The New Yorker Radio Hour

As Donald Trump and his Administration threaten to attack Iran, their motivations remain unclear. Does the President want to force Iran to make a nuclear deal, to replace the one that he scrapped in his first term, or is he really seeking regime change? To understand how this all might play out, David Remnick speaks with Karim Sadjadpour, a policy analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who writes about the Middle East for Foreign Affairs and other publications. Citing the disastrous precedents in Afghanistan and Iraq, Sadjadpour notes, “the last two decades has proven that we don’t have the ability to dictate . . . who comes to power the day after a military attack.”

Plus, After protests over the economy erupted across Iran late last year, reports emerged that the regime was killing protesters. Donald Trump threatened to intervene, but did not. Estimates vary widely, but some note that thirty thousand people or more may have been killed. Now, as the U.S. sends a huge military force to the Gulf, Iranians are waiting for war—and many in the country are in the shocking position of hoping for conflict, if it will end the Ayatollah’s government. The reporter Cora Engelbrecht has been recording her conversations with sources on the ground about what that could mean. Their voices were altered or overdubbed for our story, to protect them from reprisal.

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs have had a major impact in their short time on the market—currently, one in eight Americans say that they have been on GLP-1 drugs. As tens of millions of people take these medications, anecdotal evidence has emerged that they have a positive effect on alcohol abuse and drug addiction. Researchers are starting to run trials of the drugs for these purposes, and some speculate that GLP-1 drugs could even affect addiction behaviors such as gambling and online shopping. The physician and New Yorker medical correspondent Dhruv Khullar spoke with scientists and patients. “Over the course of my reporting,” he tells David Remnick, “I became more and more bullish on the idea that these are actually going to be really important molecules for the treatment of addiction.”

Dhruv Khullar’s “Can Ozempic Cure Addiction?” was published on February 9th.

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

Hosting the Academy Awards ceremony is a notoriously tricky gig, but Conan O’Brien nailed it in 2025, and he will return for this year’s event. Since leaving late-night television, in 2021, O’Brien has been busy: his hit podcast “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” commands perhaps a larger audience than he had on late night; he launched the travel series “Conan O’Brien Must Go”; and he’s played a therapist in the 2025 film “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You.” O’Brien talks with David Remnick about the things that have gone wrong at the Oscars; why he won’t get too “sentimental” about the gradual collapse of late night; and his shock at the deaths of Rob and Michele Reiner, who had been at O’Brien’s house on the night they were killed. 

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

Every year, ahead of Oscar night, the film critic Richard Brody joins the New Yorker Radio Hour to discuss his picks for the year’s best films. David Remnick sits down with Brody and the staff writer Alexandra Schwartz to discuss the movies that didn’t get enough credit, the ones that got too much, and the lesser-known gems among the year’s releases.
New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

In January, the Justice Department released over three million documents, including many redacted e-mails, related to Jeffrey Epstein. “Should we share the Julie Brown text with Alan [Dershowitz],” Epstein wrote in one note to a lawyer. “She is going to start trouble. Asking for victims etc.” Brown’s reporting on Epstein for the Miami Herald, and her revelations about the federal plea deal he received, had an enormous impact on public perception of Epstein and his ties to Trump. Brown joins David Remnick to discuss the latest tranche of redacted e-mails, which show, as she reported, that Trump knew about his friend’s crimes far earlier than he has admitted. Brown and Remnick also talk about Epstein’s relationship with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and why she does not believe that Epstein died by suicide. 
New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.