The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

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

  • 49 minutes 6 seconds
    The City of Minneapolis vs. Donald Trump

    The staff writers Emily Witt and Ruby Cramer discuss the situation in Minneapolis, a city effectively under siege by militaristic federal agents. “This is a city where there’s a police force of about six hundred officers [compared] to three thousand federal agents,” Witt points out. Cramer shares her interview with Mayor Jacob Frey, who talks about how Minneapolis was just beginning to recover from the trauma of George Floyd’s murder and its aftermath, and with the police chief Brian O’Hara, who critiques the lack of discipline he sees from immigration-enforcement officers. Witt shares her interviews with two U.S. citizens who were detained after following an ICE vehicle; one describes an interrogation in which he was encouraged to identify protest organizers and undocumented people, in exchange for favors from immigration authorities. 

    Ruby Cramer’s “The Mayor of an Occupied City” was published on January 23rd. Emily Witt’s “The Battle for Minneapolis” was published on January 25th. 

    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.

    30 January 2026, 6:40 pm
  • 23 minutes 15 seconds
    How Bari Weiss Is Changing CBS News

    Last October, Bari Weiss—best-known as a contrarian opinion writer who launched the right-leaning Free Press—was appointed the new editor-in-chief of CBS News. Donald Trump has called her new regime “the greatest thing that’s happened in a long time to a free and open and good press.” The New Yorker staff writer Clare Malone wrote about Weiss’s hostile takeover of CBS for the January 26, 2026, issue of the magazine. In a conversation with David Remnick, Malone discusses her reporting on Weiss: how resigning from the New York Times launched Weiss to prominence as a crusader against what she has characterized as woke groupthink; how Weiss gained the support of Silicon Valley titans who had their own political grievances; and the headlines about Weiss’s rocky beginning as head of a news network, including the on-air travails of her new anchor, Tony Dokoupil.

    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.

    27 January 2026, 11:00 am
  • 27 minutes 6 seconds
    How Tucker Carlson Became the Prophet of MAGA

    Tucker Carlson has long been a standard-bearer for far-right views, such as the racist conspiracy theory known as the “great replacement.” He recently did a chatty interview with the white supremacist Nick Fuentes, an admirer of Hitler. And yet, Carlson started out as a respected, well-connected, albeit contrarian, political journalist. Jason Zengerle, who recently joined The New Yorker as a staff writer, talks with David Remnick about his new book, “Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind.” They trace how Carlson’s sense of personal resentment toward the establishment grew; how launching his own website radicalized his politics in the years before MAGA; and his political ambitions as a potential heir to Donald Trump. “I think, if Tucker Carlson concludes that J. D. Vance can’t get elected President, maybe he has to do it himself,” Zengerle says. “So much of politics now is just being a media figure and being an entertainer. And Tucker does those things very well. . . . I think our politics are at a place where that really doesn’t seem as outrageous as it would have even just a couple years ago.” 

    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.

    23 January 2026, 6:40 pm
  • 17 minutes 47 seconds
    How Betting Took Over Sports

    Danny Funt has been reporting on the gambling boom for The New Yorker, which has generated startling recent headlines, including the arrest of a former N.B.A. coach and the indictment of two M.L.B. pitchers—not to mention the Polymarket user who won four hundred thousand dollars wagering on the seizure of Nicolás Maduro. The legalization of sports gambling, combined with the accessibility of betting apps, has made gambling so pervasive that children in elementary school are routinely placing bets, Funt tells David Remnick. Funt’s new book is “Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling.” 

    20 January 2026, 11:00 am
  • 32 minutes 33 seconds
    With the Podcast “I’ve Had It,” Jennifer Welch Goes “Dark Woke” on Politics

    Before becoming a podcaster, Jennifer Welch had a successful career as an interior designer and co-starred in a reality show on Bravo. But, since 2022, she and Angie Sullivan, her co-host on the podcast “I’ve Had It,” have gained millions of fans as a sounding board for left-leaning political frustrations. These aren’t only concerns about MAGA but also about the Democratic establishment that she views as captive to a corporate agenda. Welch talks with David Remnick about her contentious interviews with Cory Booker and Rahm Emanuel, her belief in “dark woke,” and how a white Oklahoma woman in her fifties emerged as one of the most provocative voices on today’s left.  

    16 January 2026, 6:40 pm
  • 18 minutes 49 seconds
    Does Every Marriage Need a Prenup?

    Prenups have gone from a tool of the ultra-wealthy, carrying a whiff of scandal, to a more widespread request for aspirational young couples with few assets. Wilson spoke with celebrity divorce attorney Laura Wasser, and found that generations who grew up in the era of universal no-fault divorce “just don’t trust marriage” as their elders did; “they want it in writing,” and they have developed apps that make it easy. Clauses calling for nondisparagement on social media are a common feature. But the boom in prenups, Wilson tells David Remnick, has led to couples trying to negotiate even intimate issues such as frequency of sex and body-mass index. 

    Jennifer Wilson’s “Why Millennials Love Prenups” appeared in the December 29, 2025 & January 5, 2026 issue of The New Yorker.

    13 January 2026, 11:00 am
  • 31 minutes 42 seconds
    Trump’s New Brand of Imperialism

    U.S. intervention in other countries, whether overt or covert, is by no means new, and Daniel Immerwahr notes that the open embrace of expansionism by the President and associates such as Stephen Miller goes back to the nineteenth century. Immerwahr is a professor at Northwestern University and the author of the 2019 best-seller “How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States.” He discusses Trump’s disdain for international law; tensions between the U.S. and Russia and China; and the historical link between imperialism and appeals to masculine pride.

    9 January 2026, 6:40 pm
  • 22 minutes 12 seconds
    Demi Moore Talks with Jia Tolentino

    Since she reëmerged as a star in the 2024 film “The Substance,” Demi Moore has been very busy. She has a major role in the current season of Taylor Sheridan’s “Landman” series, and she has two highly anticipated films coming out this year: a science-fiction film directed by Boots Riley, and “Strange Arrivals,” alongside Colman Domingo, about a couple who claimed to have been abducted by aliens. She sat down at The New Yorker Festival in the fall with the staff writer Jia Tolentino to discuss her varied career and how she has dealt with the pressures of the industry.

    This episode was recorded live at The New Yorker Festival, on October 25, 2025. 

    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.

    6 January 2026, 11:00 am
  • 28 minutes 42 seconds
    Salsa Star Rubén Blades on Acting, Politics, and the Power of Music

    For roughly half a century, the singer Rubén Blades has been spreading the gospel of salsa music to every corner of the globe. “You could say that Blades did for salsa what Bob Marley did for reggae,” says The New Yorker’s Graciela Mochkofsky. “He brought it into the global consciousness.” This year, Blades’s record “Fotografías” is up for a Grammy Award; should he win, it would be his thirteenth. Blades once ran for President of Panama and later served in the country’s cabinet; he’s also notable for bringing social commentary to the dance floor, from his earliest work to the recent “Inmigrantes,” a song about the impact of the climate crisis on refugees. And yet, he tells Mochkovsky, songwriters should beware of political messages. “Political songs are propaganda by definition. If you start singing about political ideology, you’re not an artist—you’re doing propaganda, basically. I try to be as close to a newspaper [reporter] as I can.”

    This segment originally aired on October 6, 2023.

    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.

    2 January 2026, 6:40 pm
  • 26 minutes 2 seconds
    Elaine Pagels on “The Historical Mystery of Jesus”

    Thirty years ago, David Remnick published “The Devil Problem,” a Profile of the religion scholar Elaine Pagels—a scholar of early Christianity who had also, improbably, become a best-selling author with “The Gnostic Gospels,” from 1979. Pagels’s latest book, “Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus,” is a summation of her lifetime of research on Christianity, as it takes on some of the central historical controversies of Christianity, including the stories of immaculate conception and the resurrection. She tells Remnick how she found and lost faith in the evangelical movement, but retained a lifelong interest in religion. “I have a sense that what we think of as the invisible world,” she feels, “has deep realities to it that are quite unfathomable.”

    This segment originally aired on March 28, 2025.

    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.

    30 December 2025, 11:00 am
  • 24 minutes 7 seconds
    The Company Behind the A.I. Boom

    Across the country, data centers that run A.I. programs are being constructed at a record pace. A large percentage of them use chips built by the tech colossus Nvidia. The company has nearly cornered the market on the hardware that runs much of A.I., and has been named the most valuable company in the world, by market capitalization. But Nvidia’s is not just a business story; it’s a story about the geopolitical and technological competition between the United States and China, about what the future will look like. In April, David Remnick spoke with Stephen Witt, who writes about technology for The New Yorker, about how Nvidia came to dominate the market, and about its co-founder and C.E.O., Jensen Huang.  Witt’s book “The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip” came out this year.   

    This segment originally aired on April 4, 2025.

    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.

    26 December 2025, 6:40 pm
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