The New Yorker Radio Hour

Lenny Shiller owns some of the most recognizable cars around; his vintage vehicles have been appearing in movies for years (often with Lenny at the wheel). We’ll visit the garage in Brooklyn they call home.  A black woman raised in a white family searches for the biological father she never knew, a man known as Big Brown, while coming to terms with her race.

Mark Singer had the temerity to write about Donald Trump, and Trump wanted revenge -- but just who came out on top? Sofia Coppola talks about working with Bill Murray on a Christmas special. And we offer safety tips on how to operate your new drone.  

On shows as different as “Jessica Jones,” “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” and “Game of Thrones,” characters confront sexual violence in ways never shown before on television. Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker’s television critic, thinks this is probably a good thing. Robert Glasper is a jazz pianist who explains why sometimes you don’t need to take a solo. And a troubled man takes to the water for a series of adventures, like something out of Mark Twain.

High school students in Queens mount a fraught election simulation, Salt Lake City’s openly gay mayor-elect talks about the Mormon Church, and Roger Angell speaks to David Remnick about writing in his tenth decade. And Lena Dunham tries to make plans with Allison Williams in “Let’s Get Drinks” -- it shouldn’t be this hard, should it?

Two interviews recorded live at the 2015 New Yorker Festival: Patti Smith talks with David Remnick about how her writing and music are intertwined, with a live performance of “Because the Night”; the fiction writers Jonathan Safran Foer and George Saunders interview each other.  

George Booth started drawing cartoons when he was three-and-a-half years old. (His first was a race car stuck in the mud.) Now nearly ninety, he’s been contributing to The New Yorker for over forty-five years. He sat down with Matt Diffee, a fellow cartoonist who considers Booth his hero, to discuss the virtues of dogs versus cats, and other big questions of the cartoon world. “We are at war,” the French President, François Hollande, declared this week, after terrorists attacked Paris last Friday. David Remnick talks with staff writer George Packer about the banlieues of Paris, and how the the Iraq War hovers over Obama’s response to Syria. Sylvia’s, the soul food institution in Harlem, has ridden waves of change, from the riots of the 1960s through the gentrification of our time. Family-owned businesses are increasingly a thing of the past in New York, but Sylvia’s keeps coming out on top. Tayshana Murphy was eighteen when she was killed. She was the victim of a feud between two housing projects that has been going on for decades. Her father, Taylonn Murphy, has dedicated his life to ending the cycle of retribution and creating a safe space for young people in Harlem. New York City is believed to have one of the highest concentrations of endangered or ‘dying’ languages of any place in the world, and Daniel Kaufman, a linguist, wants to try to save them. Judith Thurman introduces us to Kaufman and the Endangered Language Alliance.

What is it like to grow up with twenty siblings? When Sue and Hector Badeau considered the lives of children in foster homes, which are often traumatic, they felt that had to do something, and eventually adopted twenty in addition to their two biological kids. Larissa MacFarquhar reports on a family shaped by extreme compassion. When William Finnegan isn’t covering conflicts in places like Mexico, Sudan, and Somalia, he goes surfing. It’s been his hobby for half a century, and, on a recent morning, he gave David Remnick, the editor of the magazine, his first and only surfing lesson. Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer who has been writing about the environment for years, and has covered many international talks on climate change. She tells David Remnick why the upcoming U.N. conference in Paris could really matter. Finding money on the ground isn’t a bit of luck for Roger Pasquier—it’s the result of diligent effort and skill. Pasquier, who is an ornithologist, pulls in around a hundred dollars a year in spare change, but he doesn’t do it for the money.

The hacker group Lizard Squad ruined Christmas for a lot of people last year when it hacked into Sony and Microsoft servers and rendered new PlayStations and Xboxes temporarily unusable for online gaming. Soon after, the hackers starting selling an inexpensive program that anyone could use to block a Web site. Vauhini Vara, a contributor to The New Yorker’s Web site, talked to Vinnie Omari, a hacker who has been associated with Lizard Squad, about the group. This week concludes Jill Lepore’s three-part story about a woman’s search for the biological father she never knew. He was known as Big Brown, a Greenwich Village street poet whose work Bob Dylan described as “the best poetry I ever heard.” This final installment of “The Search for Big Brown” explores the connection among Brown, Dylan, and rap. David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, speaks with Gloria Steinem about Hillary Clinton, Black Lives Matter, and a fundamental question for activists: which comes first, changing hearts or changing laws? Steinem also talks about her new memoir, “My Life on the Road,” and why she decided to change her book’s title. And staff writer Rebecca Mead discusses two of her current obsessions: the soundtrack to the Broadway hit “Hamilton,” and a classic novel by a man without children that offers surprising insights on motherhood.

Amy Schumer began her career playing a deranged, rich party girl. With three seasons of her Peabody Award-winning series Inside Amy Schumer now complete, Schumer has since shifted to a more deliberate agenda, one that’s earned her the favor of Hillary Clinton and her distant relative, Senator Charles Schumer. The New Yorker’s editor David Remnick spoke with Schumer about her evolution as a comic and a feminist spokesperson, and how she’s reconciled the desire for laughs with a changing climate of political correctness. In the second installment of staff writer Jill Lepore’s story “The Search for Big Brown,” Lepore’s childhood friend Adrianna Alty starts learning about her biological father, a black street poet whose time in Greenwich Village in the 1960s brought him the admiration of Bob Dylan. Some of the rumors seem to pan out, but the man remains elusive. For many Americans, Univision journalist Jorge Ramos first came to public prominence after Donald Trump kicked him out of a campaign event in August. But for Spanish speakers, Ramos has been one of the most recognizable and respected voices in the media for decades. New Yorker staff writer William Finnegan asked Ramos about the Republican party’s stance on immigration, and why he engages with people who seem to hate him.   Then, writer Carolyn Kormann tries out Bird Genie, a new app that attempts to make birding easier by capturing snippets of songs in the field and comparing them to existing recordings. The app’s creator, Tom Stevenson, joins Kormann for some technologically assisted birding in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.

In The New Yorker Radio Hour’s début episode, the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, speaks with Ta-Nehisi Coates, the author of “Between the World and Me,” about the profound influence of James Baldwin on his writing and why he’ll always be wary of optimism. Jill Lepore, a staff writer at The New Yorker, introduces us to a childhood friend who was one of the only people of color in their small New England town. This is the first part of a three-part story, “The Search for Big Brown.” Kelefa Sanneh, who is also a staff writer, takes a day trip to a suburb of Philadelphia to visit Spraynard, a pop-punk band. Most of their friends have moved into the city, but the members of Spraynard stayed to try to create a punk scene in their home town. Boarding a plane just got even more chaotic in a Shouts & Murmurs written by George Meyer and performed by Allison Williams, from “Girls,” that imagines a farcical airport scene. And Evan Osnos, who writes about Washington for the magazine, talks about sexism in politics with Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, of New York.