The New Yorker: Politics And More

Today, we're bringing you a special preview of the new season of the New Yorker investigative podcast In the Dark, hosted by Madeleine Baran. The series examines the killings of twenty-four civilians in Haditha, Iraq, and asks why no one was held accountable for the crime.In Episode 1, a man in Haditha, Iraq, has a request for the In the Dark team: Can you investigate how my family was killed?In the Dark is available wherever you get your podcasts.

Kamala Harris will face barriers as a woman running for the Presidency. “Women constantly have to credential themselves,” Jennifer Palmieri, a veteran of Democratic politics who served in the Clinton Administration, says. She was also the director of communications for the Obama White House, and then for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential campaign. Harris will “need to remind people of what she has done in her career and what she’s done as Vice-President, because people assume that women haven’t accomplished anything.” But Harris also has notable strengths as a candidate, and—having avoided a bruising primary campaign and having been handed a torch from the incumbent—she has advantages that no other woman running for office has had. For a female candidate, the world has changed since 2016, Palmieri believes. She shares insights into how Joe Biden was finally persuaded to step out of the race, and explains what she meant by advising women to “nod less and cry more.”

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss the start of Kamala Harris’s Presidential campaign and the surge of excitement among Democrats on the Internet and at rallies. Plus, who might be her running mate and how Republicans plan to launch “racist, misogynist” attacks against her. This week’s reading: “Biden’s Exit, Harris’s Moment,” by Susan B. Glasser “Why Did Progressive Democrats Support Joe Biden?,” by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor “Kamala Harris Should Tell Her Family’s Story,” by Jay Caspian Kang “J. D. Vance’s Sad, Strange Politics of Family,” by Jessica Winter “Was Biden’s Decision to Withdraw ‘Heroic’?” by Isaac Chotiner “Kamala Harris, the Candidate,” by Doreen St. Félix “Who Should Kamala Harris Pick as Her Running Mate?” by Amy Davidson Sorkin “J. D. Vance’s Radical Religion,” by Paul Elie To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to [email protected] with “The Political Scene” in the

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 turning the page.” This week’s reading: “Kamala Harris, the Candidate,” by Doreen St. Félix “A Mood of Optimism at Kamala Harris’s First Campaign Stop,” by Emily Witt “Who Should Kamala Harris Pick as Her Running Mate?,” by Amy Davidson Sorkin To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to [email protected].

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 R.N.C.?” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells “The Spectacle of Donald Trump’s R.N.C.,” by Antonia Hitchens, photography by Sinna Nasseri To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to [email protected] with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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 of the New Right at the Republican National Convention,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells “Are We Already Moving On from the Assassination Attempt on Trump?” by Jay Caspian Kang “The Paralysis of the Democratic Party,” by Isaac Chotiner “Why Donald Trump Picked J. D. Vance for Vice-President,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells “Bernie Sanders Wants Joe Biden to Stay in the Race,” by Isaac Chotiner “Trump, Unity, and MAGA Miracles at the R.N.C.,” by Antonia Hitchens To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podca

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 potential next leader of the MAGA movement, Hitchens says. This week’s reading: “Trump, Unity, and MAGA Miracles at the R.N.C.,” by Antonia Hitchens “A Nation Inflamed,” by David Remnick “Why Donald Trump Picked J. D. Vance for Vice-President,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to [email protected].

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 from the race, and he went on to tell MSNBC’s Alex Wagner that potential Democratic rivals and even staffers “got the message” that their careers would be “blackballed” if they challenged him. Castro—who came up as the mayor of San Antonio, and then served as President Obama’s Secretary for Housing and Urban Development—ran against Biden in the Presidential primary for the 2020 election. He talks with David Remnick about how we got here, and what the Democratic Party should have done differently. 

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 long as that’s the narrative, the narrative is not on Donald Trump and the threat to democracy that he poses.”This week’s reading: “Joe Biden’s Less-Than-Awful Press Conference Does Not Mean Everything Is Now O.K.,” by Susan B. Glasser “The Controlled Normalcy of Kamala Harris’s Trip to Las Vegas,” by Antonia Hitchens “A Congressional Democrat Explains Why He’s Standing with Biden,” by Isaac Chotiner “Joe Biden’s Cynical Turn Against the Press,” by Jay Caspian Kang  “Joe Biden Is Fighting Back—but Not Against Trump, Real

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 Gersen “The Reckoning of Joe Biden,” by David Remnick “Joe Biden Is Fighting Back—but Not Against Trump, Really,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to [email protected].

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 Hamas; he seems to justify the civilian death toll Israel has inflicted on Gaza. “When you have that kind of an evil, or that kind of a movement that came out of a society,” he told Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “whether it was Nazi Germany or imperial Japan or the Confederacy here in the South, that kind of movement has to be destroyed. . . . that’s why Atlanta had to burn.” Wallace-Wells shares excerpts from his interviews with Fetterman in a conversation with David Remnick, and they discuss how Fetterman’s support for Israel is d

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 right at the local and national level, and his four-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress could actually burnish his bona fides with the base. “It’s amazing clout,” Nyugen says of Bannon’s prison sentence, “for someone in the MAGA world, in these MAGA times, with a MAGA audience.”This episode originally aired on June 20th, 2024.To discover more from “Inside the Hive” and other Vanity Fair podcasts, visit vanityfair.com/podcasts.

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 Marantz, Evan Osnos, Kelefa Sanneh, and Benjamin Wallace-Wells.

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 E. Tammy Kim “Some Faint and Likely Temporary Relief on Abortion Rights,” by Jessica Winter To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to [email protected] with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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 Court,” by Amy Davidson Sorkin To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to [email protected].

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 more associated with the genre. Throughout his career, Costner has also been working on a project called “Horizon: An American Saga.” Too lengthy and expensive for studios (Costner put up tens of millions of dollars to fund it), “Horizon” evolved over decades into a series of four films about the founding of a town in the West. Part 1, which involves the destruction wrought on Native communities by white settlement, comes out next week. While the politics of the genre have evolved, “there were certain dilemmas that [Westerns

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 This Election,” by James Lardner “Trump’s Brazen Pact with the One Per Cent,” by John Cassidy “The American Election That Set the Stage for Trump,” by Isaac Chotiner To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to [email protected] with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

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 Politics,” by Clare Malone  “What the Doomsayers Get Wrong About Deepfakes,” by Daniel Immerwahr To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to [email protected].

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 mitigate Brexit. If the Conservatives have destroyed their reputation, why won’t Labour move boldly to change the direction of the U.K.? Is the U.K. hopeless? David Remnick is joined by Rory Stewart, who spent nine years as a Conservative Member of Parliament, and now co-hosts the podcast “The Rest Is Politics.” He left the government prior to Brexit and wrote his best-selling memoir, “How Not to Be a Politician,” which pulls no punches in describing the soul-crushing sham of serving in office. “It’s not impostor syndrome,” Stew

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 a Scapegoat or a Favored Son?” by Katy Waldman “Hunter Biden and the Mechanics of the ‘Scandal Industrial Complex,’ ” with Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to [email protected] with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.