The New Yorker Radio Hour

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Carrie Brownstein on Cat Power. Plus, “Materialists,” “Too Much,” and the Modern Rom-Com.
For The New Yorker’s series Takes, Carrie Brownstein—the co-creator of Sleater-Kinney and “Portlandia”—writes about an iconic rock-and-roll image. In the summer of 2003, the musician Chan Marshall, better known as Cat Power, was transitioning from an indie darling to a major rock artist, and the staff writer Hilton Als wrote a Profile of her in The New Yorker. Facing his piece was a full-page portrait of Marshall by the celebrated photographer Richard Avedon that puts her in the lineage of rock rebels of generations past. With a long ash dangling from her cigarette, a Bob Dylan T-shirt, and her jeans half unzipped, Cat Power “maybe doesn't give a shit about being in The New Yorker,” Brownstein thinks, “which I can't say is usually the vibe.” Avedon’s image reminds Brownstein “to keep remembering … to keep going back to that place that feels sacred and special and uncynical.” Carrie Brownstein’s Take on Richard Avedon’s portrait of Cat Power appeared in the April 20, 2025, issue. Plus, audiences have been bemoaning the death of the romantic comedy for years, but the genre persists—albeit often in a different form from the screwballs of the nineteen-forties or the “chick flicks” of the eighties and nineties. On this episode from the Critics at Large podcast, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss their all-time favorite rom-coms and two new projects marketed as contemporary successors to the greats: Celine Song’s “Materialists” and Lena Dunham’s “Too Much.”
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Janet Yellen on the Danger of a “Banana Republic” Economy. Plus, Susan B. Glasser on Why “We Are the Boiled Frog.”
In conservative economics, cuts to social services are often seen as necessary to shrink the expanding deficit. Donald Trump’s budget bill is something altogether different: it cuts Medicaid while slashing tax rates for the wealthiest Americans, adding $6 trillion to the national debt, according to the Cato Institute. Janet Yellen, a former Treasury Secretary and former chair of the Federal Reserve, sees severe impacts in store for average Americans: “What this is going to do is to raise interest rates even more. And so housing will become less affordable, car loans less affordable,” she tells David Remnick. “This bill also contains changes that raise the burdens of anyone who has already taken on student debt. And with higher interest rates, further education—college [and] professional school—becomes less affordable. It may also curtail investment spending, which has a negative impact on growth.” This, she believes, is why the President is desperate to lower interest rates; he has spoken of firing his appointed chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, whom he has called a “numbskull” and a “stupid person,” and installing a more compliant chair. But lowering interest rates to further political goals, Yellen says, “are the words one expects from the head of a banana republic that is about to start printing money to fund fiscal deficits. … And then you get very high inflation or hyperinflation.”Plus, “rarely have so many members of Congress voted for a measure they so actively disliked,” Susan B. Glasser noted in her latest column in The New Yorker, after the passage of a deficit-exploding Republican budget. Millions of people will lose access to Medicaid—a fact that the President lies about directly—and many trillions of dollars will be added to the deficit. Interest payments on the federal debt will skyrocket, and Trump is so desperate for lower interest rates that he seems poised to fire his own chair of the Federal Reserve and install a compliant partisan to head the heretofore independent central bank. “Anybody panicking about that in Washington?” David Remnick asks Glasser. “I think we are the boiled frog,” she replies. “We are almost panic-immune at this point, in the same way that Donald Trump has, I think, inoculated much of America against facts in our political debate. Even inside of Washington, there's so many individual crises at one time it’s very very hard in Trump 2.0 to focus on any one of them.”
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Kalief Browder: A Decade Later
Kalief Browder was jailed at Rikers Island at the age of sixteen; he spent three years locked up without ever being convicted of a crime, and much of that time was spent in solitary confinement. In 2014, the New Yorker staff writer Jennifer Gonnerman wrote about Browder and the failings of the criminal-justice system that his case exposed: unconscionable delays in the courts, excessive use of solitary confinement, teen-agers being charged for crimes as adults, brutality on the part of correction officers. Ten years ago, on June 6, 2015, Browder died by suicide. On The New Yorker Radio Hour, Gonnerman shares excerpts from the interviews she recorded with Browder, in which he described the psychological toll of spending years in a twelve-by-seven cell.This segment originally aired on June 3, 2016.
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U2’s Bono on the Power of Music
In 2022, The New Yorker published a personal history about growing up in Ireland during the nineteen-sixties and seventies. It covers the interfaith marriage of the author’s parents, which was unusual in Dublin; his mother’s early death; and finding his calling in music. The author was Bono, for more than forty years the lyricist and lead singer of one of the biggest rock bands on the planet. As U2 sold out arenas and stadiums, Bono held forth on a range of social causes; he became “the definitive rock star of the modern era,” as Kelefa Sanneh puts it. Bono joined David Remnick at the 2022 New Yorker Festival to talk about his new memoir, “Surrender.” “When I sang in U2, something got a hold of me,” Bono said. “And it made sense of me.” They discussed how the band almost ended because of the members’ religious faith, and how they navigated the Troubles as a bunch of young men from Dublin suddenly on the world stage. Bono shared a life lesson from Paul McCartney, and he opened up about the early death of his mother. “This wound in me just turned into this opening where I had to fill the hole with music,” Bono said. In the loss of a loved one, “there’s sometimes a gift. The opening up of music came from my mother.”This segment originally aired on October 28, 2022.
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“Super Gay Poems”
In 2024, Harvard University offered a course on Taylor Swift. It was popular, to say the least. That course was taught by a professor and literary critic named Stephanie Burt. In The New Yorker, Burt has written seriously about comics and science fiction, but she’s also considered great poets such as Seamus Heaney and Mary Oliver. Now, Burt has put together an anthology titled, “Super Gay Poems.” It’s a collection of L.G.B.T.Q. poetry, whose contents begin after the Stonewall uprising, in 1969. When describing the collection, Burt tells the New Yorker Radio Hour producer Jeffrey Masters, “ There are poems where we read it and we say, Wow, that’s me. And there are poems where we read it and we say, Wow, I didn’t know that can happen; that’s not me; that’s new to me; that’s different. And there are poems where we read them and we just say, That’s beautiful. That is elegant. That is funny. That is sexy. That is hot. That is so sad that I don’t know why I like it, but I do. And I like making those experiences available to readers.”
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