The New Yorker Radio Hour

For democracy to function, we have to trust and accept the results of elections. But that trust is increasingly difficult to maintain in a world where malicious actors like the G.R.U., the Russian intelligence agency, have been actively probing our election systems for technological vulnerabilities. Sue Halpern, who reports on election security, spoke with the researcher Logan Lamb, who found a massive amount of information from the Georgia election system sitting unsecured on the Internet. The information included election officials’ passwords and the names and addresses of voters, and Lamb made the discovery during the time that (according to the Mueller investigation) Russian hackers were probing the system. Georgia is one of a number of states that do not use any paper backup for their balloting, so suspected hacking of voting machines or vote tabulators can be nearly impossible to prove. On top of this, new restrictive voting laws purge voters who, for instance, haven’t voted in the last few elections, so hackers can disenfranchise voters by deleting or changing information in the databases—without tampering with the tallied votes. Susan Greenhalgh of the National Election Defense Coalition tells Halpern that while some states are inclined to resist federal assistance in their election operations, they are poorly equipped to fight cyber-battles on their own. Plus, the story of explorer Henry Worsley, who set out at fifty-five ski to ski alone across Antarctica, hauling more than three hundred pounds of gear and posting an audio diary by satellite phone. New Yorker staff writer David Grann spoke with Worsley’s widow, Joanna, about the painful choice she made to support her husband in an endeavor that seemed fatal.   New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is part two of a two-part series. Part one can be heard here.   On the day that Maggie Robinson Katz learned that her father had only a few days to live, she also found out that her wealthy family couldn’t pay his hospital bills. Her father, Terry Robinson, had lost much of his money in the real-estate crash and the rest in a business relationship, of sorts, with a man named Jim Stuckey. A West Virginian based in Manila, Stuckey claimed that hidden in jungles and caves in the Philippines were huge caches of gold bullion, uncut U.S. currency, and Treasury bonds; if Robinson put up the money to pay the right people, Stuckey could get the treasures out. It seemed absurd to people around Robinson, and the Treasury Department warns of scams that sound just like this. But Robinson, a successful retired executive, sent Stuckey hundreds of thousands of dollars, until he was broke. His daughter Maggie struggles to understand why and how, and finally goes to Manila to confront the man who took the money.   New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

After the election of Donald Trump, the feminist journalist Rebecca Traister began channeling her anger into a book. The result, “Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger” combines an analysis of how women’s anger is discouraged and deflected in patriarchal society, with a historical look at times when that anger has had political impact. Landing a year into the #MeToo movement, it could not be more timely; an unprecedented number of women have spoken bluntly about their experiences with sexual harassment and abuse and demanded consequences. Yet Traister told David Remnick that she sympathizes with men “caught in the middle” of #MeToo, “who entered the world with one set of expectations . . . and are being told halfway through that [their behavior is] no longer acceptable.” But, Traister says, “There’s no other way to do it. We don’t get to just start fresh with a generation starting now.”   New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

Joan Jett cut a massive figure in rock and roll, starting in the nineteen-seventies and continuing with a string of hits including “I Love Rock and Roll,” “Bad Reputation,” “Crimson and Clover,” and others. Jett was kind of glam, kind of punk, and eventually just classic rock. But she was one of the first women of any style or genre to break through as a leader: she hired the band, played the guitar, wrote the songs, and sang them. She came to influence a whole generation of female rockers who wanted to be as fully empowered as she was—not to mention fans like The New Yorker’s Sarah Larson. Larson spoke with Jett on the occasion of a new documentary, “Joan Jett: Bad Reputation.” Plus, Donald Trump says trade wars are “easy to win.” Will they help the Democrats win the midterms? New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

On the day that Maggie Robinson Katz learned that her father had only a few days to live, she also found out that her wealthy family couldn’t pay his hospital bills: his fortune had disappeared. Katz didn’t learn how until several years later, when she began listening to a box of cassette tapes given to her by her stepmother. The tapes record her father, Terry Robinson, speaking on the phone with a man named Jim Stuckey, a West Virginian based in Manila, about a kind of business proposition. Hidden in jungles and caves in the Philippines, Stuckey said, were huge caches of gold bullion, uncut U.S. currency, and Treasury bonds; if Robinson put up the money to pay the right people, Stuckey could get the treasures out. It seemed absurd to people around Robinson, and the Treasury Department warns of scams that sound just like this. But Robinson, a successful retired executive, fell for it hook, line, and sinker. His daughter Maggie struggles to understand why and how, talking with The New Yorker’s Maria Konnikova and others.   This is part one of a two-part series.     New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

After a thirty-year lobbying effort, Congress designated the Pacific Northwest National Scenic Trail in 2009. Unlike the well-known Appalachian Trail and Pacific Crest Trail, the P.N.T. runs east-west, trekking twelve hundred miles across multiple mountain ranges and pristine wilderness to connect the Continental Divide with the Pacific Ocean. For hiking advocates, it’ provides a singular opportunity to commune with the unspoiled natural world. For critics, like the writer Rick Bass, the P.N.T. is a reckless intrusion of dangerous creatures—people—into an ecologically sensitive grizzly-bear habitat in the Yaak Valley of Montana. Grizzlies are often the losers in encounters with humans, and their population in the Yaak Valley is estimated to be twenty-five bears, or even fewer. For the trail’s chief advocate, Ron Strickland, the critics’ point of view is mere selfishness: if Bass himself can live in the Yaak Valley, writing about the glory of this extraordinary landscape, why shouldn’t others have the chance to walk through? The producer Scott Carrier, who reported on this conflict from Montana, sees a tragic dimension to it: when it comes to nature, we seem fated to kill that which we love.   New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

Lisa Brennan-Jobs’s memoir, “Small Fry,” shares a common theme with many memoirs: the absent parent and the mark left by that absence in the adult writer. But the parent, in this case, is a figure who has also left his mark on the larger world. While Steve Jobs was becoming a titan of Silicon Valley and changed the future of computing, his daughter Lisa and her mother were living near the poverty line, struggling to get by. At first, Jobs avoided his responsibilities to them by denying his paternity. But even after he established a relationship with his daughter, his behavior was capricious and sometimes cruel. Yet Brennan-Jobs insists that she didn’t set out to write an exposé; rather, she wanted to tell a more universal story of a young woman finding her place in the world. “Small Fry,” in other words, is about Lisa, not Steve. “I knew I was writing a coming-of-age story about a girl,” she tells David Remnick, “but that it was going to be twisted into the story of a famous man.” Plus, the historian Jill Lepore on her new book that she says is the result of a dare: “These Truths,” a monumentally ambitious account of five-hundred-plus years of American history. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

Before she published “Silent Spring,” one of the most influential books of the last century, Rachel Carson was a young aspiring poet and then a doctoral candidate in marine biology. Although she couldn’t swim and disliked boats, says historian Jill Lepore, Carson fell in love with the ocean. Gazing into tide pools, she pioneered a new kind of nature writing.  Plus: David Attenborough, the reigning master of the nature documentary, shares lessons from a life spent observing life in every corner of the world; and the cartoonist Julia Wertz, who loves the obscure nooks, crannies, and histories of New York, takes us garbage picking on a neglected bit of shoreline where the trash of decades past keeps washing ashore.    New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

The day after The New Yorker published Ronan Farrow’s exposé about Harvey Weinstein, Farrow got a phone call from the actress and screenwriter Illeana Douglas. She wanted to talk about Leslie Moonves, who was then the head of CBS and one of the most powerful men in the media industry. Douglas went on the record in a story by Farrow, describing an assault by Moonves in the nineteen-nineties and the repercussions to her career after she refused him. “I got warnings about the casting couch, but I didn’t perceive this as the casting couch,” Douglas tells David Remnick.  Moonves “was a man who I admired, and respected, and who had gained my trust. And now he was on top of me.” On September 9th, The New Yorker published a follow-up story by Farrow, describing new accusations. Three hours later, Moonves stepped down from his position at CBS. He has not, however, admitted any wrongdoing and has denied engaging in any non-consensual sex or any form of retaliation. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

Kwame Anthony Appiah is one of leading thinkers on identity. A professor of philosophy and law at New York University, Appiah also writes the New York Times Magazine’s Ethicist column, answering readers’ questions on a wide range of common but thorny problems of modern life. He came to his interest in identity early, as his parents—an Englishwoman from a politically prominent family and an anti-colonial agitator descended from Ghanaian royalty—became notorious in Britain for their interracial marriage. While his own identity may be seen as complicated, he thinks that each of our identities is also more complicated than our current way of thinking allows us to acknowledge. In his new book, “The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity,” Appiah takes a position that is somewhat contrary to the identity politics of the left. He tells David Remnick that a focus on individual identities—whether addressed through race, gender, culture, or country—can work against human solidarity, and sometimes get in the way of solving our problems. “I’m a creature of the Enlightenment,” he says.   New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.