Representative Ro Khanna of California is in the Democrats’ Congressional Progressive Caucus. And although his district is in the heart of Silicon Valley—and he once worked as a lawyer for tech companies—Khanna is focussed on how Democrats can regain the trust of working-class voters. He knows tech moguls, he talks with them regularly, and he thinks that they are forming a dangerous oligarchy, to the detriment of everyone else. “This is more dangerous than petty corruption. This is more dangerous than, ‘Hey, they just want to maximize their corporation's wealth,’ ”he tells David Remnick. “This is an ideology amongst some that rejects the role of the state.” Although he’s an ally of Bernie Sanders, such as advocating for Medicare for All and free public college, Khanna is not a democratic socialist. He calls himself a progressive capitalist. Real economic growth, he says, requires “a belief in entrepreneurship and technology and in business leaders being part of the solution.”

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has shown himself uniquely skilled at attracting attention beyond the borders of his home state.  Just this month, DeSantis blocked state funds for the Tampa Bay Rays stadium after players voiced support for gun control in the wake of the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas.  He’s also continuing a fight to punish the Disney Corporation for criticizing Florida’s so-called Don’t Say Gay law.  An Ivy League-educated anti-élitist firebrand, he is willing to pick a fight with anyone—reporters, health officials, teachers, Mickey Mouse—to grab a headline. DeSantis “practically radiates ambition,” the staff writer Dexter Filkins tells David Remnick. “He sounds like Trump, except that he speaks in complete sentences. … He’s very good at staking out a position and pounding the table and saying, I’m not giving in to the liberals in the Northeast.” Yet despite having been anointed by Donald Trump in his primary election, DeSantis has refused to “kiss the ring,” and many see DeSantis as a possible opponent to Trump in a 2024 Republican primary.

Michael R. Jackson’s Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical “A Strange Loop” features a Black queer writer named Usher, who works as an usher, struggling to write a musical about a Black queer writer. Jackson’s work tackles the terror of the blank page alongside the terrors of the dating scene, and it speaks in frank and heartbreaking terms about Usher’s attempt to navigate gay life among Black and white partners. Hilton Als talked with Jackson about how he found inspiration in his own experience seeking identity and community. “I started writing the original monologue—building a sort of life raft for myself—to understand myself,” Jackson said. “It wasn’t until I got to a place of understanding that in my life I was caught up in a loop of self-hatred, that I could see what Usher’s problem was, and therefore what the structure of the piece was that would lead him out of that and into a better place.”

“A Strange Loop” is playing now at the Lyceum Theatre, on Broadway.

Ian Frazier, who has chronicled American life for The New Yorker for more than forty years, travelled to a house in Fort Collins, Colorado, where three roommates build, fly, and race drones. Jordan Temkin, Zachry Thayer, and Travis McIntyre were among the early professional drone racers in the sport, piloting the tiny devices through complex courses at upward of eighty miles an hour. Drones have had an enormous impact on military strategy, and the commercial applications seem limitless, but to these pilots drones exist in the strange overlap between pure adrenaline and big money that defines pro sports.

This piece originally aired on February 9, 2018.

Sara Bareilles broke out as a pop-music star in the late two-thousands. But she’s gone on to have a very different kind of career, writing music for Broadway and eventually performing as an actor on stage and on television. At the New Yorker Festival, in 2024, she played her early hit “Gravity,” and spoke with staff writer Rachel Syme about the pressures of fame, aging, and why she prefers working in theatre. “There’s so much competition in the music industry. I’m not a competitive person; I don’t understand it. It’s not that theatre isn’t competitive, but there’s this feeling—everybody’s so happy to be there. Like, ‘We got a show, guys, and we don’t know how long it’s going to last!’ ”

Rachel Aviv reports on the terrible conundrum of Alice Munro for The New Yorker. Munro was a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and perhaps the most acclaimed writer of short stories of our time, but her legacy darkened after her death when her youngest daughter, Andrea Skinner, revealed that Munro’s partner had sexually abused her beginning when she was nine years old. The crime was known in the family, but even after a criminal conviction of Gerald Fremlin, Munro stood by him, at the expense of her relationship with Skinner. In her piece, Aviv explores how, and why, a writer of such astonishing powers of empathy could betray her own child, and discusses the ways that Munro touched on this family trauma in fiction. “Her writing makes you think about art at what expense,” she tells David Remnick. “That’s probably a question that is relevant for many artists, but Alice Munro makes it visible on the page. It felt so literal—like trading your daughter for art.”

Introducing Julianne Moore at the New Yorker Festival, in October, the staff writer Michael Schulman recited “only a partial list” of the directors Moore has worked with, including Robert Altman, Louis Malle, Todd Haynes, Paul Thomas Anderson, Lisa Cholodenko, Steven Spielberg, the Coen brothers, and many more legends. It seems almost obvious that Moore co-stars (alongside Tilda Swinton) in Pedro Almodóvar’s first feature in English, “The Room Next Door,” which comes out in December. Moore has a particular knack with unremarkable characters. “I don't know that I seek out things in the domestic space, but I do think I’m really drawn to ordinary lives,” she tells Schulman. “I’ve never been, like, I’m going to play an astronaut next. . . . A lot of these stories [are] domestic stories—well, that’s the biggest story of our lives, right? How do we live? Who do we love? . . . Those are the things that we all know about.”

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

With the Food Network program “Barefoot Contessa,” Ina Garten became a beloved household name. An essential element of her success is her confiding, authentic warmth—her encouragement for even the most novice home cook. Garten is “the real deal,” in the opinion of David Remnick, who has known her and her husband for many years. Although she is a gregarious teacher and presence on television, Garten prefers to do her actual cooking alone. “Cooking’s hard for me. I mean, I do it a lot, but it’s really hard and I just love having the space to concentrate on what I’m doing, so I make sure it comes out well,” she says. Garten joins Remnick to reflect on her early days in the kitchen, and to answer listener questions about holiday meals and more. Her latest book is “Be Ready When the Luck Happens,” a memoir.

This segment originally aired on December 16, 2022.

Plus, Alex Barasch picks three of the best erotic thrillers after being inspired to study the genre by his recent Profile of the director of the new film, “Babygirl.”