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WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

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

The New Yorker Radio Hour

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

This year’s midterm elections were widely seen as a victory for democracy in the United States. Election deniers were defeated in many closely watched races and voting proceeded smoothly, even in areas where the Big Lie has taken a firm hold. But the threat of authoritarianism remains strong. David Remnick talks with Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, authors of the best-seller “How Democracies Die” about recent political trends. “You can’t really live in a functioning democracy if you feel like each election is a national emergency,” Ziblatt says. “Because what it means is that we’re not confronting the major problems confronting our society.”

Is Our Democracy Safe?

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.

The Supreme Court Case That Could Upend Elections

The veteran stage and screen actress Christine Baranski first became a household name thanks to her Emmy-winning turn on the nineties sitcom “Cybill,” and her Tony-award winning work on Broadway. But “The Good Fight” took her to another level. As Diane Lockhart, a Chicago attorney and diehard liberal, Baranski captured the tensions of the political moment of Donald Trump, and the show ended its run this month. Emily Nussbaum could barely contain her excitement when sat down with Baranski at The New Yorker Festival in 2018 for a wide-ranging conversation about Baranski’s career and the timeliness of “The Good Fight.” 

This segment originally aired April 12, 2019.

Why Christine Baranski Fought the Good Fight

Quinta Brunson made a name for herself as a master of meme comedy and is a self-described “child of the Internet,” yet her ABC mockumentary series “Abbott Elementary” is an unabashed throwback to the sitcoms of her youth. Doreen St. Félix talked with Brunson at the 2022 New Yorker Festival about her influences and the everyday comedy of the workplace. St. Félix believes that Brunson has found “freedom in formula” when it comes to “Abbott,” which documents the lives of the beleaguered staff at a Philadelphia public school. “There is nothing that I could do,” Brunson says, “or [that] anyone can do that is more triumphant than someone going to their shitty job.” Writing in the wake of shows like “Black-ish,” Brunson relishes being able to center her story on Black people without addressing topical issues about race; the school is its own self-enclosed world. Just surviving, she thinks, provides its own form of liberation. “So much has happened to Black people,” she says. “Why are we still here? . . . We really could have called it quits a long time ago, and somehow we just keep going. It’s crazy to me.”

Quinta Brunson, a “Child of the Internet,” Revives the Sitcom

After six decades as an icon in country music, it’s hard to imagine Dolly Parton had anything to prove. But when she was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, in 2022, she admitted to feeling uneasy. A result of that feeling is “Rockstar,” the 77-year-old’s first foray into rock music. “I wanted the rock people to be proud of me, let’s put it that way,” Parton tells the contributor Emily Lordi. “I wanted them to say, ‘Did you hear Dolly’s rock album? Man, she killed it.’ ” For this album, which is largely comprised of covers of classic rock songs like “Freebird” along with originals like the title track, Parton channelled the likes of Joan Jett and Melissa Etheridge (who also both appear on the album). She didn’t want to make a countryfied rock album, but even at a full roar, her voice is unmistakable Dolly. “It’s a voice you know when you hear it, whether you like it or not,” Parton says. The artist is known for avoiding comment on political subjects, but she describes the volatile state of the culture in her song “World on Fire.” “The only way I know how to fight back is to write songs to say how I feel,” Parton says. “It’s just me trying to throw some light on some dark subjects these days.”

Dolly Parton “Busted a Gut” Reaching for the High Notes on “Rockstar”

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