THE NEW YORKER RADIO HOURHOSTED BYWNYC STUDIOS AND THE NEW YORKER
Profiles, storytelling and insightful conversations, hosted by David Remnick.
Popular Clips
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Jonathan Haidt on the Plague of Anxiety Affecting Young People
Fri Apr 19 2024
And then it turns out not to be. But this time is incredibly different because before there was just, you know, kids are watching TV and then, you know, much later, there is a crime wave, but it it can't be tightly linked to TV. The, you know, the evidence doesn't show that when kids watch TV, they go out and hurt people or kill, you know. So there was a lot of research. This time, there's never been anything like it. So here's what happens. The, the the Internet comes in in 2 waves. In the nineties, we get personal computers, in eighties nineties personal computers. And then we get dial up Internet. Slow, but it it allows you to connect to the world. It's amazing. So the the technological environment in nineties was miraculous. We loved it. The millennial generation grew up on it. Their mental health was fine. So a lot of the indicators of teen mental health are actually steady or improving in the late nineties and then all the way through the 2000. In 2008, the App Store comes out. Before then, there were no apps. There were just the things that Apple gave you. And I think it's 2,009, something around there is where push notifications come out. So now you have this thing in your pocket in which 1,000 or millions literally of companies are trying to get your attention and trying to keep you on their app. 2010 Instagram comes out, which was the first social media app designed to be exclusively used on the smartphone. So the the environment that we adults were in suddenly changes where now the iPhone isn't just a tool. It actually is a tool of mass distraction. And then in 2012, 2013, boom. It just then, you know, the graphs go way, way up. Mental health falls off a cliff. It's incredibly sudden. So you can give me whatever theory you want about trends in American society. But nobody can explain why it happened so suddenly in 2012 and 2013, not just here, but in Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Northern Europe. So, you know, I I'm waiting for someone to find a chemical that was released just in those areas, you know, and and a chemical that especially affects girls.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Maya Hawke on the Fear of “Missing Out,” and Jen Silverman on “There’s Going to Be Trouble”
Tue Apr 16 2024
I was visiting say that. I wanna write the next great American novel and me being like, that's not what you want. You want to write a novel. Start with a novel. Maybe a novel about fill in the blank. Like, a novel about my relationship with scissors, like, whatever, you know, fill in the blank and get specific, get personal, like, get to work and worry don't worry about how it will be received. Like, the word great is, like, that's what other people think. That's not what you think. And so that was a big epiphany for me where I was like, oh, Cool. Yes. That's what I want. Okay. Let let's get back on the road. You know? To, to this. Maya Hawk's album Chaos Angel comes out later this spring. She spoke to the New Yorkers, Rachel Son. The next great American novel. She can't even read the bottle. She says, might be a genius. Time. Now I'm a drunk, hang around, and run a younger guy and baboose for the ivory league and that television salary, think they look up to me. I was left, like, holes, and leaves, and I spoke up in the winter sprees. Now I know with me who's missing out. To sit up. Don't get in with, but for or a mama and then the gutter and my guts on the floor holding the pot.
The New Yorker Radio Hour
How a Republican and a Democrat Carved out Exemptions to Texas’s Abortion Ban
Fri Apr 12 2024
You can read Stephanie Ateledried on the fight to restore abortion rights in Texas atnewyorker.com. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Bolton, Adam Howard, Kahl'Alya, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Alicia Zuckerman. With guidance from Emily Botein and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Baresh, Victor Guan, and Alejandra Deckett. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Charina Endowment Fund.
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a coproduction of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I have said that I heard screams. I have since read that screaming with hysteria is a common reaction even to expected total eclipses. Annie Dillard is one of our great nature writers. And years ago, she wrote a brilliant essay called Total Eclipse. She read an excerpt from that piece when she joined us on the program in 2016. And with people from Texas to Maine lining up to watch Monday's Total Eclipse, it's worth hearing again. Here's Annie Dillard. People on all the hillsides, including, I think, myself, screamed when the black body of the moon detached from the sky and rolled over the sun. But something else was happening at that same instance and it was this, I believe, that made us scream. The second before the sun went out, we saw a wall of dark shadow come speeding at us. We no sooner saw it than it was upon us like thunder. It roared up the valley. It slammed our hill and knocked us out. It was the monstrous swift shadow cone of the moon. I have since read that this wave of shadow moves 1800 miles an hour. Language can give no sense of this sort of speed. Seeing it and knowing it was coming straight for you was like feeling a slug of anesthetic shoot up your arm. If you think, think. Soon, it will hit my brain. You can feel the
The New Yorker Radio Hour
The Attack on Black History, with Nikole Hannah-Jones and Jelani Cobb
Fri Apr 05 2024
Montana, New Hampshire, and on and on have legislation that betrays an anxiety about a fury against the improvement of the kind of situation that you have described from 20, 30 years ago, specifically, what is happening in the schools, Nicole, specifically that you're seeing? How would you describe the problem? Well, one, I just think it's, rich that the people who say they they are opposing indoctrination are in fact saying that curricula must be patriotic, anti communist. And even some of these places are introducing curriculum from PragerU. So What what is PragerU? Just to just to explain. It's a a right wing online, quote unquote, university. You know, they had a video where a cartoon animated Frederick Douglass was basically saying that slavery, you know, we had to have slavery in the United States. And, it it was a good thing that was abolished, but it was it was necessary. But what that does is it gives lie to the to the argument that what they're trying to do is keep students from being indoctrinated, that what they're trying to do is ensure students are learning an accurate history. We know that what we learn in social studies has seldom been about putting forth an accurate rendering of history, but really, trying to shape our collective memory and understanding of of American exceptionalism. So what we're seeing is a response to, the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, the sense that racial justice was going too far, that curriculums were changing in a way that were decentering this white narrative. And, I think part of it came from just understanding that in a, quote, unquote, culture war, when you talk about students, then you you begin to get