The New Yorker Radio Hour

The Inflation Reduction Act now before Congress is being celebrated as the most important piece of climate legislation in the history of this country—which is “a pretty low bar,” the staff writer and Pulitzer Prize-winner Elizabeth Kolbert tells David Remnick, “because they’ve never really passed a piece of legislation on climate change.” The Inflation Reduction Act is a huge political victory for Democrats; will it help save the planet? And we look at how pro-choice messaging in Kansas delivered a surprise victory for reproductive choice by borrowing a classic conservative theme: government overreach.

Alex Kotlowitz is known as a chronicler of the city of Chicago, and of lives marred by urban poverty and violence. His books set in Chicago include “An American Summer,” “There Are No Children Here,” and “Never a City So Real.” But for some 40 years, he has returned to a remote stretch of woods summer after summer. At a young age, he found himself navigating a canoe through a series of lakes, deep in the woods along Minnesota’s border with Canada. The stretch of wilderness is known as the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. Larger than the state of Rhode Island, it is a patchwork of more than a thousand lakes, so pristine you can drink directly from the surface. At the age of sixty-seven, he finds the days of paddling, the leaky tents, the long portages, the schlepping of days’ worth of food (and alcohol) harder, but Kotlowitz will return to the Boundary Waters as long as he can. This spring, he brought a recorder with him on his annual canoe trip, capturing what has kept him coming back year after year. Plus, Susan Orlean remembers Ivana Trump, who died last month, at the age of 73.

Last month, the story of a 10-year-old rape victim captured national headlines. The young girl was forced to travel out of state because of Ohio’s draconian abortion ban with no exceptions for rape or incest, which would have been nearly unthinkable until very recently. Jane Mayer took a deep dive into statehouse politics to learn how a longtime swing state—Ohio voted twice for President Barack Obama—ended up legislating like a radically conservative one. Its laws, she says, are increasingly out of step with the state’s voters, and this is owing to a sweeping Republican effort at gerrymandering. While familiar, gerrymandering “has become much more of a dark art,” Mayer tells David Remnick, “thanks to computers and digital mapping. They have figured out ways now to do it that are so extreme, you can create districts [in which the incumbent] cannot be knocked out by someone from another party.” Mayer also speaks with David Pepper, an Ohio politician and the author of “Laboratories of Autocracy,” who explains how a district is firmly controlled by one party, the representative is driven by the primary process inexorably toward extremism, until you have “a complete meltdown of democracy.”

Much of the globe has seen record-breaking temperatures in recent heat waves that seem increasingly routine. Dhruv Khullar, a contributor and a practicing physician, looks at the effects of extreme heat in India, where the capital, New Delhi, recorded a temperature this year of 122 degrees. “People are amazingly resilient,” he notes. “But I think we’re approaching that point where even the most resilient people, the type of lives that they have to live—because of climate change—are not going to be sustainable for very much longer.” And the climate activist Daniel Sherrell talks about his book “Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of the World” with Ngofeen Mputubwele. The book articulates Sherrell’s view that we can live now only by walking a tightrope between hope and despair.

Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, serves on Congress’s Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the Capitol.  He spoke with David Remnick about the effort to demonstrate Donald Trump’s culpability in the insurrection in a way that would resonate with voters, and about Trump’s political future.  Trump is “guilty as sin, and everybody can see it,” Raskin says, and he is running low on patience for the Department of Justice to act.  “As a citizen, I would hope and expect to see action,” Raskin notes, given the committee’s findings. “But I try to be careful not to browbeat the Attorney General of the United States.”

Jason Isbell got into the music business early; he had a publishing deal when he was twenty-one. But he really came into his own as a songwriter around ten years ago, as he was getting sober from years of alcohol and drug use. His record “Southeastern,” which comes in the tradition of musicians like Guy Clark, swept the Americana Music Awards in 2014. Isbell spoke with John Seabrook at The New Yorker Festival in 2016, shortly after his record “Something More than Free” was released, and he played a live set of songs including “Different Days,” “How to Forget,” and “Speed Trap Town.”   This segment first aired December 30, 2016.

In New Mexico, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham has declared the state a “reproductive safe haven” between Arizona to the west, and Texas to the east. Already, she says, New Mexico’s few abortion clinics are seeing an influx of patients from outside its borders. “When you are a safe-haven state,” she says, “you put real stress on [the] current provider system.” Lujan Grisham speaks with David Remnick about her executive order—issued days after the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs—to prevent the extradition of abortion providers, a request that she expects to see from Texas law enforcement. Dobbs puts states at odds over one of the contentious issues of our time. “They’ve invited states now to fight with each other, sue each other,” she says; this is “the most despicable and horrible aspect, frankly, of this particular decision.”

Evan Puschak, known on YouTube as the Nerdwriter, posts videos dissecting topics from Shakespeare and Tarkovsky to Superman; from Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump. The videos are complex; he may spend weeks editing image, sound, and written narration. He spoke with the Radio Hour’s Ngofeen Mputubwele about what drew him to the essay form, and how he’s found success online. “The essay is not a treatise. It’s not a term paper. It’s not something systematically covering everything about a subject,” Puschak says. “It is an inquiry. . . . The cool thing about the video essay is that you are seeing these people’s thoughts articulated with a whole new toolbox.” As much as he loves the video form, Puschak is crossing over into print next month with a book of essays titled “Escape Into Meaning.” Plus, the writer Kelefa Sanneh highlights some notable tracks playing on country radio stations this summer.

Until very recently, Dmitry Bykov was a huge presence on the Russian literary scene. He is a novelist, a poet, a biographer, and a critic. He was a frequent presence on Echo of Moscow, the liberal radio station that was closed after the invasion of Ukraine, and his blunt political commentary made him an enemy of the regime. Bykov was teaching in the United States, at the Institute for European Studies at Cornell University, when the invasion of Ukraine began, and because of his forthright opposition to it, he may not be able to return home as long as Putin remains in power. Bykov calls Putin’s dictatorship “the final stage of Russian decline.” He blames not only Putin himself but the Russian people for the failure of democracy to take root. “In Russia they have a choice: to change the country—change themselves—or to keep Putin. They prefer to keep Putin,” Bykov tells David Remnick. “They’re really ready to die, but not to change their mind.” Most Russians, he continues, seem content “to make Putin responsible for everything, exclaiming, ‘We didn’t know, we couldn’t prevent him.’ ”

The comedian Hannah Gadsby has been touring this summer with a show called “Body of Work.” She came to wide attention in 2018, with the Netflix special “Nanette.” It was a full-length comedy show, and, at the same time, a carefully structured critique of standup comedy which argued that comedians have to distort personal experience for the sake of a joke, inflicting a kind of violence on themselves and their audiences. Gadsby recently published a memoir about her breakout moment called “Ten Steps to Nanette.” The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum talked with Gadsby back in 2018, when “Nanette” had just been released. Plus, Patricia Marx tries the trendy relaxation technique called flotation therapy—formerly known as a sensory deprivation tank. But relaxing, Marx found, is just too stressful, and her microphone was the only thing that found peace.