The New Yorker Radio Hour

Since the Inauguration, in January, there’s been a kind of protest renaissance for those on the left and some in the center of American politics; at rallies and marches, they’ve dusted off chants and songs that became symbols of resistance during the civil-rights and Vietnam eras. But many of these protesters weren’t alive in the sixties, and the songs of their parents’ or grandparents’ generations may not resonate for them. “Primer for a Failed Superpower” was a concert performance, organized by the theatre company the Team, that mixed classic protest songs with contemporary anthems, all sung by a cast that spanned generational lines from boomers to teens. The New Yorker’s Vinson Cunningham talked to two young performers, Maxwell Vice and Logan Rozos, about how that generational divide played out, and what public protest is worth in the age of social media.  

Hillary Clinton harbors no doubts, she tells David Remnick in a long interview, that political allies of Donald Trump astutely “guided” the release of hacked e-mails by WikiLeaks and the planting of fake news in order to sabotage her. In a new book, “What Happened,” Clinton is by turns angry, accusatory, and apologetic about the 2016 election and its outcome. She describes the infiltration by Russia as a “clear and present danger” to the electoral process that Republicans should take as seriously as Democrats; Putin could, she points out, just as easily turn on Trump. She also tells Remnick that the media failed voters by focussing coverage on scandals rather than policies; she analyzes how sexism affected voters as they judged a woman who sought the highest office in the land; she wishes that President Obama had acted more forcefully on what was known about Russian involvement; and she lays out a plan for diplomatic efforts to address the North Korea nuclear crisis. A resolution is possible, she believes, but she worries that “nobody’s home at the State Department. There isn’t anybody to really guide a strategic approach to North Korea, as opposed to tweeting and speechifying.”      

A magical time of unfettered creativity but zero productivity, the days before the Internet were so strange that it’s hard to believe they were real. Clearly no one got anything done, ever. Jenny Slate performs Emma Rathbone’s “Before the Internet,” from The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs. Plus: Ten years ago, Susan Orlean, a staff writer at The New Yorker, wrote about a former laser physicist who had given up a successful career to become an origami artist. In time, Robert Lang became one of the world’s top practitioners,and origami became a surprising area of scientific activity, with government grants encouraging research into how materials fold. Orlean caught up with Lang at the OrigamiUSA convention recently, where she tried her hand at Lang’s popular goldfish—which has a hinged jaw and fins—and talked with him about the life lessons of folding paper.

When is speech no longer just speech? David Remnick looks at how leftist protests at Berkeley, right-wing violence in Charlottesville, and open-carry laws around the country are testing the traditional liberal consensus on freedom of expression. He speaks with Mark Bray, the author of a new and sympathetic book about Antifa; Melissa Murray, a law-school professor at U.C. Berkeley; and Dahlia Lithwick, a legal analyst for Slate.

We have yet to learn just how closely the views of the Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch resemble those of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, a staunch conservative and a standard-bearer for the legal philosophy known as originalism. Originalists claim to interpret the Constitution by relying on its words and on the contemporary writings of the Constitution's framers. The New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore, a professor of history, says that Gorsuch has been candid about the limitations of historical thinking. But she also notes that liberal jurists, for their part, have become more engaged in historical research to bolster their decisions, and thus are “out-originalizing originalists.” Plus: Alexa is the voice-recognition program in Echo, Amazon’s speaker device. It sits in your house, always on, listening for commands to look up information, play media on your computer, or order stuff from Amazon. The New Yorker’s Sarah Larson tests out Alexa, and finds it to be like “2001: A Space Odyssey” crossed with “The Golden Girls.” This episode originally aired on September 30, 2016  

We take for granted that popular entertainers can and should advocate for causes they believe in. But until Harry Belafonte pioneered that kind of activism in the middle of the last century, stars largely kept their political leanings private. In the lead-up to last year’s Many Rivers to Cross festival, which Belafonte helped dream up, the New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb paid a visit to the actor, musician, and civil-rights icon. Belafonte turned ninety this year and is looking to pass the torch, but he’s worried about the state of the civil-rights movement and what he sees as a lack of organized response: we have a struggle, he says, but not a movement. Cobb, who covers many civil-rights and other political issues for the magazine, teases out what Belafonte means.   Plus, the Mashco Piro tribe is one of the last remaining groups to survive only by hunting and gathering with tools that its members make themselves. Residing deep in the Amazon rain forest, they are extremely isolated and, for nearly a century, have rarely been seen by outsiders. Recently, however, there have been encounters with the outside world—and members of the Mashco Piro have killed two people. In this segment, the New Yorker staff writer Jon Lee Anderson journeys up the Madre de Dios River to a remote contact point where government anthropologists are trying to establish relations with the Mashco Piro. They are charged with protecting the tribe from potentially fatal contact with drug traffickers, loggers, and epidemic diseases, and with preventing further violence.   This episode originally aired on September 30, 2016  

Nick Lowe made it big as a pioneer of what the English called “pub rock” and Americans usually call power-pop. Lowe had his biggest successes in the New Wave era but continues to release records and perform, and six of his middle-period records are being reissued this year on the Yep Roc label. In the opinion of one fan, staff writer Nick Paumgarten Nick Paumgarten, Lowe is as great as he ever was. Now Lowe is engaged in figuring out how to age gracefully in rock and roll. “Some of my colleagues and associates have to behave like they did when they were young, and I wanted to avoid that rubbish at all costs,” he told Paumgarten on a recent visit. “The thing was for me to accept the fact that I was getting older, and to actually embrace it and use it as an advantage instead of trying to hide it.” But, after the rocker recently lost close friends to illness, accepting old age might be getting a little harder. Plus: on-the-job horror stories from three great writers—Gillian Flynn, Akhil Sharma, and Alison Bechdel.

John Ridley has been active in in film and television since the nineteen-nineties; he also has seven novels under his belt, as well as a play and several graphic novels. And, since the release of “12 Years a Slave,” for which he wrote the screenplay, Ridley has emerged as one of Hollywood’s strongest voices on issues of race. This year he came out with the series “Guerrilla,” a fictional account of a couple in the black-power movement of the nineteen-seventies; and “Let It Fall,” a documentary about the Rodney King verdict and the years of tension leading up to it. Yet, despite the recent resurgence of some of the most glaring examples of racism in America, Ridley tells David Remnick that he’s committed to a view that the nation can change for the better, and that to be honest about racism need not lead to despair: “I absolutely want to work on things right now where the hope is not so aspirational—it is there, it is underscored a little bit more.” Plus, hostility toward identity politics—nurtured by Steve Bannon and others—helped propel the rise of Donald Trump. But that feeling is not only to be found on the right. The Columbia professor Mark Lilla, a Democrat and a self-described liberal, has been saying very much the same thing: that vocal opposition to racism, and support for gay and transgender rights, have been costing Democrats election after election all over America. “We cannot do anything for these groups we care about if we do not hold power—it is just talk,” Lilla tells David Remnick. “Our rhetoric in campaigning must be focussed on winning so we can help these people. An election is not about self-expression—it’s a contest.”

The New Yorker’s Josh Rothman explains why men are missing out on romance novels, and Sherman Alexie reads a new story about a motel maid confronting the ugly sides of human nature.

A former C.I.A. operative writes about the struggle between East and West, and Annie Dillard describes the awesome, frightening experience of a total eclipse.