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WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

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

The New Yorker Radio Hour

Since Zadie Smith published her début novel, “White Teeth,” twenty-five years ago, she has been a bold and original voice in literature. But those who aren’t familiar with Smith’s work outside of fiction are missing out. As an essayist, in The New Yorker and other publications, Smith writes with great nuance about culture, technology, gentrification, politics; “There’s really not a topic that wouldn’t benefit from her insight,” David Remnick says. He spoke with Smith about her new collection of essays, “Dead and Alive.” “The one thing about talking about essays,” she notes, ruefully, “is you find yourself saying the same thing, but worse—without the commas.” One of the concerns in the book is the role of our devices, and social media in particular, in shaping our thoughts and our political discourse. “Everybody has a different emphasis on [Donald] Trump and what’s going on. My emphasis has been on, to put it baldly, mind control. I think what’s been interesting about the manipulations of a digital age is that it is absolutely natural and normal for people to be offended at the idea that they are being manipulated. None of us like to feel that way. And I think we wasted about—whatever it’s been since the invention of the Iphone—trying to bat away that idea, calling it a moral panic, blaming each other, [and] talking about it as if it were an individual act of will.” In fact, she notes, “we are all being manipulated. Me, too. . . . Once we can all admit that, on the left and the right, then we can direct our attention to who’s been doing this and to what advantage.”

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

Zadie Smith on Politics, Turning Fifty, and Mind Control

Richard Linklater is one of the most admired directors working today, and yet moviegoers may admire him for very different things. There are early comedies such as “Slacker” and “Dazed and Confused”; there’s the romance trilogy that started with “Before Sunrise,” starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy; and the crowd-pleasers like “School of Rock” and “Hit Man.” Linklater’s “Boyhood,” a coming-of-age story shot in the course of twelve years as its protagonist grew from child to young adult, is almost without precedent. This month, Linklater has two new movies releasing almost simultaneously, both dramatizing historical moments in the lives of creative geniuses. In “Blue Moon,” Hawke plays the Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart at the moment his career is being eclipsed by a rival, Oscar Hammerstein II. “My tagline for this movie, that they’re not going to use on any posters, but it’s my tagline: ‘Forgotten, but not gone,’ ” Linklater tells our film critic Justin Chang. “It’s so heartbreaking . . . to do a film about the end of someone’s career.” In “Nouvelle Vague,” which is almost entirely in French, Linklater depicts the unconventional filming of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless,” his triumphant 1959 début. “The most important film,” Linklater says, “is the one you make in your head.” 

Justin Chang’s article about Richard Linklater was published on September 27, 2025.

Richard Linklater on His Two New Films, “Blue Moon” and “Nouvelle Vague”

The swiftness and severity with which the Trump Administration has tried to impose its will on higher education came as a shock to many, not least university presidents and faculties from Harvard to U.C.L.A. But for conservatives this arena of cultural conflict has been a long time coming. The staff writer Emma Green has been speaking with influential figures in the current Administration as well as in the larger conservative movement about how they mapped out this battle for Donald Trump’s return to power. “There’s a recognition among the people that I interviewed,” Green tells David Remnick, “that the Administration cannot come in and script to universities: this is what you will teach and this is the degrees that you will offer, and just script it from top to bottom. First of all, that would be not legally possible. And it also, I think in some ways, violates core instincts that conservatives have around academic freedom, because a lot of these people have been on élite campuses and had the experience of being told that their views weren’t acceptable.” Green also speaks with James Kvaal, an education official who served in both the Biden and Obama Administrations, and May Mailman, a conservative education-policy activist who worked in the Trump White House and coördinated its attacks against universities. “When you have federal grants, you do not need to be funding racism and racial hierarchies and violence and harassment,” Mailman told Green. “I think that line is: do what you wanna do, but we don’t want to have to fund it.” 

Emma Green’s “Inside the Trump Administration’s Assault on Higher Education” was published on October 13, 2025.

How the Trump Administration Made Higher Education a Target

The filmmaker John Carpenter has a whole shelf of cult classics: “They Live,” “The Thing,” “Escape from New York,” “Halloween,” and so many more. And while he hasn’t directed a new movie in more than a decade, Carpenter has continued working in the film industry, composing scores for other directors (Bong Joon Ho recently approached him about a horror movie). He has also released albums of cinematic music—no film required—often working with his son, Cody Carpenter, and the musician Daniel Davies, his godson. The New Yorker Radio Hour producer Adam Howard talks with Carpenter ahead of the launch of his new small tour, just in time for Halloween, and they discuss the unusual shift he made from directing to composing. “It’s a transition from pain to joy. Directing movies is very, very stressful,” Carpenter explains. “Playing music in front of a live audience—it’s joy. It’s just joy.” Carpenter suggests three inspirational scores from film history: Bebe and Louis Barron’s electronic music for “Forbidden Planet”; Bernard Herrmann work on Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”; and Hans Zimmer’s music for “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.”

John Carpenter Picks Three Favorite Film Scores

Next month, New York City may elect as its next mayor a man who was pretty much unknown to the broader public a year ago. Zohran Mamdan, who is currently thirty-three years old and a member of the State Assembly, is a democratic socialist who won a primary upset against the current mayor, Eric Adams, and the former governor Andrew Cuomo, who was trying to stage a political comeback. Mamdani now leads the race by around twenty percentage points in most polls. His run for mayor is a remarkable story, but it has not been an easy one. His campaign message of affordability—his ads widely tout a rent freeze in the city—resonates with voters, but his call for further taxing the top one per cent of earners has concerned the state’s governor, Kathy Hochul. 

In Congress, Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries have yet to even endorse him. “There are many people who will say housing is a human right, and yet it oftentimes seems as if it is relegated simply to the use of it as a slogan,” Mamdani tells David Remnick at his campaign headquarters, in midtown Manhattan. “It often comes back to whether you’re willing to fight for these ideals that you hold.” Donald Trump, for his part, dubs Mamdani a Communist, and has threatened to withhold federal funds from New York if he’s elected, calling such a vote “a rebellion.” An attack by the President “will be an inevitability,” Mamdani says, noting that the city’s legal department is understaffed for what may be an epic battle to come. “This is an Administration that looks at the flourishing of city life wherever it may be across this country as a threat to their entire political agenda. And New York City looms large in their imagination.” 

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign was chronicled by Eric Lach, a staff writer covering New York politics and life for The New Yorker.

Zohran Mamdani Says He's Ready for Donald Trump

Lionel Richie has been making music for fifty years. He has sold more than a hundred million albums, his hits too numerous to list, and he has endeared himself to younger generations as a judge on “American Idol.” He’s now the author of a memoir, “Truly.” Although the book has a lot of triumphs to cover, Richie doesn’t shy away from his failed marriages and the mistakes that led to the breakup of the Commodores, the band that launched him to stardom. “When I started out this book, I had some great stories I was gonna tell, keep it real surfacy—you know, no big deal,” Richie tells Hanif Abdurraqib. “I didn’t realize that it was going to take me on a journey of, It’s not this mountaintop and this mountaintop and this mountaintop. It was this mountaintop and then the valley. The book is about the valley. And . . . each time I went down in the valley it was painful because there were things in this book that I wanted to forget in life but what created the real substance of me was I had to face my insecurities.”

How Lionel Richie Mastered the Love Song

Robert P. George is not a passive observer of the proverbial culture wars; he’s been a very active participant. As a Catholic legal scholar and philosopher at Princeton University, he was an influential opponent of Roe v. Wade and same-sex marriage, receiving a Presidential medal from President George W. Bush. George decries the “decadence” of secular culture, and, in 2016, he co-wrote an op-ed declaring Donald Trump “manifestly unfit” to serve as President. Although George disagrees with the Administration’s tactics to change universities’ policies by punishment, he agrees with its contention that campuses have become hotbeds of leftism that stifle debate. He regards this not as a particular evil of the left but as “human nature”: “If conservatives had the kind of monopoly that liberals had,” George tells David Remnick, “I suspect we’d have the same situation, but just in reverse.” His recent book, “Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth: Law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment,” tries to chart a course back toward civil, functioning debate in a polarized society. “I encourage my students to take courses from people who disagree with me, like Cornel West and Peter Singer,” the latter of whom is a controversial philosopher of ethics. “Cornel and I teach together for this same reason. Peter invites his students to take my courses. That’s the way it should be.”

A Conservative Professor on How to Fix Campus Culture

The Political Scene’s Washington Roundtable—the staff writers Jane Mayer, Susan Glasser, and Evan Osnos—discuss how, in the wake of the reinstatement of Jimmy Kimmel’s show, public resistance has a chance to turn the tide against autocratic impulses in today’s politics. They are joined by Hardy Merriman, an expert on the history and practice of civil resistance, to discuss what kinds of coördinated actions—protests, boycotts, “buycotts,” strikes, and other nonviolent approaches—are most effective in a fight against democratic backsliding. “Acts of non-coöperation are very powerful,” Merriman, the former president of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, says. “Non-coöperation is very much about numbers. You don’t necessarily need people doing things that are high-risk. You just need large numbers of people doing them.”

This segment originally aired on The Political Scene on September 26, 2025.

Jimmy Kimmel and the Power of Public Pressure

The author and podcaster Ezra Klein may be only forty-one years old, but he’s been part of the political-culture conversation for a long time. He was a blogger, then a Washington Post columnist and editor, a co-founder of Vox, and is now a writer and podcast host for the New York Times. He’s also the co-author of the recent best-selling book “Abundance”. 

Most recently, Klein has drawn the ire of progressives for a column he wrote about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, in which he praised the late conservative activist for practicing politics “the right way.” He’s also been making a case for how the Democrats can reëmerge from the political wilderness. But some of his other ideas have also invited their share of detractors. 

Klein tells David Remnick, “I try to take seriously questions that I don’t love. I don’t try to insist the world works the way I want it to work. I try to be honest with myself about the way it’s working.” In response to criticism that his recent work has indicated a rightward shift in his thinking, Klein says, “One thing I’ve been saying about the big tent of the Democratic Party is the theory of having a big tent doesn’t just mean moving to the right; it also means accepting in the left.”

Ezra Klein’s Big-Tent Vision of the Democratic Party

The staff writer Sam Knight was in Qatar recently, reporting on the World Cup, where, despite years of controversy, a familiar rhythm of upsets, triumphs, and defeats has taken hold. But he finds that the geographical shift toward an Arab nation may benefit the sport. Plus, David Remnick talks with Mathias Döpfner, the C.E.O. of the German news publisher Axel Springer, which acquired Politico for a billion dollars last year. Döpfner relishes taking provocative stances, but has been a vocal critic of media outlets that he says are increasingly catering to partisan audiences. “I think it is not about objectivity or neutrality,” he notes. “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.”

Politico’s Mathias Döpfner, and Sam Knight Reports from Qatar

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.

The Man Who Escaped from Auschwitz to Warn the World

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