the charges was that Whitehead, a close friend of New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, tried to extort a businessman by claiming he had pull with City Hall. This is not the first time that friends of the Mayor have found themselves in legal trouble, or that Adams has faced questions about potential corruption. Eric Lach writes a regular column about New York City politics, and over the weekend he published a bombshell report on the long history between the Mayor and Whitehead. He joins Tyler Foggatt to talk about the persistent questions surrounding their relationship.

Bob Woodward has been writing about the White House for more than fifty years, going toe to toe with nearly every President after Richard Nixon. Woodward is every inch the reporter, not one to editorialize. But, during his interviews with Donald Trump at the time of the COVID-19 crisis, Woodward found himself shouting at the President—explaining how to make a decision, and trying to browbeat him into listening to public-health experts. Woodward has released audio recordings of some of their interviews in a new audiobook called “The Trump Tapes,” which documents details of Trump’s state of mind, and also of Woodward’s process and craft. Despite having written critically of Trump in 2018, Woodward found his access unprecedented. “I could call him anytime, [and] he would call me,” Woodward tells David Remnick. His wife, Elsa Walsh, “used to joke [that] there’s three of us in the marriage.”

The House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government was launched on Tuesday, with Representative Jim Jordan, a combative ally of Donald Trump and a co-founder of the far-right Freedom Caucus, at the helm. This powerful new committee has the authority to investigate the federal government and how it has collected, analyzed, and used information about American citizens. Its mandate includes access to sensitive documents and details about covert actions, all of which fall under Congress’s typical oversight authority. But the new committee also provides a way for Republicans to advance the narrative that conservatives are systematically under attack. The staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos gather for their weekly conversation to look at historical parallels of this new committee, and how it will likely handle issues such as Hunter Biden’s laptop and the recent revelation that Joe Biden had a number of classified documents in his possession.

On Sunday, a mob of protesters ransacked Brazil’s capital, claiming that the recent Presidential election had been rigged. The riots, eerily reminiscent of the United States Capitol attack, were carried out in the name of Brazil’s former President, Jair Bolsonaro, a political figure who has been described as the “Trump of the Tropics.” Andrew Marantz, a New Yorker staff writer, was in Brazil during November’s election, when another former President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, defeated Bolsonaro. He joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the contagiousness of far-right political movements in the age of social media.

By Thursday evening, Kevin McCarthy had lost eleven votes for Speaker of the House, the longest series of inconclusive ballots for the role since 1859. Until the next Speaker is selected, nothing can happen in the House of Representatives: no new legislation, no top-secret briefings, not even paychecks for lawmakers. McCarthy’s fate remained unclear when the staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos gathered for their weekly conversation, on Friday morning. Whatever the outcome, they say, the entire saga is instructive about the current state of the Republican Party—who wields true power, what the role of big money is, and even what the next two years of divided government might look like.

Luke Mogelson, a contributing writer at The New Yorker, is one of the rare reporters who has seen the war in Ukraine from the front lines. He recently spent two weeks embedded with a group of fighters from around the world who had chosen to travel to Ukraine and join the war against Russia. In a new story in the magazine, he writes about the sophisticated and incessant violence of the war, and the mentality that keeps these volunteer soldiers there, fighting on behalf of a country that is not their own. He joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss what he witnessed.

During the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd, Broadway theatres were among the many institutions to announce a commitment to equity and protecting Black lives. But for many Black performers, the promise rang hollow. Frustrated by what he perceived to be a lack of accountability, the actor Britton Smith and colleagues at Broadway Advocacy Coalition organized events that pointed to the industry’s failures and called for genuine change. BAC won a Tony Award for its work. But two years later, “the fire [has] crumbled into ashes, and now the ashes are starting to settle,” Smith tells Ngofeen Mputubwele. “You have to go through a process of (finding) peace. … Some people are horrible. Some people want to learn, some people don’t. Some people want to keep their power, some people don’t.”

2022 was the year that the contours of the post-pandemic world started to heave into view. Critical aspects of domestic and international politics were reordered. The staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos gather for their weekly conversation to consider the most important stories of 2022. They talk through the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, changing perceptions in Washington of the U.S.-China relationship, and the immense toll of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Plus, they offer some year-end reading and watching recommendations.

In 2022, three hundred and forty pieces of legislation in twenty-three states targeted L.G.B.T.Q. rights. The most high-profile was Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill—officially the Parental Rights in Education Act—introduced by Governor Ron DeSantis. The law limits the discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in grade-school classrooms, including through the removal of books and other educational materials. DeSantis, of course, won a landslide reëlection contest in November, with parental rights a central part of his platform. In July, when the “Don’t Say Gay” law was newly implemented, Jessica Winter joined Tyler Foggatt to discuss the history of queer children’s literature, why the right finds it so dangerous, and how its banning will affect the lives and education of young people.

This episode was originally released on July 14, 2022.

Tracy K. Smith was named Poet Laureate in 2017, at the beginning of the fierce partisan divide of the Trump era. She quickly turned to her craft to address the deep political divisions the election laid bare, putting together a collection called “American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time.” Then she hit the road, visiting community centers, senior centers, prisons, and colleges, and reading poems written by herself and others for groups small and large. “It was exhausting, and exhilarating, and it was probably the best thing I could have done as an American,” she told The New Yorker’s poetry editor, Kevin Young.

This segment originally aired July 5, 2019.

On Monday, the House select committee investigating January 6th voted unanimously to refer Donald Trump to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation over the attack on the Capitol, including a charge of insurrection. The staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos gather for their weekly conversation to talk about the committee’s eighteen-month probe and what’s next for the forty-fifth President.

After a nearly eighteen-month investigation, which included televised hearings and more than a thousand interviews, the January 6th Committee is set to release its final report. As indicated by the executive summary, the report will lay bare who is to blame for the Capitol attack: Donald Trump, unambiguously. The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, authored the foreword to a publication of the full report being co-issued by the magazine and Celadon Books. He joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the committee’s exhaustive work, the historic nature of its criminal referral, and the possible outcomes ahead for Trump.

Nancy Pelosi has been one of the most powerful people in Washington for decades. As the first woman to serve as Speaker of the House, she shaped and passed monumental pieces of legislation—from Obamacare to the Inflation Reduction Act—often with slim majorities. She learned lessons as part of a powerful Baltimore political family and then went on to navigate sexism in Washington politics and stand up to Donald Trump. The staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos gather for their weekly conversation to discuss the secret to Pelosi’s effectiveness. Plus: what the next two years might hold for Kevin McCarthy as he takes over the role and navigates narrow Republican control.

Last week, the Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema announced that she would be leaving the Democratic Party and registering as an Independent—a decision that seems especially dramatic given the Democrats’ slim majority. Yet Sinema is joining a growing bloc of about forty per cent of the electorate that does not identify with either party. Amy Davidson Sorkin joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the causes of this widespread dissatisfaction, and whether an Independent movement could energize electoral politics in our highly partisan moment. “In theory, a third party would be great, and yet it’s so worrisome because there’s all of these real threats to democracy in the last few years,” Sorkin says. “But another threat to democracy is people feeling deeply alienated from politics and like there is no home for them.”

For Washington insiders and people in the media, Politico publishes some of the wonkiest reporting inside the Beltway. It’s not what you’d call a mass-market publication, but it’s highly influential—it was Politico that obtained and published Samuel Alito’s draft opinion of the Supreme Court decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade. The German news publisher Axel Springer, led by the C.E.O. Mathias Döpfner, acquired Politico last year for more than a billion dollars. “I believe that journalism has a very bright future if we get some things right,” Döpfner tells David Remnick. The C.E.O. relishes taking provocative stances, but he has been a vocal critic of media outlets that he says increasingly cater to partisan audiences; he cites as an example the resignation of a New York Times editor over the publication of a right-wing opinion piece. “It is not about objectivity or neutrality,” he tells Remnick. “It is about plurality.” Politico, Döpfner says, is taking “a kind of contrarian bet: if everybody polarizes, the few who do differently may have the better future.”

It’s been a busy week in national politics: Raphael Warnock triumphed over Herschel Walker in the Georgia runoff, Kyrsten Sinema left the Democratic caucus in the Senate, and the Democrats proposed a new calendar for the 2024 Presidential primaries. There are also the myriad investigations into Donald Trump, and criminal convictions of Trump Organization companies for tax fraud. The staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos gather for their weekly conversation, starting with Donald Trump’s recent call to “terminate” the Constitution, so that he can be reinstated as President or have the 2020 election be “redone.”

Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, won reëlection by a stunning nineteen-point margin. With that kind of popularity—in a state with twenty-nine electoral votes—he seems well positioned to run for President. To do so, he must win supporters away from Donald Trump, who has already announced a 2024 run, in a speech delivered from Mar-a-Lago. DeSantis has questioned the “huge underperformance” of Trump-endorsed Republicans in the midterms, while touting his own brand of politics. Could he be the next leader of the G.O.P.? Dexter Filkins, who profiled the Governor earlier this year, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss how Florida became ground zero of the new Republican Party.

J. Michael Luttig is a retired judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals and a prominent legal mind in conservative circles, close with figures including Clarence Thomas and William Barr. On January 5, 2020, he got a call from Vice-President Mike Pence’s then-lawyer asking Luttig to publicly back Pence’s decision not to attempt to overturn the election the next day. Luttig tweeted that the Vice-President had no constitutional authority to stop the election, and suddenly the judge was thrust into the center of the crisis.Now Luttig is siding with Democrats as co-counsel on the Supreme Court case Moore v. Harper, which he tells David Remnick is “the most important case, since the founding, for American democracy.” At the heart of the debate is the independent-state-legislature theory, a once-fringe legal concept that Donald Trump and his allies believe should have allowed Pence to reject the popular vote in 2020. If the court adopts the theory, it could grant legislatures essentially unfettered authority to run national elections; they could not be challenged even if the election violated the state constitution. Such power, in the hands of a gerrymandered legislature, could be used to bypass the popular vote and appoint a new slate of electors, effectively empowering state lawmakers to choose a winner. The court will hear the case on December 7th.

All week, Washington, D.C., has been talking about Donald Trump’s dinner with Nick Fuentes, a notorious white supremacist and Holocaust denier. A wave of prominent Republicans have repudiated the dinner and anti-Semitism, including Senators Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney. Trump’s former Vice-President, Mike Pence, condemned the meeting as well, with the caveat that he didn’t think his former boss was a bigot or an anti-Semite. But the issue goes beyond a single meal. The staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos gather for their weekly conversation, to look at the modern history of the far right in Republican politics.

Anger over China’s “Zero-COVID” policy erupted in protests this week. It’s a startling and nearly unheard-of challenge to President Xi’s power, a short time after he secured a third term in office. The anger over Zero COVID is unique, the staff writer Jiayang Fan tells the host Tyler Foggatt, because it has united disparate groups across China that transcend class and geography. But Fan cautions about concluding this moment is the start of a revolution: “These political wobbles are something that the Communist Party is accustomed to, to a certain degree, despite trying to prevent it at all costs.” A clampdown seems to be already under way.

The protests also arrive at a delicate moment in U.S.-China relations. Tensions over trade and Taiwan have flared. The Biden Administration has even criticized China’s Zero-COVID restrictions and lockdowns. “I can see Beijing using Biden’s words as a piece of evidence that the protests in China are not organic but somehow seeded by hostile foreign agents,” Fan says. “Even though clearly not many foreigners are getting into China these days.”

Many of the most important and powerful people in Washington, D.C., are on the older side. Joe Biden turned eighty last week. Mitch McConnell is also eighty. Nancy Pelosi, who recently stepped away from a leadership position in her party, is eighty-two. All three of these leaders have delivered big victories for their respective parties. But there is a question of whether America is becoming a gerontocracy—a country ruled by the elderly. The staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos gather for their weekly roundtable conversation to ask: Do age and experience impart wisdom for troubled times, or can they create an inability to confront new ways of thinking?

Supposedly, things in Hollywood have been changing for women and people of color. After the #MeToo, #OscarsSoWhite, and Black Lives Matter movements, leaders in the entertainment industry promised a lot: new kinds of stories were going to be told, by newly diverse writers, showrunners, and casts. In short, Hollywood’s long history of sexism and discrimination was going to be “reckoned” with. But, as studios have shifted with changing social expectations, there’s been talk of a backlash within Hollywood. Actors and studio execs, who were previously worried about getting “cancelled” by their progressive fans, have expressed feelings of “fatigue.” In a wide-ranging conversation about politics, entertainment, and social media, Doreen St. Félix, a staff writer who was previously The New Yorker’s television critic, offers some perspective on the current mood in Hollywood and what makes for good art.

No self-respecting sports fan is naïve about the role that money plays in pro sports. But, by any standard, the greed and cynicism behind the World Cup are extraordinary. The cloud of scandal surrounding FIFA, the international soccer organization, has led to indictments and arrests on charges of wire fraud, racketeering, and money laundering around the globe. Headlines have been filled with reports of the deaths of workers who constructed the facilities. “People are normally careful enough not to leave a paper trail,” the contributor Heidi Blake notes. But she says, of investigating FIFA, “I’ve never seen graft and corruption documented in this kind of detail.” Blake speaks with David Remnick about “The Ugly Game,” which she co-authored with Jonathan Calvert, and how Qatar came to host the World Cup.

Donald Trump announced his third bid for the White House this week. But the landscape is very different from when he glided down the Trump Tower escalator in 2015. He has lost the popular vote twice. He has been impeached twice. He is facing numerous criminal investigations, including for his role in trying to overturn the 2020 election. Many of his hand-picked candidates lost key midterm races. The staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos draw on their deep political reporting to break down the significance of this week’s announcement, along with the news that Nancy Pelosi is stepping down as the leader of the House Democrats.

**This conversation was recorded hours before Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the appointment of a special counsel in the investigations of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and the discovery of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

​​Nearly four hundred election deniers ran in the midterms, and not only did the highest-profile among them lose their races, they even willingly conceded. Does this mean that Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” movement has run out of political steam? Or is it merely shapeshifting for a new era? Rachel Monroe, who has been reporting from conspiracy-ridden Maricopa County, Arizona, and Sue Halpern, who has written extensively about the fragility of our voting machines, join Tyler Foggatt to discuss the challenges of building public trust in our elections.

Today we’re unveiling The Political Scene, an expanded and reimagined version of our flagship politics podcast, showcasing the great political journalism of The New Yorker. We’re thrilled to announce four new hosts and a new weekly show. Tyler Foggatt, a senior editor at the magazine, is now the permanent host of in-depth conversations about the most pressing story of the week, featuring The New Yorker’s deep bench of writers and thinkers. New episodes will be released on Wednesdays. On Fridays, the staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos will anchor a new weekly roundtable. They’ll bring their vast expertise to bear on the biggest issues facing the country, providing an insider’s take on this perilous moment in American politics. And on Mondays, we’ll continue to bring you a politics-focussed segment from The New Yorker Radio Hour, presented by the magazine’s editor, David Remnick. As always, thank you for listening.

Rudolf Vrba was sent to Auschwitz at the age of seventeen, and, because he was young and in good health, he was not killed immediately but put to labor in the camp. Vrba (originally named Walter Rosenberg) quickly discovered that the scale of the killing was greater than anyone on the outside knew or could imagine, and Jewish communities were being deported without understanding their fate. Jonathan Freedland chronicles Vrba’s story in his new book, “The Escape Artist.” The young Vrba had a “crucial realization, which is [that] the only way this machine is going to be stopped—this death machine—is if somebody gets the word out,” Freedland told David Remnick. Freedland recounts how, against terrible odds, Vrba managed to escape the camp, and provided direct testimony of the Holocaust that reached Allied governments.

This interview was recorded at a live event at the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.

On Tuesday, as results from the midterms came in, Democrats were pleased to see that a predicted red wave had not come to pass. That is, with one exception: in the bright blue state of New York. So far, Republicans have taken ten of New York’s twenty-six congressional districts, flipping four seats away from Democrats. The significance of this number can’t be overstated in an election where Republicans only needed to flip five seats, nationwide, in order to take control of the House of Representatives. Eric Lach, a staff writer at The New Yorker, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the legacy of Andrew Cuomo, the state’s redistricting saga, and how the Republicans secured this unlikely electoral victory.

Until recently, the Reverend Russell Moore held a leading position—president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission—in the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the country. He left the S.B.C. last year after criticizing the Church’s response to scandals around sexual abuse and ongoing racism, which Moore describes as a sin. Moore, who now serves as the editor of Christianity Today, sits down with David Remnick to reflect on his connection with his faith, as well as the current state of Christianity in American politics. He has written that Christian nationalism is “liberation theology for white people,” and it is a danger to Christians—another form of secularization that makes religion an instrument. “Jesus always refused to have his gospel used as a means to an end,” he tells Remnick. “People who settle for Christianity or any other religion as politics are really making a pitiful deal.”

This week, the Supreme Court heard two cases—against Harvard and U.N.C.—that may very well bring about the end of affirmative action at American colleges and universities. The practice rests on the Fourteenth Amendment: equal protection under the law. But the conservative John Roberts court is reëvaluating what “equal protection” really means, raising the idea that current methods of affirmative action are actually a thinly veiled form of racism. Jeannie Suk Gersen, a New Yorker contributing writer and a professor at Harvard Law School, was in attendance for Monday’s oral arguments. She joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss whether a more holistic admissions process is the best way to create diversity, and whether diversity is really the best ideal for universities to aspire to.

Francis Suarez, the Republican mayor of Miami, is popular in the city he governs, and increasingly prominent beyond it. Conservative voices as disparate as Kanye West and George Will have floated him as a 2024 Presidential candidate. Suarez is a proudly dissident Republican: he loves tech companies, welcomes migrants, and thinks his party can lead the fight against climate change. He’s no culture warrior, and, though he shares a state with Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, he has kept both at arm’s length. So is he, Kelefa Sanneh wonders, a Republican at all? Suarez seems to be taking a long view. “Leadership,” he says, depends on whether “you have the talent to articulate a message, a vision, and a plan to get people to a place where people will follow—even if maybe they’re not so sure, maybe they’re not that comfortable with it.”

We are two weeks from the midterms, and things aren’t looking good for the Democrats. It’s a difficult political environment to campaign in; inflation and gas prices are high, and President Biden’s approval rating is low. Far-right candidates are polling better than expected in races at every level of the government. Because the Democrats’ majority in Congress was already narrow, even a few flipped seats could dictate the future of reproductive choice, and of public trust in the electoral system—as many Republican candidates still deny Biden’s victory in 2020. Some of the most crucial races are extremely tight, with the leading candidates ahead by a percentage point or less. Benjamin Wallace-Wells, who has been covering the midterms for The New Yorker, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss a few key races and what’s at stake in November.

The security of voting has become a huge topic of concern. That’s especially true after 2020, when it became an article of faith for Donald Trump supporters that the election was somehow stolen by President Joe Biden. J. Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, has been studying voting machines and software for more than a decade. “We made a number of discoveries, including that [voting machines] had vulnerabilities that basically anyone could exploit to inject malicious software and change votes,” he tells the staff writer Sue Halpern. Conspiracy theories aside, he says, we must address those vulnerabilities in computerized voting. But hand counting ballots, advocated by some election skeptics, is not a plausible solution. “Perhaps as time goes on we’ll get Republicans and Democrats to agree that there are some real problems in election security that we would all benefit from addressing. ”

Earlier this month, the House G.O.P. account tweeted, “Kanye. Elon. Trump.”—a declaration of the Party’s new mascots. Since then, Kanye West has cemented this role, with a series of bizarre publicity stunts. First, he appeared at Paris Fashion Week wearing a T-shirt that read “White Lives Matter.” Then he started making incendiary comments on social media and in interviews. On one podcast, West alleged that George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose—a claim that prompted the Floyd family to announce a $250-million lawsuit against him. On “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” West made anti-Semitic comments, some of which were so explicit that they were cut from the interview before it aired. When his social-media accounts were frozen, West, who now goes by the name Ye, declared his intention to buy Parler, a conservative alternative to Twitter. In a statement, Parler said that West’s support would help the platform “create a truly non-cancelable environment.” Andrew Marantz, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a tortured Kanye fan, joins the guest host Tyler Foggatt to discuss the radicalization of a hip-hop icon, which he wrote about this week, and the dilemmas of free speech online.

Since the reversal of Roe v. Wade, the contributor Stephania Taladrid has been following a network of women who are secretly distributing abortion pills across the United States. The group has its roots in Mexico, where some medications used for at-home abortions are available at a lower cost over the counter. Volunteers—they call themselves “pill fairies”—are sourcing the medications at Mexican pharmacies and bringing them over the border. The work is increasingly perilous: in states like Texas, abetting an abortion is considered a felony, carrying long prison sentences. But, to Taladrid’s sources, the work is imperative. “I mean, there’s nothing else to do, right?” one woman in Texas, who had an abortion using the medication she received from a pill fairy, said. “You can’t just lie down and accept it. You can’t.”

Note: The interview excerpts featured in this story (with the exception of Verónica Cruz’s) are not the actual voices of Taladrid’s subjects. To protect their anonymity, the excerpts were re-recorded by actors.

Read Stephania Taladrid’s full reporting here.