The New Yorker Radio Hour

Residents of Tangier Island, in the Chesapeake Bay, live through each hurricane season in fear of a major storm that would decimate their land. With its highest point only four feet above sea level, the island loses ground to erosion every year, and its residents may be among the first climate-change refugees of the United States. “I do believe in climate change,” Trenna Moore, a schoolteacher, says. “But I believe in what it says: centimetres a year. We’re losing feet.” The New Yorker’s Carolyn Kormann and the Radio Hour’s Sara Nics travelled to the island, and spent time with James Eskridge, a commercial crabber and mayor of the town of Tangier, Virginia. A stalwart supporter of Donald Trump, Eskridge told the President of the residents’ desire for a seawall around the entire island. Based on his own observations, Eskridge disputes the entire scientific community that sea-level rise is a threat, but he sees that the danger is real: “If we were to get a hurricane to come in, it would wipe out the whole harbor here, and probably a good chunk of the island.”

In October, 2016, Bruce Springsteen appeared at The New Yorker Festival for an intimate conversation with David Remnick. (The event sold out in six seconds.) This entire episode is dedicated to that conversation.

In his review of “The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected),” the New Yorker critic Anthony Lane paraphrased no less an author than Leo Tolstoy. “All happy families are alike,” Lane wrote, but “every unhappy family, in its own way, belongs in a Noah Baumbach movie.” In films like “The Squid and the Whale” and “Margot at the Wedding,” Baumbach shows a particular feel for family dynamics, and for characters who are messed up and exasperating but feel as real as the people around you. “The Meyerowitz Stories” stars Dustin Hoffman as an artist long past his prime, and Adam Sandler as one of his sons. Sandler’s character has moved back home to his father’s house, and, though the world might judge him a failure, his relationship with his own daughter redeems him. Noah Baumbach talked with The New Yorker’s Susan Morrison about how families judge success and failure. Plus, Erica Jong talks about her relationship with her grandfather, their visits to the American Museum of Natural History (across the street from their apartment building), and how his devotion to her in her childhood gave her the confidence to succeed as a writer.

The allegations against Harvey Weinstein have opened the floodgates for women in other industries and walks of life to go public with claims of sexual misconduct—and to be heard instead of dismissed. Ronan Farrow, who broke the Weinstein story for The New Yorker, shares his perspective on the fallout with the staff writer Alexandra Schwartz. And David Remnick talks with the feminist thinker bell hooks, who sees the roots of male violence in patriarchal culture and the way that boys are raised into it. If we don’t understand the male psyche and how we deform it, hooks argues, we will never solve the problem.

When Adam Davidson was a reporter in Baghdad during the Iraq War, he started dating a fellow-reporter, Jen Banbury, of Salon. On a holiday break, they left the war zone and traveled to Aleppo, Syria—then a beautiful, ancient, bustling city—and, while there, they ate the best sandwiches that they had ever had. They were shockingly good, so much so that Adam and Jen never quite registered what was in them or where they came from. The couple, now married, told this story to many friends over the years, but none was more interested than Dan Pashman, the host of the food podcast “The Sporkful.” Fascinated by the mystery, Pashman set out on a quest to find and re-create the sandwiches. He talked to Syrian emigrés, a political refugee, and finally to Imad Serjieh, the owner of the family sandwich shop that bears his last name. Pashman found that the Serjieh sandwiches—preferably the one made with boiled, spiced lamb brain—aren’t just a local favorite; they capture the essence of the city, and, as long as they are still being made, Pashman thinks, Aleppo lives. Plus, the writer and monologuist Jenny Allen has something she’d like to say to you—or, rather, some things she’d like you to stop saying.  

Tina Brown is a legend in New York publishing. She was barely thirty years old when she was recruited from London to take over a foundering Vanity Fair. Take over she did, becoming one of the power centers of New York culture by bringing together the intellectual world and the celebrity world of entertainment. She later brought enormous change to The New Yorker (including, for the first time, photographs); she launched Talk magazine with Harvey Weinstein; and she helped launch the Daily Beast. Her new book, “The Vanity Fair Diaries, 1983-1992” is a kind of coming-of-age story about a pre-Internet era of unruffled ambition, unlimited budgets, big shoulders, big hair, and fabulous parties. Tina Brown tells David Remnick that her experience with Weinstein, as unpleasant as it was—she found the mogul “bullying [and] duplicitous,” profane and erratic—did not prepare her for the revelations of brutality and intimidation that have been published in The New Yorker and elsewhere. The experience has shaken her. “I have friends who’ve been accused of things who I want instinctively to defend, but I’ve held back,” Brown says. “Because I don’t know what’s coming next. The truth is, you realize you don’t really know anybody.” Plus, the cartoonist Emily Flake on the joys of Rudy’s Bar, where the combo of a shot and a beer costs five bucks. The sense of history and ritual, and the troubles confessed across generations, remind her of church—but at church, Flake points out, “they’re not going to let you sit around for six hours and drink.”

Donald Trump memorably claimed, without a shred of evidence, that millions of votes cast by undocumented immigrants had given Hillary Clinton the popular vote in the 2016 election. More circumspect conservatives argue that voter fraud is a real problem requiring more stringent checks on voting—which their opponents see as thinly disguised voter suppression. Here, three views on voter fraud: a Kansas lawyer who defended a woman charged with fraud; the columnist John Fund, who argues that voter fraud may exist widely, whether we see it or not; and Lorraine Minnite, a political-science professor who researched the topic exhaustively, and who tells the staff writer Jelani Cobb that purposeful fraud in the electoral system essentially does not exist.

Jeffrey Toobin tells David Remnick that, despite the mounting indictments against members of Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign, Trump is almost certainly safe from impeachment. Republican House members, Toobin says, have no incentive to moderate their support of the President—despite his low national poll numbers—because the only competition these representatives face is from the right flank of their own party. Gerrymandering, assisted by the latest computer modelling, has allowed the party in power in each state to lock itself into a nearly unassailable majority of votes. The Supreme Court could conceivably change that in a redistricting case called Gill v. Whitford, which Toobin has written about; he tells David Remnick that it is “the most important Supreme Court case in decades.” Hinging on the swing vote of Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Court will decide whether it can act as a check on gerrymandering, or whether a functioning two-party system can fade into history.  Plus, the fiction writer George Saunders talks about the inspiration for his recent novel, which is set on one very dark night in the soul of Abraham Lincoln.

In “Slut: The Play,” Katie Cappiello captures the trauma of sexual assault, based on the stories of teen-agers in her theatre company. (Hilton Als wrote about the play for the magazine.) A member of the cast, Mary Miller, tells David Remnick that the play inspired her to tell her own story for the first time outside a therapist’s office. Cappiello, the artistic director of the Arts Effect NYC, asks, “Who better to speak this truth than those who face it day in and day out?” In a conversation with Remnick, she explains what she’s learned from working with teen-age boys on a play about sexual aggression and violence. Also, Ian Frazier visits the farm of the future, in an industrial building in New Jersey; Siri has some special instructions for when you’ve had a few too many to navigate safely. These segments originally aired on March 4, 2016, and January 13, 2017.    

When OxyContin came on the market, in 1995, physicians were understandably wary of the addictive potential of a powerful new opioid. As Patrick Radden Keefe reports, the manufacturer, Purdue Pharma, aggressively marketed OxyContin to physicians, claiming that the drug’s delayed-release mechanism could limit the risk of addiction. Instead, OxyContin led to many new addictions, and many addicted patients eventually sought street drugs like heroin. Steven May started at Purdue Pharma as a sales rep in 1999, and years later went on to allege fraud against Purdue as a participant in a whistle-blower lawsuit (which was dismissed on procedural grounds). May tells Keefe that he was trained to market the drug as one “to start with and to stay with,” despite seeing early on its addictive potential. Purdue Pharma is a privately held company controlled by members of the Sackler family, who have a net worth of thirteen billion dollars. The Sacklers have donated handsomely to cancer research, medical schools, art museums, and universities. But Keefe tells David Remnick that the Sacklers have donated “nothing for the opioid crisis. Nothing for addiction treatment. If there is any sense in that family that they bear any moral culpability for where we are today, they’re not acting on it.”