Food production has been seriously disrupted to the coronavirus pandemic. It has forced producers, including dairy farmers, to dispose of more of their supplies, which has led to more food waste. Joe Diglio, president/CEO of the Michigan Milk Producers Association, has a conversation with WEMU's David Fair about how the problems are being addressed in this week's "Issues of the Environment."

About 14% of Michigan's population is African American. Roughly 40% of COVID-19 fatalties are in the African American community. It is an alarming statistic. Lt. Governor Garlin Gilchrist heads the state's Coronavirus Task Force on Racial Disparities. He joined WEMU's David Fair and Michigan League of Conservation Voters executive director Lisa Wozniak to discuss what is being done to address the immediate crisis. He also highlights the longer term issues that will need to be addressed and what the role of the task force will be to that end.

It's been forecast that this spring will be quite wet. That could bring flooding to portions of Washtenaw County. Washtenaw County Water Resources Commissioner Evan Pratt joined WEMU's David Fair to discuss planning for such issues and the proactive nature of work already underway on this week's "Issues of the Environment."

Apple, Amazon, Alphabet (which owns Google), and Facebook—known in the tech world as the Big Four—are among the largest and most profitable companies in the world, and they’ve been accustomed to the laxest of oversight from Washington. But the climate may have shifted in a significant way. The Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice, and the House Judiciary Committee are all investigating different aspects of the Big Four; Elizabeth Warren has made breaking up these companies a cornerstone of her Presidential campaign. Sue Halpern, a New Yorker contributor, sounds a cautious note about these developments. Current antitrust law doesn’t well fit the nature of these businesses, and breaking up the companies will not necessarily solve underlying issues, like the lack of privacy law. In a twist, Halpern says, the Big Four and now asking the federal government for more regulation—because, she explains to David Remnick, the companies’ lobbyists can sway Washington more easily than they can influence state governments like California, which just passed a rigorous data-privacy law similar to the European Union’s. “They’re being called to account, they have to do something,” she notes, “but they want to direct the conversation so that, ultimately, they still win.”

The New Yorker contributor Jenna Krajeski recently met with a woman who calls herself Esperanza. In her home country, Esperanza was coerced and threatened into prostitution, and later was trafficked into the United States, where she was subjected to appalling conditions. Esperanza eventually obtained legal help, and applied for something called a T visa. The T visa contains unusual provisions that recognize the unique circumstances of human-trafficking victims in seeking legal status. It has also been a crucial tool to obtaining victims’ coöperation in prosecuting traffickers. The Trump Administration claims to want to fight the problem of human trafficking, but Krajeski notes that its policies have done the opposite: T-visa applicants can now be deported if their applications are rejected. This dramatic change in policy sharply reduced the number of applications from victims seeking help. “If what [the Administration] cares about is putting traffickers in prison, which is what they say they care about, their prosecutions are going down and will go down further,” Martina Vandenberg, the president of the Human Trafficking Legal Center, says. “Trafficking victims under the circumstances can’t actually coöperate.”

Sarah Stillman joins Dorothy Wickenden to talk about how the deterrence policies of Republican and Democratic Presidents have failed, and what the Democratic candidates should be saying about how to deal with asylum seekers.

For decades, critical praise for a TV show was that it was “not like TV,” but more like a novel or a movie. That ingrained hierarchy always bugged Emily Nussbaum, who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for her criticism in The New Yorker. She has been compared to Pauline Kael, but Nussbaum—acknowledging the compliment—is quick to point out that she has never written about movies, nor has she wanted to. She was inspired to be a TV critic by “Television Without Pity,” a blog site of passionate, informed fans arguing constantly. In her new book, “I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way through the TV Revolution,” Nussbaum argues that the success of serious antihero dramas like “The Sopranos” and “Breaking Bad” has led many to devalue mainstays of TV, like comedies and even soap operas. It’s time to stop comparing TV to anything else, she tells David Remnick. 

It’s hard to recall a newly elected freshman representative to Congress who has made a bigger impact than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her primary victory for New York’s Fourteenth District seat—as a young woman of color beating out a long-established white male incumbent—was big news, and Ocasio-Cortez has been generating headlines almost daily ever since. Practically the day she took her seat in Congress, Ocasio-Cortez became the hero of the left wing of the Democrats and a favored villain of Fox News and the right. She battled Nancy Pelosi to make the Green New Deal a priority, and has been involved with a movement to launch primary challenges against centrist or right-leaning Democrats. Like Bernie Sanders, she embraces the label of democratic socialism and supports free college education for all Americans. She has called for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She joined David Remnick in the New Yorker Radio Hour studio on July 5th, just after her trip to the border to examine migrant-detention facilities. Remnick and Ocasio-Cortez spoke about why she courted controversy by referring to some facilities as “concentration camps”; why she thinks the Department of Homeland Security is irredeemable; and whether Joe Biden is qualified to be President, given his comments about colleagues who supported forms of segregation. “Issues of race and gender are not extra-credit points in being a good Democrat,” she says. “They are a core part of the ... competencies that a President needs. . . . Where are you on understanding the people that live in this country?”

Since 1969, when an estimated six hundred million people around the world watched two astronauts walk on the surface of the moon, a significant number of people have doubted that it ever took place. A major line of conspiracy theory insists that the footage was faked (and directed by Stanley Kubrick, some have said) in an elaborate hoax engineered by NASA. In 1976, a book called “We Never Went to the Moon” was self-published by a man named Bill Kaysing, a former technical writer at Rocketdyne who claimed to have seen secret government documents. It attracted little notice, but Kaysing continued to make media appearances and fuel doubters into this century. Andrew Marantz, who has written on conspiracy theories for The New Yorker, notes that the moon landing always had skeptics, but the Internet and social media gave them platforms to advance even their most far-fetched views. Marantz sees links between the moon hoax and political conspiracy theories like QAnon. While skepticism toward government claims may be justified, conspiracy theories that dispute the most basic accounts of truth erode the functioning of a democracy, Marantz thinks; they lead to a totalitarian state where, in the words of Hannah Arendt, “everything was possible and ... nothing was true.” 

In June, protests erupted in Hong Kong over a proposed bill that could have allowed the Chinese government to prosecute political dissidents living in Hong Kong. This past Sunday, police in the city fired tear gas and rubber bullets at protesters, and a group of masked men attacked protesters and civilians at a Hong Kong train station. The protests are only the latest expression of increasing tension between Hong Kong, which has been a special administrative region since 1997, and the People’s Republic of China. Jiayang Fan joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss that rancorous relationship, and whether Beijing might order a military crackdown.

Tana French was an actor in her thirties when she sat down to write about a mystery that took the lives of two children, which became the global blockbuster “In the Woods.” With her subsequent books about the Dublin Murder Squad, French became known as “the queen of Irish crime fiction”—despite having been born in the United States. French’s latest book, “The Witch Elm,” departs from her line of police procedurals: the narrator is a civilian, a happy-go-lucky young man named Toby whose life is turned upside down when he is attacked during a burglary. Although the book involves a murder, “The core story arc is not the murder and the solution,” French tells Alexandra Schwartz. “The core story arc is Toby going from this golden boy [with] his happy life to somebody who’s had that shattered. . . . Where will this crisis take him?” Though known as a literary mystery writer, French acknowledges that some of her fans have found the plot frustrating. “If you’re coming to this book expecting a straight-up crime novel . . . you are going to be a hundred pages in [asking], ‘Where’s my murder?’ ” 

In May, the Colorado senator Michael Bennet became the nineteenth Democrat to announce that he was running for the Party’s Presidential nomination. He is among the most experienced and respected candidates: prior to his decade as a Democratic senator from a purple state, he was the chief of staff to the governor, and, before that, the superintendent of Denver Public Schools. He is the kind of moderate many voters say that they’re seeking. Still, Bennet has struggled to make his voice heard when much of the attention is being lavished on the progressives in the race. Senator Bennet joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss why he is running for President, the trials of being a political underdog, and his ideas about how to restore America in an age of broken politics.

When Mohamedou Salahi arrived at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, in August of 2002, he was hopeful.  He knew why he had been detained: he had crossed paths with Al Qaeda operatives, and his cousin had once called him from Osama bin Laden’s phone.  But Salahi was no terrorist—he held no extremist views—and had no information of any plots. He trusted the American system of justice and thought the authorities would realize their mistake before long. 

He was wrong. 

Salahi spent fifteen years at Guantánamo, where he was subjected to some of the worst excesses of America’s war on terror; Donald Rumsfeld personally signed off on the orders for his torture.  And, under torture, Salahi confessed to everything—even though he had done nothing. “If they would have wanted him to confess to being on the grassy knoll for the J.F.K. assassination, I’m sure we could have got him to confess to that, too,” Mark Fallon, who led an investigation unit at Guantánamo, said.  

Ben Taub reported Mohamedou Salahi’s story for The New Yorker and tried to understand what had gone wrong in the fight against Al Qaeda. Salahi met Ben in Mauritania, because, when the U.S. released him, it was under the condition that Mauritania would withhold his passport. He would like to go abroad—he needs medical treatment, and he hopes to live in a democracy. But, for an innocent victim of Guantánamo, being released isn’t the same as being free. 

On Sunday, the Indian government of Narendra Modi revoked the semi-autonomous status of Kashmir, the Muslim-majority region on the border between India and Pakistan, and brought it under control of the Indian government. Imran Khan, Pakistan’s Prime Minister, condemned the move as another policy decision designed to promote Hindu supremacy in India. Outrage among Muslims in the region may also affect the ongoing peace talks between the United States and the Taliban in Afghanistan, where the capital, Kabul, was the target of a terrorist attack on Wednesday. Dexter Filkins joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the situation in Kashmir and its ramifications around the world.

Earlier this month, a gunman killed nine people and injured nearly thirty more in Dayton, Ohio. The shooting in Dayton, the 251st mass shooting in the United States this year, took place only hours before an even deadlier mass shooting in El Paso, Texas. As the city reeled, its mayor, Nan Whaley, was suddenly rocketed into prominence as both a spokesperson for Dayton and a figure in the national conversation about gun violence. Paige Williams, who met with Nan Whaley after the shooting, joins Eric Lach to discuss the role of local officials in times of national tragedy.

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s first starring role was in the 2002 movie “Secretary,” a distriburbing romantic comedy about a troubled woman in a sadomasochistic relationship with her boss. Since then, Gyllenhaal has continued to push the boundaries of how sex is depicted onscreen as an executive producer and star of “The Deuce,” HBO’s drama about the beginnings of the porn industry. In a conversation with The New Yorker’s Lauren Collins, Gyllenhaal talks about her character, Candy, who leaves street prostitution to perform in porn and eventually makes her way into directing. Since the show premièred, the #MeToo movement has shed light on how women are asked to compromise themselves, not only in sex work but in entertainment and almost every other walk of life. “Many women have been asked to compromise themselves, and have done it,” Gyllenhaal tells Collins, admitting that she has moments of thinking, “Oh, my God. How did I laugh at that joke or stay in that meeting or put that shirt on?” Gyllenhaal also talks about adapting a novel by Elena Ferrante, who gave her the film rights—on condition that Gyllenhaal direct the adaptation herself. 

The third and final season of “The Deuce” begins in September, 2019. 

Mike Pompeo is the last surviving member of President Trump’s original national-security team. Pompeo entered the Administration as the director of the C.I.A., but, after the sudden end of Rex Tillerson’s tenure as Secretary of State, Pompeo was elevated to the position of America’s top diplomat. All this despite the fact that Pompeo had no diplomatic experience, a résumé that includes exaggerations, and a history of criticizing Trump. Since the 2016 election, though, Pompeo has rebranded himself as a strong advocate for the President, and has come to embrace Trumpism alongside many other former critics in his party. Susan B. Glasser joins Eric Lach to discuss Pompeo’s journey from traditional California Republican to staunch Trump ally, and what it says about larger trends within the Republican Party.

In 2014, a pair of crimes shocked Israelis and Palestinians. The first was the abduction and murder of three Israeli boys by a Hamas-linked group. Then there was an act of reprisal—the torture, burning, and murder of a Palestinian teen-ager named Mohammed Abu Khdeir—by Israeli right-wing extremists. Even by the standards of this conflict, the killings were shocking. 

“Our Boys,” a co-production of HBO and the Israeli Keshet Studios, examines the forces that led to Abu Khdeir’s killing. It is not for the faint of heart, David Remnick says, but the series is as complex and deep a portrayal of the conflict as he has ever seen. Remnick spoke with two of the creators: Hagai Levi, an Israeli Jew, and Tawfiq Abu Wael, a Palestinian living in Israel. Abu Wael tells Remnick why he resisted pressure from activists not to participate in an Israeli production. 

Around the world, the number of measles cases is on the rise. Public health officials in the United States have put some of the blame on "anti-vaxxers," who believe that vaccines have destructive side effects and choose not to vaccinate their children. In some communities, school systems have made vaccinations mandatory, touching off political battles over personal and religious liberty. Nick Paumgarten joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the political lessons of the movement for the wider "war on science."

Marianne Williamson, the self-help author associated with the New Age movement, has never held political office. But the race for the Presidency, she thinks, is less a battle of politics than a battle of souls. In her appearance in the July Democratic debates, she said that President Donald Trump is bringing up a “dark psychic force.” “The worst aspects of human character have been harnessed for political purposes,” she tells David Remnick. Williamson sees herself as a kind of spiritual counter to Trump, reshaping our moral trajectory. And she does have policies, which include repealing the 2017 tax cut and an ambitious plan for slavery reparations, and also tapping some surprising people for her Cabinet. Campaigning on her credentials hasn’t been easy: she’s had to debunk some myths and clarify some statements. She is not an anti-vaxxer, she insists—she apologizes for her earlier remarks on the subject—or a medical skeptic. “I’m Jewish,” she says, “I go to the doctor.” She does not, she says, even have a crystal in her home. “I know this sounds naïve,” she complains, but “I didn’t think the left was so mean. I didn’t think the left lied like this.” 

After more than two years of debates and one deadline extension, the United Kingdom is set to leave the European Union on October 31st. Last week, with no Brexit deal in sight, Prime Minister Boris Johnson moved to suspend Parliament for five weeks leading up to that deadline. The move outraged members of Parliament and spurred a revolt in Johnson’s own party, resulting in legislation that may prohibit him from executing a no-deal Brexit. Johnson has called for a general election, though he no longer has the legislative majority he needs to force a vote. Sam Knight joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the week in Parliament and what it might mean for the future of British democracy.

The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, talks with Salman Rushdie about “Quichotte,” his apocalyptic quest novel. A few years ago, when the four hundredth anniversary of “Don Quixote” was being celebrated, Rushdie reread Cervantes’s book and found himself newly engaged by a much-improved translation. He immediately began thinking of writing his own story about a “silly old fool,” like Quixote, who becomes obsessed with an unattainable woman and undertakes a quest to win her love. This character became Quichotte (named for the French opera loosely based on “Don Quixote”), who is seeking the love of—or, as she sees it, stalking—a popular talk-show host. As Quichotte journeys to find her, he encounters the truths of contemporary America: the opioid epidemic, white supremacy, the fallout from the War on Terror, and more. “I’ve always really liked the risky thing of writing very close up against the present moment,” Rushdie tells Treisman. “If you do it wrong, it’s a catastrophe. If you do it right, with luck, you somehow capture a moment.” At the same time, the novel gives full rein to Rushdie’s fantastical streak—at one point, for instance, Quichotte comes across a New Jersey town where people turn into mastodons. Treisman talks with the author about the influence of science fiction on his imagination, and about his personal connection to the tragedy of opioids. Rushdie’s much younger sister died from the consequences of addiction, and the book is centrally concerned with siblings trying to reconnect after separation.

One of the big stories of the 2016 presidential election was the rupture within the Republican Party. "Never Trump" traditionalists lost their fight to prevent the nomination of Donald Trump, but a small faction still strenuously objects to his scorched-earth style and many of his policies. Earlier this month, Catholic University hosted a debate between two prominent conservatives representing two distinct visions. On one side, the constitutional lawyer and National Review staff writer David French, a voice for traditional Republicanism who sees Trump as a threat to democracy. On the other side, Sohrab Ahmari, the op-ed editor of the New York Post and who fervently supports the president and describes politics as "war and enmity." Benjamin Wallace-Wells joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss what their opposing positions mean for the future of the Republican Party.

This past Saturday, a series of air strikes in Saudi Arabia damaged more than a dozen oil installations, including one of the most critical oil-production facilities in the world. The attack threw global fuel markets into disarray. Houthi rebels in Yemen claimed that they launched the strikes, but they have long been armed by Iran, fuelling conjecture that the attacks were carried out by Tehran. Robin Wright joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss how Iran views U.S. policies in the Gulf and how the Trump Administration has unwittingly strengthened the regime’s hard-liners.

People of color have suffered disproportionately under cannabis criminalization, and social-justice advocates have played a major role in the push for legalization; Michelle Alexander’s book “The New Jim Crow” changed many people’s minds on this issue. But, as the legal cannabis market takes off into a multibillion-dollar economy, this “green rush” is likely to leave behind those who suffered. An entrepreneur in New York tells the staff writer Jelani Cobb that “while we’re waiting [for legalization], huge corporations are . . . working on their packaging, how they’re going to come to the market. If we don’t have that same freedom, how is it fair?” Cobb reports on how legalization bills are seeking to address that historical inequity. In Oakland, California, a bill stipulates that half of dispensary permits must be awarded to people who have been harmed by criminalization in the past. But one businessman tells Cobb that, without access to capital, would-be dispensary owners will be shut out, and will likely end up selling those permits for cheap.

This week, evidence emerged that Trump tried to enlist the help of a foreign power to discredit his political opponents—in this case, Democratic Presidential hopeful Joe Biden. Further disclosures revealed that the President may have been aided in his efforts by his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, Vice-President Mike Pence, and Attorney General William Barr. On Tuesday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced the start of a formal impeachment inquiry against President Trump, saying that he had betrayed his oath of office, the nation’s security, and the integrity of U.S. elections. Jeffrey Toobin, Jane Mayer, and David Rohde—three New Yorker writers who have reported extensively about the Administration—join Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the case against Trump, and how his inner circle may have helped jeopardize his Presidency.

Senator Cory Booker burst onto the national scene about a decade ago, after serving as the mayor of the notoriously impoverished and dangerous city of Newark, New Jersey. To get that job, Booker challenged an entrenched establishment. “My political training comes from the roughest of rough campaigns,” he tells David Remnick. “You just won’t think it’s America, the kind of stuff we had to go up against. And it [was] such a great way to learn [that campaigning] has to be retail—grassroots. And so much of this, in those early primary states, is about that.”  

Booker spoke with Remnick about growing up black in a largely white area of New Jersey, where his parents had to fight to be able to buy a home; about his long relationship with the Kushner family, which started back when Jared Kushner’s father, Charles, was a leading Democratic donor; and why he’s proud to collaborate with even his direst political opponents on issues such as criminal-justice reform. “Donald Trump signed my bill,” Booker states. “I worked with him and his White House to pass a bill that liberated thousands of black people from prison” by retroactively reducing unjustly high sentences related to crack cocaine. “Tell that liberated person that Cory Booker should not deal with somebody that he fundamentally disagrees with.” 

Note: In this interview, Senator Booker asserts, “We now have more African-Americans in this country under criminal supervision than all the slaves in 1850.” The historical accuracy of this comparison has been challenged. More accurately, the number of African-American men under criminal supervision today has been compared to the number of African-American men enslaved in 1850. 

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was on the line for President Trump’s July 25th phone call with the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, during which Trump urged Zelensky to assist in an investigation into Trump’s political rival, Joe Biden. Pompeo, a fierce Trump loyalist and the last surviving member of his original national-security team, is now implicated in a scandal that threatens Trump’s Presidency. Susan B. Glasser joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the rapidly unfolding Ukraine story and Pompeo’s place within it.

David Remnick asks five New Yorker contributors about the nascent impeachment proceedings against the President. Susan Glasser, the magazine’s Washington correspondent, notes that Republicans have attacked the inquiry but have not exactly defended the substance of Trump’s phone call to Zelensky. Joshua Yaffa, who has been reporting from Kiev, notes Ukraine’s disappointment in the conduct of the American President; Jane Mayer describes how an impeachment scenario in the era of Fox News could play out very differently than it did in the age of Richard Nixon; Jelani Cobb reflects on the likelihood of violence; and Jill Lepore argues that, regardless of the outcome, impeachment is the only constitutional response to Donald Trump’s actions. “This is the Presidential equivalent of shooting someone on Fifth Avenue,” she tells Remnick. 

Last Sunday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan informed President Trump of his intention to launch a military offensive in northeastern Syria, in an effort to eradicate the Kurdish militias there. Trump agreed to draw down American troops to clear the way for the Turkish army. Though Erdoğan regards those militias as terrorist groups, the Kurds have been close American allies in the battle against ISIS. Trump’s decision was met with harsh criticism by high-ranking Republicans, U.S. military officials, and others. Dexter Filkins joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss how the incursion into Syria is affecting one of the most volatile regions in the world, and what it could mean for Trump’s Presidency.

On September 23rd, Representative Abigail Spanberger joined six other House Democrats—all from swing districts and all veterans of the military, defense, and intelligence communities—in drafting an op-ed in the Washington Post declaring President Trump a threat to the nation. The op-ed signalled a shift in the position of the moderate members of the House Democratic caucus. The day after the Post op-ed ran, the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, announced a formal impeachment inquiry into Trump. Spanberger joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss divisions within the Party, how Democratic candidates can win in 2020, and the Trump debacles in Ukraine and northern Syria.

Farrow’s reporting on Harvey Weinstein and other accused perpetrators of sexual assault helped opened the floodgates of the #MeToo movement. In his new book, “Catch and Kill,” and in “The Black Cube Chronicles” published on newyorker.com, Farrow details the measures that were taken against him and against some of the accusers who went on the record. These included hiring a private spy firm staffed by ex-Mossad officers. Speaking with David Remnick, Farrow lays out a connection between accusations against Harvey Weinstein and NBC’s Matt Lauer. And he interviewed a private investigator named Igor Ostrovskiy who was assigned to spy on him—until he had a crisis of conscience.

Senator Elizabeth Warren has made a "wealth tax" one of the centerpieces of her presidential campaign. The plan was developed with the help of the economists Emmanuael Saez and Gabriel Zucman, part of a new generation of economists whose work focuses on the failures of free markets and advocate what many see as radical social change. John Cassidy joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss how this cohort is affecting policy among the Democratic candidates, and whether the economy might help Donald Trump's 2020 re-election bid.

This week, the House of Representatives voted to move forward with public hearings into whether President Trump abused his office for political gain. House Republicans unanimously voted against the proceedings, and describe the impeachment process as a conspiracy to unlawfully unseat the President. Trump has called the process an attempted coup. Susan B. Glasser joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss what to expect from the Intelligence Committee’s televised hearings.

Jeff Sessions, then the Attorney General, announced in 2017 the cancellation of the Obama-era policy known as DACA—Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. A number of plaintiffs sued, and their case goes to the Supreme Court next week. The New Yorker’s Jonathan Blitzer spoke with two of the attorneys who will argue for it. The noted litigator Ted Olson is generally a champion of conservative issues, but he is fighting the Trump Administration on this case. He told Blitzer, “It’s a rule-of-law case—not a liberal or conversative case—involving hundreds of thousands of individuals who will be hurt by an abrupt and unexplained and unjustified change in policy.” And Blitzer also spoke with Luis Cortez, a thirty-one-year-old from Seattle who is arguing his first Supreme Court case. Cortez is an immigration lawyer who is himself an undocumented immigrant protected by DACA status; if he loses his case, he will be at risk of deportation. 

Lena Waithe is the screenwriter and creator of the Showtime series “The Chi,” about the South Side of Chicago, but she tells Jelani Cobb, “Getting your own TV show is like getting beaten to death by your own dream.” Her first script for a feature film is “Queen & Slim,” directed by Melina Matsoukas. It’s about a man and woman who are on a not-great first date, during which they unintentionally kill a police officer at a traffic stop that escalates. “I just wanted to write something about us. But unfortunately, if I’m writing about us, how can I ignore the fact that we’re being hunted?” The film arrives in the aftermath two notorious police killings of black people—Botham Jean in Dallas and Atatiana Jefferson in Fort Worth—only the latest in a long line of similar tragedies. “I do not want that kind of publicity for my film,” Waithe says. “I am like every other black person. . . . Every time these stories hit our phones, a piece of us dies, because we know that we could be next.”

This week, ten of the seventeen candidates still running for the Democratic nomination met on a debate stage in Atlanta. The setting was significant: for decades, Georgia has been seen as a Republican stronghold, but last year the Democrat Stacey Abrams very nearly won the election for governor. Democrats hope that the state will go blue in 2020. Key to any Democratic strategy in Georgia, and in other states, will be mobilizing black voters, ninety-three per cent of whom went for Abrams in 2018. Jelani Cobb joins Eric Lach to discuss the candidates’ messages on race, and how voter suppression efforts may play a role in the 2020 election.

Since 2016, Andrew Marantz has been reporting on how the extremist right has harnessed the Internet and social media to gain a startling prominence in American politics. One day, he was contacted by a woman named Samantha, who was in the leadership of the white-nationalist group Identity Evropa. (She asked to be identified only by her first name.) “When I joined, I really thought that it was just going to be a pro-white community, where we could talk to each other about being who we are, and gain confidence, and build a community,” Samantha told him. “I went in because I was insecure and it made me feel good about myself.” Samantha says she wasn’t a racist, but soon after joining the group she found herself rubbing shoulders with the neo-Nazi organizer Richard Spencer, at a party that culminated in a furious chant of “seig heil.” Marantz and the Radio Hour producer Rhiannon Corby dove into Samantha’s story to understand how and why a “normal” person abandoned her values, her friends, and her family for an ideology of racial segregation and eugenics—and then came out again. They found her to be a cautionary tale for a time when facts and truth are under daily attack. “I thought I knew it all,” she told them. “I think it's extremely naive and foolish to think that you are impervious to it. No one is impervious to this.”

Samantha appears in Andrew Marantz’s new book, “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation.” 

For decades, conservative organizations have poured time, attention, and money into state politics, and today, Republicans control the governorships and state legislatures of twenty-one states. But in recent years, grassroots progressive movements have begun to close the gap. Democrats have seen victories in formerly Republican districts in Mississippi, Virginia, North Carolina, and Maine. In two election cycles, Future Now, an organization that supports progressive candidates in state-level races, has helped flip three legislatures. Its co-founder and executive director, Daniel Squadron, joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss how progressive voters can make their voices heard on the issues they care most about.

In August, India suspended the autonomy of the state of Kashmir, putting soldiers in its streets and banning foreign journalists from entering. Dexter Filkins, who was working on a story about Narendra Modi, would not be deterred from going. To evade the ban, he sought the help of an Indian journalist, Rana Ayyub. Ayyub had once gone undercover to reveal the ruling party’s ties to sectarian and extrajudicial violence against the Muslim minority. In a conversation recorded last week, Filkins and Ayyub tell the story of how they got into Kashmir and describe the repression and signs of torture that they observed there. Ayyub’s book “Gujarat Files,” about a massacre of Muslims in Gujarat, has made her a target of Hindu nationalists; one of the book’s translators was killed not long ago. She spoke frankly with Filkins about the emotional toll of living in fear of assassination.

This week, after two months of questioning seventeen former and current State Department and White House officials, the House Intelligence Committee released its report on the impeachment inquiry into President Trump. What has the country learned with certainty about how the Administration tried to strong-arm the new President of Ukraine, and about the fictional counter-narrative being spun by the Republican Party? Susan B. Glasser joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the strengths and weaknesses in the Democrats’ case for the impeachment of the President.

The current impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump are only the fourth in American history, and William Cohen has been near the center of power for three of them. First, he was a Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee in 1974, when his vote in favor of articles of impeachment helped end the Presidency of Richard Nixon. Twenty years later, as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, he had to navigate American military policy around the Lewinsky scandal. Cohen is now a Washington power-broker, and he tells The New Yorker’s Michael Luo the story of both sagas and their relation to today’s news. During Watergate, Cohen received death threats for what was perceived as his betrayal of Nixon, and he says that his chances for a Republican leadership position were “finished.” But Cohen implores his G.O.P. successors in Congress to put Constitution above party; otherwise, “this is not going to be a democracy that will be recognizable a few years from now.”

Three weeks ago, members of a Chilean feminist collective called Las Tesis put on blindfolds and party dresses and took to the streets. The festive atmosphere put their purpose in stark relief: the song they sang was “Un Violador En Tu Camino” (“A Rapist in Your Path”). It’s a sharp indictment of the Chilean police, against whom a hundred charges of sexual violence have been lodged since the beginning of the anti-government protests in October. The lyrics also target the patriarchy in general. The song might have remained a local phenomenon, but someone put it on Twitter, and, in the span of a few days, it became the anthem of women protesting sexism and violence throughout Latin America. A few days later, the protest was replicated in Paris and Berlin, and, shortly thereafter, in Istanbul, where it was shut down by police. The New Yorker’s Camila Osorio was recently in Chile and recounts the exciting story of the creation of a global movement.

Four months ago, Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker’s longtime art critic, was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. In this week’s issue of the magazine, Schjeldahl writes a personal history about New York’s downtown art scene in the sixties, how he overcame years of abusing drugs and alcohol, what led him to art criticism, and the trick of finding beauty in cracks in the sidewalk. For the final Political Scene podcast of 2019, Schjeldahl joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss life beyond politics.

David Remnick has appeared as the guest of Terry Gross on “Fresh Air” a number of times over the years, talking about Russia, Muhammad Ali, and other subjects. Hosting “Fresh Air” for nearly forty-five years, Gross is a defining voice of NPR, and is perhaps the most celebrated interviewer of our time. In October, 2019, the tables turned, and Gross joined Remnick as his guest for a live interview at The New Yorker Festival. They spoke about how she first found her way to the microphone, the role of feminism in establishing NPR, the limits of her expertise, and what she has had to give up to prepare for serious conversations day after day.

The New Yorker’s Eric Lach is in Iowa for the month leading up to the Democratic caucuses. Next week’s debate, in Des Moines, was likely going to focus on health care and other domestic issues core to the Democratic platform, but the agenda may instead be dominated by a discussion of the Trump Administration’s killing of the Iranian general Qassem Suleimani and the United States’ fraught history of war in the Middle East. Polls show that Joe Biden is trusted on foreign-policy issues, but Lach suggests that Bernie Sanders’s history of opposing wars—and his quick and confident articulation of his position on Iran—may sway voters seeking a clear message. Nearly a year into the campaign, votes will finally be cast, and in Iowa the deciding factor may involve personal contact more than ideological positions. Iowa voters tend to say, “ ‘I’ve shaken this person’s hand, and I’ve shaken this person’s hand, and I’m going to make my decision after I’ve shaken this other person’s hand.’ That counts for a lot, I think,” Lach says.

This week, Democratic Presidential candidates met for their final debate before the Iowa caucuses, a few weeks after Trump ordered the targeted killing of the Iranian military commander Qassam Suleimani. They talked about how America’s role in the world is threatened by the President’s erratic—and, in the case of Ukraine, likely criminal—approach to foreign policy. But many voters remain skeptical that Trump can be beaten. Susan B. Glasser joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the radical uncertainties of the 2020 race.