The New Yorker Celebrates a Hundred Years as a Poetry and Fiction Tastemaker
David Remnick talks with The New Yorker’s literary guiding lights: the fiction editor Deborah Treisman and the poetry editor Kevin Young. Treisman edited “A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker,” and Young edited “A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker,” both of which were published this month. “When you asked me to do this,” Young remarks to David Remnick, “I think my first response was, I’ve only wanted to do this since I was fifteen. . . . It was kind of a dream come true.” Treisman talks about the way that stories age, and the difficulty of selecting stories. “The thing to remember is that even geniuses don’t always write their best work right right off the bat. People make a lot of noise about rejection letters from The New Yorker that went to famous writers, or later-famous writers. And they were probably justified, those rejections.”
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Bill Gates on His New Memoir and Dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago
In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, Bill Gates was the best known of a new breed: the tech mogul—a coder who had figured out how to run a business, and who then seemed to be running the world. Gates was ranked the richest person in the world for many years. In a new memoir, “Source Code,” he explains how he got there. The book focusses on Gates’s early life, and just through the founding of Microsoft. Since stepping away from the company, Gates has devoted himself to his foundation, which is one of the largest nonprofits working on public health around the globe. That has made him the target of conspiracy theories by anti-vaxxers, including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has asserted that Gates and Anthony Fauci are together responsible for millions of deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gates views the rise of conspiracy thinking as symptomatic of larger trends in American society exacerbated by technology. “The fact that outrage is rewarded because it’s more engaging, that’s kind of a human weakness,” he tells David Remnick. “And the fact that I thought everybody would be doing deep analysis of facts and seeking out the actual studies on vaccine safety—boy, was that naïve. When the pandemic came, people wanted some evil genius to be behind it. Not some bat biology.”
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Returning to a Home Consumed by the Wildfires
The staff writer Dana Goodyear has reported on California extensively: the entertainment industry; a deadly crime spree in Malibu; Kamala Harris’s rise in politics; and the ever more fragile environment. She covered the destructive Woolsey Fire, in Los Angeles, in 2018. Recently, Goodyear found her own life very much in the center of the story. Living in Pacific Palisades, she had to evacuate early this month, and she documented her return days later to a scene of devastation in this audio story. “The house just is an idea of a house, or the aftermath of a house,” she said. “You can walk through the arched door at the front and the back, but there’s just pretty much nothing in between.”
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How “Saturday Night Live” Reinvented Television, Fifty Years Ago
“Saturday Night Live” turns fifty this year. Profiling its executive producer, Lorne Michaels, the New Yorker editor Susan Morrison sheds light on one of the most important people in show business. Morrison spent years talking to Michaels for her new book, “Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live,” and she includes recordings of those interviews in a conversation with David Remnick. “Lorne was a real student of what I call sort of the hinges between eras,” Morrison says. To keep the show current, Michaels “paid attention to replenishing the casts in a sort of seamless way, so that it would never seem like an old guy trying to do an entertainment for young people.” Plus, one of the show’s most notable alumni, Tina Fey—rumored to be a possible successor to Michaels, who is now eighty—reads an excerpt from the magazine’s review of the show’s first season, back in 1975.
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The Political Scene: Big Money and Trump’s New Cabinet
The Washington Roundtable—with the staff writers Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos—discusses this week’s confirmation hearings for Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense and Pam Bondi as Attorney General, and the potential for a “shock and awe” campaign in the first days of Donald Trump’s second term. Plus, as billionaires from many industries gather around the dais on Inauguration Day, what should we make of President Biden’s warning, in the waning days of his Administration, about “an oligarchy taking shape in America”?This segment was originally published January 17, 2025, in The New Yorker’s Political Scene podcast.
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