The New Yorker Radio Hour

In “Slut: The Play,” Katie Cappiello captures the trauma of sexual assault, based on the stories of teen-agers in her theatre company. (Hilton Als wrote about the play for the magazine.) A member of the cast, Mary Miller, tells David Remnick that the play inspired her to tell her own story for the first time outside a therapist’s office. Cappiello, the artistic director of the Arts Effect NYC, asks, “Who better to speak this truth than those who face it day in and day out?” In a conversation with Remnick, she explains what she’s learned from working with teen-age boys on a play about sexual aggression and violence. Also, Ian Frazier visits the farm of the future, in an industrial building in New Jersey; Siri has some special instructions for when you’ve had a few too many to navigate safely. These segments originally aired on March 4, 2016, and January 13, 2017.     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.

When OxyContin came on the market, in 1995, physicians were understandably wary of the addictive potential of a powerful new opioid. As Patrick Radden Keefe reports, the manufacturer, Purdue Pharma, aggressively marketed OxyContin to physicians, claiming that the drug’s delayed-release mechanism could limit the risk of addiction. Instead, OxyContin led to many new addictions, and many addicted patients eventually sought street drugs like heroin. Steven May started at Purdue Pharma as a sales rep in 1999, and years later went on to allege fraud against Purdue as a participant in a whistle-blower lawsuit (which was dismissed on procedural grounds). May tells Keefe that he was trained to market the drug as one “to start with and to stay with,” despite seeing early on its addictive potential. Purdue Pharma is a privately held company controlled by members of the Sackler family, who have a net worth of thirteen billion dollars. The Sacklers have donated handsomely to cancer research, medical schools, art museums, and universities. But Keefe tells David Remnick that the Sacklers have donated “nothing for the opioid crisis. Nothing for addiction treatment. If there is any sense in that family that they bear any moral culpability for where we are today, they’re not acting on it.” 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 British writer, activist, and rapper Riz Ahmed has had a very public life since leaving drama school to star in “The Road to Guantánamo.” He won an Emmy for playing the lead in “The Night Of,” appeared in the Star Wars film “Rogue One,” and played Hannah Horvath’s baby daddy on “Girls.” He has continued his music career as Riz MC and was featured on the song “Immigrants (We Get the Job Done)” from “The Hamilton Mixtape.” Riz has been an outspoken activist for immigrants in the U.S. and Britain, and, at this year’s New Yorker Festival, he spoke to Alexis Okeowo about how his past has shaped who he is and steered his career choices. Ahmed’s work is often political, but he resents the category of political art, which he sees as a way to marginalize viewpoints that the mainstream views with suspicion.   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.

In 2010, the Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, then known as Bradley Manning, sent nearly seven hundred and fifty thousand classified military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks. The leak earned Manning a thirty-five-year prison sentence, which was commuted by President Obama to seven years. Less than five months out of prison, she sat down with The New Yorker’s Larissa MacFarquhar at the 2017 New Yorker Festival. Manning discussed her tumultuous upbringing, including her months living as a homeless teen in Chicago; her highly public gender transition; and her treatment in military prison. She also described the quick decision that led her to send the documents to WikiLeaks. Having seen “All the President’s Men,” Manning had originally intended to send the documents to the Washington Post or The New York Times, but, at the time, she said, the newspapers struggled to provide her with the security protocols she insisted on. Only WikiLeaks offered the necessary level of security, and she took the chance. “I was running out of time,” she told MacFarquhar. “They just had the tools available, they knew how to use them. That’s all it boiled down to. I had to go back to Iraq.” Though the trial is behind her, Manning maintains a fierce conviction that her leak posed no threat to U.S. soldiers or local sources in Iraq or Afghanistan, a fact disputed by the government and many N.G.O.s disputed by many, including leading human-rights groups. Her disclosures profoundly embarrassed the government, made WikiLeaks a household name, and, by some accounts, served as a catalyst for the Arab Spring. But Manning hopes to be done with the leaks, and to spend the next phase of her life as an advocate for trans people. 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 death last month of Hugh Hefner reopened a conversation about the “Playboy” founder and the world he created. Hefner said that his magazine’s pictures of naked or near-naked women were an empowering blow against puritanism; his critics argued that they normalized the degradation of women. Janice Moses was just nineteen and in desperate need of a job when she started in the magazine’s photo department, eventually rising to become a photo editor. Empowered as a professional woman, she became increasingly uncomfortable with the content, especially as “Playboy” began competing with more explicit rivals such as “Hustler.” After Hefner died, Janice’s daughter, Michele Moses—a member of the The New Yorker’s editorial staff—had a few questions about her mother’s years making centerfolds. Also: The New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb talks with Bill Rhoden, a writer-at-large for ESPN’s “Undefeated,” about the fifty-year history of black athletes embracing politics on the field. Is it time, they ask, to retire “The Star-Spangled Banner” from football?   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.

Annie Clark, known as St. Vincent, launched her career as a guitar virtuoso—a real shredder—in indie rock, playing alongside artists like Sufjan Stevens. As a bandleader, she’s moved away from the explosive solos, telling David Remnick, “There’s a certain amount of guitar playing that is about pride, that isn’t about the song. . . . I’m not that interested in guitar being a means of poorly covered-up pride.” Her songs are dense, challenging, and not always easy, but catchy and seductive. Remnick caught up with Clark before the launch of her new album, “MASSEDUCTION.”  They talked about the clarity of purpose she needed in order to “clear a path” to write the “glamorously sad songs” she’s become known for. 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.

Patricia Marx is a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, and Roz Chast is a celebrated cartoonist. Chast’s book “Can’t We Please Talk About Something More Pleasant,” about dealing with her aging parents, was a best-seller in 2014, winning awards that don’t usually go to books of cartoons. But something you don’t know about Chast and Marx is that they played in a band. As the Daily Pukeleles, they claim, they influenced some of the biggest names in music in the sixties and beyond. But they were always a little too far ahead of the curve for the mainstream. For the first time ever, Patricia Marx and Roz Chast tell their story. Plus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jennifer Egan talks with David Remnick about cops and mobsters, and the torture of writing a novel.     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 Trump SoHo was supposed to be a splash for the Trump Organization and for Ivanka and Donald Trump, Jr., who were leading the project. Instead, they were stuck trying to market very small units to buyers as the financial crisis hit. That they lied in selling the building isn’t in question, and the Manhattan District Attorney's office began investigating; but, after a meeting between the D.A. and  Marc Kasowitz, a Trump lawyer, the government never filed charges. What happened? Andrea Bernstein, of WNYC, and the Pulitzer Prize-winner Jesse Eisinger, of ProPublica, jointly reported on the Trump SoHo; they spoke to The New Yorker’s Adam Davidson, who has reported extensively on the Trump Organization. Plus, the staff writer Doreen St. Félix tells David Remnick why Cardi B, the first female rapper since Lauryn Hill to hit the Billboard No. 1—is shaking up the music industry. 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.

A crime reporter and a business writer try to figure out how the government can charge a bank a sixteen-billion-dollar fine for wrongdoing yet fail to prosecute any individual at that bank for a crime. Plus, a long walk with Karl Ove Knausgaard. Knausgaard’s monumental autobiographical novel in six volumes, “My Struggle,” describes the events of his life in immense detail over thousands of pages—a most unlikely literary hit. His new project is only a bit less ambitious. It’s a four-part series named after the seasons, one book per season, which he wrote for his daughter while awaiting her birth. Each book consists of dozens of short essays, reflections on the most common things, tangible and intangible. The first book in the series, “Autumn,” was just published in the U.S. When Karl Ove Knausgaard was in New York recently, he met up with The New Yorker’s Joshua Rothman, and they covered all the basics: near-death experiences, raising kids, puberty, brain surgery, and turtles. 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.

David Simon believes in the dignity of labor, “even when it’s undignified.” What “The Wire” (which he created) did for the drug trade in Baltimore, “The Deuce,” also on HBO, does for sex work and the beginnings of the pornography industry in New York, in the seventies. Critics have compared Simon not so much to other television showrunners as to novelists like Dickens; Simon’s work is similarly wide in scope, with large casts, and aims to create a picture of a whole world. At bottom, he wants to follow the money from the street to the bosses to the politicians. But while Simon is sympathetic to the sex workers he depicts in “The Deuce,” and even to some of the pimps and mobsters who exploit them, he is unambiguously critical of porn’s effect on America. He tells David Remnick that porn—universally available on the Internet in its most extreme forms—has warped a whole culture toward misogyny. Plus, Ellie Kemper as a character with pathological delusions of gracefulness; and the rapper Wiki grows up. 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.