New Yorker: Political Scene
A weekly discussion about the President and developments in Washington, hosted by The New Yorker's executive editor, Dorothy Wickenden, and featuring the magazine's Washington correspondent, Ryan Lizza, and other contributors.
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Israel and America’s Difficult Friendship
David Remnick and Bernard Avishai talk with Amelia Lester about ...
David Remnick and Bernard Avishai talk with Amelia Lester about the strained relationship between Israel and the United States, negotiations on Iranian disarmament, and the impact of both for the upcoming Israeli elections.
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Instability in Ukraine
George Packer and Evan Osnos join Dorothy Wickenden to talk ...
George Packer and Evan Osnos join Dorothy Wickenden to talk about the U.S. and Europe’s ongoing struggle against Vladimir Putin.
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Fear of Vaccines
“Where is my child’s liberty if she is made sick ...
“Where is my child’s liberty if she is made sick by the freedom of someone else not to be vaccinated?” says New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter about the politics of falling inoculation numbers. Specter joins fellow staff writer Ryan Lizza and host Dorothy Wickenden on this week’s Political Scene podcast to discuss the anti-vaccination movement and American hostility to science. The discuss the origins of suspicions about vaccines, the history of government responses to epidemics [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/30/resistant], the change in popular attitudes toward science during the George W. Bush Administration [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/06/the-covenant], and President Obama’s inability to convince some Americans that vaccinations are safe for their children. “When he champions something, it polarizes the issue,” says Lizza. “If he says the sky is blue, people may start to question that.”
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The Evolution of Islamic Extremism
On this week’s Political Scene podcast, the New Yorker staff ...
On this week’s Political Scene podcast, the New Yorker staff writer Jon Lee Anderson joins host Dorothy Wickenden to talk about the current status of the war against Islamic radicalism. The two discuss the ways in which terrorism is expanding across the Middle East, the dystopian vision of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), and the limited impact of ISIS’s defeat in the Syrian town of Kobani. “Once again they have been stopped on the Turkish border, but they have found ways in which to appear to be important,” says Anderson. “In this rarefied media world that we live in, what gets more headlines: The fact that ISIS was pushed out of Kobani or this horrific hostage situation with the Japanese journalist and the Jordanian pilot?”
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Obama's Legacy
“For obvious reasons, there was a lot of bragging in ...
“For obvious reasons, there was a lot of bragging in that speech and there was a lot of emphasis on the good economic news,” says Ryan Lizza about the State of the Union. Lizza joins fellow staff writer Hendrik Hertzberg and host Dorothy Wickenden on this week’s Political Scene podcast to talk about President Obama’s speech and how it might shape political debate during his last two years in office. They discuss what the President can accomplish without the support of Congress, the growing bipartisan agreement that income inequality is a major problem, and the likelihood that a failure to act on climate change will detract from Obama’s legacy. “Ten years from now, fifteen years from now, he may be seen as the guy who had the big chance to do something about the catastrophes now engulfing the world and didn’t do enough,” says Hertzberg.
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After Charlie Hebdo
In the early aughts, “there was a genuine panic about ...
In the early aughts, “there was a genuine panic about how capable Al Qaeda was of creating events on the scale of 9/11,” the New Yorker staff writer Steve Coll says. “The real capacity of the transnational jihadist movement is a lot more like what you saw in Paris.” Coll joins his fellow-writer John Cassidy and the host Dorothy Wickenden on this week’s Political Scene podcast to talk about the international campaign against Islamic extremism following the attack on the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. They discuss France’s difficulty in assimilating Arab immigrants, the evolution of terrorism over the past decade, and the use of secret warrants for surveillance under the Patriot Act. “Whatever policies we pursue, we’ve got to take a two-part approach: Are they going to be effective in the short term, but are they going to have counterproductive effects in the long-term, in generating a bigger flow of disaffected young Muslims?” Cassidy says.
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Keystone and Congress
“Keystone became a symbol, that if you could block this ...
“Keystone became a symbol, that if you could block this one project, maybe worldwide people would think twice before vigorously trying to extract oil from oil sands and similar projects,” the New Yorker writer Ryan Lizza says on this week’s Political Scene podcast. Lizza is joined by his fellow-writer John Cassidy and the host Dorothy Wickenden to talk about the politics of oil in the new, Republican-dominated Congress. They discuss Obama’s threat to veto the pipeline, the economic downsides of falling oil prices, and the reasons we won’t see a carbon tax. “I’m sure the Obama Administration is in favor of an energy tax. Most moderate conservative economists are in favor of it if you push them against the wall, but it’s the politics that has been seen as poison,” says Cassidy.
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A New Cuba
“There had been eighteen months of secret negotiations, seven meetings ...
“There had been eighteen months of secret negotiations, seven meetings that took place in Canada, under the good offices of the Canadian government, and also by Pope Francis in the Vatican, to help make this happen,” Jon Lee Anderson says about the restoration of diplomatic relations with Cuba. Anderson joins his fellow New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos and host Dorothy Wickenden on this week’s Political Scene podcast to talk about the new relationship between the two nations. They discuss the differences between Raúl and Fidel Castro that made the agreement possible, the impact that Marco Rubio’s opposition could have on his Presidential campaign, and the diplomatic lessons we can draw from U.S.-China relations. “China today is still a one-party state. It’s not like Cuba is going to wake up next year and suddenly have freedom of expression, freedom of worship, rule of law, judicial independence, human-rights protections,” says Osnos. “We will still represent an oppositional political culture that is not going to be relieved just because we have this new, much more open economic relationship.”
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The Torture Report
“The stain from this scandal is one of the worst ...
“The stain from this scandal is one of the worst ever in the history of the C.I.A., and from my standpoint one of the worst in the country,” Jane Mayer says of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on C.I.A. interrogation tactics. Mayer joins her fellow New Yorker staff writer Steve Coll and Amelia Lester, an editor for the magazine, on this week’s Political Scene podcast to talk about the report and its political significance. They discuss the unreliability of information obtained through torture and the unlikeliness of anyone being held accountable for the treatment of detainees. “I don’t think there’s any prospect of reviving criminal investigations in the United States,” Coll says.
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Negotiating Climate Change
Focussing on a very narrow set of countries, as we ...
Focussing on a very narrow set of countries, as we did in Kyoto, and looking for aggressive emissions cuts in the short term doesn’t do anything,” Robert Stavins, the director of the environmental economics program at the Harvard Kennedy School, says about the international conference on climate change taking place in Lima this week. Stavins joins the New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert and host Dorothy Wickenden on this week's Political Scene podcast to talk about the conference, which is the first of its kind since the 2009 conference in Copenhagen. They also discuss the recent United States-China agreement to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, the evolution of the Republican Party's pronouncements on environmental issues, and the fact that climate change remains a second-order issue to the American public. Of this, Kolbert says, “While I really think we have to applaud the administration for saying, ‘this is the best we can do in a bad situation,’ as a country we have to ask ourselves, ‘Really, is this the best we can do?’ ”
