The New Yorker Radio Hour

Danielle Deadwyler, who first grabbed the spotlight for her performance as Emmett Till’s mother in the film “Till,” stars in a new film called “The Piano Lesson”—one of August Wilson’s Century Cycle plays about Black life in Pittsburgh. Denzel Washington has committed to adapting and producing all ten of Wilson’s Century Cycle plays; “The Piano Lesson” is directed by his son Malcolm, and his other son John David co-stars. Deadwyler plays Berniece, a widow who has kept the family piano after her migration north to Pittsburgh; her brother, who remained in Mississippi, wants to sell it to buy a plot of land. Themes of inheritance and history are central to the siblings’ conflict. “Histories are passed as we keep doing things together . . . through struggle, through joy, through lovemaking, through challenge,” Deadwyler explained to the New Yorker’s Doreen St. Félix. “The Piano Lesson” is playing in select theatres, and will be available on Netflix starting November 22nd.

American voters have elected a President with broadly, overtly authoritarian aims. It’s hardly the first time that the democratic process has brought an anti-democratic leader to power. The political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, who both teach at Harvard, assert that we shouldn’t be shocked by the Presidential result. “It's not up to voters to defend a democracy,” Levitsky says. “That’s asking far, far too much of voters, to cast their ballot on the basis of some set of abstract principles or procedures.” He adds, “With the exception of a handful of cases, voters never, ever—in any society, in any culture—prioritize democracy over all else. Individual voters worry about much more mundane things, as is their right. It is up to élites and institutions to protect democracy—not voters.” Levitsky and Ziblatt published “How Democracies Die” during Donald Trump’s first Administration, but they argue that what’s ailing our democracy runs much deeper—and it didn’t start with Trump. “We’re the only advanced, old, rich democracy that has faced the level of democratic backsliding that we’ve experienced…. So we need to kind of step back and say, ‘What has gone wrong here?’ If we don’t ask those kinds of hard questions, we’re going to continue to be in this roiling crisis,” Ziblatt says.

Sam Gold has directed five Shakespeare tragedies, but his latest, “Romeo + Juliet,” is something different—a loud, clubby production designed to attract audiences the age of its protagonists. “It’s as if the teens from ‘Euphoria’ decided that they had to do Shakespeare,” Vinson Cunningham said, “and this is what they came up with.” The production stars Rachel Zegler, who starred in Steven Spielberg’s remake of “West Side Story,” and Kit Connor, of the Gen Z Netflix hit “Heartstopper,” and features music by Jack Antonoff. Gold, who cut his teeth doing experimental theatre with the venerable downtown company the Wooster Group, bristles at the view that his production is unfaithful to the original. “A lot of people falsely sort of label me as a deconstructionist or something, because they’re wearing street clothes,” he tells Cunningham. “I’m not deconstructing these plays. I’m doing the play. . . . I think it’s a gross misunderstanding of the difference between conventions and authentic engagement in a text.” Gold aspires to excite kids to get off their phones. “We are in a mental-health crisis [of] teen suicide. I’m doing a play about teen suicide, and all those young people are coming. And I think we can help them.”

In the end, Donald Trump’s rhetoric of another stolen election, and his opponents’ warnings that he would once again attempt to subvert a loss, were moot. Trump, a convicted felon and sexual abuser, won not only the Electoral College, but the popular vote—the first time for a Republican President since 2004. Democrats lost almost every swing state, even as abortion-rights ballot measures found favor in some conservative states. David Remnick joins The Political Scene’s weekly Washington roundtable—staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos—to discuss Kamala Harris’s campaign, Trump’s overtly authoritarian rhetoric, and the American electorate’s rightward trajectory.

It made news when the retired general John Kelly, Donald Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, said that the former President fit the definition of a fascist. The MSNBC host Rachel Maddow could hardly be blamed if she said, I told you so. Maddow’s podcast “Ultra” and her book “Prequel” detail the history of Nazi and far-right movements in America in the twentieth century—and the people who fought them. “When we talk about making America great again and we talk about the threat of an authoritarian takeover in the United States in the form of Trumpism, it is not something foreign,” Maddow explained to David Remnick last week at The New Yorker Festival. “It is something that’s coming from a fascist place that is a recurring, ebbing, and flowing tide that we’ve faced in multiple generations.”

In recent weeks and months, dozens of prominent security and military officials and Republican politicians have come out against Donald Trump, declaring him a security threat, unfit for office, and, in some cases, a fascist. Way out in front of this movement was Liz Cheney. Up until 2021, she was the third-ranking Republican in Congress, but after the January 6th insurrection she voted to impeach Trump. She then served as vice-chair of the House Select Committee on the January 6th attack. She must have expected it would cost her the midterms and her seat in Congress, which ended up being the case when Wyoming voters rejected her in 2022. Since then, Cheney has gone further, campaigning forcefully on behalf of Vice-President Harris. David Remnick spoke with Cheney last week at The New Yorker Festival, shortly after Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, blocked its planned endorsement of Harris. “It absolutely proves the danger of Donald Trump,” Cheney said. “When you have Jeff Bezos apparently afraid to issue an endorsement for the only candidate in the race who’s a stable, responsible adult, because he fears Donald Trump, that tells you why we have to work so hard to make sure that Donald Trump isn’t elected,” Cheney told Remnick. “And I cancelled my subscription to the Washington Post.”

One aspect of the Vice-President’s background that’s relatively overlooked, and yet critical to understanding her, is her membership in the sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha. “In one of the bylaws,” the writer Jazmine Hughes tells David Remnick, “it says that the mission of the organization, among many, is to uplift the social status of the Negro.” Far from a Greek party club, A.K.A. "is an identity” to its members. When Donald Trump insinuated that Kamala Harris had “turned Black,” in his words, for political advantage, “a lot of people pointed to her time at Howard, and her membership in A.K.A., [as] a very specific Black American experience that they did not see from someone like Barack Obama.” Jazmine Hughes’s reporting on “The Tight-Knit World of Kamala Harris’s Sorority” was published in the October 21, 2024, issue ofThe New Yorker. Plus, Kai Wright, who hosts WNYC’s “Notes from America,” speaks with the choreographer Bill T. Jones. This week, the Brooklyn Academy of Music is re-mounting Jones’s work “Still/Here,” which caused a stir when it débuted at BAM, thirty years ago: The New Yorker’s own dance critic at the time, Arlene Croce, declared that she wasn’t going to review it. Now “Still/Here” is considered a landmark in contemporary dance, and Jones a towering figure.

In these final days of the Presidential campaign, Vice-President Kamala Harris has been getting in front of voters as much as she can. Given the polls showing shaky support among Black men, one man she absolutely had to talk to was Lenard McKelvey, much better known as Charlamagne tha God. As a co-host of the syndicated “Breakfast Club” morning radio show, Charlamagne has interviewed Presidential candidates such as Harris, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden, as well as New York City’s embattled Mayor Eric Adams and many more. He tells David Remnick that he received death threats just for speaking with Harris—“legitimate threats, not … somebody talking crazy on social media. That’s just me having a conversation with her about the state of our society. So imagine what she actually gets.” Charlamagne believes firmly that the narrative of Harris losing Black support is overstated, or a polling fiction, but he agrees that the Democrats have a messaging problem. The author of a book titled “Get Honest or Die Lying,” Charlamagne says that the Party has shied away from widespread concerns about immigration and the economy, to its detriment. “I just want to see more honesty from Democrats. Like I always say, Republicans are more sincere about their lies than Democrats are about their truth!”

If Vice-President Kamala Harris wins in November, it will likely be on the strength of the pro-choice vote, which has been turning out strongly in recent elections. Her statements and choices on the campaign trail couldn’t stand in starker relief against those of Donald Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, who recently called for defunding Planned Parenthood. Meanwhile, Harris “is the first sitting Vice-President or President to come to a Planned Parenthood health center, to come to an abortion clinic, and really understand the conversations that have been happening on the ground,” Alexis McGill Johnson, Planned Parenthood’s president and C.E.O., told David Remnick. The organization is spending upward of $40 million in this election to try to secure abortion rights in Congress and in the White House. A second Trump term, she speculates, could bring a ban on mifepristone and a “pregnancy czar” overseeing women in a federal Department of Life. “Is that scary enough for you?” Johnson asks.

Since the blockbuster success of his musical “Hamilton,” Lin-Manuel Miranda has been busy: acting, directing, and composing for Disney projects, including the upcoming movie “Mufasa: The Lion King.” But his new project is more personal, and a throwback in the best sense. Working with the playwright Eisa Davis, he has reimagined a movie from his childhood as a concept album. “The Warriors” is a cult classic released in 1979. “The Warriors are a gang from Coney Island, and they have to fight their way from the Bronx all the way back down to Coney Island in the course of the film,” Miranda tells David Remnick. The film reads as a nineteen-seventies period piece, but Miranda and Davis find a classical dimension to it. “The tale is an old tale. Sol Yurick, who wrote the novel the movie is based on, based it on the Anabasis, which is a soldier’s account of trying to get back home from war” in ancient Greece. “It’s this mythic story. . . . It doesn’t get more clear than that as a plotline.” To tell that story in song and rap, Miranda brought together a cast of legends including Lauryn Hill, Nas, Marc Anthony, members of the Wu-Tang Clan, and more. If releasing a concept album, meant to be listened to straight through, seems like a stretch for 2024 audiences, Miranda is unfazed. “What’s interesting about “Hamilton” is that no one I talked to thought it was a good idea when I was writing it. But I could see it. And it was the idea that wouldn’t leave me alone.”

Bon Iver is the alias of Justin Vernon, who holds an unusual place in music as both a singer-songwriter in an acoustic idiom and a collaborator with the biggest stars in pop, including Taylor Swift, Charli XCX, and Kanye West. Bon Iver’s new three-song EP, titled “SABLE,” is his first record of his own songs in more than five years. Vernon rarely gives interviews, so this is an extended version of his conversation with the staff writer Amanda Petrusich. They touched on the meaning of “sable,” a word that can refer to mourning and darkness. Vernon is not altogether comfortable with the acclaim he has received. “I’m not, like, famous on the street, People-magazine famous, but . . . there’s been a lot of accolades,” he tells Petrusich. “I was getting a lot of positive feedback for being heartbroken and having heartache and I’ve wondered . . . [if] maybe I’m pressing the bruise.”

Since July 21st, when Joe Biden endorsed her in the Presidential race, all eyes have been on Vice-President Kamala Harris. The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos has been reporting on Harris for months, speaking with dozens of people close to her from her childhood to her days as a California prosecutor, right up to this lightning-round campaign for the Presidency. “What’s interesting is that some of those people . . . were asking her, ‘Do you think there should be a process? Some town halls or conventions?,’ ” Osnos tells David Remnick. “And her answer is revealing. . . . ‘I’m happy to join a process like that, but I’m not gonna wait around. I’m not gonna wait around.’ ” But if Harris’s surge in popularity was remarkable, her lead in most polls is razor-thin. “If she wins [the popular vote] and loses the Electoral College, that’ll be the third time since the year 2000 that Democrats have suffered that experience,” he notes. “You can’t underestimate how seismic a shock and a trauma—that’s not an overstatement—it will be, particularly for young Americans who have tried to say, ‘We’re going to put our support behind somebody and see if we can change this country.’ ”

Between book bans, the movement for parental rights, the fight over cellphones, and budgets being slashed, life in a public school is stressful—and a fertile ground for comedy. Brian Jordan Alvarez created and stars in “English Teacher,” débuting this season on FX. Alvarez has been an actor for many years, with a role on the reboot of “Will & Grace,” among many others, but he burst into viral fame on TikTok with a goofy song about the virtues of sitting, sung in a strange accent. Suddenly everybody was talking about him—including the staff writer Vinson Cunningham, who spoke with Alvarez recently. The new show is a much more conventional kind of social comedy, focussed on a gay Latino English teacher in Texas. “Evan wants to be, and is, in so many ways, essentially an out, proud gay guy,” Alvarez explained to Cunningham. “But how does that feel in this school with all these different forces coming at him?”

Long before Donald Trump got serious about politics, Newt Gingrich saw himself as the revolutionary in Washington, introducing a combative style of party politics that helped his party become a dominating force in Congress. Setting the template for Trump, Gingrich described Democrats not as an opposing team with whom to make alliances but as an alien force—a “cultural élite”—out to destroy America. Gingrich has written no less than five admiring books about Trump, and he was involved with pushing the lie of the stolen election of 2020. Like many in the Party, he balks at some of Trump’s tactics, but always finds an excuse. “I would probably not have used the language Trump used,” for example in calling Vice-President Kamala Harris “mentally disabled,” Gingrich says. “Partly because I think that it doesn’t further his cause. . . . I would simply say that he is a very intense personality . . . and occasionally he has to explode.” But he sees Trump as seasoned and improved with age, and his potential in a second term far greater. “It’s almost providential: he’s had four years [out of office] to think about what he’s learned . . . and he has a much deeper grasp of what has to be done and how to do it.”

In Michigan, many voters—particularly Arab American and Muslim voters—remain deeply upset by the Biden Administration’s support for the Israeli military, in the face of the enormous death toll in Gaza. In her Presidential campaign, Kamala Harris has not articulated any major shift in policy. Earlier in the year, during the primary elections, activists urged Democrats to check the box for “Uncommitted,” as a rebuke to Biden. But now, just weeks away from the general election, these disaffected Democrats could cost Harris the election. Andrew Marantz, who has reported on the Uncommitted Movement, talks with one of the its founders, Abbas Alawieh, about the difficult moral calculus facing Muslim Democrats, and why the Party spurned overtures from pro-Palestinian groups. The antiwar candidate Jill Stein, of the Green Party, is now polling very well with Muslim voters, and Donald Trump’s campaign is claiming that he can stop the war; however, Uncommitted leaders feel they cannot endorse Harris. In conversation with David Remnick, Marantz recalls that Hillary Clinton lost Michigan by around ten thousand votes; more than one hundred thousand people checked “Uncommitted.”

Actors and comedians have usually played Donald Trump as larger than life, almost as a cartoon. In the new film “The Apprentice,” Sebastian Stan doesn’t play for laughs. He stars as a very young Trump falling under the sway of Roy Cohn (played by Jeremy Strong)— the notorious, amoral lawyer and fixer. “Cohn took Donald Trump under his wing when Donald was a nobody from the outer boroughs,” the film’s writer and executive producer Gabriel Sherman tells David Remnick. He “taught him the dark arts of power brokering … [and] introduced him to New York society.” Sherman, a contributing editor to New York magazine, also chronicled Roger Ailes’s rise to power at Fox News in “The Loudest Voice in the Room.” Sherman insists, though, that the film is not anti-Trump—or not exactly. “The movie got cast into this political left-right schema, and it’s not that. It’s a humanist work of drama,” in which the protégé eventually betrays his mentor. It almost goes without saying that Donald Trump has threatened to sue the producers of the film, and the major Hollywood studios wouldn’t touch it. Sherman talks with Remnick about how the film, which opens October 11th, came to be. Plus, Jill Lepore is a New Yorker staff writer, a professor of history at Harvard University, and the author of the best-seller “These Truths” as well as many other works of history. While her professional life is absorbed in the uniqueness of the American experience, she finds her relaxation across the pond, watching police procedurals from Britain. “There’s not a lot of gun action,” she notes, “not the same kind of swagger.” She talks with David Remnick about three favorites: “Annika” and “The Magpie Murders,” on PBS Masterpiece; and “Karen Pirie,” on BritBox. And Remnick can’t resist a digression to bring up their shared reverence for “Slow Horses,” a spy series on Apple TV+ that’s based on books by Mick Herron, whom Lepore profiled for The New Yorker.

Since the war in Ukraine began, the historian Timothy Snyder has made several trips to Ukraine, and it was there that he wrote parts of his newest book, “On Freedom.” The author of “Bloodlands” and “On Tyranny,” Snyder spoke in Ukrainian with soldiers, farmers, journalists, and politicians, including President Volodymyr Zelensky. He talks with David Remnick about the Ukrainian conviction that they can win the war, and the historical trends that support that conviction. But the thrust of Snyder’s new book is to apply what he learned from them to larger principles that apply to our own country. In areas taken back from Russian control, Ukrainians would tell Snyder they were “de-occupied,” rather than liberated; “freedom,” he writes, “is not just an absence of evil but a presence of good.” “If you think that freedom is just negative,” Snyder told David Remnick, “if you think that freedom is just an absence of [evil] things, I think you then argue yourself into a position where given the absence, stuff is going to work out. … The market is going to deliver you freedom, or the founding fathers … something else is going to deliver you freedom. And that of course is wrong. It’s an essentially authoritarian conviction. Because if anyone’s going to deliver you freedom, it’s going to be you, in some way.” Share your thoughts on The New Yorker Radio Hour. As a token of our appreciation, you will be eligible to enter a prize drawing up to $1,000 after you complete the survey. https://selfserve.decipherinc.com/survey/selfserve/222b/76152?pin=1&uBRANDLINK=4&uCHANNELLINK=2

The political strategist Sarah Longwell has dedicated the last seven years to understanding why so many Republicans find Donald Trump irresistible, and how they might be persuaded to vote for someone else. Longwell is a lifelong Republican who became a leader of the Never Trump wing of the G.O.P., and her communications firm, Longwell Partners, has been running weekly focus groups including swing-state voters, undecided voters, and discontented Trump supporters. These are the people who might determine the winner of the 2024 election. “I think that Donald Trump has done more damage to himself with a lot of these people who held their nose and voted for him the second time; [after] January 6th, a lot of them are going to leave it blank,” Longwell told David Remnick. “At the end of the day, what this election will come down to is the Republicans who get there on Kamala Harris, and the ones who just refuse to get there on Trump.” Longwell publishes the political news site the Bulwark, and was also the first female national board chair of the Log Cabin Republicans, which represents L.G.B.T.Q. conservatives. Share your thoughts on The New Yorker Radio Hour. As a token of our appreciation, you will be eligible to enter a prize drawing up to $1,000 after you complete the survey. https://selfserve.decipherinc.com/survey/selfserve/222b/76152?pin=1&uBRANDLINK=4&uCHANNELLINK=2

Lake Street Dive recorded their first album with money that their bassist won in a songwriting contest. They built a following the old-fashioned way, touring small venues for years and building a loyal following of fans—including David Remnick—who thought of them as an under-the-radar secret. Almost twenty years later, the band finds themselves onstage at Madison Square Garden. “My main inspiration for playing M.S.G. is Billy Joel,” the bassist Bridget Kearney said. “It feels like the club when he’s playing there, because he’s so comfortable there. . . . Like, ‘Welcome to my monthly gig, here again at Madison Square Garden.’ It won’t be quite like that for us . . . but I’d love it if we could in some ways make it feel intimate, make it feel like it’s a gigantic dive bar.” They joined David Remnick in the studio at WNYC to perform “Good Together”and “Set Sail (Prometheus & Eros),” from their new album, and “Shame, Shame, Shame,” an older song about a Donald Trump-like “big man” who doesn’t “know how to be a good man.” Share your thoughts on The New Yorker Radio Hour. As a token of our appreciation, you will be eligible to enter a prize drawing up to $1,000 after you complete the survey. https://selfserve.decipherinc.com/survey/selfserve/222b/76152?pin=1&uBRANDLINK=4&uCHANNELLINK=2

In 2024, all eyes are on Pennsylvania: its nineteen electoral votes make it the largest swing state, and it’s considered a critical battleground for either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris to win the White House. For many years, Pennsylvania trended slightly blue, but the state has become deeply purple—with a divided state House and a series of razor-thin margins in general elections. One notable exception to this was the 2022 Pennsylvania governor’s race. The Democrat Josh Shapiro won by almost fifteen points against a Trump-aligned Republican, and his approval ratings in the state remain high. “To win in Pennsylvania, you’re not winning with only Democrats,” Shapiro told David Remnick. “You’ve got to get like-minded Independents and Republicans.” Shapiro was on the shortlist of candidates for Harris’s pick for Vice-President—which may be the cause of attacks from Donald Trump, including one calling him an “overrated Jewish governor.” He spoke with Remnick to talk about Harris’s choice of Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, as her running mate, and what it takes for a Democrat to win Pennsylvania. “We’re a big state, but we’re still a retail state,” Shapiro said, “meaning you got to show up!” Share your thoughts on The New Yorker Radio Hour. As a token of our appreciation, you will be eligible to enter a prize drawing up to $1,000 after you complete the survey. https://selfserve.decipherinc.com/survey/selfserve/222b/76152?pin=1&uBRANDLINK=4&uCHANNELLINK=2