Podcasts about The New Yorker Festival

Ophira Eisenberg! Comedian! Writer! Story-teller! Host! Friend! Delight! More! Ophira is taping her next 1-hour comedy special, produced by Lewis Black, at The Comedy Cellar on Nov 9, 2025 at 5pm and 7pm.  You can follow me @ophirae everywhere except for TikTok where she is @ophiranyc. We have a great chat! You can have a great listen! Also, this is only the first HALF of our chat. For part two, subscribe via Apple Podcasts OR merely click on over here to Patreon! PS Below is more about Ophira, from the bio on her website. Enjoy that as well! Ophira Eisenberg is a Canadian-born standup comedian, writer, and host. She hosted NPR's comedy trivia show Ask Me Another for 9-years, where she interviewed and played silly games with hundreds of celebrities including Sir Patrick Stewart, Awkwafina, Rosie Perez, Yo-Yo Ma, Bob The Drag Queen, Nick Kroll, Chelsea Handler, Jim Gaffigan, Michael C. Hall, and so many others. As a comic and a parent to a 6-year-old, Ophira is the host of the new comedy podcast Parenting Is A Joke co-produced by iHeart Radio and Pretty Good Friends Productions. The show launches on October 18th. She can be seen live, regularly headlining across the United States, Canada, and Europe delivering her unique blend of standup and storytelling to a loyal fan base of smart, irreverent comedy lovers. She has appeared at Montreal's Just for Laughs Festival, The New Yorker Festival, The New York Comedy Festival, Moontower Comedy Festival, Bumbershoot, The Nantucket Film Festival, Women in Comedy Festival and more. Her new comedy album at special Plant-Based Jokes is available on iTunes and is streaming now on YouTube. Lauded as “hilarious, high risk, and an inspiration,” Ophira filmed her comedy special Inside Joke, when she was 8½ months pregnant. The show's material revolves around how she told everyone that she was never going to have kids, and then unexpectedly found herself expecting at “an advanced maternal age.” Her other comedy albums, Bangs! and As Is She has appeared on Comedy Central, This Week at The Comedy Cellar, Kevin Hart's LOL Network, HBO's Girls, Gotham Live, The Late Late Show, The Today Show, and VH-1. The New York Times called her a skilled comedian and storyteller with “bleakly stylish” humor. She was also selected as one of New York Magazine's “Top 10 Comics that Funny People Find Funny,” and hailed by Forbes.com as one of the most engaging comics working today.  Ophira is a regular host and teller with The Moth and her stories have been featured on The Moth Radio Hour and in two of The Moth's best-selling collections, including the most recent New York Times Bestseller: How To Tell A Story: The Essential Guide to Memorable Storytelling from The Moth.  Ophira's first book, Screw Everyone: Sleeping My Way to Monogamy (Seal Press), is a comedic memoir about her experiments in the field as a single woman, traveling from futon to futon and flask-to-flask, gathering data, hoping to put it all together and build her own perfect Frankenmate. It was optioned for a feature film.  She is also sought after as a brilliant interviewer and moderator, and has interviewed dozens of celebrities, writers, and actors including Neil Gaiman at New York's Town Hall; Jane Curtain, Anne Beatts, Heather Gardner, Sudi Green, Alysia Reiner, Jeanne Tripplehorn, David Crane, Jeffrey Klerik at The Nantucket Film Festival; Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara, Daniel Levy and Annie Murphy at the 92nd Street Y; and Nell Scovell and Sloane Crosley at The Mark Twain House.  Originally from Calgary, Alberta, Canada, Ophira graduated with a Cultural Anthropology and Theater degree from McGill University. She now lives in Brooklyn, NY where she is a fixture at New York City's comedy clubs including the Comedy Cellar, Gotham Comedy Club, New York Comedy Club and Carolines, as well as Brooklyn's famed performance venues The Bell House, Union Hall, and Littlefield. She resides with her husband and son where she can regularly be seen drinking a ton of coffee.

As an avid reader, I'm always seeking that next great book. The one that allows me to see myself and the world more clearly, comforts me when I'm lost, or inspires me to move through my day differently. This series is my opportunity to pass these remarkable books onto you, as readers of A Mind of Her Own, both for your own enjoyment and also, as a self-serving shout-out to the universe to send me more amazing, life-changing reads. I'm excited to hear what you think, and I'm so glad you're here!Life-Changing Reads: A Series1. Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation, by Parker Palmer“Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening…vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear.”I read this book when I was feeling lost, searching for a life that aligned with my values and desires, and doubting myself at every step. I kept hearing this call to write, to create, but I thought it was something I should do in my “non-work” time, because it wasn't a serious activity for a physician. Parker's discussion of his own struggle to find his true vocation, through an altruistic but ultimately unsustainable career path, was a fundamental guide on my journey.2. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking, by Susan Cain“So when introverts assume the observer role, as when they write novels, or contemplate unified field theory—or fall quiet at dinner parties—they're not demonstrating a failure of will or a lack of energy. They're simple doing what they're constitutionally suited for.”I listened to this book in the car, sitting in LA traffic, during my psychiatry residency. I still remember the feeling of hearing these words, suggesting my tendency to prefer listening to talking, observing to acting, thinking to doing was not because I was lazy, overly shy or antisocial. It was what I was “constitutionally suited for.” This was a revelation.Here I am now, writing books, listening as a psychiatrist and podcast host, and taking time to think about life's great mysteries. Thank you, Susan, for your beautiful writing.3. The Good Life: Lessons From the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness, by Robert Waldinger, MD and Marc Schulz, PhD“Do I matter? Some of us have lived the majority of our lives and find ourselves looking back, others have most of our lives in front of us and are looking forward. For all of us, regardless of age, it helps to remember that this question of mattering, of leaving something for future generations and of being part of something bigger than ourselves, is not just about our personal achievements—it's about what we mean to other people. And it's never too late to start now and leave a mark.”This book, by the directors of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, is a powerful summary of the lives of two generations of individuals from the same families for over 80 years. It's remarkable to read their quotes as they navigate joy, loss, struggles and successes over the years. The reason I've found it so important to read and reread is its powerful reminder of the importance of our relationships in creating happiness. Not money. Not fame. Not a perfect body. Not prizes or rings or medals. It's all about the love and connection we have in our lives.Today, as I try to navigate the overwhelmingly stressful news and constant churn of social media, it grounds me in my day-to-day life to reflect on those in my closest orbit. How can I connect with them today? How do I show my love and interest in ways both silly and sincere? Even if I've been feeling disconnected, I trust that it is never too late to leave my own mark in their lives and remember the joy of having them in mine.4. How Do You Feel? One Doctor's Search for Humanity in Medicine, by Jessi Gold, MD, MS“Sometimes, the heaviest emotional burden is to bear witness or to hold space for someone else's story. To do my job well and be someone whom people can trust, I need to care. I need to be truly empathetic. I need to be raw and available.”This beautiful book, by Jessi Gold, describes so many aspects of my experience as a psychiatrist. She writes about the unique emotional toll of meeting with patients during some of their darkest moments, as they are working to overcome trauma, abuse, loss or grave illnesses. Reading this was incredibly validating. In the past, when I had finished my clinical week, I would look back and wonder, “Why can't I do more? Why didn't I see more patients? There is so much need.”Dr. Gold's book helped me to be self-compassionate, recognizing I could only be truly present if I also took care of myself. This is a message I now try to pass along to the psychiatry residents I teach. We are human, and we have limits. Thank you, Jessi, for generously sharing your life with us. Your work is so important.Listen to Dr. Gold on The Reflective Mind Podcast at https://amindofherown.substack.com/p/speaking-the-quiet-part-out-loud?r=1wdz1l5. Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up by James Hollis, Ph.D.“To engage with the summons of our souls is to step into the deepest ocean, uncertain whether we will be able to swim to some new, distant shore. And yet, until we have consented to swim beyond the familiar lights of the port left behind, we will never arrive at a newer shore.”This stunning book, by Dr. James Hollis, a Jungian scholar and prolific writer, shares his own story of midlife depression and his decision to leave the familiar to seek training in Zurich and become a Jungian analyst. He writes beautifully about his struggle to identify his own path with the guidance of Jung's theory of individuation, defined as “the lifelong project of becoming more nearly the whole person we were meant to be.” I read and re-read this book as I was struggling with my own path to meaning in midlife, and I found such comfort in his powerful belief that we all can tap into what we already know: the person we are most meant to be.You can listen to his beautiful description of his path here: https://amindofherown.substack.com/p/a-nameless-longing-when-your-soul?r=1wdz1l6. Shrill, by Lindy West (I also highly recommend the Hulu series by the same name, starring Aidy Bryant )“I am my body. When my body gets smaller, it is still me. When my body gets bigger, it is still me. There is not a thin woman inside me, awaiting excavation. I am one piece.”Thinking back on my training during medical school and beyond, I can summarize any lecture about body size with one phrase: overweight equals unhealthy. This repeated conflation means I now must consciously uncouple one from the other in my clinical work, stepping back from the broad and imprecise shorthand to consider how they are, and are not, actually related.Lindy West's book helped me significantly as I was trying to shift my thinking on this topic. Her frank depiction of life in her larger body was at times heartbreaking (especially in the doctor's office), frequently humorous (with chapter titles like “Are you there, Margaret? It's me, a person who is not a complete freak.”) and overall a powerful motivator for change. I think all health care providers should read it at least once.If this resonates, check out my interview with Dr. Mara Gordon all about the size-inclusive healthcare revolution. https://amindofherown.substack.com/p/the-size-inclusive-healthcare-revolution?utm_source=publication-search7. Words Are My Matter: Writings on Life and Books by Ursula K. Le Guin“Fiction offers the best means of understanding people different from oneself, short of experience. Actually, fiction can be lots better than experience, because it's a manageable size, it's comprehensible, while experience just steamrollers over you and you understand what happened decades later, if ever.”I grew up in a very small town in North Dakota, just a few miles from the South Dakota border. I didn't recognize the enormity of the sky above my childhood home until I returned as an adult, head tipped back, staring upward in awe. I grew up there with a loving family and a surrounding community willing to cheer me on in events from basketball games to theater performances, but I always felt a bit out of place. Reading became my reassurance that the world was as big as the sky overhead, and I would eventually find my own path. Books also helped me recognize the importance of placing myself in another's shoes, virtual empathy-building machines that taught me about those whose lives were so incredibly different from my own.This book of Ursula K. Le Guin's essays, poems and book reviews reveals a grounded, opinionated, brilliant woman who decided to create entire worlds with stunning clarity, illuminating the challenges existing in our own. Readers and writers alike will not be sorry for taking a moment to absorb her work.If this interests you, please feel free to listen to my short essay, Books are Empathy Machines.8. Intimations by Zadie Smith“Talking to yourself can be useful. And writing means being overheard.”This book by Zadie Smith, a collection of six essays, was published in 2020, and provides a glimpse into the author's life during the early months of the Covid-19 virus. I've long been an admirer of her fiction, but this series allowed a much more intimate window into her wandering mind, trying to comprehend her place in a society turned inside out with uncertainty and fear.What does it mean to be an artist when people are being categorized as “essential workers?” Is loyalty to a place something that can outlast a feeling of unique vulnerability? How can writing provide an outlet for survival when the world is so fraught? There was comfort in her struggle to understand and in her feeling of disorientation, which I certainly shared. I emerged from her writing feeling more hopeful and far less alone.If this essay resonated, please feel free to check out this podcast episode Hope is the Best Antidote for Demoralization with Dr. James L. Griffith, MD9. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi“We grow up believing that what counts most in our lives is that which will occur in the future…[however] since what we experience is reality, as far as we are concerned, we can transform reality to the extent that we influence what happens in consciousness and thus free ourselves from the threats and blandishments of the outside world.”My summary: We are always living for tomorrow, while life only happens right now, in our moment-by-moment experience, which we have the power to shape through our attention.You have likely heard of the concept of Flow, described by Dr. Csikszentmihalyi (here is a googled pronunciation: chik sent mee hai ee) as an optimal experience when a “person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” It is often referred to as being in a “flow state,” so immersed in a particular task that you lose track of time and are able to concentrate in a prolonged and highly satisfying way. He refers to our attention our “psychic energy.” Where we give our attention is quite literally how we experience our lives. This has never been more relevant, each of us tasked with creating our own protective filters from the onslaught of demands on our limited—because we're human—attention spans.This book is a revelation, with insights about the very nature of consciousness, what it means to be happy, and how we can infuse our lives with more pleasure. Flow can emerge in a wide variety of settings, whether it's while listening to or creating music, engaging in satisfying sex or consuming delicious foods. It may also occur when we are working on a challenging problem at the office, pushing past a confusing but compelling problem in school, or out solving problems in the world beyond. I've learned so much from his writing, and have absorbed his ideas which influence many of my own.If the concept of a flow and the quest for a meaningful life is of interest, check out my interview, “What Lights You Up?' with Dr. Jordan Grumet, palliative care physician and writer.10. Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief by Pauline Boss“In the case of ambiguous loss…complicated grieving can be a normal reaction to a complicated situation—the endless searching of a battlefield by the mother of a missing soldier; a stepchild's angry outbursts when his biological parent is totally excluded; a wife's depression and withdrawal because her husband has suffered a brain injury and is no longer himself.”I've found ambiguous loss to be such a powerful and surprisingly common experience in my psychiatry practice. This idea describes the unique suffering caused by uncertainty or a lack of resolution regarding a missing loved one. This could be psychological absence of someone still in our presence, such as when our loved one is struggling with dementia or severe mental illness, or the physical absence of those we still keep very much present in our psychological lives, including missing persons with unknown whereabouts.After first reading Ambiguous Loss, I reached out to Dr. Pauline Boss, now in her 90s, to thank her for her work and speak with her about this extremely helpful framework, which had a profound effect on me. She shared the origins of the research into this topic, begun with the families of pilots declared missing in action in Vietnam and Cambodia while she was at the Center of Prisoner of War Studies in the U.S. Naval Health Research Institute in San Diego. She spoke about interviewing the wives of these missing pilots and the intense pain caused by the ambiguity surrounding their husbands' whereabouts. This ongoing, often unresolvable grief can lead to depression, isolation, and ongoing family disruption, even generations later. By giving a name to this phenomenon, however, Pauline Boss has helped countless families begin to heal from the unimaginable and move forward into a more hopeful future.11. Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? A Memoir by Roz Chast“After my father died, I noticed that all the things that had driven me bats about him—his chronic worrying, his incessant chitchat, his almost suspect inability to deal with anything mechanical—now seemed trivial. The only emotion that remained was one of deep affection and gratitude that he was my dad.”This is the first graphic novel on my list, but it certainly won't be the last. I've been a fan of Roz Chast for a long time, with her quirky but poignant New Yorker cartoons. This powerful memoir highlights something I've found particularly helpful in my work and personal life: difficult truths are much more palatable if we can pair them with humor. My family has always taken this approach, particularly my father, coping with some truly heartbreaking cases in the hospital with an off-color joke about bowel movements around the family dinner table. Humor is also considered one of the most mature psychological defense mechanisms we use to cope with stress or loss in our lives, so way to go, Dad!Roz shares with us a uniquely painful time in her life, as her parents age well into their 90s, experiencing the indignities of increasingly frail bodies and waning independence. She writes with brave candor about the exhausting and expensive path an adult child must walk when her parents can no longer care for themselves, and her conflicted feelings as she watches them slowly fade. Her cartoons throughout provide much-needed moments of levity, as well as a beautiful tribute to the lives of these important people. If you or a loved one is going through this painful, but common, journey, this book could provide some true comfort, and maybe even a laugh or two.12. Congratulations, By the Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness by George Saunders“Be a good and proactive and even somewhat desperate patient on your own behalf—seek out the most efficacious, anti-selfishness medicines, energetically, for the rest of your life. Find out what makes you kinder, what opens you up and brings out the most loving, generous, and unafraid version of you—and go after those things as if nothing else matters.Because, actually, nothing else does.”These words are part of a lovely convocation address George Saunders delivered to the graduating students of Syracuse University, where he is a professor of creative writing. Understandably, it resonated far beyond the campus, and speaks a truly important message for today's world.I should admit, I have a soft spot for George Saunders. I imagine I'm not alone in this. I saw him speak at a New Yorker Festival event several years ago and he did not disappoint: sharp as a tack while also being thoughtful and extremely humble. In addition, he was super funny, which made sense because he's the author of one of the most hilarious short stories I've ever read. In “Pastoralia,” two employees are assigned to a caveman diorama in a fading fun park. One of them, who takes his role incredibly seriously, frequently pretends to scan the horizon for large game and refuses to speak to his cave mate, using only grunts and body language to communicate. The other employee, a chain-smoking, mint-eating mother of a struggling adult child seems to be trying to just get through the day, breaking every rule of proper performance, much to her cave mate's dismay. The story is simply sublime.My dear friend, John, who trained with me in psychiatry residency and became one of my dearest friends, introduced me to this story, along with other memorable cultural experiences such as the show “Broad City” and referring to the bathroom as the “wazzer.” He died in 2020 after a battle with brain cancer, but his legacy lives on, especially in my plan to someday turn “Pastoralia” into a musical (his idea). After all, what better way to honor his memory? Miss you John, but thank you for all you taught me.Thanks for reading A Mind of Her Own! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and hear about upcoming episodes & book events.Find Dr. Reid on Instagram: @jenreidmd and LinkedInYou can also preorder her upcoming book, Guilt Free!Also check out Dr. Reid's regular contributions to Psychology Today: Think Like a Shrink.Seeking a mental health provider? Try Psychology TodayNational Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255Dial 988 for mental health crisis supportSAMHSA's National Helpline - 1-800-662-HELP (4357)-a free, confidential, 24/7, 365-day-a-year treatment referral and information service (in English and Spanish) for individuals and families facing mental and/or substance use disorders.Disclaimer:The views expressed on this podcast reflect those of the host and guests, and are not associated with any organization or academic site. Also, AI may have been used to create the transcript and notes, based only on the specific discussion of the host and guest and reviewed for accuracy.The information and other content provided on this podcast or in any linked materials, are not intended and should not be construed as medical advice, nor is the information a substitute for professional medical expertise or treatment. All content, including text, graphics, images and information, contained on or available through this website is for general information purposes only.If you or any other person has a medical concern, you should consult with your health care provider or seek other professional medical treatment. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something that have read on this website, blog or in any linked materials. If you think you may have a medical emergency, call your doctor or emergency services (911) immediately. You can also access the National Suicide Help Line at 1-800-273-8255 or call 988 for mental health emergencies. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amindofherown.substack.com

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.

Stand Up is a daily podcast that I book,host,edit, post and promote new episodes with brilliant guests every day. Please subscribe now for as little as 5$ and gain access to a community of over 700 awesome, curious, kind, funny, brilliant, generous souls Check out StandUpwithPete.com to learn more GET TICKETS TO PODJAM II In Vegas March 27-30 Confirmed Guests! Professor Eric Segall, Dr Aaron Carroll, Maura Quint, Tim Wise, JL Cauvin, Ophira Eisenberg, Christian Finnegan and The Ladies of The Hue will all join us! Ophira Eisenberg is a Canadian-born standup comedian, writer, and host. She hosted NPR's comedy trivia show Ask Me Another for 9-years, where she interviewed and played silly games with hundreds of celebrities including Sir Patrick Stewart, Awkwafina, Rosie Perez, Yo-Yo Ma, Bob The Drag Queen, Nick Kroll, Chelsea Handler, Jim Gaffigan, Michael C. Hall, and so many others. As a comic and a parent to a 6-year-old, Ophira is the host of the new comedy podcast Parenting Is A Joke co-produced by iHeart Radio and Pretty Good Friends Productions. The show launches on October 18th. She can be seen live, regularly headlining across the United States, Canada, and Europe delivering her unique blend of standup and storytelling to a loyal fan base of smart, irreverent comedy lovers. She has appeared at Montreal's Just for Laughs Festival, The New Yorker Festival, The New York Comedy Festival, Moontower Comedy Festival, Bumbershoot, The Nantucket Film Festival, Women in Comedy Festival and more. Her new comedy album at special Plant-Based Jokes is available on iTunes and is streaming now on YouTube. Lauded as “hilarious, high risk, and an inspiration,” Ophira filmed her comedy special Inside Joke, when she was 8½ months pregnant. The show's material revolves around how she told everyone that she was never going to have kids, and then unexpectedly found herself expecting at “an advanced maternal age.” Her other comedy albums, Bangs! and As Is She has appeared on Comedy Central, This Week at The Comedy Cellar, Kevin Hart's LOL Network, HBO's Girls, Gotham Live, The Late Late Show, The Today Show, and VH-1. The New York Times called her a skilled comedian and storyteller with “bleakly stylish” humor. She was also selected as one of New York Magazine's “Top 10 Comics that Funny People Find Funny,” and hailed by Forbes.com as one of the most engaging comics working today.  Ophira is a regular host and teller with The Moth and her stories have been featured on The Moth Radio Hour and in two of The Moth's best-selling collections, including the most recent New York Times Bestseller: How To Tell A Story: The Essential Guide to Memorable Storytelling from The Moth.  Ophira's first book, Screw Everyone: Sleeping My Way to Monogamy (Seal Press), is a comedic memoir about her experiments in the field as a single woman, traveling from futon to futon and flask-to-flask, gathering data, hoping to put it all together and build her own perfect Frankenmate. It was optioned for a feature film.  She is also sought after as a brilliant interviewer and moderator, and has interviewed dozens of celebrities, writers, and actors including Neil Gaiman at New York's Town Hall; Jane Curtain, Anne Beatts, Heather Gardner, Sudi Green, Alysia Reiner, Jeanne Tripplehorn, David Crane, Jeffrey Klerik at The Nantucket Film Festival; Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara, Daniel Levy and Annie Murphy at the 92nd Street Y; and Nell Scovell and Sloane Crosley at The Mark Twain House.  Originally from Calgary, Alberta, Canada, Ophira graduated with a Cultural Anthropology and Theater degree from McGill University. She now lives in Brooklyn, NY where she is a fixture at New York City's comedy clubs including the Comedy Cellar, Gotham Comedy Club, New York Comedy Club and Carolines, as well as Brooklyn's famed performance venues The Bell House, Union Hall, and Littlefield. She resides with her husband and son where she can regularly be seen drinking a ton of coffee. Pete on Blue Sky Pete on Threads Pete on Tik Tok Pete on YouTube  Pete on Twitter Pete On Instagram Pete Personal FB page Stand Up with Pete FB page All things Jon Carroll  Follow and Support Pete Coe Buy Ava's Art  Hire DJ Monzyk to build your website or help you with Marketing Gift a Subscription https://www.patreon.com/PeteDominick/gift    

When Emily Nussbaum introduced Alan Cumming at the New Yorker Festival, she said, “Plenty of actors light up a room, but Alan Cumming is more of a disco ball—reflecting every possible angle of show business.” Cumming appears in mainstream dramas such as “The Good Wife,” and also more indie projects like his one-man version of “Macbeth”; his performances in musicals such as “Cabaret” are legendary. He also owns a nightclub; his memoir “Not My Father's Son” was a bestseller, and so on. And Cumming plays the host on the Emmy-winning reality show “The Traitors.” He combines “a dandy Scottish laird—sort of James Bond villain, sort of eccentric, old-fashioned nut who has this big castle.” Spoiler alert: “It's supposed to be my castle. It's not.” Nussbaum asks about his perspective on reality TV before he started on “Traitors.” “Zero, really,” Cumming confesses. “I was a bit judgy. … The thing I don't like about a lot of those shows is that they laud and therefore encourage bad behavior and lack of kindness.” Before “The Traitors,” Cumming's first brush with reality television was on “Who Do You Think You Are?,” a BBC genealogy program that confronted him with shocking secrets about his own family. “It made a good memoir, I suppose,” he jokes. “Just how awful that was. It was awful. But no, I don't regret it.”

Stand Up is a daily podcast that I book,host,edit, post and promote new episodes with brilliant guests every day. Please subscribe now for as little as 5$ and gain access to a community of over 700 awesome, curious, kind, funny, brilliant, generous souls Check out StandUpwithPete.com to learn more GET TICKETS TO PODJAM II In Vegas March 27-30 Confirmed Guests! Professor Eric Segall, Dr Aaron Carroll, Maura Quint, Tim Wise, JL Cauvin, Ophira Eisenberg, Christian Finnegan and More! 31 minutes Ezra Levin is the co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible. Prior to founding Indivisible, Ezra served as Associate Director of Federal Policy for Prosperity Now, a national anti-poverty nonprofit. Previously, he was the Deputy Policy Director for Congressman Lloyd Doggett (D-TX), Field Director for Doggett's 2010 reelection campaign, and an AmeriCorps VISTA in the Homeless Services Division of the San Jose Housing Department.   Along with his co-founder and spouse Leah Greenberg, Ezra has been featured as one of TIME 100's Most Influential People of 2019, included on GQ's 50 Most Powerful People in Trump's Washington, and ranked #2 on the Politico 50 list of top thinkers, doers and visionaries transforming American politics. He has appeared as a commentator on and/or been interviewed by MSNBC, CNN, NPR, Pod Save America, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico, TIME Magazine, the New Yorker, the Nation, Slate, and Rolling Stone, among others. He is the co-author of We Are Indivisible: A Blueprint for Democracy After Trump, published by Simon & Schuster's One Signal Publishers in 2019.  He holds a Bachelor of Arts from Carleton College and a Master in Public Affairs from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. 1 hour 2 mins Ophira Eisenberg is a Canadian-born standup comedian, writer, and host. She hosted NPR's comedy trivia show Ask Me Another for 9-years, where she interviewed and played silly games with hundreds of celebrities including Sir Patrick Stewart, Awkwafina, Rosie Perez, Yo-Yo Ma, Bob The Drag Queen, Nick Kroll, Chelsea Handler, Jim Gaffigan, Michael C. Hall, and so many others. As a comic and a parent to a 6-year-old, Ophira is the host of the new comedy podcast Parenting Is A Joke co-produced by iHeart Radio and Pretty Good Friends Productions. The show launches on October 18th. She can be seen live, regularly headlining across the United States, Canada, and Europe delivering her unique blend of standup and storytelling to a loyal fan base of smart, irreverent comedy lovers. She has appeared at Montreal's Just for Laughs Festival, The New Yorker Festival, The New York Comedy Festival, Moontower Comedy Festival, Bumbershoot, The Nantucket Film Festival, Women in Comedy Festival and more. Her new comedy album at special Plant-Based Jokes is available on iTunes and is streaming now on YouTube. Lauded as “hilarious, high risk, and an inspiration,” Ophira filmed her comedy special Inside Joke, when she was 8½ months pregnant. The show's material revolves around how she told everyone that she was never going to have kids, and then unexpectedly found herself expecting at “an advanced maternal age.” Her other comedy albums, Bangs! and As Is She has appeared on Comedy Central, This Week at The Comedy Cellar, Kevin Hart's LOL Network, HBO's Girls, Gotham Live, The Late Late Show, The Today Show, and VH-1. The New York Times called her a skilled comedian and storyteller with “bleakly stylish” humor. She was also selected as one of New York Magazine's “Top 10 Comics that Funny People Find Funny,” and hailed by Forbes.com as one of the most engaging comics working today.  Ophira is a regular host and teller with The Moth and her stories have been featured on The Moth Radio Hour and in two of The Moth's best-selling collections, including the most recent New York Times Bestseller: How To Tell A Story: The Essential Guide to Memorable Storytelling from The Moth.  Ophira's first book, Screw Everyone: Sleeping My Way to Monogamy (Seal Press), is a comedic memoir about her experiments in the field as a single woman, traveling from futon to futon and flask-to-flask, gathering data, hoping to put it all together and build her own perfect Frankenmate. It was optioned for a feature film.  She is also sought after as a brilliant interviewer and moderator, and has interviewed dozens of celebrities, writers, and actors including Neil Gaiman at New York's Town Hall; Jane Curtain, Anne Beatts, Heather Gardner, Sudi Green, Alysia Reiner, Jeanne Tripplehorn, David Crane, Jeffrey Klerik at The Nantucket Film Festival; Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara, Daniel Levy and Annie Murphy at the 92nd Street Y; and Nell Scovell and Sloane Crosley at The Mark Twain House.  Originally from Calgary, Alberta, Canada, Ophira graduated with a Cultural Anthropology and Theater degree from McGill University. She now lives in Brooklyn, NY where she is a fixture at New York City's comedy clubs including the Comedy Cellar, Gotham Comedy Club, New York Comedy Club and Carolines, as well as Brooklyn's famed performance venues The Bell House, Union Hall, and Littlefield. She resides with her husband and son where she can regularly be seen drinking a ton of coffee. Pete on Blue Sky Pete on Threads Pete on Tik Tok Pete on YouTube  Pete on Twitter Pete On Instagram Pete Personal FB page Stand Up with Pete FB page All things Jon Carroll  Follow and Support Pete Coe Buy Ava's Art  Hire DJ Monzyk to build your website or help you with Marketing Gift a Subscription https://www.patreon.com/PeteDominick/gift

Sara Bareilles broke out as a pop-music star in the late two-thousands. But she's gone on to have a very different kind of career, writing music for Broadway and eventually performing as an actor on stage and on television.  At the New Yorker Festival, in 2024, she played her early hit “Gravity,” and spoke with staff writer Rachel Syme about the pressures of fame, aging, and why she prefers working in theatre. “There's so much competition in the music industry. I'm not a competitive person; I don't understand it. It's not that theatre isn't competitive, but there's this feeling—everybody's so happy to be there. Like, ‘We got a show, guys, and we don't know how long it's going to last!' ” 

Introducing Julianne Moore at the New Yorker Festival, in October, the staff writer Michael Schulman recited “only a partial list” of the directors Moore has worked with, including Robert Altman, Louis Malle, Todd Haynes, Paul Thomas Anderson, Lisa Cholodenko, Steven Spielberg, the Coen brothers, and many more legends. It seems almost obvious that Moore co-stars (alongside Tilda Swinton) in Pedro Almodóvar's first feature in English, “The Room Next Door,” which comes out in December. Moore has a particular knack with unremarkable characters. “I don't know that I seek out things in the domestic space, but I do think I'm really drawn to ordinary lives,” she tells Schulman. “I've never been, like, I'm going to play an astronaut next. . . . A lot of these stories [are] domestic stories—well, that's the biggest story of our lives, right? How do we live? Who do we love? . . . Those are the things that we all know about.”New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

James Taylor's songs are so familiar that they seem to have always existed. Onstage at the New Yorker Festival, in 2010, Taylor peeled back some of his influences—the Beatles, Bach, show tunes, and Antônio Carlos Jobim—and played a few of his hits, even giving the staff writer Adam Gopnik a quick lesson.This segment originally aired on July 7, 2017.

“Gypsy,” a work by Stephen Sondheim, Jule Styne, and Arthur Laurents, is often called the greatest of American musicals; a new production on Broadway is a noteworthy event, especially when a star like Audra McDonald is cast in the lead role of Rose. McDonald has won six Tonys for her acting, in both plays and musicals. In the repertoire of musicals, race in casting is still very much an issue, and one columnist criticized her portrayal of Rose because of her race. “I have dealt with this my entire career,” McDonald tells Michael Schulman, recalling that in her breakout performance, in “Carousel,” some audiences “were upset with me that I was playing Carrie, saying, ‘She wouldn't have been Black.' There's a man who comes down from heaven with a star in his hand!” In a wide-ranging interview onstage at The New Yorker Festival, McDonald discusses how when she was a child theatre was initially intended to be a type of therapy for her, and the roles her parents wouldn't let her take. “Gypsy” is currently in previews on Broadway. 

It made news when the retired general John Kelly, Donald Trump's longest-serving chief of staff, said that the former President fit the definition of a fascist. The MSNBC host Rachel Maddow could hardly be blamed if she said, I told you so. Maddow's podcast “Ultra” and her book “Prequel” detail the history of Nazi and far-right movements in America in the twentieth century—and the people who fought them. “When we talk about making America great again and we talk about the threat of an authoritarian takeover in the United States in the form of Trumpism, it is not something foreign,” Maddow explained to David Remnick last week at The New Yorker Festival. “It is something that's coming from a fascist place that is a recurring, ebbing, and flowing tide that we've faced in multiple generations.”

In recent weeks and months, dozens of prominent security and military officials and Republican politicians have come out against Donald Trump, declaring him a security threat, unfit for office, and, in some cases, a fascist. Way out in front of this movement was Liz Cheney. Up until 2021, she was the third-ranking Republican in Congress, but after the January 6th insurrection she voted to impeach Trump. She then served as vice-chair of the House Select Committee on the January 6th attack. She must have expected it would cost her the midterms and her seat in Congress, which ended up being the case when Wyoming voters rejected her in 2022. Since then, Cheney has gone further, campaigning forcefully on behalf of Vice-President Harris. David Remnick spoke with Cheney last week at The New Yorker Festival, shortly after Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, blocked its planned endorsement of Harris. “It absolutely proves the danger of Donald Trump,” Cheney said. “When you have Jeff Bezos apparently afraid to issue an endorsement for the only candidate in the race who's a stable, responsible adult, because he fears Donald Trump, that tells you why we have to work so hard to make sure that Donald Trump isn't elected,” Cheney told Remnick. “And I cancelled my subscription to the Washington Post.”

In recent weeks and months, dozens of prominent security and military officials and Republican politicians have come out against Donald Trump, declaring him a security threat, unfit for office, and, in some cases, a fascist. Way out in front of this movement was Liz Cheney. Up until 2021, she was the third-ranking Republican in Congress, but after the January 6th insurrection she voted to impeach Trump. She then served as vice-chair of the House Select Committee on the January 6th attack. She must have expected it would cost her the midterms and her seat in Congress, which ended up being the case when Wyoming voters rejected her in 2022. Since then, Cheney has gone further, campaigning forcefully on behalf of Vice-President Harris. David Remnick spoke with Cheney last week at The New Yorker Festival, shortly after Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, blocked its planned endorsement of Harris. “It absolutely proves the danger of Donald Trump,” Cheney said. “When you have Jeff Bezos apparently afraid to issue an endorsement for the only candidate in the race who's a stable, responsible adult, because he fears Donald Trump, that tells you why we have to work so hard to make sure that Donald Trump isn't elected,” Cheney told Remnick. “And I cancelled my subscription to the Washington Post.”

The Washington Roundtable discusses the 2024 election with the historian Michael Beschloss, before a live audience at The New Yorker Festival, on October 26th. He calls this election a “turning point” as monumental as the election of 1860—on the eve of the Civil War—and that of 1940, when the U.S. was deciding whether to adopt or fight Fascism. “I think Donald Trump meets most of the parts of the definition of the word fascist,” Beschloss says. “You go through all of American history, and you cannot find another major party nominee who has promised to be dictator for a day, which we all know will not be only for a day.” But, if Trump does return to the White House, he adds, there is still hope that the rule of law, public protest, and the presence of state capitals free of federal domination will allow the U.S. to resist autocracy.This week's reading: “Garbage Time at the 2024 Finish Line,” by Susan B. Glasser “Safeguarding the Pennsylvania Election,” by Eliza Griswold “The Fight Over Truth in a Blue-Collar Pennsylvania County,” by Clare Malone “Standing Up to Trump,” by David Remnick “The Trump Show Comes to Madison Square Garden,” by Andrew Marantz “The Obamas Campaign for Kamala Harris,” by Emily Witt “Trump's Health, and Ours,” by Dhruv Khullar To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.

Since the comedian Julio Torres came to America from El Salvador, more than a decade ago, his fantastical style has made him a singular presence in the entertainment landscape. An early stint writing for “Saturday Night Live” yielded some of the show's weirdest and most memorable sketches; soon after that, Torres's work on the HBO series “Los Espookys,” which he co-wrote and starred in, cemented his status as a beloved odd-child of the comedy scene. In his most recent work, he's applied his dreamy sensibility to very real bureaucratic nightmares. “Problemista,” his first feature film, draws on Torres's own Kafkaesque experience navigating the U.S. immigration system; in his new HBO show, “Fantasmas,” the protagonist considers whether to acquire a document called a “proof of existence,” without which everyday tasks like renting an apartment are rendered impossible. In a live taping at The New Yorker Festival, the hosts of Critics at Large talk with Torres about his creative influences, and about using abstraction to put our most impenetrable systems into tangible terms. “Life today is so riddled with these man-made labyrinths that are life-or-death … there's something very lonely about it,” Torres says. “These flourishes are there in service of the humanity.”Read, watch, and listen with the critics:“Problemista” (2023)“Fantasmas” (2024-)“Los Espookys” (2019-22)“I Want to Be a Vase,” by Julio Torres“My Favorite Shapes” (2019)“Saturday Night Live” (1975-)“Julio Torres's ‘Fantasmas' Finds Truth in Fantasy,” by Vinson Cunningham (The New Yorker)“The Hunchback of Notre Dame” (1996)“Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle” (2003)“The Substance” (2024)New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts. Share your thoughts on Critics At Large. As a token of our appreciation, you will be eligible to enter a prize drawing up to $1,000 after you complete the survey.https://selfserve.decipherinc.com/survey/selfserve/222b/76152?pin=1&uBRANDLINK=4&uCHANNELLINK=2

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker and the host of The New Yorker Radio Hour, talks about this year's New Yorker Festival, and the election.

New Yorker cartoonist, Drew Dernavich, joins us on the podcast this week. It's been over a year since Drew has joined the podcast. His last appearance was the ill-fated 100th Anniversary episode that is unlistenable due to technical problems (the problem being that none of us knew how to properly use a professional podcast studio). Drew talks about what he's been up to this last year and joins us in the discussion of the New Yorker contests, our favorite cartoons from the current issue and the frequent portion of the podcast that we're calling "Vin Doesn't Get It".Drew also invites everyone to come see him and other cartoonists at the annual New Yorker Festival at the end of October for a live cartoon improv session. We'll post more information on that as it becomes available.We also talk bit about the letterpress prints he has collaborated on with Paul and his wife, Christy. The newest print "All Caps" will be available soon. You can still order the two previous prints here:https://www.nesjapress.com/shop/prints-and-broadsides/drew-dernavich-cartoonsWe discuss the winning entry for Contest #904 (Can You Lasso a Goat, Ted?).Finalists for Contest #906 (The Olympic "Go Fish" Finals). Current Contest #908 (I Don't See How This Is Remotely Funny).Send us questions or comments to:  Cartooncaptioncontestpodcast@gmail.com

Liza Donnelly, a writer and award-winning cartoonist with The New Yorker Magazine, shared the story behind her title with us on July 17, 2024.⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐Rating: 5 out of 5.MORE ABOUT LIZA:Of the interview, our founder and host, Sue Rocco, says: "Listen in as I sit down with Liza to discuss a troubled home growing up, finding her love of drawing and making people laugh, landing a spot at The New Yorker as the youngest female cartoonist and exploring the long history of women trying to find their voice."Liza has been drawing cartoons and writing about culture and politics for The New Yorker Magazine for forty years. She has contributed to CBS News and CNN, creating political cartoons as well as live-drawing special cultural and political events. Donnelly writes and draws for The New York Times and CNN Opinion pages and the Washington Post. Liza is also a screenwriter, working on her third feature and currently pitching a documentary.Donnelly delivered a very popular TED talk, which was translated into 40 languages and viewed over 1.4 million times. She is a return speaker at SXSW, has delivered talks at the United Nations in New York and Geneva, The New Yorker Festival, five TEDxes (most recently in Charlottesville, Virginia), universities, NGOs and corporate venues in the US and abroad. Donnelly has been a Cultural Envoy for the US State Department, traveling around the world to speak about freedom of speech, cartoons and women's rights.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/women-to-watch-r/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

During the 2023 New Yorker Festival, three legendary staff writers got together to discuss the craft of investigative journalism: digging for information like detectives, and then presenting it in a way to rival the best thrillers. For each of these writers, the “bad guy” —whose actions usually set the story in motion – needs to be presented in three dimensions; trusting the reader to grapple with that person's perspective is key to an engrossing story. “I look at these big, boring issues often, like economic inequality or corruption in politics,” Jane Mayer says. “You take a subject like campaign finance – the Citizens United decision and how it's corrupted politics. If you can find somebody like [Charles or David] Koch and explain there actually was a billionaire behind so much of this, and he has a story, and he has a family, and there are always screwed-up fathers and sons involved in these families. . . . It means that you're able to explain the ethical choices people make.” Mayer is best known for her book “Dark Money,” about the Koch brothers; David Grann wrote “Killers of the Flower Moon” and “The Wager,” both best-sellers; and Patrick Radden Keefe covered the Sackler family's opioid dynasty in “Empire of Pain,” and a murder during the Troubles in Northern Ireland in “Say Nothing.”  They were joined by their editor, The New Yorker's Daniel Zalewski.  

Across five studio albums, Florence and the Machine has explored genres from pop to punk and soul. Florence Welch, the group's singer and main songwriter, is by turns introspective and theatrical, poetic and confessional. She sat down with John Seabrook at The New Yorker Festival in 2019 to reflect on her band's rapid rise to stardom. She also spoke about her turn toward sobriety after years of heavy drinking. “The first year that I stopped, I felt like I'd really lost a big part of who I was and how I understood myself,” she says. “What I understood is that that was rock and roll, and, if you couldn't go the hardest, you were letting rock and roll down.” But eventually getting sober let her connect more deeply with fans and with the music. “To be conscious and to be present and to really feel what's going on—even though it's painful, it feels like much more a truly reborn spirit of rock and roll,” she says.  Welch wrote the music and the lyrics for “Gatsby: An American Myth,” which opened in June at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts.This segment originally aired on May 24, 2022. 

Fifty years ago, in July, 1974, The New Yorker began publishing a lengthy excerpt of Robert Caro's “The Power Broker.” When the book appeared, it ran more than twelve hundred pages and won a Pulitzer Prize. In vivid, astonishing detail, it shows how a city planner named Robert Moses gained power over New York City that dwarfed that of any mayor or governor, and radically changed the city. “The Power Broker” became a landmark of political reporting and biography, and made Caro one of the most celebrated writers in America. David Remnick sat down with Caro at the McCarter Theatre, in Princeton, New Jersey, in 2019, when “Working”—a collection of short pieces about Caro's methods—had been published. Their discussion encompassed Caro's early years as a newspaper reporter, his interviewing techniques, and his determination to tackle huge projects, including his chronicle of the life of Lyndon B. Johnson, four volumes of which have been published to date.This segment originally aired on June 18, 2019. 

On today's episode I had the pleasure of talking to Ophira Eisenberg about her journey to becoming a standup comic, parenting and work life balance. Ophira is a Canadian-born standup comedian, writer, and host. She hosted NPR's comedy trivia show Ask Me Another for 9-years, where she interviewed and played silly games with hundreds of celebrities including Sir Patrick Stewart, Awkwafina, Rosie Perez, Yo-Yo Ma, Bob The Drag Queen, Nick Kroll, Chelsea Handler, Jim Gaffigan, Michael C. Hall, and so many others. As a comic and a parent to a 6-year-old, Ophira is the host of the new comedy podcast Parenting Is A Joke co-produced by iHeart Radio and Pretty Good Friends Productions. The show launches on October 18th. She can be seen live, regularly headlining across the United States, Canada, and Europe delivering her unique blend of standup and storytelling to a loyal fan base of smart, irreverent comedy lovers. She has appeared at Montreal's Just for Laughs Festival, The New Yorker Festival, The New York Comedy Festival, Moontower Comedy Festival, Bumbershoot, The Nantucket Film Festival, Women in Comedy Festival and more. Her new comedy album at special Plant-Based Jokes is available on iTunes and is streaming now on YouTube. Lauded as “hilarious, high risk, and an inspiration,” Ophira filmed her comedy special Inside Joke, when she was 8½ months pregnant. The show's material revolves around how she told everyone that she was never going to have kids, and then unexpectedly found herself expecting at “an advanced maternal age.” Her other comedy albums, Bangs! and As Is She has appeared on Comedy Central, This Week at The Comedy Cellar, Kevin Hart's LOL Network, HBO's Girls, Gotham Live, The Late Late Show, The Today Show, and VH-1. The New York Times called her a skilled comedian and storyteller with “bleakly stylish” humor. She was also selected as one of New York Magazine's “Top 10 Comics that Funny People Find Funny,” and hailed by Forbes.com as one of the most engaging comics working today. Ophira is a regular host and teller with The Moth and her stories have been featured on The Moth Radio Hour and in two of The Moth's best-selling collections, including the most recent New York Times Bestseller: How To Tell A Story: The Essential Guide to Memorable Storytelling from The Moth. Ophira's first book, Screw Everyone: Sleeping My Way to Monogamy (Seal Press), is a comedic memoir about her experiments in the field as a single woman, traveling from futon to futon and flask-to-flask, gathering data, hoping to put it all together and build her own perfect Frankenmate. It was optioned for a feature film. She is also sought after as a brilliant interviewer and moderator, and has interviewed dozens of celebrities, writers, and actors including Neil Gaiman at New York's Town Hall; Jane Curtain, Anne Beatts, Heather Gardner, Sudi Green, Alysia Reiner, Jeanne Tripplehorn, David Crane, Jeffrey Klerik at The Nantucket Film Festival; Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara, Daniel Levy and Annie Murphy at the 92nd Street Y; and Nell Scovell and Sloane Crosley at The Mark Twain House. Originally from Calgary, Alberta, Canada, Ophira graduated with a Cultural Anthropology and Theater degree from McGill University. She now lives in Brooklyn, NY where she is a fixture at New York City's comedy clubs including the Comedy Cellar, Gotham Comedy Club, New York Comedy Club and Carolines, as well as Brooklyn's famed performance venues The Bell House, Union Hall, and Littlefield. Ophira Eisenberg https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com https://www.instagram.com/ophirae https://www.facebook.com/OphiraEisenberg https://twitter.com/OphiraE https://www.tiktok.com/@ophiranyc American gypC Podcast http://americangypc.com https://www.instagram.com/americangypcpodcast/ https://www.tiktok.com/@UCtt0HzXgvNADAOyRarKZFkQ https://www.linkedin.com/in/american-gypc-1940a2231 https://open.spotify.com/show/2stCfDEs5xOY7xMldvZjXo http://luamlee.com --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/american-gypc/support

At seventy-four, Bruce Springsteen has been cementing his status as a rock-and-roll legend for almost fifty years: he released his widely heralded, but not initially widely heard, début, “Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.” in 1973. But, true to form, the artist who became known to his fans as the Boss hasn't rested on his laurels. After weathering a spate of health troubles this past year, which led him to cancel much of his tour, the rock icon plans to hit the road again in the new year, all over the U.S., Canada, and Europe. When Springsteen published his autobiography, “Born to Run,” back in 2016, David Remnick called it “as vivid as his songs, with that same pedal-to-the-floor quality, and just as honest about the struggles in his own life.” In October of that year, Springsteen appeared at the New Yorker Festival for an intimate conversation with the editor. (The event sold out in six seconds.) This entire episode is dedicated to that conversation. Springsteen tells Remnick how, as a young musician gigging around New Jersey, he decided to up his game: “I'm going to have to write some songs that are fireworks. . . . I needed to do something that was more original.” They talked for more than an hour about Springsteen's tortured relationship with his father, his triumphant audition for the legendary producer John Hammond, and his struggles with depression. As Springsteen explains it, his tremendously exuberant concert performances were a form of catharsis: “I had had enough of myself by that time to want to lose myself. So I went onstage every night to do exactly that.”This episode originally aired in 2016. 

We're in the midst of another election season, and yet again American democracy hangs in the balance, with a leading Presidential candidate who has threatened to suspend parts of the Constitution. How did the foundations of our political system become so shaky?  Jelani Cobb, the dean of the journalism school at Columbia University; Evan Osnos, a Washington correspondent for The New Yorker; and the best-selling author and historian Jill Lepore joined The New Yorker's Michael Luo for a discussion of that very existential question during the most recent New Yorker Festival. From Cobb's perspective, “it's not that complicated,” he notes, “If we went all the way back to the fundamental dichotomy of the people who founded this country and the way they subsidized their mission of liberty with the lives of slaves. So we've always been engaged in that dialectic.” Lepore argues that people on both sides of the political divide choose to embrace an account of the past that accords with their politics, something she considers “incredibly dangerous.” Osnos, who witnessed the upheaval of January 6th firsthand, thinks the deeper problem is disengagement from the country and the political system. “I was struck by how many of [the rioters] told me it was their first trip to Washington,” Osnos says. “They came to Washington to sack the Capitol.”CORRECTION: Jelani Cobb notes that Queens was at one time the second-whitest borough of New York City, and is the most diverse county in the United States. Measures of diversity vary; in some recent data, Queens ranks third among counties. 

We're in the midst of another election season, and yet again American democracy hangs in the balance, with a leading Presidential candidate who has threatened to suspend parts of the Constitution. How did the foundations of our political system become so shaky?  Jelani Cobb, the dean of the journalism school at Columbia University; Evan Osnos, a Washington correspondent for The New Yorker; and the best-selling author and historian Jill Lepore joined The New Yorker's Michael Luo for a discussion of that very existential question during the most recent New Yorker Festival. From Cobb's perspective, “it's not that complicated,” he notes, “If we went all the way back to the fundamental dichotomy of the people who founded this country and the way they subsidized their mission of liberty with the lives of slaves. So we've always been engaged in that dialectic.” Lepore argues that people on both sides of the political divide choose to embrace an account of the past that accords with their politics, something she considers “incredibly dangerous.” Osnos, who witnessed the upheaval of January 6th firsthand, thinks the deeper problem is disengagement from the country and the political system. “I was struck by how many of [the rioters] told me it was their first trip to Washington,” Osnos says. “They came to Washington to sack the Capitol.”CORRECTION: Jelani Cobb notes that Queens was at one time the second-whitest borough of New York City, and is the most diverse county in the United States. Measures of diversity vary; in some recent data, Queens ranks third among counties

Samantha Irby's latest essay collection, “Quietly Hostile,” cemented her place as one of the great professionally funny people working today. Her books and her writing for such TV shows as “Shrill” and “Tuca & Bertie” are distinguished by a no-holds-barred, raunchy, often scatological brand of humor and a willingness to poke fun at just about anything—including herself. In a live taping of Critics at Large at this year's New Yorker Festival, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz sat down with Irby to unpack her approach. They discussed humor as a coping mechanism; her work on the “Sex and the City” reboot, “And Just Like That . . .,” and the ensuing backlash; and how the Internet has transformed the comedy landscape. “What people enjoy is so varied,” Irby says. “The future is you finding very specific things that delight you, and having them readily available.” New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We all have thoughts that can be seemingly absurd or self-contradictory. In this week's episode, both of our storytellers reckon with their conflicting thoughts.Part 1: After surviving breast cancer, comedian Ophira Eisenberg hates the pink breast cancer awareness ribbon.Part 2: After the sudden death of his mom, Richard Kemeny feels numb to the world and his feelings.Ophira Eisenberg is a standup comic and host of NPR's nationally syndicated comedy, trivia show Ask Me Another where she interviews and plays silly games with Sir Patrick Stewart, Taye Diggs, Awkwafina, Roxane Gay, Terry Crews, Jessica Walter, Josh Groban, Nick Kroll, Tony Hawk, George Takei, Sasha Velour, Ethan Hawke, Julia Stiles, Lewis Black, Uzo Aduba, Michael C. Hall and more. She also is a regular host and teller with The Moth and her stories have been featured on The Moth Radio Hour and in their best-selling books, including the most recent: Occasional Magic: True Stories About Defying the Impossible. Ophira's own comedic memoir, Screw Everyone: Sleeping My Way to Monogamy was optioned for a feature film. She has appeared on Comedy Central, This Week At The Comedy Cellar, The New Yorker Festival, Kevin Hart's LOL Network, HBO's Girls, Gotham Live, The Late Late Show, The Today Show, and VH-1. Her comedy special Inside Joke is available on Amazon and iTunes.Richard Kemeny is a freelance science and travel writer based in London. His work has appeared in New Scientist, The Atlantic, Science, Hakai, the BBC and National Geographic. He used to produce The Economist's science and tech podcast, Babbage, and has reported from several countries for PRI's The World. He has received fellowships to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Marine Biological Laboratory, and used to work for a coral reef restoration foundation on the northern coast of Colombia. In his spare time he goes bouldering or thinks about cold water swimming. He is @rakemeny Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We all have thoughts that can be seemingly absurd or self-contradictory. In this week's episode, both of our storytellers reckon with their conflicting thoughts. Part 1: After surviving breast cancer, comedian Ophira Eisenberg hates the pink breast cancer awareness ribbon. Part 2: After the sudden death of his mom, Richard Kemeny feels numb to the world and his feelings. Ophira Eisenberg is a standup comic and host of NPR's nationally syndicated comedy, trivia show Ask Me Another where she interviews and plays silly games with Sir Patrick Stewart, Taye Diggs, Awkwafina, Roxane Gay, Terry Crews, Jessica Walter, Josh Groban, Nick Kroll, Tony Hawk, George Takei, Sasha Velour, Ethan Hawke, Julia Stiles, Lewis Black, Uzo Aduba, Michael C. Hall and more. She also is a regular host and teller with The Moth and her stories have been featured on The Moth Radio Hour and in their best-selling books, including the most recent: Occasional Magic: True Stories About Defying the Impossible. Ophira's own comedic memoir, Screw Everyone: Sleeping My Way to Monogamy was optioned for a feature film. She has appeared on Comedy Central, This Week At The Comedy Cellar, The New Yorker Festival, Kevin Hart's LOL Network, HBO's Girls, Gotham Live, The Late Late Show, The Today Show, and VH-1. Her comedy special Inside Joke is available on Amazon and iTunes. Richard Kemeny is a freelance science and travel writer based in London. His work has appeared in New Scientist, The Atlantic, Science, Hakai, the BBC and National Geographic. He used to produce The Economist's science and tech podcast, Babbage, and has reported from several countries for PRI's The World. He has received fellowships to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Marine Biological Laboratory, and used to work for a coral reef restoration foundation on the northern coast of Colombia. In his spare time he goes bouldering or thinks about cold water swimming. He is @rakemeny Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The director Spike Lee looked back at the length and breadth of his career so far during a sit-down with David Remnick at the New Yorker Festival. Although Lee's storied filmography may be familiar to movie buffs, few are likely to know as much about his humble beginnings as the scion of a celebrated, but often unemployed, musician—the late Bill Lee. The young Spike Lee bore some resentment toward his father, an upright-bass player who eschewed countless gigs because he refused to play an electric bass guitar. “[I]t wasn't until later that I saw that, yo, this is his life. He was not going to play music that he didn't want to play.” As an artist in his own right, Lee has taken a similar approach to filmmaking. He has tackled a myriad of genres and difficult subject matter, without sacrificing his unique voice and social consciousness to satisfy Hollywood. “Some things you just can't compromise,” he told Remnick. Now in his fourth decade as a filmmaker, Lee hopes to one day make a long-gestating bio-pic about Joe Louis and have his career last as long as that of one of his idols. “Kurosawa was eighty-six!” the sixty-six-year-old Lee said, of the Japanese filmmaker's retirement age. “I got to at least get to Kurosawa.” In this interview, Lee mentions the influence of Kurosawa and several other notable filmmakers. For further reading, here is a list of ninety-five films he has deemed essential for any cinephile.

The director Spike Lee looked back at the length and breadth of his career so far during a sit-down with David Remnick at the New Yorker Festival. Although Lee's storied filmography may be familiar to movie buffs, few are likely to know as much about his humble beginnings as the scion of a celebrated, but often unemployed, musician—the late Bill Lee. The young Spike Lee bore some resentment toward his father, an upright-bass player who eschewed countless gigs because he refused to play an electric bass guitar. “[I]t wasn't until later that I saw that, yo, this is his life. He was not going to play music that he didn't want to play.” As an artist in his own right, Lee has taken a similar approach to filmmaking. He has tackled a myriad of genres and difficult subject matter, without sacrificing his unique voice and social consciousness to satisfy Hollywood. “Some things you just can't compromise,” he told Remnick. Now in his fourth decade as a filmmaker, Lee hopes to one day make a long-gestating bio-pic about Joe Louis and have his career last as long as that of one of his idols. “Kurosawa was eighty-six!” the sixty-six-year-old Lee said, of the Japanese filmmaker's retirement age. “I have to at least get to Kurosawa.” Plus, the sports writer Louisa Thomas talks with the New Yorker Radio Hour's Adam Howard about the stars to watch in the N.B.A.'s new season. Share your thoughts on The New Yorker Radio Hour  podcast.

Dave and Ethan share their experience of attending the Weird Al Q&A with Andy Borowitz at the 2023 New Yorker Festival at Webster Hall in New York City on October 7th. They talk about the event as well as the rest of their weekend together - including a surprising meeting with another one of their favorite celebrities.

Thank you Ophira for your groan worthy efforts! You can learn more about Ophira through her website: https://www.ophiraeisenberg.com/ Listen to her podcast, Parenting is a Joke, here: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/parenting-is-a-joke/id1649234901 About Ophira: Ophira Eisenberg is a Canadian-born standup comedian, writer, and host. She hosted NPR's comedy trivia show Ask Me Another for 9-years, where she interviewed and played silly games with hundreds of celebrities including Sir Patrick Stewart, Awkwafina, Rosie Perez, Yo-Yo Ma, Bob The Drag Queen, Nick Kroll, Chelsea Handler, Jim Gaffigan, Michael C. Hall, and so many others. As a comic and a parent to a 6-year-old, Ophira is the host of the new comedy podcast Parenting Is A Joke co-produced by iHeart Radio and Pretty Good Friends Productions. The show launches on October 18th. She can be seen live, regularly headlining across the United States, Canada, and Europe delivering her unique blend of standup and storytelling to a loyal fan base of smart, irreverent comedy lovers. She has appeared at Montreal's Just for Laughs Festival, The New Yorker Festival, The New York Comedy Festival, Moontower Comedy Festival, Bumbershoot, The Nantucket Film Festival, Women in Comedy Festival and more. Her new comedy album at special Plant-Based Jokes is available on iTunes and is streaming now on YouTube. Lauded as “hilarious, high risk, and an inspiration,” Ophira filmed her comedy special Inside Joke, when she was 8½ months pregnant. The show's material revolves around how she told everyone that she was never going to have kids, and then unexpectedly found herself expecting at “an advanced maternal age.” Her other comedy albums, Bangs! and As Is She has appeared on Comedy Central, This Week at The Comedy Cellar, Kevin Hart's LOL Network, HBO's Girls, Gotham Live, The Late Late Show, The Today Show, and VH-1. The New York Times called her a skilled comedian and storyteller with “bleakly stylish” humor. She was also selected as one of New York Magazine's “Top 10 Comics that Funny People Find Funny,” and hailed by Forbes.com as one of the most engaging comics working today.  Ophira is a regular host and teller with The Moth and her stories have been featured on The Moth Radio Hour and in two of The Moth's best-selling collections, including the most recent New York Times Bestseller: How To Tell A Story: The Essential Guide to Memorable Storytelling from The Moth.  Ophira's first book, Screw Everyone: Sleeping My Way to Monogamy (Seal Press), is a comedic memoir about her experiments in the field as a single woman, traveling from futon to futon and flask-to-flask, gathering data, hoping to put it all together and build her own perfect Frankenmate. It was optioned for a feature film.  She is also sought after as a brilliant interviewer and moderator, and has interviewed dozens of celebrities, writers, and actors including Neil Gaiman at New York's Town Hall; Jane Curtain, Anne Beatts, Heather Gardner, Sudi Green, Alysia Reiner, Jeanne Tripplehorn, David Crane, Jeffrey Klerik at The Nantucket Film Festival; Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara, Daniel Levy and Annie Murphy at the 92nd Street Y; and Nell Scovell and Sloane Crosley at The Mark Twain House.  Originally from Calgary, Alberta, Canada, Ophira graduated with a Cultural Anthropology and Theater degree from McGill University. She now lives in Brooklyn, NY where she is a fixture at New York City's comedy clubs including the Comedy Cellar, Gotham Comedy Club, New York Comedy Club and Carolines, as well as Brooklyn's famed performance venues The Bell House, Union Hall, and Littlefield. She resides with her husband and son where she can regularly be seen drinking a ton of coffee.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker and the host of "The New Yorker Radio Hour" talks about this year's New Yorker Festival, and current politics.

When they were just thirteen and eleven years old, sisters Chloe and Halle Bailey started posting videos of themselves singing on YouTube and quickly built a following. Their covers often went viral—their version of Beyoncé's “Pretty Hurts” even caught the attention of Beyoncé, who brought them on tour as her opening act.  Now, with two albums and five Grammy nominations behind them, the sisters are for the first time working on separate projects: Halle is starring as Ariel in an upcoming remake of “The Little Mermaid,” and Chloe is releasing a solo album, “In Pieces,” later this month. Chloe Bailey spoke with the contributing writer Lauren Michele Jackson at the New Yorker Festival in October about the mixed blessing of social-media stardom. “When we program our minds to think about being No. 1 … it really suffocates you and it stifles the process,” she says. “Right now, I'm just creating to be creating, and I have never felt more free.”  Plus, the lost New Jersey photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson. In 1975, the French master photographer spent a month documenting New Jersey, which he called a “shortcut to America.” Why did the pictures disappear?

Martin McDonagh burst onto the London theatre scene as a young playwright in the nineteen-nineties. At one point, he had four plays running simultaneously on stages across London. But McDonagh also aspired to work in movies, and he eventually shifted his focus to directing films such as “In Bruges” and “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.” “When you sit down to write something, how do you know if it's a movie or a play?” the staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe asked McDonagh at The New Yorker Festival. “If it has four characters, and it's set indoors, it's a play,” McDonagh replied—“if it doesn't have any donkeys or dogs.” McDonagh's new film, “The Banshees of Inisherin,” starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, is his first feature set in Ireland, and it prominently features a donkey. “Banshees” traces the story of a friendship breaking apart in the beautiful, remote hills of the country's west. “I just wanted this [movie] to be sort of plotless in a way,” McDonagh said. “Just to have the unravelling of this breakup be what the whole story was about.” The film is now nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.  This segment originally aired on October 21, 2022.

The veteran stage and screen actress Christine Baranski first became a household name thanks to her Emmy-winning turn on the nineties sitcom “Cybill,” and her Tony-award winning work on Broadway. But “The Good Fight” took her to another level. As Diane Lockhart, a Chicago attorney and diehard liberal, Baranski captured the tensions of the political moment of Donald Trump, and the show ended its run this month. Emily Nussbaum could barely contain her excitement when sat down with Baranski at The New Yorker Festival in 2018 for a wide-ranging conversation about Baranski's career and the timeliness of “The Good Fight.” This segment originally aired April 12, 2019.

Quinta Brunson made a name for herself as a master of meme comedy and is a self-described “child of the Internet,” yet her ABC mockumentary series “Abbott Elementary” is an unabashed throwback to the sitcoms of her youth. Doreen St. Félix talked with Brunson at the 2022 New Yorker Festival about her influences and the everyday comedy of the workplace. St. Félix believes that Brunson has found “freedom in formula” when it comes to “Abbott,” which documents the lives of the beleaguered staff at a Philadelphia public school. “There is nothing that I could do,” Brunson says, “or [that] anyone can do that is more triumphant than someone going to their shitty job.” Writing in the wake of shows like “Black-ish,” Brunson relishes being able to center her story on Black people without addressing topical issues about race; the school is its own self-enclosed world. Just surviving, she thinks, provides its own form of liberation. “So much has happened to Black people,” she says. “Why are we still here? . . . We really could have called it quits a long time ago, and somehow we just keep going. It's crazy to me.”

OPHIRA EISENBERG (NPR, THE MOTH) TO HOST NEW IHEARTPODCAST "PARENTING IS A JOKE" PREMIERES TUESDAY, OCTOBER 18Guests include Jessi Klein, Roy Wood Jr., Eugene Mirman, Chuck Bryant, Chris Gethard, Catherine Reitman, Dr. Emily Oster and more.Parents are overwhelmed AF and could use a laugh. Join comedian host Ophira Eisenberg as she talks to your favorite celebrity comics and actors about their careers and their kids as well as teen angst, Nietzche, workaholism, being ok with not being cool anymore, eating sticks, and debating whether or not kids should watch The Godfather. Guests include Emmy-award winner Jessi Klein, stand-up comedian Roy Wood Jr. (The Daily Show), Eugene Mirman (Bob's Burgers), Rachel Bloom (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), Chuck Bryant (Stuff You Should Know), Chris Gethard, Dr. Emily Oster and more.Parenting is a Joke is produced by Pretty Good Friends and iHeart Podcasts and is available on the iHeartRadio app and everywhere podcasts are heard. New episodes every Tuesday.Episodes here: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-parenting-is-a-joke-102629737/OPHIRA EISENBERG BIOOphira Eisenberg is a standup comedian, writer and host. She has appeared multiple times on CBS's The Late Late Show as well as on Comedy Central, This Week At The Comedy Cellar, Kevin Hart's LOL Network, , HBO's Girls, Gotham Live, Hulu's Up Early Tonight, The Today Show and featured at The New Yorker Festival.She hosted NPR's national comedy trivia show Ask Me Another for 9 years, where she interviewed and played silly games with over 300 celebrities, including Sir Patrick Harris, Rosie Perez, Yo -Yo Ma, Chelsea Handler, Awkwafina, Roxanne Gay, Bob The Drag Queen, Nick Kroll, Matthew McConaughey and more.She is a regular host and teller on The Moth Radio Hour. Her stories are included in three of The Moth's best-selling collections, including the most recent: How To Tell A Story: The Essential Guide to Memorable Storytelling from The Moth.Ophira's own comedic memoir, Screw Everyone: Sleeping My Way to Monogamy, was optioned for a television series. Her comedy special Inside Joke is available on Amazon, and her new comedy album and special Plant-Based Jokes is available through 800 Pound Gorilla Records, and streaming on YouTube.

Last month, 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 ahold 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 year's New Yorker Festival featured two conversations with renowned playwrights: Suzan-Lori Parks and Martin McDonagh. Parks, the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for drama, sat down with the staff writer Vinson Cunningham. “The marketplace is telling us that Black joy is what sells,” she said. “I'm very suspicious about what the marketplace wants me to create because I know in my experience where real Black joy resides—and sometimes that's in the place where there might be some traumatic thing that also happened.” A revival of Parks's groundbreaking play, “Topdog/Underdog,” just opened on Broadway.  And McDonagh, who is out with a new film, “The Banshees of Inisherin,” spoke with Patrick Radden Keefe. “The Banshees of Inisherin” traces the story of a friendship breaking apart in the beautiful, remote hills of western Ireland. “I just wanted this [movie] to be sort of plotless in a way,” McDonagh said. “Just to have the unravelling of this breakup be what the whole story was about.”

Tomorrow marks the last expected public hearing of the Congressional January 6th Committee. The eight previous hearings have already revealed extraordinary information about just how close American democracy came to being overturned during the insurrection. But what has yet to be revealed? Will we learn what Trump was doing while the Capitol was stormed? Will action be taken? The New Yorker's Washington bureau—Evan Osnos, Jane Mayer, and Susan B. Glasser—are joined at the New Yorker Festival by Representative Jamie Raskin, who is both a congressman and a constitutional scholar, to discuss the legal theory of the many possible cases against Donald Trump. “Trump is a one-man crime wave,” Raskin says. “Like, he personally affects the crime rate.”

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker and the host of The New Yorker Radio Hour, talks about this year's New Yorker Festival, plus the anti-war protests in Russia and more.

Aimee Mann, the celebrated Los Angeles singer and songwriter, recently released an album called “Queens of the Summer Hotel.” It was inspired in part by Susanna Kaysen's best-selling memoir “Girl, Interrupted,” about Kaysen's time in a psychiatric hospital. Mann sat down with Atul Gawande at The New Yorker Festival to talk about the new album, the lessons of living through a pandemic, and how liberated she felt when she broke her ties with major record labels. “When you're at a record label and you're trying to ascertain whether something can be a hit or a single, you listen in a different way—and then everything sounds like garbage,” she said. Mann decided that she didn't “want to keep baring my soul to people who hate everything I'm doing.”  This segment was originally aired November 26, 2021.

Jason Isbell got into the music business early; he had a publishing deal when he was twenty-one. But he really came into his own as a songwriter around ten years ago, as he was getting sober from years of alcohol and drug use. His record “Southeastern,” which comes in the tradition of musicians like Guy Clark, swept the Americana Music Awards in 2014. Isbell spoke with John Seabrook at The New Yorker Festival in 2016, shortly after his record “Something More than Free” was released, and he played a live set of songs including “Different Days,” “How to Forget,” and “Speed Trap Town.”   This segment first aired December 30, 2016.

Across five studio albums, Florence and the Machine has explored genres from pop to punk and soul; the band's most recent record, “Dance Fever,” just came out. Florence Welch, the group's singer and main songwriter, is by turns introspective and theatrical, poetic and confessional. She sat down with John Seabrook at The New Yorker Festival in 2019 to reflect on her band's rapid rise to stardom. She also spoke about her turn toward sobriety after years of heavy drinking. “The first year that I stopped, I felt like I'd really lost a big part of who I was and how I understood myself,” she says. “What I understood is that that was rock and roll, and, if you couldn't go the hardest, you were letting rock and roll down.” But eventually getting sober let her connect more deeply with fans and with the music. “To be conscious and to be present and to really feel what's going on—even though it's painful, it feels like much more a truly reborn spirit of rock and roll,” she says.

Appearing at the New Yorker Festival, in conversation with Michael Schulman , Bridget Everett brought her dog onstage. It was unconventional, but no more so than anything else she does. Vulgar, badly behaved, and entirely comfortable with herself, Everett's persona as a cabaret performer whips audiences into a frenzy at the legendary Joe's Pub, in New York. That cult following led to parts on the television shows “Inside Amy Schumer”, “Lady Dynamite,” and “Girls,” and in the movie “Trainwreck.” But Everett found a new depth in last year's “Patti Cake$,” as the barfly mother of the movie's title character, who is a young, overweight white woman aspiring to be a rapper. Everett's character, Barb, is a failed singer who mocks her daughter's musical career. “I get the urge to want to tear somebody down even when you love them, because you don't want them to slip away, or you don't want them to have something you never had,” she said. “If I was still in Kansas and I wasn't singing, and I wasn't doing what I want to do, that's exactly who I would be. And I would be that drunk and I would be at that bar, hopefully not with those nails, but I would be that person.” *This episode contains explicit language.

As a young boy, Jim Carrey got in trouble for staring in the mirror. He didn't do it because he was vain; he was practicing the comic skills that made him one of the great impressionists of our time, a man whose face seems to be made of some pliable alien material. Yet that malleable face is as capable of portraying deep and complex emotion as it is of making us laugh. As a result, Carrey's career has been one reinvention after another. These days, he's been lighting up Twitter as a political cartoonist—his way of drawing Donald Trump is particularly grotesque—and starring in the television series “Kidding.” He plays a children's entertainer, in the mold of Mr. Rogers, who is struggling with the death of his own son. Carrey sat down with Colin Stokes at the New Yorker Festival in October, 2018. He spoke about his reverence for Fred Rogers and the inspiration he takes from Eastern philosophy. “I don't exist,” Carrey says. “There's no separation between you and me at all . . . I know I'm sounding really crazy right now, but it's really true.”

When the acting Attorney General Sally Yates wouldn't defend the so-called Muslim travel ban, she was promptly sacked—“before it was fashionable to be fired” in the Trump Administration, Jeffrey Toobin says.  Yates, who served in the Justice Department during the Bush and Obama Administrations, talks with Toobin at the 2018 New Yorker Festival, about the impact of Trump on her career and on American politics. The singer Kelela reinvents R. & B. with influences from jazz to trip-hop and electronica, and she performs a live set at the festival accompanied by the producer and d.j. Loric Sih.    

Seth Meyers—a veteran of “Saturday Night Live” and the host of NBC's “Late Night with Seth Meyers”—sat down at the 2017 New Yorker Festival to walk Ariel Levy through a career that seems charmed. As an unknown improv performer, Meyers was picked for the cast of “Saturday Night Live”; he eventually became the show's head writer and the host of “Weekend Update,” alongside Amy Poehler. Along the way, Meyers tells Levy, he had a number of strange run-ins with Donald Trump. When Trump appeared on “S.N.L.,” he was in a sketch about his lack of empathy, with Meyers playing his son. Later, Meyers hosted the White House Correspondents' Association dinner and observed that “Donald Trump says he has a great relationship with the blacks. But unless the Blacks are a family of white people, I think he's mistaken.” After, it was widely reported that President Obama's mockery of Trump at that event spurred Trump to launch a campaign for the Presidency. At first, Meyers was hurt by the lack of attention. “I wanted to share credit. . . . I helped trick an unelectable person to run for President,” Meyers says. “Then he won. And when he won, my first thought was, ‘This is Obama's fault. I had nothing to do with it.' ”

The author of “No Logo” and “The Shock Doctrine,” Naomi Klein has become what Noam Chomsky was to an earlier generation of leftists. Her theories tie inequality and climate change together, arguing that capitalists use disasters to advance the agenda of neoliberalism. In a conversation with the staff writer Jia Tolentino at the 2017 New Yorker Festival, Klein makes the case that, by embracing billionaire “saviors” like Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg, liberals helped pave the way for Donald Trump. She is clearly a partisan of the left, but she thinks we could all benefit from reflecting on the ways that each of us—on social media, for example—is a little bit Trumpish.