The New Yorker: Politics And More

Inside The Hive host Brian Stelter explores the fracturing of the evangelical church with Tim Alberta, an Atlantic staff writer and author of “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory.” Alberta, the son of an evangelical pastor, charts the church’s rightward trajectory and embrace of Donald Trump, who is seen as a champion in an Us vs. Them political showdown. Stelter and Alberta also discuss how a steady diet of outrage on cable news, talk radio, and social media has helped radicalize the flock. 

In 1979, as Christmas approached, the United States Embassy in Tehran held more than fifty American hostages, who had been seized when revolutionaries stormed the embassy. No one from the U.S. had been able to have contact with them. The Reverend M. William Howard, Jr., was the president of the National Council of Churches at the time, and when he received a telegram from the Revolutionary Council, inviting him to perform Christmas services for the hostages, he jumped at the opportunity. In America, “we had a public that was quite riled up,” Reverend Howard reminds his son, The New Yorker Radio Hour’s Adam Howard. “Who knows what might have resulted if this issue were not somehow addressed? . . .Might there be an American invasion, an attempt to rescue the hostages in a militaristic way?” Reverend Howard was aware that the gesture had some propaganda value to the Iranian militants, but he saw a chance to lower the tension. Accompanied by another Protestant minister and a Catholic bishop, Howard entered front-

The Washington Roundtable: For their final episode of 2023, the New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos search for a single word to encapsulate U.S. politics in 2023. It was a hard year to sum up: Donald Trump was criminally indicted four times; support for reproductive rights drove voters in elections across the country; and Republican primary hopefuls searched for solid footing in a crowded field. Glasser, Mayer, and Osnos explore the common threads in this year’s big political stories, and consider how a year full of surprises couldn’t prevent the most predictable political outcome of all: a likely Biden/Trump rematch in 2024.

In 2023, Isaac Chotiner conducted more than sixty Q&As for The New Yorker, on a wide array of international and domestic topics. He has gained a reputation for being a fearless interviewer, who does not flinch from confrontation. Chotiner joins senior editor Tyler Foggatt to look back on the year. They revisit a few conversations that stood out—about settlements in the West Bank, Henry Kissinger, and India’s economic growth—and discuss some questions Chotiner hopes to get answered in 2024. 

Growing up in Gaza, Mosab Abu Toha wasn’t used to seeing Israeli soldiers in person. “You are bombed from the sky. You are bombed by tanks. You do not see the people, the soldiers who are killing you and your family,” he tells David Remnick. Abu Toha is a poet educated in the United States, who has contributed to The New Yorker from Gaza since Israel launched its bombardment after the October 7th Hamas attack. As Abu Toha and his family tried to flee Gaza, he was stopped by Israeli forces, taken from his wife and kids, and wrongly accused of being a Hamas activist.  He describes being stripped naked and beaten in detention. “I kept saying, ‘Someone please talk to me,’ ” Abu Toha recalls. After an interrogation, he was released, but with a more pessimistic view of the possibility for peace. “In Gaza, even a child who is six or three or four years old, is no longer a child. They are not living their childhood. They are not children. They are not learning how to speak English, how to draw; they’re just learning

The Washington Roundtable: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s requests for more aid from the United States got a frosty reception from many Republicans on the Hill this week. It’s the most recent expression of the American far right’s affinity for Vladimir Putin’s project in Russia, and, more recently, for Viktor Orbán’s consolidation of power in Hungary. The New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz joins the Washington Roundtable to discuss his reporting on CPAC Hungary, where far-right political figures gathered in Budapest last year, and on why American conservatives are gravitating toward figures like Putin and Orbán. “You don’t have to be a red-string-on-a-corkboard conspiracy theorist to see the connections,” Marantz says. “In Florida, for example, Ron DeSantis’s administration has admitted when they wrote the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, they were modelling it on a previous Hungarian law, which was itself modelled on a previous Russian law. So, no one’s really entirely hiding the ball here.” Marantz joins

Last week, the U.S. Congress passed a nonbinding resolution that deemed any expression of anti-Zionism to be a form of antisemitism. This move closely follows the model set by the German government, which has created strict measures to combat antisemitism and a bureaucracy to enforce those measures. Sometimes, Jewish people are found to be in violation. In both Germany and the United States, many politicians championing similar protections are members of the right wing, some of whom are also known white supremacists. Masha Gessen, a New Yorker staff writer, recently wrote an essay about the politics of memory in Europe and the widespread insistence that the Holocaust is a singular event unlike any other. Gessen joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss how the stories we tell about history can prevent us from understanding the conditions that give rise to atrocities. “The thing is, if something is unimaginable, then anything that happens in the present, which is by definition imaginable, is not like it,” Gessen says. “A

Liz Cheney has been Republican royalty, and a conservative stalwart in Washington—a daughter of former Vice-President Dick Cheney and culture warrior Lynne Cheney. But after protesting Donald Trump’s election lies, and voting for his impeachment after January 6th, she found herself in exile from the G.O.P. Cheney is contemplating a Presidential campaign on a third-party line.  As she promotes her new book, “Oath and Honor,” she is raising the alarm that Americans across the political spectrum have become “numb” to Trump’s overtly dictatorial aspirations. “People really understood that what he had done [on January 6th] was unacceptable, not to mention unconstitutional and illegal,” she tells David Remnick. “That recognition quickly dwindled.” She finds herself frustrated with former allies on the right who have become shameless enablers of Trump; she does not trust Speaker Mike Johnson, a former friend, to perform his constitutional duties during the electoral process. She is also concerned that the left is sq

The Washington Roundtable: Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced his resignation from Congress this week, not long after a coup by several of his Republican colleagues cost him the leadership. The lawmaker who had temporarily filled the Speaker position—Representative Patrick McHenry of North Carolina—also announced his departure from the lower chamber. But it’s not just former House Speakers who are leaving their positions. Dozens of members of the 118th Congress are not running for reëlection. Some are leaving to run for higher office, others are retiring, yet others have simply had enough—and one, Representative George Santos, was expelled. Former Representative Jim Cooper, Democrat of Tennessee, joins the New Yorker staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos on this week’s episode to analyze this phenomenon. “It’s really become a clown show, and elections are like clown swapping,” he tells them. “I don’t think there is a Republican Party anymore, and, if there is one, it’s ungovernable b

Donald Trump may be the first former President to be indicted for a crime, but he is not the first to lead an insurrection and then attempt to dodge the consequences. More than a hundred and fifty years ago, the U.S. government set out to try Jefferson Davis, the former President of the Confederacy, for treason. Those efforts failed. In this week’s New Yorker, Jill Lepore, a staff writer at the magazine and a historian at Harvard, writes an essay about the lasting consequences of that failure. There are many parallels between our current moment and the post-Civil War reunification era: the thorniness of prosecuting politicians, the fear of inciting more political violence, and questions about how best to move a bitterly divided country forward. Lepore joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the historical lessons of Jefferson Davis and the legal efforts to kick Trump off the ballot using the disqualification clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.