The New Yorker staff writers and cultural critics Doreen St. Félix and Vinson Cunningham join Tyler Foggatt to discuss Kamala Harris’s sudden ascendence to the top of the Democratic ticket. How might her gender, race, and long political career from prosecutor to Vice-President shape the campaign ahead? “In a weird way, I think that she can run against both Trump and, implicitly, very subtly, against Biden, too,” Cunningham says. “I think her strongest way to code herself is: we're finally...

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss President Biden’s stunning exit from the 2024 Presidential election and his endorsement for Vice-President Kamala Harris to lead the Democratic ticket. How could this new matchup change the terms of the race, now that Biden’s age is no longer a key issue?This week’s reading: “Joe Biden’s Act of Selflessness,” by Evan Osnos “Joe Biden Leaves the Stage,” by Adam Gopnik “Where Do Republicans and Democrats Stand After...

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss takeaways from the Republican National Convention, which Glasser reports had the feeling of “a very polite Midwestern cult meeting.” Plus, Donald Trump's selection of J. D. Vance as his running mate and the mounting pressure for President Biden to drop out of the race.This week’s reading: “Donald Trump’s Second Coming,” by Susan B. Glasser “Doctors Are Increasingly Worried About Biden,” by Dhruv Khullar “The Rise...

The New Yorker contributing writer Antonia Hitchens calls Tyler Foggatt from Milwaukee to offer some details and observations from the first night of the Republican National Convention, at which Donald Trump was formally nominated to be the G.O.P.’s 2024 Presidential nominee. An assassination attempt on the former President over the weekend only heightened the messianic feeling that surrounds Trump, and gave a strange poignancy to the anointing of J. D. Vance as Trump’s running mate and the...

The panic that gripped Democrats during and after President Biden’s performance in the June debate against Donald Trump didn’t come out of nowhere. In January of last year, the Radio Hour produced an episode about President Biden’s age, and the concerns that voters were already expressing. But no nationally prominent Democratic politician was willing to challenge Biden in the primaries. After the debate, Julián Castro was one of the first prominent Democrats to say that Biden should withdraw...

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss President Joe Biden’s struggle to retain voters’ confidence in his bid for reëlection and his animosity toward the “élites” he says are insisting that he step down. Plus, Donald Trump’s campaign strategy amid Democratic turmoil and ahead of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.“The problem is the meta-narrative, which seems to be centered on: Will Biden faceplant or won’t he?,” Jane Mayer says. “And, so...

The New Yorker contributor and Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss a once obscure constitutional provision that allows Cabinet members to remove an unfit President from office. Gersen believes it’s time to use it on Biden. “The Twenty-fifth amendment was designed for a situation in which the President may not recognize his own impairment,” she says.    This week’s reading: “This Is What the Twenty-fifth Amendment Was Designed For,” by Jeannie Suk...

Many Democrats saw John Fetterman as a progressive beacon: a Rust Belt Bernie Sanders who—with his shaved head, his hoodie, and the Zip Code of Braddock, Pennsylvania—could rally working-class white voters to the Democratic Party. But at least on one issue, Fetterman is veering away from the left of his party, and even from centrists like Majority Leader Chuck Schumer: Israel’s war in Gaza. Fetterman has taken a line that is not just sympathetic to Israel after the October 7th attack by...

With the New Yorker office closed for the July 4th holiday, The Political Scene brings you a recent episode from Vanity Fair’s “Inside the Hive,” hosted by the special correspondent Brian Stelter. Tina Nguyen, a national correspondent for Puck, and the Washington Post’s Isaac Arnsdorf, a national political reporter, join Stelter to discuss how Steve Bannon helped rehabilitate Donald Trump among Republicans after January 6th. Bannon’s popular “War Room” podcast has been galvanizing the far...

At the beginning of 2021, it seemed like America might be turning a new page; instead, the election of 2024 feels like a strange dream that we can’t wake up from. Recently, David Remnick asked listeners what’s still confounding and confusing about this Presidential election. Dozens of listeners wrote in from all over the country, and a crack team of political writers at The New Yorker came together to shed some light on those questions: Susan B. Glasser, Jill Lepore, Clare Malone, Andrew...

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss President Joe Biden’s flubs, and Donald Trump’s lies, in the first Presidential debate. Plus, how American politics arrived at this point and what is next for the Democratic Party. This week’s reading: “Was the Debate the Beginning of the End of Joe Biden’s Presidency?” by Susan B. Glasser “The Writing on Joe Biden’s Face at the Presidential Debate,” by Vinson Cunningham “Do the Democrats Have a Gen Z Problem?” by...

The New Yorker staff writer Amy Davidson Sorkin joins Tyler Foggatt to examine the biggest Supreme Court decisions of the year—those already decided and those yet to come. They discuss the Court’s attempt to moderate its radical rulings on guns and abortion, its politicized selection of which cases to hear, and its influence on the 2024 election. This week’s reading: “The Supreme Court Steps Back from the Brink on Guns,” by Amy Davidson Sorkin “Yet More Donald Trump Cases Head to the Supreme...

Kevin Costner has been a leading man for more than forty years and has starred in all different genres of movies, but a constant in his filmography is the Western. One of his first big roles was in “Silverado,” alongside Kevin Kline and Danny Glover; he directed “Dances with Wolves,” which won seven Oscars, including Best Director and Best Picture; more recently, Costner starred as the rancher John Dutton in the enormously successful “Yellowstone.” Perhaps no actor since Clint Eastwood is...

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss whether the debate  will affect the outcome of the November election. The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who is the author of “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s,” joins the conversation to look at what the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debate can tell us about the upcoming event.This week’s reading: “Project Trump, Global Edition,” by Susan B. Glasser “Biden Is the Candidate Who Stands for Change in...

The New Yorker staff writer Clare Malone joins Tyler Foggatt to analyze how President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are being skewered on social-media platforms like TikTok and Instagram. She discusses our shifting media habits, why the 2016 election is surfacing in new contexts online, and how both campaigns are relying on algorithms to gain momentum ahead of November.This episode originally aired on January 31, 2024. This week’s reading: “The Meme-ification of American...

On July 4th—while the U.S. celebrates its break from Britain—voters in the United Kingdom will go to the polls and, according to all predictions, oust the current government. The Conservative Party has been in power for fourteen years, presiding over serious economic decline and widespread discontent. The narrow, contentious referendum to break away from the European Union, sixty per cent of Britons now think, was a mistake. Yet the Labour Party shows no inclination to reverse or even...

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos analyze the impact of Hunter Biden’s criminal conviction and how the trial turned the spotlight on the Biden family’s private struggles through grief and addiction. Plus, how Trump supporters are waging an attack on the justice system and making its integrity one of the core issues of the 2024 Presidential election.This week’s reading: “Happy Seventy-eighth Birthday, Mr. Ex-President,” by Susan B. Glasser “Is Hunter Biden...

The New Yorker writers Stephania Taladrid and Jonathan Blitzer join Tyler Foggatt to unpack President Biden’s stringent new executive order on asylum and the border. They discuss the strained diplomatic relations between the United States and Mexico and the political calculations underpinning Biden’s decision, and imagine what negotiations between Donald Trump and Mexican President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum would look like. This week’s reading: “Will Mexico Decide the U.S. Election?,” by...

When Raphael Warnock was elected to the Senate from Georgia in the 2020 election, he made history a couple of times over. He became the first Black Democrat elected to the Senate from the Deep South. At the same time, that victory—alongside Jon Ossoff’s—flipped both of Georgia’s Senate seats from Republican to Democrat. Once thought of as solidly red, Georgia has become a closely watched swing state that President Biden can’t afford to lose in November, and Warnock is a key ally. He dismisses...

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser and Jane Mayer speak with Sarah Longwell, a longtime G.O.P. strategist and publisher of the Bulwark. Longwell has conducted focus groups across the country for the past eight years, and her research provides an unparalleled look at what motivates certain Republican voters to stay with Trump and what causes others to abandon him. She’s applying that research to persuade a segment of Republican voters to change their vote to Biden, now that Trump has...

The New Yorker staff writer Rivka Galchen joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss a class at the University of Chicago with a tantalizingly dark title: “Are We Doomed?” It’s in the interdisciplinary field of existential risk, which studies the threats posed by climate change, nuclear warfare, and artificial intelligence. Galchen, who spent a semester observing the course and its students, considers how to contend with this bleak future, and how to understand the young people who may inherit it. This...

In “The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports,” the journalist Michael Waters tells the story of Zdeněk Koubek, one of the most famous sprinters in European women’s sports. Koubek shocked the sporting world in 1935 by announcing that he was transitioning, and now living as a man. The initial press coverage of Koubek and another prominent track star who transitioned, Mark Weston, was largely positive, but Waters tells the New Yorker sports columnist Louisa Thomas...

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss the consequences of a major moment in American history and politics: the first-ever trial and conviction of a former President in a court of law. Will Donald Trump’s guilty verdict threaten his campaign, or will it only shore up support from his party? This week’s reading: “The Revisionist History of the Trump Trial Has Already Begun,” by Susan B. Glasser “Trump Is Guilty, but Voters Will Be the Final Judge,” by...

Kyle Chayka, a New Yorker staff writer and the author of the Infinite Scroll column, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the latest ChatGPT release—which uses a voice that sounds, suspiciously, like Scarlett Johansson’s character in the dystopian sci-fi movie “Her.” Chayka has reported extensively on artificial intelligence, and he describes some recent blunders that tech companies, including OpenAI and Google, have made in trying to push their products through.This week’s reading: “Faux ScarJo...