From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
This special episode comes from “On the Media” ’s Peabody-winning series “The Divided Dial,” reported by Katie Thornton. You know A.M. and F.M. radio. But did you know that there is a whole other world of radio surrounding us at all times? It’s called shortwave—and, thanks to a quirk of science that lets broadcasters bounce radio waves off the ionosphere, it can reach thousands of miles, penetrating rough terrain and geopolitical boundaries. How did this instantaneous, global, mass communication tool—a sort of internet-before-the-internet—go from a utopian experiment in international connection to a hardened tool of information warfare and propaganda? This first episode of Season 2 of “The Divided Dial” is called “Fishing in the Night.”
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33:49
Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson on President Joe Biden’s Decline, and Its Cover-Up
Nearly a year ago, a Presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, moderated by Jake Tapper and Dana Bash of CNN, began the end of Biden’s bid for a second term. The President struggled to make points, complete sentences, and remember facts; he spoke in a raspy whisper. This was not the first time voters expressed concern about Biden’s age, but his decline was shocking to many, and suddenly Trump seemed likely to win in a landslide. New reporting by Tapper and Thompson reveals that the debate was no fluke at all. In “How Joe Biden Handed the Presidency to Donald Trump” (an excerpt from their new book “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again”), they lay out a case that the latter half of Biden’s Presidency was carefully stage-managed by his top aides; Biden would often end the workday as early as four-thirty. “What [aides and] others would say is, ‘His decision-making was always fine.’ The job of the President is not just decision-making. It’s also communication,” Tapper tells David Remnick. “If you are a President . . . and you’re not able to go into a room full of donors and speak extemporaneously for ten minutes, then there’s something wrong. And that was happening in 2023.”
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49:50
Percival Everett’s “James” Wins a Pulitzer
A year ago, Percival Everett published his twenty-fourth novel, “James,” and it became a literary phenomenon. It won the National Book Award, and, just this week, was announced as the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. “James” offers a radically different perspective on the classic Mark Twain novel “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”: Everett centers his story on the character of Jim, who is escaping slavery. The New Yorker staff writer Julian Lucas is a longtime Everett fan, and talked with the novelist just after “James” was released. “My Jim—he’s not simple,” Everett tells Julian Lucas. “The Jim that’s represented in ‘Huck Finn’ is simple.” This segment originally aired on March 22, 2024.
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20:17
Elissa Slotkin to Fellow-Democrats: “Speak in Plain English”
When Elissa Slotkin narrowly won her Senate seat in Michigan last fall, she was one of only four Democratic senators to claim victory in a state that voted for Donald Trump. It made other Democrats take note: since then, the Party has turned to her as someone who can bridge the red state–blue state divide. In March, Slotkin delivered the Democrats’ rebuttal to Trump’s speech before Congress, and she’s been making headlines for criticizing her own party’s attempts to rein in the President and the Republican Party. She thinks Democrats need to start projecting “alpha energy,” that identity politics “needs to go the way of the dodo,” and that Democrats should drop the word “oligarchy” from their vocabulary entirely.Slotkin prides herself on her bipartisanship, and she believes that Democrats must use old-school collegial collaboration in Congress. And, as different Democratic leaders have appeared on The New Yorker Radio Hour in the past few months, discussing what the next four years might have in store, Slotkin tells David Remnick about a different path forward.
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28:38
How Donald Trump Is Trying to Rewrite the Rules of Capitalism
For a long time, Republicans and many Democrats espoused some version of free-trade economics that would have been familiar to Adam Smith. But Donald Trump breaks radically with that tradition, embracing a form of protectionism that resulted in his extremely broad and chaotic tariff proposals, which tanked markets and deepened the fear of a global recession. John Cassidy writes The New Yorker’s The Financial Page column, and he’s been covering economics for the magazine since 1995. His new book, “Capitalism and Its Critics: A History,” takes a long view of these debates, and breaks down some of the arguments that have shaped the U.S.’s current economic reality. “Capitalism itself has put its worst face forward in the last twenty or thirty years through the growth of huge monopolies which seem completely beyond any public control or accountability,” Cassidy tells David Remnick. “And young people—they look at capitalism and the economy through the prism of environmentalism now in a way that they didn’t in our generation.”
Ireland