The New Yorker Radio Hour

During the lead-up to the 2016 election, three actors who have played fictional Presidents of the United States discussed what it means to be “Presidential,” in a panel moderated by Michael Schulman. Bill Pullman, who, as President Thomas J. Whitmore, rallied the nations of the world to join forces in “Independence Day,” talks about how a reaction to Bill Clinton informed the movie’s depiction of an ex-military President. Alfre Woodard talks about how “State of Affairs” imagined a second black President in the character of Constance Payton. And Tony Goldwyn, who played Fitzgerald Grant, on “Scandal,” talks about Presidential nudity.

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Seth Meyers—a veteran of “Saturday Night Live” and the host of NBC’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers”—sat down at the 2017 New Yorker Festival to walk Ariel Levy through a career that seems charmed. As an unknown improv performer, Meyers was picked for the cast of “Saturday Night Live”; he eventually became the show’s head writer and the host of “Weekend Update,” alongside Amy Poehler. Along the way, Meyers tells Levy, he had a number of strange run-ins with Donald Trump. When Trump appeared on “S.N.L.,” he was in a sketch about his lack of empathy, with Meyers playing his son. Later, Meyers hosted the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner and observed that “Donald Trump says he has a great relationship with the blacks. But unless the Blacks are a family of white people, I think he’s mistaken.” After, it was widely reported that President Obama’s mockery of Trump at that event spurred Trump to launch a campaign for the Presidency. At first, Meyers was hurt by the lack of attention. “I wanted to share credit. . . . I helped trick an unelectable person to run for President,” Meyers says. “Then he won. And when he won, my first thought was, ‘This is Obama’s fault. I had nothing to do with it.’ ”

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Aretha Franklin brought Barack Obama to tears when she performed “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” at the Kennedy Center Honors tribute to Carole King in December 2015. When video from that event went viral, it reawakened Aretha fans across the country. The New Yorker’s David Remnick, who wrote about Franklin, looks back on the singer’s childhood in Detroit and reflects on her music’s unparalleled combination of “Saturday night and Sunday morning.”

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Parker Posey has been a vivid presence in American film, especially indie film, for twenty-five years. She got her start in “Dazed and Confused,” and went on to appear in dozens of movies, including Christopher Guest’s cult-classic satires “Waiting For Guffman,” “Best in Show,” and “A Mighty Wind.”

Like her performances, Parker Posey’s new memoir is surprising and funny. “You’re On an Airplane” is written as a monologue delivered by the author to her seatmate on a long flight. It’s also full of recipes, and it includes instructions for throwing pottery. Being so practical and resourceful—not to mention a former cheerleader—served Posey in good stead when she, The New Yorker’s Michael Schulman, and his producer Alex Barron found themselves locked out of her building and trapped in the small yard behind it.  

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We delve into the escapist joys of a great summer read. David Remnick talks with Lee Child, whose thrillers about Jack Reacher—twenty-three books and counting, with a hundred million copies in print—bring the mystique of the cowboy to modern America. Amanda Petrusich says that the start of “Moby-Dick” nails the desperation to get out of town that afflicts every New Yorker; Vinson Cunningham explains how the usually tragic plays of Eugene O’Neill help him loosen up and find his rhythm as a prose writer; and Helen Rosner pulls out a cookbook to make a strawberry fool—a luridly hued but beautiful dessert that perfectly captures the taste of summer.  

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William Finnegan’s memoir, “Barbarian Days,” from 2015, holds the distinction of being the one book about surfing to win a Pulitzer Prize. On a Sunday morning, not long past dawn, he took David Remnick to the Rockaways for his first and only surfing lesson. And Kristen Roupenian, the author of the story “Cat Person,” revisits her old stomping grounds of Plimoth Plantation, the living-history museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where reënactors portray pilgrims from the early seventeenth century. Roupenian’s “Cat Person” revolves around online romance and consent, and it touched a nerve with readers in the #MeToo era, becoming one of the most-read stories ever on newyorker.com. It couldn’t be more of the moment, but Roupenian credits those Pilgrim reënactors for shaping her as a writer. Growing up near Plimoth Plantation, she says, you realize early that history isn’t a sequence of facts: it’s always a story someone is telling you.

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All her life, Astrid Holleeder knew that her older brother Willem was involved in crime; in their tough Amsterdam neighborhood, and as children of an abusive father, it wasn’t a shocking development. But she was stunned when, in 1983, Willem and his best friend, Cornelius van Hout, were revealed to be the masterminds behind the audacious kidnapping of the beer magnate Alfred Heineken. Although he served some time for the crime, it was only the beginning of the successful career of Holleeder. He became a celebrity criminal; he had a newspaper column, appeared on talk shows, and took selfies with admirers in Amsterdam. He got rich off of his investments in the sex trade and other businesses, but kept them well hidden. But when van Hout was assassinated and other of Holleeder’s associates started turning up dead, Astrid suspected that her brother had committed the murders. She decided to wear a wire and gather the evidence to put him away.f that didn't work, she told the New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe, she would have to kill Willem herself. Willem is on trial now for multiple murders, and Astrid is testifying against him. Living in hiding, travelling in disguise, she tells Keefe the story of her complicity and its consequences. Keefe’s story about Astrid Holleeder, “Crime Family,” appears in this week’s magazine.

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Tommy Orange had never read a book about what it means to be a Native American in a big city. In a conversation with The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Orange says that urban Native writers like himself—he is a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma, and grew up in Oakland, California—may feel their own experience to be inauthentic, compared to stories set on the reservation. Orange’s début novel, “There, There,” follows a small cast of Native characters whose lives converge at a powwow at the Oakland Coliseum. Plus, Vinson Cunningham on the particular joys of a New York wedding, complete with metal detectors.  

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At the recent summit in Helsinki, Vladimir Putin proposed that, in exchange for letting Robert Mueller interrogate some G.R.U. agents who are linked to election hacking, the U.S. should turn over a group of officials and citizens to Moscow. The most senior of them was Michael McFaul, who served as the U.S. Ambassador to Russia during the Obama Administration—a time of chilly relations between the nations. McFaul and his family were subjected to treatment unthinkable for a diplomat: stalking, harassment, and surveillance.  The White House has said that it is no longer considering Putin’s overture, but McFaul tells David Remnick that Putin’s increasingly assertive behavior—and Trump’s reverential attitude towards Putin—has him concerned for his safety. Meanwhile, after Helsinki, bipartisan support is growing in the Senate for a bill that would impose severe sanctions on Russia to retaliate for election meddling. Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, is a co-sponsor of the DETER Act, and he tells staff writer Susan Glasser that the daylight between congressional Republicans and the President is growing.  

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Thomas McGuane, the acclaimed author of “The Sporting Club,” thinks fiction set in the American West could stand to lose some of its ranching clichés. The novelist, a consummate outdoorsman and devoted fisherman, met up with the writer Callan Wink, who recently published his first book of stories and works as a fishing guide on the Yellowstone River.  McGuane and Wink discussed the state of the short story and the late author Jim Harrison, a mutual friend, all while sitting in a fifteen-foot drift boat. And, yes, they caught a few fish, too. 

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The novelist and short-story writer Philip Roth died in May at the age of eighty-five. In novels like “Portnoy’s Complaint,” “The Human Stain,” and “American Pastoral,” Roth anatomized postwar American life—particularly the lives of Jewish people in the Northeast. And in works like “The Ghost Writer” and “The Plot Against America,” he speculated on how the shadow of authoritarianism might fall over the United States. The breadth and depth of Roth’s work kept him a vital literary figure throughout the second half of the twentieth century, and established him among the most respected writers of fiction in American history. David Remnick speaks with Roth’s official biographer, Blake Bailey, about Roth’s life and career. Judith Thurman, Claudia Roth Pierpont, and Lisa Halliday discuss the portrayals of women in Roth’s work and the accusations of misogyny that he has faced. And, finally, we hear an interview with the author, from 2003, when he sat down with David Remnick for the BBC. Plus: the actor Liev Schreiber reads excerpts from Roth’s fiction.

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The Navajo Nation covers over twenty-seven thousand square miles in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico; it’s an area roughly the size of West Virginia. Vincent Salabye grew up there, in a community troubled by memories of conquest by the United States Army and by persistent poverty, addiction, and despair. To grapple with these hereditary demons, Salabye came up with a novel idea: he hopped on a bike. As a kid, he once rode all the way to Texas and back: almost three thousand miles. “That's my horse,” says Vincent. “It takes me places. That's always ingrained in me. That's how my mind-set is, trying to explore the lands that I always grew up on.”

Now a new crop of cyclists on the Navajo Nation are following Salabye’s impulse, and making a new kind of bike riding called Enduro their own. It’s a dangerous, difficult, and extremely intense form of high-speed downhill racing. Enduro has given some Navajo men a new way to connect with their ancient tribal lands and to defy the hard prospects and low expectations that too often characterize coming of age on the rez.

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Benjamin Wallace-Wells provides a survey of some key midterm races and considers what they tell us about the direction of the Democratic Party. And David Remnick speaks with the saxophonist and bandleader Kamasi Washington. For anyone who thinks of jazz as just classic compositions played in dimly lit clubs, Washington’s music will come as a surprise and revelation. His concerts are like dance parties. And his albums draws on influences from Coltrane to Stravinsky to Fela Kuti to N.W.A. His eclectic style has made him a star in the jazz world, and has attracted some high-profile collaborators, including Lauryn Hill, Snoop Dogg and Kendrick Lamar. And the political message of some of his music led one critic to call him “the jazz voice of Black Lives Matter.” “The major effect that music has is it connects people,” Washington tells David Remnick, “That’s kind of the extent of what the music can do. In the end, the world changes as people decide to change.”

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

This episode originally aired on November 10, 2017

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Tina Brown is a legend in New York publishing. She was barely thirty years old when she was recruited from London to take over a foundering Vanity Fair. Take over she did, becoming one of the power centers of New York culture by bringing together the intellectual world and the celebrity world of entertainment. She later brought enormous change to The New Yorker (including, for the first time, photographs); she launched Talk magazine with Harvey Weinstein; and she helped launch the Daily Beast. Her new book, “The Vanity Fair Diaries, 1983-1992” is a kind of coming-of-age story about a pre-Internet era of unruffled ambition, unlimited budgets, big shoulders, big hair, and fabulous parties.

Tina Brown tells David Remnick that her experience with Weinstein, as unpleasant as it was—she found the mogul “bullying [and] duplicitous,” profane and erratic—did not prepare her for the revelations of brutality and intimidation that have been published in The New Yorker and elsewhere. The experience has shaken her. “I have friends who’ve been accused of things who I want instinctively to defend, but I’ve held back,” Brown says. “Because I don’t know what’s coming next. The truth is, you realize you don’t really know anybody.” Plus, the cartoonist Emily Flake on the joys of Rudy’s Bar, where the combo of a shot and a beer costs five bucks. The sense of history and ritual, and the troubles confessed across generations, remind her of church—but at church, Flake points out, “they’re not going to let you sit around for six hours and drink.”

This episode originally aired on November 10, 2017

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The author of “No Logo” and “The Shock Doctrine,” Naomi Klein has become what Noam Chomsky was to an earlier generation of leftists. Her theories tie inequality and climate change together, arguing that capitalists use disasters to advance the agenda of neoliberalism. In a conversation with the staff writer Jia Tolentino at the 2017 New Yorker Festival, Klein makes the case that, by embracing billionaire “saviors” like Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg, liberals helped pave the way for Donald Trump. She is clearly a partisan of the left, but she thinks we could all benefit from reflecting on the ways that each of us—on social media, for example—is a little bit Trumpish.  

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On a high-school speech-and-debate team, Hasan Minhaj learned the value of a joke: “If I made the judges laugh, I automatically saw an increase in the amount of points that I would get. And so I was like, ‘Oh, that’s a really powerful tool to get people on your side.’ ”  Now a “Daily Show” correspondent, Minhaj was asked to host the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner during the first year of the Trump Administration. “No one wanted to do this,” he said. “So, of course, it lands in the hands of an immigrant.” But he is increasingly aware of the limits of comedy. After performing at the Moth’s story-slam events, he wrote the special “Homecoming King,” now on Netflix, which describes the hate crimes that his Indian immigrant family endured after September 11th.  He spoke with the staff writer Vinson Cunningham at the 2017 New Yorker Festival. Plus, Yotam Ottolenghi finished a graduate program in philosophy; he tells Jane Kramer why he left it for a life in the kitchen.  

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The John Hughes films that made Molly Ringwald famous—“Sixteen Candles,” “Pretty in Pink,” and “The Breakfast Club”—look very different to their star now that she has a teen-age daughter of her own. Speaking with the writer and director Judd Apatow, who was heavily influenced by Hughes, Ringwald says, “I don’t want to imagine a world where somebody basically mistreats my daughter and she doesn’t expect an apology.”  But Apatow is well aware that, in time, audiences may judge his own body of work critically: “People will watch it in the future and go, ‘Whoa, how did they think that was O.K. to do?’ ” Plus, Autumn Miles, a survivor of domestic abuse who has become an evangelical activist, says that churches need to stop encouraging women to submit to abuse. If male church leaders are guilty of sexism, she tells Eliza Griswold, they need to “repent.”

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Border Patrol, which has forcibly separated families in border detention, has put some immigrant children in the care of a separate agency, the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Although a recent executive order modified the Administration’s “zero tolerance” policy of child separation, it said nothing about reuniting the more than two thousand children still in detention with their families. Jonathan Blitzer has reported on the bureaucratic nightmare facing mothers and fathers when the government is unable or unwilling to tell them where their children are. At an ICE facility in El Paso, Blitzer spoke with Ana Maritza Rivera, whose five-year-old son, Jairo, was taken from her. Through sheer luck, she found a case worker who knew his location, but it isn’t clear whether the government will reunite them before deporting Rivera to her native Honduras. Blitzer says that Rivera told an official, “If I get to the airport and my son is not there, you’ll be killing me.” And two crossword-puzzle constructors explain to David Remnick how they are crafting clues for a younger, more diverse audience of “solvers.” “I want to see more bands that I like,” Kameron Austin Collins says. “I want to see more black people—black people who aren’t Jay-Z or Nas, who are common in crossword puzzles because of the letter combinations.”  

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Hannah Gadsby is a headlining comedian in Australia, a regular at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and is about to become a very big deal in America with a special on Netflix called “Nanette.”  It’s a full-length comedy show, and at the same time, a carefully structured critique of stand-up comedy. “Nanette” reflects her experiences as an overweight woman, a lesbian, a native of Tasmania, and an adult diagnosed with autism, and addresses subjects as serious as Gadsby’s sexual assault..  She tells The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum that comedy contains a kind of violence, and she might be done with it.  Plus: Amanda Petrusich picks three outdoor music festivals worth sweating for.

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Jane Mayer explains why Charles and David Koch are willing to spend as much as thirty million dollars on advertising that opposes Donald Trump’s campaign of tariffs—right as the midterm elections offer voters a referendum on his Presidency.  And David Remnick speaks with James Wood, the literary critic and sometime novelist.  When Wood joined The New Yorker as a literary critic, he promised that he wouldn’t “go soft”: he had been well known at The New Republic for battles with prominent writers whose styles he found flawed.  Wood tells David Remnick that he now regrets that choice of words. Changing his mind or expanding his taste needn’t be seen as form of capitulation.  Criticism itself, Wood says, has been, to some degree, a detour from his calling: writing his own fiction. Wood’s new novel, “Upstate,” follows a father—an Englishman, like Wood—as he spends time with his adult daughters.  One is an energetic corporate executive, the other a melancholy professor of philosophy. The book is a meditation on what it means to be a parent, and Wood notes that male novelists, including Karl-Ove Knausgaard and Michael Chabon, are finally beginning to write about the experience of parenting as a central concern.  

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Donald Trump came into office promising to make so many cuts to the government that “your head will spin.” Evan Osnos has been reporting from Washington on how the Administration is radically changing the civil service, and he’s found that, to a degree unprecedented in modern times, political loyalty is prized over qualifications and experience. In many departments, senior officials deemed insufficiently loyal have been “turkey-farmed”—reassigned to jobs that are meaningless or less important than their previous posts. (The practice was known in the Nixon Administration as the “new activity technique.”) Osnos spoke with Matthew Allen, who was, until recently, the communications director at the Bureau of Land Management. And Bob Odenkirk, who played a newsman in “The Post,” reminds you of some headlines you may have missed.  

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The 2018 World Cup begins this week in Russia, and America is taking a powder. The men’s team failed to qualify for the tournament after a stunning upset loss to Trinidad and Tobago, which is considered to be one of the worst teams in competition. Perhaps no fan was more upset than Roger Bennett, an English soccer commentator and new U.S. citizen, who has rather quixotically devoted himself to the sport as it’s played in America. Bennett is the co-host of the podcast “Men in Blazers” from NBC Sports, and recently hosted “American Fiasco” for WNYC Studios—a longform exploration of the epic U.S. failure in the 1998 World Cup. Bennett spoke with Michael Luo, the editor of newyorker.com, about why the same problems keep casting a shadow over the sport’s future in America. Plus, a visit to Tangier, Virginia. The island is washing out to sea, and its residents may be among the first American refugees of climate change. But that’s not how they see the loss of their island.

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Anthony Bourdain—the chef turned author, food anthropologist, and television star—died this week, at sixty-one. Bourdain made his début in The New Yorker in 1999, with an essay called “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” about working in the restaurant industry. {{}}   It was an account of what really goes on in restaurants—extremely vivid, funny, gross, and, in parts, genuinely disturbing. After the success of that article, Bourdain went on to publish his best-selling memoir, “Kitchen Confidential,” and it’s no exaggeration to say that a star was born. When he took to television, it wasn’t for a typical celebrity-chef “stand and stir” show, but for a much more ambitious endeavor. On “Parts Unknown,” Bourdain travelled the world with a film crew, in search of authenticity.  It was never just about the food: his focus was on the people who make it and the people who eat it—from the farmers to the cooks to the diners, including President Obama, who Bourdain shared a meal with in Vietnam.

He spoke with David Remnick in 2017.  

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When a young Amanda Petrusich, now a staff writer who covers music, first heard Talking Heads’ “Remain in Light,” she felt “almost like it was being beamed in from outer space.” The record, released in 1980, was strikingly original—a hybrid of experimental rock, Afrobeat, and seventies funk, reimagined by a white American rock band and their English producer. Nearly forty years later, the Beninese pop star Angélique Kidjo has chosen to release her own, track-by-track cover version of “Remain in Light,” working with the producer Jeff Bhasker, who is known for his collaborations with Kanye West and Beyoncé. Kidjo has figuratively brought the record back to Africa, with spoken interludes in her native language of Fon. Nonetheless, she is skeptical of the idea of cultural appropriation, broadly defined.  “Who are we to [own] any culture?” she asks. “Even our own culture doesn’t belong to us.” Petrusich spoke with Kidjo and with David Byrne, formerly of Talking Heads, about the impulses behind both versions, and the large influence of Fela Kuti. And the food correspondent Helen Rosner recommends a baking show, a book, and a perfect summer cake recipe.  

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Glenda Jackson, who has played both Queen Elizabeth and King Lear, served as a humble member of Parliament for more than two decades in between those roles; she talks with David Remnick about performing at eighty-two and about the state of British politics. And Marco Rubio talks with Susan B. Glasser about the threat of China and how to be a conservative in Trump’s Washington.  

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Malcolm Gladwell spoke with The New Yorker’s Dorothy Wickenden in 2015 about the social dynamics of school shootings. Studying the literature of sociology, Gladwell compares shootings to a riot, in which each person’s act of violence makes the next act slightly more likely. And David Remnick speaks with the Columbia professor Mark Lilla, whose book “The Once and Future Liberal” argues provocatively that identity politics and support for marginalized groups are costing the Democrats election after election. “We cannot do anything for these groups we care about if we do not hold power—it is just talk,” Lilla says. “An election is not about self-expression—it’s a contest.”

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Paul Schrader made an auspicious début as the screenwriter of “Taxi Driver” and the director of “Blue Collar” and “American Gigolo.” But as Hollywood turned away from serious drama, Schrader struggled. Schrader is, above all, serious about filmmaking: the product of a strict Dutch Calvinist upbringing in which movies were forbidden, he first fell in love with directors like Robert Bresson and Ingmar Bergman— icons of the European, intellectual tradition in cinema. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody considers Schrader to be a true auteur and one of the greats of American film. They spoke about religion and movies on the occasion of Schrader’s new film, “First Reformed.” It stars Ethan Hawke as the troubled pastor of a small church, and it reflects Schrader’s obsession with morality in a fallen world. Plus: on-the-job horror stories from three great writers—Gillian Flynn, Akhil Sharma, and Alison Bechdel.

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This year, the original members of the Breeders—indie-rock royalty—are back together, twenty-five years after “Last Splash,” an album that fans regard as a classic. Kim Deal, Kelly Deal, Josephine Wiggs, and Jim MacPherson joined David Remnick in the studio to play songs off their new record, “All Nerve.” They also talk about the toll of drugs and alcohol, about playing together after decades, and about the persistence of sexism in rock. Kim Deal once said that “misogyny is the backbone of the music industry,” and she remains bitter about how badly female musicians are treated—even by their friends. She recalls a remark that Charles Thompson, who led the Pixies under the name Black Francis, once made about her.  “I’m paraphrasing … he said, ‘Kim, all she would have to do was smile and the crowd would erupt in cheers.’ Of course that’s going to bother me.” For Deal, this comment minimized her work as a musician: “I’m sweating, I’m almost going to pass out with the heat, I just threw up a little bit in my mouth, the misogynist tour driver did not get sanitary napkins so I’m probably bleeding a little down my leg right then. I’m doing downstrokes, really fast, exhausting music … at the same time I have to find the pitch of the song because I’m singing a melodic harmony on top of everything … All that is happening, [but] all I did was just sit there and smile, and the crowd was clapping because I smiled?”

The Breeders performed “Off You” live at WNYC Studios.  

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Susan B. Glasser, a staff writer for The New Yorker based in Washington, speaks with Wendy Sherman about the Trump Administration’s withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, also known as the Iran deal. As the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs in the Obama Administration, Sherman helped write that agreement, and led the U.S. negotiating team in complex multilateral talks. She also has first-hand experience negotiating with the North Korean government, having visited Pyongyang with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright during the Clinton Presidency.  

The Iran deal seemed to be working: in exchange for curbing its nuclear program, as the International Atomic Energy Agency subsequently verified, Iran got relief from sanctions. But Donald Trump lambasted the deal throughout his campaign and Presidency; he called it overly generous and vowed to withdraw from it. John Bolton, his recently appointed national security adviser, opposed the deal on the grounds that verification was not “infallible.” Sherman has a sobering question for the Trump Administration, which now wishes to negotiate with Kim Jong Un about North Korea’s nuclear program: “How in God’s name can any verification or monitoring of North Korea be infallible?” And Evan Osnos speaks with Victor Cha, the top North Korea adviser to George W. Bush, about the mixed signals on diplomacy coming from Pyongyang.  Might the Trump Administration, eager for a foreign-policy win, be led into giving up too much?

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Before she was placed on the list of Saddam Hussein’s enemies, the poet Dunya Mikhail worked as a journalist for the Baghdad Observer. In her new book, “The Beekeeper,” Mikhail tells the stories of dozens of Yazidi women who survived kidnapping and sexual slavery by the Islamic State, and the man—a beekeeper—who helped arrange their escapes. Plus, the novelist Michael Cunningham finds all of humanity on display in Washington Square Park, and the humorist Jack Handey asks the questions that have been baffling humorists since the beginning of time: What’s funny, and why?

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Senator Mark Warner is the vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is trying to explore the possibility of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign while avoiding a partisan blowup. Warner fears that that, with Russia, we’re confronting twenty-first-century threats with twentieth-century tools. And Simon Parkin, who writes about gaming for The New Yorker, reports on how military officers and diplomats predict world events using a game that’s something like a cross between Dungeons & Dragons, Risk, and a rap battle.

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Last year, Glenn Close was on Broadway as Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard,” reprising a role she had originally played in 1993. Since 1974, when she made her début on Broadway, she has won three Tony Awards and three Emmys, and has been nominated six times for an Oscar.  Like Desmond, many of Glenn Close’s characters could be described as “difficult”: sometimes scary and possibly insane, but, above all, just complicated. But Close bridles at the notion that any of them—even Alex Forrest, the unhinged lover she played unforgettably in “Fatal Attraction”— villains.  “I don’t think of them as evil,” Close said to The New Yorker staff writer Michael Schulman,  at the New Yorker Festival in 2017. “The only evil character I’ve ever played was Cruella!”   

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In a career spanning more than forty years, the biographer Robert Caro has written about only two subjects.  But they’re very big subjects: Robert Moses, the city planner who brought much of New York under his control without holding elected office, in “The Power Broker”; and President Johnson, in “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” of which Caro has completed four of a projected five volumes.  More than life histories, these books are studies of power, and of how two masters of politics bent democracy to their wills.

Caro, who started out as a newspaper reporter, is a completist.  When he was writing about Johnson’s oath of office after the assassination of President Kennedy, Caro referred to a famous news photograph that showed twenty-six people in the room—and interviewed every person still living..  And when Caro realized he had forgotten the photographer, he interviewed him, too. This truly prodigious research is complemented by the elegance of Caro’s prose, which commands rhythm, mood, and sense of place in a way that resembles the work of a novelist.  When he appeared at the New Yorker Festival, in 2017, Caro was interviewed by one of the great novelists working today, Ireland’s Colm Tóibín.

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Inspired by “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich,” by The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos, Patricia Marx gets herself ready for the apocalypse. The only problem: Marx is a writer, not a Silicon Valley mogul. She isn’t super-rich, or even regular-rich. Apocalypse prep on a budget, Marx discovers, is a whole other ball game. Plus: “I’m a Proud Nuclear-Missile Owner”—written by Teddy Wayne, and performed by Nick Offerman—takes the right to bear arms to a whole other level.

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This week, a reporter looks at a rural town where the largest immigration raid in a decade has ripped apart a community; Ronan Farrow talks about his reporting on Harvey Weinstein, which just won the Pulitzer Prize; and Jeffrey Toobin speaks with a romance novelist-turned-state lawmaker who hopes to become the governor of Georgia. She would be the first black woman to lead any state in the nation.

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Last week, Andrew Andrew Sean Greer's novel "Less" won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.  "Less" about a novelist in mid-life named Arthur Less, and his attempt to avoid the wedding of a younger ex-boyfriend by accepting invitations to literary events in other countries.  In 2017, The New Yorker published an excerpt from the book with the title “It’s a Summer Day.” Greer read from the excerpt on the New Yorker’s podcast The Writer’s Voice, which features a short story from the magazine read by the author every week.  

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In a long career in law enforcement, the former F.B.I. Director James Comey aimed to be above politics, but in the 2016 election he stepped directly into it.  In his book, “A Higher Loyalty,” Comey makes the case to America that he handled the F.B.I. investigations into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails and Donald Trump’s campaign correctly, regardless of the consequences. Even after being fired by President Trump, the former F.B.I Director says he doesn’t dislike the President; he tells David Remnick that what he feels is more akin to sympathy.  Trump “has an emptiness inside of him, and a hunger for affirmation, that I’ve never seen in an adult,” Comey says. “He lacks external reference points. Instead of making hard decisions by calling upon a religious tradition, or logic, or tradition or history, it’s all, ‘what will fill this hole?’ ” As a result, Comey says, “The President poses significant threats to the rule of law,” and he chides Congressional Republicans for going along with the President’s aberrations. “What,” he rhetorically asks Mitch McConnell and others, “are you going to tell your grandchildren?”  Nevertheless, Comey remains hopeful about the resilience of American institutions. “There isn’t a ‘deep state,’ [but] there is a deep culture,” he believes. “It is [about] the rule of law and doing it the right way,” and it serves as “a ballast” during political turmoil. David Remnick’s interview with James Comey was taped live at New York’s Town Hall on April 19, 2018.

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

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

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Frank Oz was a teenager when he started working with Jim Henson, the puppeteer and filmmaker behind the Muppets. Oz went on to create characters like Bert,  Cookie Monster, Miss Piggy, and Yoda from “Star Wars.”

Michael Schulman is a contributor to The New Yorker and the magazine’s foremost authority on all things Muppet. He takes a trip uptown, to Frank Oz’s home in Manhattan, and talks with Oz about his most iconic characters, moving on after the death of Jim Henson, and what’s missing from today’s Muppets. Plus, The New Yorker’s Naomi Fry recommends three things not to miss on the Internet.

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

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

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When police showed up to question John Thompson, he was worried that it was because he had sold drugs to an undercover cop.  When he realized they were investigating a murder, he could only laugh: “Shit, for real? Murder?”Thompson was insistent on his innocence, but New Orleans prosecutors wanted a conviction for a high-profile murder, and they were not scrupulous about how they got it. Thompson quickly found himself on death row. Eighteen years later, just weeks before Thompson was due to be executed, his lawyers discovered that a prosecutor had hidden exculpatory evidence from the defense. Thompson had been set up. This was a violation of the Brady Rule, established by the Supreme Court, in 1963, to ensure fair trials. Ultimately, he was exonerated of both crimes, but his attempts to get a settlement from the district attorney’s office—compensation for his time in prison—were thwarted. Though an appeals court had upheld a fourteen-million-dollar settlement, the Supreme Court reversed the decision, declining to punish the D.A. for failing to enforce the Court’s previous decision.

Thompson’s case revealed fundamental imbalances that undermine the very notion of a fair trial.  Under the Brady Rule, prosecutors must share with the defense any evidence that could be favorable to the defendant.  But there is essentially no practical enforcement of this rule. In most states, prosecutors are the ones who hold the evidence and choose what to share, and disclosing exculpatory evidence makes their cases harder to win. We have absolutely no idea how many criminal trials are flawed by these violations.The staff writer Andrew Marantz, his wife, Sarah Lustbader, of the Fair Punishment Project, and the producer Katherine Wells reported on John Thompson’s story and its implications. They spoke with the late John Thompson (who died in 2017), with his lawyers, and with Harry Connick, Sr., the retired New Orleans D.A. who, despite having tried very hard to have Thompson killed, remains unrepentant.

This episode contains explicit language and may not be suitable for children.

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

Plus, Jia Tolentino visits the prize-winners at the Westminster dog show and tries to come to terms with the badly behaved mutt who’s wrecking her home.

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

Plus, The New Yorker’s critic of pop music, Carrie Battan, plays three tracks that have grabbed her attention lately.

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

Plus, Tracy K. Smith, the poet laureate says that “green space has fed the inner silence that I think most writers are seeking.”

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

Plus, Svetlana Alexievich, who won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature for her oral histories about life in the U.S.S.R.

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

Plus, Curtis Sittenfeld talks with Joshua Rothman on why men should read romance novels.

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

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