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Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the Confounding Politics of Junk Food. Plus, Kelefa Sanneh on the Long Influence of Kraftwerk
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, has been undermining public trust in vaccines and overseeing crippling cuts to research across American science. And yet his “make America healthy again” highlights themes more familiar in liberal circles: toxins in the environment, biodiversity, healthy eating. Kennedy has put junk food at the center of the political conversation, speaking about ultra-processed foods and their established links to chronic disease—despite President Donald Trump’s well-known reverence for fast food of all kinds. Marion Nestle, a leading nutrition researcher and the author of “Food Politics,” has written in depth on how money and politics affect our diet and our health, and about the ways that American science research has been hampered by limited funding. She tells the physician and contributing writer Dhruv Khullar, who’s been reporting on the American diet, that “it would be wonderful if R.F.K., Jr., could make the food supply healthier. I just think that in order to do that, he’s going to have to take on the food industry, and I don’t think Trump has a history of taking on corporations of any kind. . . . I’ll believe it when I see it.” Kraftwerk—the pioneering electronic music group that débuted more than half a century ago —has been touring the U.S., with stops planned in Europe this year. The staff writer Kelefa Sanneh calls them one of the most influential bands of all time, playing a formative role in hip-hop, techno, EDM, and much of popular music as we know it. Sanneh picks tracks from Kraftswerk’s repertoire and demonstrates how those sounds trickle out through music history, from Afrika Bambaataa to Coldplay.
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32:29
A Historical Epic of the Chinese in America
In recent years, there’s been a stark uptick in the level of violence and hate crimes that Asian Americans have experienced, but the “precarity of the Asian American experience is not new,” Michael Luo tells David Remnick. Luo is a longtime New Yorker editor, and the author of a new book about the Chinese American experience. He looks at how tensions over labor—with native-born workers often blaming immigrants for their exploitation by business interests—intersected with racial and religious prejudice, culminating in episodes of extraordinary violence and laws that denied immigrants civil rights and excluded new arrivals from Asia. “The way politicians, craven politicians, talk about immigrants today could be just torn from the nineteenth century,” he points out. “I do think that the ‘stranger’ label is still there.” But Luo also uncovers the extraordinary support of Chinese Americans from Frederick Douglass, who argued extensively for the immigrants’ political participation and civil rights. “Asian American history is American history,” Luo says. “I want all the dads who are reading about World War Two, . . . who are interested in Civil War literature, to read about this different racial conflagration.” Luo’s book is “Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America.”
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19:30
Cory Booker: “America Needs Moral Leadership, and Not Political Leadership”
As Donald Trump continues to launch unprecedented and innovative attacks on immigrants, civic institutions, and the rule of law, the Democratic response has been—in the eyes of many observers—tepid and inadequate. One answer to the sense of desperation came from Senator Cory Booker, who, on March 31st, launched a marathon speech on the Senate floor, calling on Americans to resist authoritarianism. Booker beat the record previously held by Senator Strom Thurmond’s twenty-four-hour-long filibuster of the Civil Rights Act, in 1957, and he spoke in detail about Americans who are in desperate straits because of federal job cuts and budget slashing. “We knew . . . if I could last twenty-four hours and eighteen minutes, that we could potentially command some attention from the public,” Booker tells David Remnick. “That’s the key here . . . to deal with the poverty of empathy we have in our nation right now.” Yet Booker bridles as Remnick asks about Democratic strategy to resist the Administration’s attacks. Instead, he emphasized the need for “Republicans of good conscience” to step up. “Playing this as a partisan game cheapens the larger cause of the country,” he argues. “This is the time that America needs moral leadership, and not political leadership.”
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30:27
Nikki Glaser at the Top of Her Game
In the past few years, the comedian Nikki Glaser has breathed new life into the well-worn comedic form of the roast. Last year, she performed a roast of the football legend Tom Brady for a Netflix special, to much acclaim—with Conan O’Brien opining that “no one is going to do a better roast set than that.” Glaser has been on a hot streak since then, hosting the Golden Globes in January and touring the country with a new show. But rising to the top of the comedy world, Glaser tells David Remnick, hasn’t settled her insecurities, or her impostor syndrome. “It just never goes away— that feeling of not being worthy, or being thought of as less than,” Glaser says. It’s why, as Remnick notes, she insists on leading her set with a joke right out of the gate. “Part of it is I just know that people think women aren’t as funny, so I have to prove it right away . . . and then, ‘Can we all just relax and you can trust me?’ ”New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.
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26:36
How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE
Elon Musk, who’s chainsawing the federal government, is not merely a chaos agent, as he is sometimes described. Jill Lepore, the best-selling author of “These Truths” and other books, says that Musk is animated by obsessions and a sense of mission he acquired through reading, and misreading, science fiction. “When he keeps saying, you know, ‘We’re at a fork in the road. The future of human civilization depends on this election,’ he means SpaceX,” she tells David Remnick. “He means . . . ‘I need to take these rockets to colonize Mars and that’s only going to happen through Trump.’ ” The massive-scale reduction in social services he is enacting through DOGE, Lepore thinks, is tied to this objective. “Although there may be billions of [people] suffering here on planet Earth today, those are miniscule compared to the calculation of the needs of the billions of humans that will one day ever live if we can gain escape velocity from planet Earth. . . . That is, in fact, the math that lies behind DOGE.” Lepore’s BBC radio series on the SpaceX C.E.O. is called “X-Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story.” Plus, an organizer of the grassroots anti-Musk effort TeslaTakedown speaks with the Radio Hour about how she got involved, and the risks involved in doing so. that poses. “It’s a scary place we all find ourselves in,” Patty Hoyt tells the New Yorker Radio Hour producer Adam Howard. “And I won’t stop. But I am afraid.”
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