Dave Davies
Appearances
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
She's the Emma Bloomberg Associate Professor of Public Policy and Management at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and director of the People Lab, which does research on how to recruit, retrain, and support the government workforce and integrate evidence-based policymaking into government.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
You know, I wonder if, you know, workers are, while they're getting these messages from the top, are having their personal supervisors reassure them at all saying, look, this is not something we're doing. What you do is important. We want to keep doing it. Hang in there. Have you heard things like that?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
There have been media reports of people who were discharged with language about poor performance or similar language, but who have said in interviews that they've had nothing but positive performance reports. Generally speaking, what kinds of rights do they have to appeal these firings?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Earlier in her career, she was a policy advisor to Prime Minister George Papandreou of Greece, pursuing government reform at a time of financial crisis. Well, Elizabeth Linos, welcome to Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
We're going to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Elizabeth Lino. She is an associate professor of public policy and management at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
You know, it's not a new complaint that government is bloated and wasteful. And there have been efforts by past presidents to trim the workforce. Can you talk a bit about that and what kind of results they produced?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
There's a perception in all of this recent activity that the public payroll is bloated, not just inefficient, but just too many people. How does the federal workforce compare with, I don't know, past decades?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Can you think of an example of that, a particular service or function which got privatized and kind of simply displaced the workforce outside the federal employment?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
In writing about these recent reductions, you wrote, the administration seems to be weakening or fully eliminating teams that were doing exactly the kind of work DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, claims to value. Focus on data, evaluation, and customer service teams that have spent years.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
reducing bureaucratic red tape, modernizing service delivery, and bringing in critical tech talent. In other words, there were people out there doing the kind of work that Doge was supposed to do, how to get more for the taxpayer's dollar. Some might be skeptical of that statement. Can you give us an example of this?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
The administration's response to some of the complaints that have arisen, I mean, have – is essentially that, look, extreme times sometimes demand extreme measures. Government spending is out of control. Musk himself has said, yes, we will make mistakes, but we will correct them quickly. What's your reaction to that? Do you think things could get better with time?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Let's take another break here. We're speaking with Elizabeth Linos. She's an associate professor of public policy and management at Harvard University School of Government. We'll be back after this short break. This is Fresh Air. You know, earlier in your career, I mentioned that you were a policy advisor to the prime minister of Greece at a time of financial crisis.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
I mean, I wonder if you can share any of that experience that might offer insight into this effort to reshape the American government.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
You know, something like 80 percent of the federal workers live outside the Washington, D.C. area. What might be the economic impact of these job cuts on communities where workers live?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Now, before we talk about the specific measures that the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, as Elon Musk's outfit is called, let's just talk a little bit about the rules here. I mean, I know that most federal government employees work under the civil service system. Just tell us a little bit about how long we've had that, what it was intended to do.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Elon Musk and Doge claimed at one point $55 billion in savings. That's kind of been picked apart. Do we know how much of that is real?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Yeah, it's interesting. I've covered local government where payroll costs are a huge part of the government because you're engaged in direct service delivery, collecting trash and operating libraries. The federal government is different. I mean how much of the federal budget is payroll?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
This effort is really just underway. I mean, it's been a few weeks really. Do you have any idea what to expect in the future? Where do you think this is going to go?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
What's an example of one of these cuts that will be apparent to citizens soon?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Elizabeth Linos, thank you so much for speaking with us.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Elizabeth Linos is the Emma Bloomberg Associate Professor of Public Policy and Management at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Coming up, Maureen Corrigan reviews Last Scene, a book about newly freed African Americans in the 1860s who took out ads to find lost children, spouses, siblings, and parents. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
When slavery ended in 1865, newly freed black Americans began to search for their lost family members, taking out ads, seeking information about children, spouses, siblings, and parents. In her new book, Last Seen, historian Judith Giesberg tells some of the stories of people who placed those ads. Book critic Maureen Corrigan has this review.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. Here's a hypothetical question. If he wanted to, could Elon Musk establish a new bathroom breaks policy for more than 2 million federal employees?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed Last Scene by Judith Giesberg, who also founded the Last Scene Project website. On tomorrow's show, we hear from actor Natasha Rothwell. She returns to the third season of HBO's The White Lotus as Belinda, the compassionate spa manager from season one.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
She'll talk about the unique experience of shooting in Thailand, as well as her time as a writer and performer on Insecure and her own show, How to Die Alone. I hope you can join us. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Oren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman, and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producer is Molly Sivinesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
What has been the posture of Donald Trump and his administration and his supporters towards civil service?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Well, he hasn't, but since the Trump administration took office and gave Musk's Department of Government Efficiency a mandate to shrink the government, Musk has wielded an astonishing level of authority over the federal workforce.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Speaking in general, what protections does the civil service system offer government employees?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
You know, it's been a really turbulent few weeks for federal employees. I wonder, you know, you've done work with these folks. Have you talked to federal employees? What have they told you about their experiences?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
After gaining access to the Treasury Department's massive payment system, Musk and his team have dismissed thousands of employees, terminated countless contracts, and targeted two government agencies created by Congress for elimination. Last weekend, federal workers received an email instructing them to reply with five bullet points stating what they'd accomplished the previous week.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Is there one employee that maybe you could describe for us without identifying them by name or position?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
So let's talk about what's happened here. Do we know how many government employees have been taken off the payroll so far by Doge, more or less?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Let's pause on that for a second. I mean, what does that tell you about how government employees feel about their jobs and about this buyout offer, if we can call it that?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
So let's talk about the next big effort, which was the sweeping purge of employees who were on probation, presumably because they didn't yet have the requisite time to get full civil service protection so that they were more vulnerable. You've written that this might be one of the worst ways to trim a workforce. Why?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Musk added in a social media post that failure to respond would be taken as a resignation. That got pushback from several Trump-appointed agency leaders who told their employees not to respond. Much of what Musk has done is under court challenge, but President Trump has said he'd like to see him become even more aggressive.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
Trevor Burrus So if I put these two things together, it seems as if the deferred departure, so we call buyout offer, was designed as supposed to get higher paid, probably more experienced people in government who – Doge probably thought were not that productive anyway, try to get them to leave. The result seems to have been that the departures were exactly what you'd expect in a normal year.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
So that didn't really work. But they are trimming a lot of people who presumably are bringing new energy and talent.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
We have an older workforce, I gather, from your writing in the federal government. What are the implications of that for this massive reduction effort?
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
To help us understand these efforts to drastically reshape the American government, we've invited Elizabeth Linus to join us.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
You know, there was an extraordinary move, and I mentioned this in the introduction, which I think is a measure of Musk's influence in the government, that he got these emails sent to people last weekend instructing them to reply with five bullet points stating what they'd accomplished the previous week. There was some pushback. Some agency had said, you don't have to do that.
Fresh Air
The Ripple Effect Of Musk's Government Purge
But, you know, Musk added in this social media post that failure to respond would be taken as a resignation. What was your reaction when you heard about this?
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. For decades, scientists have dreamed of computers so sophisticated they could think like humans and worried what might happen if those machines began to act independently. Those fears and aspirations accelerated in 2022 when a company called OpenAI released its artificial intelligence chatbot called ChatGPT.
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
You know, the account that you give us in the book is pretty detailed and really interesting about how all this unfolded. One of the things that struck me is that some of the leading players in developing AI weren't just coders or computer nerds. A lot of them studied classics or philosophy or worked in completely unrelated fields. Is there a connection here?
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
Rivlin has worked for the New York Times, among other publications, and published 10 previous books. In 2017, he shared a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on the Panama Papers. His new book is AI Valley, Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion Dollar Race to Cash in on Artificial Intelligence. Well, Gary Rivlin, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thanks for having me. Let's just start with a couple of basics.
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
I'm going to take another break here. We are speaking with Gary Rivlin. He's a veteran investigative reporter. His new book is AI Valley, Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion Dollar Race to Cash in on Artificial Intelligence. He'll be back to talk more after a short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
You made the point earlier that it's enormously expensive to develop AI. I mean the talent is high-priced and it takes tons and tons of computing power to develop the systems, to run them once you have them, which means not a couple three million dollars but hundreds of millions in some cases or more, which means that the big companies in tech – Microsoft, Google, Meta, we all know the names –
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
have an edge but it's interesting as I read your story that doesn't that's no guarantee of success is it sometimes it's kind of an obstacle having a big organization you know it's interesting let's use the example of Google let's give Google credit first they were so far ahead of almost everyone else
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
You know, we're used to computers being very smart. I mean, way back in 2011, Siri appeared on Apple products. What distinguishes artificial intelligence from just smart computers?
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
Right, right. And so a lot of times you see the big companies buying smaller startups that have shown promise. It's interesting that this company called OpenAI kind of became the public face of artificial intelligence in a way. It was A startup that didn't have the power of a Microsoft or a Google behind it. It was this guy, Sam Altman and some other folks. Elon Musk.
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
Yeah, Elon Musk among others, right, right. And there's a moment that was sort of a critical transformational point. when they released this version of ChatGPT. But that was preceded by a dinner at Bill Gates House, which you described, which the house being as absolutely as magnificent as you would expect Bill Gates House to be. Tell us about that evening. What happened?
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
We're going to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Gary Rivlin. He's a veteran investigative reporter. His new book is AI Valley, Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion Dollar Race to Cash in on Artificial Intelligence. We'll be back to talk more in just a moment. This is Rush Air.
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
You know, a few weeks ago, there was this development which kind of shook the stock market. This Chinese company called DeepSeek announced that they had created this artificial intelligence system at far less cost without the sophisticated microchips that American companies were using. It made Americans wonder, heavens, are we about to be overtaken? I don't know. Where does all this leave us?
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
You know, Reid Hoffman, the investor who's been very active in this area, is ultimately very optimistic about where AI is going to take us. Where are you on that scale?
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
Speaking of guardrails, what rules, if any, do you have for your kids and their use of chatbots?
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
You know, within three... You just told about a million people what you may or may not have done. God, I'm doing...
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
It's learned a lot of words. Okay. Now, this may be another artificial distinction, but new talk is now of artificial general intelligence, a great leap forward. What is that exactly?
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
Our guest veteran investigative reporter Gary Rivlin has burrowed deep into the AI world to understand the plans and motivations of those pushing artificial intelligence and what impact they could have for good or ill. In his new book, Rivlin writes that in March of 2023, there were more than 3,000 startup companies in the U.S.
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
A few days ago, I'm sure you saw this, Kevin Roos, the respected tech columnist for the New York Times, wrote a piece saying that we're going to quickly see companies claiming they have artificial general intelligence. And whatever you call it, these dramatically more powerful AI systems are coming and soon. And Ezra Klein of the New York Times opinion section says essentially the same thing.
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
Both of them agree we're not ready for the implications of this. Do you agree with that?
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
I mentioned in the introduction that President Biden had issued this executive order trying to establish some processes and guardrails and safeguards. Trump swept all that away saying, nope, that's onerous government regulation. Let innovation proceed. And it's funny. The last time you and I talked on this program, it was about –
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
Efforts to implement the Dodd-Frank reforms of the financial system. And one of the difficulties was that, was that that bill had general principles. But regulators had to actually spell out what it meant to regulate some pretty complicated contracts and instruments in the world of finance.
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
working on artificial intelligence, with new ones popping up at a rate of 30 per day. While AI is already in use in some fields, such as medical diagnosis, many believe the field is on the verge of a new breakthrough, achieving artificial general intelligence, systems that truly match or approximate human cognitive abilities.
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
And what you'd written about then was how the private interest had gotten in and kind of gummed all that up with – by disputing everything. But I'm wondering what does – what do regulations that control something as sprawling as AI – what does that look like? What do we need in terms of – how do we get prepared?
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
And they could learn how to pursue an agenda and keep it hidden, right, to deceive in their own interest. Yeah. So what would that look like in terms of – what are the dark fears here?
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
Some believe it could be as transformational to human society as the Industrial Revolution. But many fear where it may take us. A poll of AI researchers in 2022 found that half of them believe there's at least a 1 in 10 chance that humanity will go extinct due to our inability to control AI.
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
Wow. So what are some of the darkest fears? I mean, starting nuclear war, you set it to defend territory with drones and it gets – decides it needs to be more aggressive than the generals want to. I mean, what is it – what are the fears?
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
Right, right. You know, there's something that you wrote in the book. You wrote about a couple of tech guys, Tristan Harris and Azar Raskin, who had real experience in the tech world, who said they worried about AI because it's a technology whose creators confess they do not understand why their models do what they do. Is that literally true? That's kind of scary. Yeah.
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
In 2023, President Joe Biden issued an executive order imposing some regulatory safeguards on AI development. But President Trump quickly repealed that order upon taking office, saying Biden's dangerous approach imposed unnecessary government control on AI innovation. We've invited Gary Rivlin here to help us understand all these issues and developments.
Fresh Air
The Promise & Peril Of AI
One more thing about the national political scene. There's a lot of talk about tech bros and Donald Trump. Elon Musk is clearly a driving force in the administration's effort to cut federal workforce and contracts. There are a bunch of billionaires from the tech world at his inauguration. Do you think that there's an elite tech agenda to radically reshape society at work through Donald Trump?
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. If you follow the news, you know these are strange and turbulent times in Washington as the Trump administration sinks to shrink and recast the federal government with blinding speed and fury. Trump's opponents would no doubt like to see Congress assert its authority to stop the dismantling of agencies and programs its past members have authorized.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
And there's plenty of evidence in stories you tell in the book that if people forget the MAGA base, they will pay for it. And so it's not just Donald Trump. It's the people who have come to believe. Right.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
You know, people know of Steve Bannon. They may know he has a podcast, but it's a four-hour daily podcast. Is this right?
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
We recorded our conversation yesterday. Annie Carney, Luke Broadwater, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thank you so much for having us. Yeah, thank you. That is a colorful title. And I thought we would begin with an audio clip of a moment in 2024 which kind of captures some of the craziness of this particular Congress and its breakdown in civility.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
We're going to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Luke Broadwater and Annie Carney. Both are correspondents for The New York Times. Annie Carney covers Congress. Luke Broadwater covers the White House. Both of them were deeply involved in covering the last Congress, and they have a new book about it. It's called Madhouse.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
How Donald Trump, MAGA Mean Girls, a former used car salesman, a Florida Nepo baby, and a man with rats in his walls broke Congress. We'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
You know, Annie Carney, you were saying that – I think you both mentioned this – that there were cases in the last Congress where there were Republicans who publicly towed the MAGA line and were good soldiers but that privately had serious qualms about it. And I'm wondering if you are hearing privately from Republican members these days whether they're worried about –
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
The cuts that the administration is making through Elon Musk and Doge and the effect of tariffs, are they concerned about what this is going to do to Republicans' popularity?
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
This was a hearing of the House Oversight Committee where the ostensible purpose was to consider a motion to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress. The sound we'll hear, you might have heard it before. It's a little confusing at moments. We'll hear eventually from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
I'm wondering how they feel about Elon Musk generally. I mean this – he came in and got a hold of the payment system and the treasury department and was able to essentially – as he said, it put AID in the wood chipper, the agency for international development. How do they view his role?
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
Trump has a big agenda of tax cuts coming, apart from all that he's doing to restructure the government. He wants to make the tax cuts that were made in the last administration permanent, and that's probably going to have a big impact on the deficit, increasing it. How does that look to play in the Congress?
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
But it begins when Texas Democrat Jasmine Crockett is criticizing Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. And Greene makes an insulting comment about Crockett's eye makeup. Let's listen.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
Let me reintroduce you again. We are speaking with Annie Carney and Luke Broadwater. Both are correspondents for The New York Times. Their new book about the last Congress is titled Madhouse. We'll talk more after this short break. This is Fresh Air. One of the reasons that the last congress that you wrote about was so chaotic was that Republicans had a majority but a very narrow one.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
And you had about 20 or so members who simply were going to follow their own dictates and couldn't be persuaded by Kevin McCarthy or anybody else to do what the leadership wanted. Who were they? What were they after?
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
Right. And he's done a complete 180 on Ukraine. I mean, one of the things that you describe is when Biden was still in office and they wanted to get that military aid package for Ukraine done, that Mike Johnson actually quite skillfully negotiated an arrangement where he could make that happen. Yes.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
Those guys are all in a deep state now. It just isn't a great gig, really, which is surprising, you know, because, I mean, look, this is a dream come true. You're a member of this body that Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy served in. Why was it a bad gig?
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
I was also just surprised to read that a lot of members sleep, don't rent apartments. They actually sleep in their offices and then shower in the members' gyms.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
We haven't seen much of that, but we have seen bills introduced to enable a third Donald Trump term, rename Dulles Airport after him and carve his image into Mount Rushmore. Whatever happens, our two guests today have the experience, insight and sources to tell the story.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
Good times under the Capitol Dome. That was an insane night. Yeah, well, so either of you can pick this up. But just tell us a little. Give us some context for this and what it tells us about this Congress.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
Sorry to interrupt, but I read this in the book and I was astonished to read this.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
Annie Carney and Luke Broadwater are both veteran reporters who cover Washington for The New York Times, and they've written a new book about the 118th Congress, the one elected in 2022.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
You know, it's interesting because I remember in the book where you describe this shift in strategy by Democrats. We're not going to sort of stay above the fray. We are going to engage and give it right back to them.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
And part of the theory was that Republican members would think about what their future careers will be like if they have embarrassed themselves and adopted things which, you know, defy reality or decorum. Did that strategy work at all?
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
It's a look inside the corridors of power when Democrat Joe Biden was president, dealing with what the authors say was the first MAGA-controlled Congress, one that fully adopted the extremism and stagecraft of Trumpism. There are fascinating accounts of high stakes negotiations and of House members cursing, insulting and threatening each other, but not a lot of serious legislating.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
One other thing that I just – a general observation about the account of this congress that you provide us is how many times there are physical threats among members. And I mean in many cases, leaders of congress, things – say that again and I'll kick your you-know-what or I'll drop you. You both have been around a while. I know, Luke, I know you covered City Hall and the Maryland legislature.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
Have you ever seen anything like this?
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
Reporters are sometimes criticized for revelations in books that people wish they had read in the newspapers. As you did this, did you put some of this stuff in the paper or did you mostly save it for the book?
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
The House passed only 27 bills that became law in its two-year session, the lowest number since the Great Depression. Before joining the New York Times in 2018, Annie Carney worked at Politico, the New York Daily News, and the New York Post.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
Well, I want to talk about what's going on these days in the Capitol. I mean, your book deals with the two-year period that ended, I guess, in January. But boy, a lot's happening right now. And Democrats are trying to figure out how to deal with Donald Trump, who is riding a wave. And with his team trying to reshape government in a dramatic fashion.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
And there are real divisions within the Democratic Party on what to do about it, how to handle it. You've written about how the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, kind of has a take-it-all-on approach, respond to everything, whereas Hakeem Jeffries, the leader of the Democrats in the House, kind of picks his battle. I guess a difference in emphasis.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
I'm wondering what you are hearing from rank-and-file Democrats in Congress about this debate.
Fresh Air
Inside The 'Mad House' Of Congressional Disfunction
Luke Broadwater worked for nearly a decade at the Baltimore Sun, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for stories about a scandal at the state's largest hospital system that led to the resignation of Baltimore's mayor. Carney and Broadwater's new book is Madhouse, how Donald Trump, MAGA mean girls, a former used car salesman, the Florida Nepo baby, and a man with rats in his walls broke Congress.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. If you enjoyed the HBO series Succession about the children of an aging media mogul competing to inherit his business empire, you'll want to read the new article in The Atlantic by my guest, McKay Coppins.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
James Murdoch, you write, was the executive who became the public face of the scandal, even though he says he was really not deeply involved in running those papers. When this broke out, what posture did Rupert Murdoch take towards his son in this crisis?
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
It's on The Atlantic's website, and it's also the magazine's April issue cover story. Well, McKay Coppins, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thanks for having me. Early in the piece, you describe a day in the case when James Murdoch is being deposed. He's in a Manhattan law office under oath, and one of his dad's lawyers is asking questions. Do you want to just set the scene? Tell us what happened.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
We need to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with McKay Coppins. He's a staff writer for The Atlantic. His new article is Growing Up Murdoch, James Murdoch on Mind Game, Sibling Rivalry, and the War for the Family Media Empire. He'll be back to talk more after a short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air. So I want to move us into the Trump era here.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Lachlan Murdoch, the elder son, had left the company. He had been in Australia for many years. And then in 2015, he moves back, gets an office in Los Angeles. He's with the company. James, the younger brother, has an office in New York, putting them in kind of an awkward position, both being prominent executives in the company.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
And then in 2015, Donald Trump appears on the scene as a presidential candidate. One question I've always had is how much Rupert Murdoch is motivated by an ideological agenda as opposed to accumulating in wealth and power. And you write that in 2016, Rupert Murdoch was openly scornful of Trump's candidacy at first saying his election would be the end of the Republican Party.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
But once he had momentum, you write the Fox News primetime lineup turned into a four-hour Trump commercial. How did James regard this, his turn in Fox News?
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
And Lachlan was still in the company. Do we know what his attitude was towards the Fox News embrace of Trump and what his relationship was like with James during this time?
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
So James gradually became a bit more public about his views. I mean particularly he put out a statement about Trump's remarks on the march in Charlottesville saying – Trump saying that there were very fine people in the Tiki Torch march there. And then there was another occasion when there were terrible forest fires in Australia.
Fresh Air
The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
And some media, I think the Daily Beast, asked for comment about, well, what about the fact that the Murdoch papers in Australia ignore climate change as an element of all this? What happened?
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
It's about the real-life drama involving the children of 93-year-old Rupert Murdoch and their battle over who will someday lead his business properties, most prominently Fox News. And even if you didn't see Succession, the story is still fascinating, both because of the intense family dynamics and the stakes in this conflict.
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
We are speaking with McKay Coppins. He's a staff writer for The Atlantic. His new article online is Growing Up Murdoch, James Murdoch on Mind Games, Sibling Rivalry, and the War for the Family Media Empire. We'll continue our conversation after this short break. This is Fresh Air. So let's get to the court battle that's at the heart of this story.
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
There was a plan in place for many, many years, a trust which said that when Rupert Murdoch passed away, that the voting rights in the company would be split among four siblings, Lachlan and James, the two boys, Liz, their sister, and then Prue, who was their sister from a previous marriage.
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
And to a lot of observers, that meant that it might be James who had the upper hand over Lachlan because it was assumed that the two sisters might work with him in terms of the future direction of the company. This was problematic for Rupert Murdoch, right? So he hatches a plan. What does he do?
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Right. Now, we should note that it was an irrevocable trust, right? I mean it was not supposed to be meddled with and it spread the wealth in one way. But this involved the voting rights for control of the direction of the company would be four equal ways. And the only way in this irrevocable trust it could be amended would be if you could show – tell me if I have this right –
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
that the proposed change was in the interest of all of the beneficiaries. In other words, they had to show that putting Lachlan in charge was better for everybody, right?
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
What kind of communications were there among the parties? I mean did Rupert – I mean did he arrange a meeting with the four siblings? Did he approach them individually? I mean what do we know about how he presented it and how they reacted?
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
In the depositions, which were really brutal as you know, there was one section that you talked about where Rupert Murdoch's lawyer was suggesting to James in his deposition that Fox's value actually derives from – well, let's just say something other than journalistic standards. Tell us about this.
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
We're going to take a break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with McKay Coppins. He is a staff writer for The Atlantic. His new article now online is Growing Up Murdoch, James Murdoch on Mind Game, Sibling Rivalry, and the War for the Family Media Empire. He'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
This trial began in September 2024 in this county courthouse. James took the stand. What did he say the experience was like for him emotionally?
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
So after all this testimony, it didn't go particularly well for Rupert. It went much better for James and his siblings' side of it. And this all came down to a single man, Edmund Gorman, who's the Washoe County Probate Commissioner. This multibillion-dollar company and all this comes down to one man, one county official, and he issues a clear ruling, right?
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Rupert and Lachlan have appealed. Is it likely to stand, do you think? What's the course from here?
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
You note that James and his wife Catherine have spent millions on political contributions, mostly to Democrats I think and to pro-democracy causes and other philanthropic work, particularly climate change. Is it fair to assume that if this verdict holds that when Rupert Murdoch dies, Fox News is not going to be the same product?
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
I'm not sure any of us would be still speaking to our siblings if we had gone through a legal process in which everything that any of us had said about each other in person or in texts or messages or conversations behind our back, if all that came flooding back, boy, it would be awful.
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
You know, I mentioned the HBO series Succession in the introduction. You know, I thought it was great television, but I wouldn't have guessed that the people who actually lived lives like this would be interested in it because, I mean, come on, it's television. But actually, you discovered that members of the family were into it, right?
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
McKay Coppins, thank you so much. This is interesting. Thank you. McKay Coppins is a staff writer for The Atlantic. His new article is Growing Up Murdoch, James Murdoch on Mind Games, Sibling Rivalry, and the War for the Family Media Empire. On tomorrow's show, Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has eliminated the jobs of thousands of government employees and
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
and left many more uncertain about their positions. We'll talk with Harvard professor of public policy Elizabeth Linos about what that means for federal workers and the rest of us who depend on government services. I hope you can join us. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Diana Martinez.
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our senior producer today is Teresa Madden. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Monique Nazareth, Faya Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman, and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavey-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show.
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
All right. Well, let's talk about this story. I mean, the Murdoch story. I mean, Rupert Murdoch actually inherited a newspaper from his dad who had an interesting background in journalism. And then he went off on this swashbuckling campaign to acquire one paper and then use the leverage on that to get another and another. And at the time, he was 40.
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
He was the most powerful media owner in Australia. He moves to the United Kingdom and buys tabloids and eventually a broadsheet there, eventually ends up in the States where he gets the Wall Street Journal and starts Fox News, which was a big success. I wouldn't normally assume that someone who owns media businesses would necessarily want his kids to get involved in the family business.
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
The outcome could mean big changes for Fox News, which Coppins describes as the most powerful conservative media force in the world. Late last year, the parties in this family dispute squared off in an epic court battle over the succession plan for the Murdoch empire.
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
They have resources. They could get educations, do whatever they want. Did Rupert Murdoch consciously try to bring his children, get them interested in the media?
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Now, he had two sons, Lachlan and James, born 15 months apart. Lachlan was a little older. James was a little younger. And the other major character in this is their sister, Liz. Those three were the children of Murdoch's second wife, Anna. There was a fourth, Prudence, known as Prue, and she was the daughter of his previous marriage.
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
But those three, James, Lachlan, and Liz, were the main characters for most of this drama. James and Lachlan would both eventually play prominent roles in the businesses and would be rivals for succession over the years at various times. But James didn't start out that way, did he? I mean he went a whole different direction out of college and thereafter.
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Rupert Murdoch wanted to amend the family trust to ensure his eldest son Lachlan would take the helm, shutting out his younger son James, who was troubled by Fox News' hard right bent.
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
So we were talking about the Murdoch family. James, the younger of the two sons, wasn't in the business at first, but he eventually did get in. This is interesting. One of the things that I found puzzling watching the succession, the HBO drama, was seeing each of these children assuming that they're ready to take over this big company or even a division of a big company.
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
I mean, to me, they just looked like regular people, but they had no problem thinking they could manage hundreds of people and budgets of Hundreds of millions of dollars. And then in your story, I see that James Murdoch at age 27 gets sent to run an Asian satellite TV company that his father owned called Star, which was losing money. And he does it and succeeds. Yeah.
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Coppins writes that the trial testimony and depositions and discovery in the case were often intensely personal, bringing up years of painful secrets, scheming and manipulation, lies, media leaks, and devious betrayals. For his story, Coppins had extensive interviews with James Murdoch and his wife Catherine. Their side prevailed in the trial verdict, which is under appeal.
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Now, Lachlan, the other son, the eldest son, who had been in the company longer and had seemed to be the heir apparent to the family business, eventually got fed up after some disputes internally and in 2005 resigned and moved his family back to Australia, right? Out of the succession picture? Yeah.
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Right. He ended up moving to the UK and becoming quite the powerful and influential person, having dinner with the prime minister. Some said that he sort of was striking a figure kind of like his father. Is that fair? Yeah.
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
McKay Coppins is a staff writer for The Atlantic and the author of two books, The Wilderness, about the battle over the future of the Republican Party, and Romney, A Reckoning, a biography of Mitt Romney. The online version of his new article is Growing Up Murdoch, James Murdoch on mind games, sibling rivalry, and the war for the family media empire.
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
Right. I mean you're right that in Sky, it's a British satellite TV company that he actually brings in people who have standards of conduct and business negotiation which weren't the typical Rupert Murdoch way of doing things.
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The Murdoch Family's Real-Life 'Succession' Rivalry
In 2011, the Murdoch family business was hit by an epic scandal, revelations by The Guardian and other media that reporters at the Murdoch-owned paper The News of the World had used private investigators to hack the cell phones of subject of their stories, including the mother of a murdered child and families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and others.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Right. I mean we should just note in passing that President Zelensky of the Ukraine has categorically rejected the idea of ceding any territory to Russia. I realize that an armistice isn't exactly the same thing as that. But that wouldn't be easy to sell. But there's also the fact – and in your book, you note that Trump essentially kind of agreed with –
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Putin that Ukraine isn't even a real country. He's been very warm towards Putin. He's expressed sympathy with the idea that it was provocative to even talk about putting Ukraine in NATO. So I guess another question is, is Trump going to do all he can to shut off all U.S. military assistance to Ukraine and try and get allies to do the same?
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
You know, there's also the broader question of Donald Trump and his attitude and relations with Russia and Putin. You know, he's always said very warm things about him. Seems to think he can do a lot because of their personal relationship.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
This was last week. And this is a moment where you're asking him about some of this, you know, ambitions that he has articulated for taking Greenland and Canada and the Panama Canal. Let's listen.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
What's not to like, huh? We are speaking with David Sanger. He is the White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times. His latest book published last April is New Cold Wars, China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West. A paperback edition will be coming out later this spring.
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
We'll talk more after a break about the challenges facing the Trump administration. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
You noted recently that when President Biden agreed to let Ukraine send long-range missiles deep into Russia, Russia formally announced a change to its policy on the use of nuclear weapons. This is interesting. What was the change?
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
I mean, the other thing, I guess, is the buildup of weapons. And the START treaty, which limits nuclear weapons, expires, I think, early next year, right?
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
And of course, it's more complicated because in the old Cold War, it was the United States and the Soviet Union. I mean, the stakes were terrifying, but there was a stability to it. Now, you got the United States facing Russia and China that are increasingly cooperative with each other and with North Korea and with Russia. Iran. And the stakes and the methods of contention are different.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
I mean, cyber attacks are a part of this. Access to technology and precious metals are part of this. It's a lot more complicated, isn't it?
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
You know, the fact that these challenges are so much more complicated comes at a time that we have a president who famously doesn't have a lot of patience for listening to detailed briefings or reading detailed policy papers. And, you know, who has said his unpredictability is an asset. The fact that I think he once said Xi Jinping knows he's effing crazy. Referring to himself.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Yeah. Yeah. Referring to himself. Is Trump suited for the challenges here?
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. The inauguration of Donald Trump to the presidency is just days away, which means, among other things, that U.S. foreign policy is about to see an adjustment. In addition to some major known challenges – the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, Iran's nuclear program, and relations with China – Trump has thrown some new initiatives into the mix.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
We are speaking with David Sanger. He is a White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times. His book published last April is New Cold Wars, China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West. A new paperback edition will be out this spring. We'll continue our conversation after this break. This is Fresh Air.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Let's focus on Iran a bit. You know, there's some big decisions coming here. Trump pulled the United States out of the nuclear deal that the Obama administration had negotiated with Iran, saying it was a terrible deal. Let me just ask you, first of all, was it a bad deal in the eyes of independent analysts?
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
And that is Donald Trump speaking to our guest David Sanger last week at Mar-a-Lago. Before we get into the substance of all of this, one quick fact check. Is China operating the Panama Canal?
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Trump has talked about maximum pressure, right? Sanctions, cutting off oil, that kind of thing. This has happened before. Is it effective?
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
And the fact that Iran has these alliances with Russia, right, and China, does that make it trickier?
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
We are speaking with David Sanger. He's a White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times. His book published last April is New Cold Wars, China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West. A paperback edition will be coming out later this spring. We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is Fresh Air.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Well, let's talk a little bit about the Middle East and specifically Israel. You know, it's interesting that I think you wrote that at Donald Trump's news conference in Mar-a-Lago last week. Four times he repeated what he has said, that if the hostages taken by Hamas are not out by Inauguration Day, quote, all hell will break out in the Middle East, unquote. Do we know what that means?
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Do you have a sense of how he's going to approach this?
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
I have to ask you, you know, with all of the known serious foreign policy challenges that Trump has to tackle, why do you think he chose to bring up these American expansionist ambitions now? I can't believe it was an accident.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
You know, there's still these huge questions that remain, even if there's a truce and return of some hostages, like who's going to govern Gaza in the future and what sort of autonomy will Israeli forces give it? And what about the broader question of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza?
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
I mean, you know, Trump has gotten some credit for the Abraham Accords, which established relations between Israel and some Arab states. Do you have any sense that there's any commitment to or prospect of broader progress on these issues?
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
You know, David Sanger, before I let you go, I want to just ask you a bit about the reporting process here. I mean, you've covered five presidents and one of them was Trump in his first term. You've written that one of the characteristics of Trump's presidency is conspiracy theories and made up facts.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
How do you deal with facts that are made up, particularly if you have a press office that, you know, isn't going to run to try and clarify or, you know, walk them back at all?
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Well, David Sanger, thank you again for speaking with us. Thank you. David Sanger is a White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times. His latest book, New Cold Wars, China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West, comes out in paperback this spring. We recorded our interview yesterday.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
On tomorrow's show, Pico Ayer talks about his memoir that's sadly a little too relevant. It's called A Flame, Learning from Silence. It's about his many retreats to a Benedictine monastery in California's Big Sur and the wildfires that have threatened the monastery and burned down his mother's home while he was there. He nearly died in a fire. I hope you can join us.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham.
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
Fresh Air
Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
He's revived his interest in somehow buying or annexing Greenland and said he wants to take control of the Panama Canal, refusing to rule out military action to achieve both objectives. And for good measure, he said Canada would make a nice 51st state and said he might use economic force to make that happen.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
You know, it's a self-governing territory of Denmark. Does anyone think the U.S. could legally use force to take Greenland? I mean, what's been the reaction in Congress and foreign capitals to this kind of talk?
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Yeah, well, I mean the whole kind of notion of the world order led by the United States, an important element of it was that international boundaries are not open to negotiation or change by force. This is a pretty dramatic turn, isn't it?
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Our guest, New York Times White House and national security correspondent David Sanger, has written that Trump's recent comments are a reminder that something else is coming back to Washington, a chaotic stream of consciousness presidency.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Right. And other places in the South China Sea, I guess. Canada is certainly a different animal in a way. I mean, what has been the reaction to him suggesting that Canada should join with the United States?
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
I mean, you'd have to think if you were serious about any of these initiatives, you wouldn't start with public declarations. You would have a plan. You would meet privately with all of the relevant players, wouldn't you?
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Sanger has spent four decades at the Times covering five presidents from Clinton to Biden and sharing in three Pulitzer Prizes, most recently for coverage of Russia's role in the 2016 election. Last April, Sanger published his fourth book, one which offers a framework for understanding the challenges the United States faces in an increasingly dangerous and volatile world.
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
Let's talk about Ukraine and Russia. Trump has expressed admiration for Putin. That's well known. And he has said that this war is horrific, would never have happened on his watch, and that he will quickly resolve it without ever saying how. Now he's going to have to actually do something. What are you hearing from sources about what that might be?
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Can The U.S. Aquire Greenland? & Other Q's About Trump Foreign Policy
It's called New Cold Wars, China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West. We've invited him back on the show to share some insights on what we might expect from a Trump foreign policy. Well, David Sanger, welcome back to Fresh Air. Dave, great to be back here with you. Let's start by listening to a bit of the news conference that Trump had in Mar-a-Lago.
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
All right. Warmly received by the Bitcoin crowd. One of the things he has said is that we ought to have a national crypto – I don't know if it's Bitcoin or crypto generally but a stockpile. I mean there's a strategic reserve of petroleum, right? And we have gold in Fort Knox. How do we explain the idea of a crypto coin national stockpile? What would be the purpose? Yeah.
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Right. And just to clarify, you mentioned that the supply of Bitcoin is limited. That's different from other meme coins where people can just make up as many as they want. Bitcoin, when it was established, there was a limited quantity that can be made. So there is a real supply and demand there, I guess.
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
All right. All right. So limited item isn't necessarily valuable. All right. We're going to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Zeke Fox. He's an investigative reporter for Bloomberg. His book is Number Go Up, Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall. We'll talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies. This is Fresh Air.
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
And people trade for it, right? They speculate in it hoping that its value will rise or fall, right? Right.
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Donald Trump has gotten support from some of the giants in the tech world, you know, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and I think Peter Thiel probably too. Are those folks also crypto advocates? What is their relationship with the crypto world?
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Let's talk about some of the appointments that Trump has made, which, again, are good news for crypto supporters. He wants a change at the Securities and Exchange Commission. Gary Gensler, the previous chair, was very unpopular in the crypto world. Why?
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Now, just so I understand the principle in these lawsuits, the idea is that if investors buy money in the stock market, there are rules that say that in order to get your security in the stock market, you have to provide certain information, orderly reports and earnings reports and assets and liabilities. And so that there's, in theory, some basis that an investor has to evaluate the value of it.
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
In the case of cryptocurrency exchanges … What? Any of that required?
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Right. Now, these cases that the Securities and Exchange Commission filed, are they still pending in courts?
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
We are speaking with Zeke Fox. He's an investigative reporter for Bloomberg. His book is Number Go Up, Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall. We'll talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies. This is Fresh Air.
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
So, Zeke Fox, let's talk about Howard Lutnick, who has been designated as the Commerce Secretary by Donald Trump. He's been nominated. He faces confirmation. He is the chief executive officer and a principal owner of a New York investment bank, Cantor Fitzgerald, which some may remember was famous for having lost more than 600 employees in the 9-11 attacks, including Howard Lutnick's brother.
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
There has been concern about Letnick and his bank's ties to a cryptocurrency operator called Tether. You want to explain what Tether is and what it does?
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
You mean there were 50 billion Tether coins in circulation, for which they presumably had 50 billion in U.S. dollars somewhere?
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Right, and his is a particular subspecies called a meme coin. You want to explain what that is?
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. Besides the executive orders, pardons, and other moves, Trump and his family have started selling a brand new cryptocurrency coin featuring an image of Trump drawn from the assassination attempt he experienced during the presidential campaign.
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Yeah. So it's not like Lutnik himself is personally making deals with human traffickers or drug dealers. He accepts assets from this company Tether that uses its stable coin for transactions with all kinds of people, including people who in some cases are criminals. Is that the case?
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
You know, in your book, you describe discovering a center of ripoff artists, scammers based in Cambodia, like a whole kind of little mini city of apartment blocks of people in these rooms, calling people, luring them into handing over their money. And Tether is involved in all this. Tell us what you found.
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
I have to ask you, since people read stories about crypto going through the roof and Bitcoin being worth $100,000, have you invested in any crypto? And what do you say – I'm sure friends must ask you since they know you're reporting on this. Hey, should I get into this?
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
All right. Well, we'll leave it there. Zeke Fox, thanks so much for speaking with us. Thanks, Dave. Zeke Fox is an investigative reporter for Bloomberg. His book is Number Go Up, Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall. We recorded our conversation earlier this week. Coming up, we remember cartoonist and writer Jules Feiffer, who died last week. This is Fresh Air.
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Jules Feiffer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, playwright, and screenwriter, died Friday at his home in Richfield Springs, New York. He was 95. Feiffer's syndicated strip, titled Feiffer, used simple line drawings to portray characters in scenes that satirized contemporary life. The strip began in the Village Voice and ran for more than four decades.
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Pfeiffer's creative impulses found expression in many media. He illustrated the classic children's book The Phantom Tollbooth. He wrote screenplays for the films Little Murders and Carnal Knowledge, among others. He wrote novels and Broadway plays, and his cartoons appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Playboy magazine.
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Terry spoke to Jules Feiffer in 1982 when a collection of his cartoons titled America from Eisenhower to Reagan was published. He told her that finding anyone who knew what to do with his cartoons and his particular brand of humor took a while.
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Right. So you get people who, for a lark or whatever, just decide to do it for the fun of having this digital image. And if they drive the price up, the folks who own a lot can make them a lot of money and people have made fortunes, right?
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
It's a venture that by some accounts could make the president billions of dollars, though we'll discuss what that actually means. The new coin, which has drawn criticism from government ethics lawyers, is just one of several moves Trump has made to embrace cryptocurrency. He plans to replace the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who sued many crypto companies.
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Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
And what are government ethics watchdogs saying about this?
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Now, this actually isn't Trump's first crypto coin, right? I mean, in July, I think, he launched an enterprise called World Liberty Financial, which issues digital tokens. You want to explain what this is?
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Trump's nominee to head the commission is Paul Atkins, a pro-crypto executive. And Trump's nominee for Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, heads an investment bank that's deeply involved with the cryptocurrency that's been used by arms dealers, scam artists, and drug traffickers, among others. If you find the whole subject of cryptocurrency confusing, fear not.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
I have to mention one other colorful aspect of the World Liberty Financial Enterprise. And that is that one of the co-founders, I guess, was a guy named Chase Hero. Who is he?
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Wow. You know, we have a little audio clip of this guy, Chase Hero. And he's driving a car, which I think he says is a Rolls Royce in the audio, right? And kind of explaining kind of, I guess, what you might call the amorality of the crypto industry. Let's listen to this.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Our guest today, Bloomberg investigative reporter Zeke Fox, has written a fascinating and accessible book about crypto and he's reported on Trump's newfound enthusiasm for the industry. We'll talk about Trump's crypto moves as well as the nature of cryptocurrency, its role in the economy, and what the future holds for digital currency.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Trump was not always a fan of cryptocurrency. Here's something he said. I believe this was on Fox Business in 2021.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Okay, throwing cold water on crypto, about four years ago, a little less, I guess, what accounts for his conversion, do you think?
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Again, not a real card. It's a digital card, right? What do they call it? A non-fungible token? Yeah.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Wow. You know, I think we have a clip of some of that speech. It's probably worth spending that. Let's listen. This is Donald Trump at the Bitcoin Magazine convention in July.
Fresh Air
Trump's Foray Into Cryptocurrency
Zeke Fox's book is Number Go Up, Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall. We recorded our conversation earlier this week. Zeke Fox, welcome to Fresh Air. Thanks, Dave. So let's start with a simple understanding of what cryptocurrency is, right? It's a coin or a currency that really only exists as a digital entry in some computers of whoever creates or issues the coin.
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
In 1949, a Republican activist named Suzanne Stevenson formed an organization called the Minute Women of the USA to fight what she perceived as the creep of Soviet communism in America.
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
The group would attract tens of thousands of members, and they were told to meet in small cells and appear as individual concerned citizens when they wrote letters or heckled liberal speakers or packed a city council meeting to oppose public housing. The story of the Minutewomen is one of many told in a new book by our guest, journalist and historian Clay Risen.
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
Risen examines the frenzy of anti-communist activity that swept the nation after the Second World War, most often associated with the Hollywood blacklist and the relentless and mostly unfounded charges of communist infiltration leveled by Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy.
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
Risen describes the red-baiting hysteria of the period in colorful detail, and he writes that there's a through-line to be found from that era up to our current political moment. Clay Risen is currently a reporter and editor at the New York Times, now assigned to the obituaries desk, and is the author of eight books, some about American history and some about whiskey.
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
Before writing obituaries, Risen was a senior editor on the Times 2020 politics coverage and before that an editor on the opinion desk. His new book is Red Scare, Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. Clay Risen, welcome to Fresh Air. Thanks for having me.
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
There's a lot of detail in this book, but there's also a big picture sense of what was really happening with this outbreak of anti-communist fervor.
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
And one of the strands you say was a culture war, a long simmering resentment among conservatives about the changes that had taken place in the nation with the New Deal, new rights for organized labor, the beginnings of the social security system, etc., Roosevelt was enormously popular really as the result of these programs.
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
What were the greatest objections to those changes and what form did the opposition take?
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
Yeah.
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
Right. So you had that thing going on. There's this people who were angry, felt that they had been pushed aside, left out, that their way of life was ignored and replaced with something alien. The second strand you cite, of course, is the emergence of the Cold War and the fear of the Soviet Union. And that was connected to a communist presence in the United States.
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
And we should note that while Soviet-style communism is discredited among Americans today, it was different in the 30s and 40s, right?
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
Thank you.
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
Thank you. Thank you.
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Fresh Air
Best Of: A Writer Grapples With A Life-Changing Accident / The Post WWII 'Red Scare'
Thank you.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Dave Davies. Terry has our first interview. I'll let her introduce it.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
Tilda Swinton is starring in the new Pedro Almodovar film, The Room Next Door, now showing in select theaters. She spoke with Terry Gross. In 1997, Marianne Jean-Baptiste became the first black British actress to receive an Oscar nomination for Mike Lee's drama Secrets and Lies.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
Now, nearly 30 years later, she and Lee have reunited on the comedic drama Hard Truths, in which she plays a profoundly unhappy woman living in North London. The performance has earned Jean-Baptiste best actress prizes from several critics groups. Our film critic, Justin Chang, has this review.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. He reviewed hard truths. Coming up, we hear from Adrian Brody. His new film, The Brutalist, just won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture Drama. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Dave Davies. Today, Tilda Swinton. She stars in the new Pedro Almodovar film as a woman who has suffered from cancer and therapies haven't worked and now intends to end her life within a month. She asks a friend, played by Julianne Moore, to stay with her during that time.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
Adrian Brody spoke with Tanya Mosley. He's currently starring in the film The Brutalist. It's now playing in select theaters, including IMAX, and opens nationwide on January 17th. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
And we hear from Oscar and now Golden Globe Award winning actor Adrian Brody. He stars in the film The Brutalist, which just won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture Drama. Brody plays a Hungarian Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor who seeks a fresh start in post-war America. Brody drew from his mother and grandfather's experience as Hungarian immigrants for the role.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
Also, film critic Justin Chang reviews the new Mike Lee film Hard Truths. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Tilda Swinton / Adrien Brody
We're listening to Terry's interview with Tilda Swinton. She stars in the new Pedro Almodovar film, The Room Next Door. It's now showing in select theaters. We'll hear more of their conversation after a break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
This trial began in September 2024 in this county courthouse. James took the stand. What did he say the experience was like for him emotionally?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
After all this testimony, it didn't go particularly well for Rupert. It went much better for James and his siblings' side of it. And this all came down to a single man, Edmund Gorman, who's the Washoe County Probate Commissioner. This multibillion-dollar company and all this comes down to one man, one county official, and he issues a clear ruling, right?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Rupert and Lachlan have appealed. Is it likely to stand do you think? What's the course from here?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Dave Davies. If you enjoyed the HBO series Succession about the children of an aging media mogul competing to inherit his business empire, you'll want to read the new article in The Atlantic by my guest McKay Coppins.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
You know, you note that James and his wife, Catherine, have spent millions on political contributions, mostly to Democrats, I think, and to pro-democracy causes and other philanthropic work, particularly climate change. Is it fair to assume that if this verdict holds that when Rupert Murdoch dies, Fox News is not going to be the same product?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
You know, I mentioned the HBO series Succession in the introduction. You know, I thought it was great television. But I wouldn't have guessed that the people who actually lived lives like this would be interested in it because, I mean, come on, it's television. But actually you discovered that members of the family were into it, right?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
It's about the real-life drama involving the children of 93-year-old Rupert Murdoch and their battle over who will someday lead his business properties, most prominently Fox News. And even if you didn't see Succession, the story is still fascinating, both because of the intense family dynamics and the stakes in this conflict.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
McKay Coppins, thank you so much. This is interesting. Thank you. McKay Coppins is a staff writer for The Atlantic. His new article is Growing Up Murdoch, James Murdoch on mind games, sibling rivalry, and the war for the family media empire.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Flow is an animated movie from Latvia that follows an unlikely collection of animals who are brought together by a massive flood that overwhelms the countryside. The film, which is now streaming on Max, already won animation prizes from the Golden Globes, the New York Film Critics, and the Los Angeles Film Critics, among others.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
And it's received Oscar nominations for both Best Animated Feature and Best International Film. Our critic-at-large John Powers says it is quite simply wonderful.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
The outcome could mean big changes for Fox News, which Coppins describes as the most powerful conservative media force in the world. Late last year, the parties in this family dispute squared off in an epic court battle over the succession plan for the Murdoch empire.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Rupert Murdoch wanted to amend the family trust to ensure his eldest son Lachlan would take the helm, shutting out his younger son James, who was troubled by Fox News' hard right bent.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
John Powers reviewed the animated film Flow, which is up for two Oscars. Coming up, Harvard professor of public policy Elizabeth Linos talks about the extraordinary measures Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has taken to shrink the size of the federal government. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
If he wanted to, could Elon Musk establish a new bathroom breaks policy for more than 2 million federal employees? Well, he hasn't. But since the Trump administration took office and gave Musk's Department of Government Efficiency a mandate to shrink the government, Musk has wielded an astonishing level of authority over the federal workforce.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
After gaining access to the Treasury Department's massive payment system, Musk and his team have dismissed thousands of employees, terminated countless contracts, and targeted two government agencies created by Congress for elimination. Last weekend, federal workers received an email instructing them to reply with five bullet points stating what they'd accomplished the previous week.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Coppins writes that the trial testimony and depositions and discovery in the case were often intensely personal, bringing up years of painful secrets, scheming and manipulation, lies, media leaks, and devious betrayals. For his story, Coppins had extensive interviews with James Murdoch and his wife Catherine. Their side prevailed in the trial verdict, which is under appeal.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Musk added in a social media post that failure to respond would be taken as a resignation. That got pushback from several Trump-appointed agency leaders who told their employees not to respond. Much of what Musk has done is under court challenge, but President Trump has said he'd like to see him become even more aggressive.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
To help us understand these efforts to drastically reshape the American government, we've invited Elizabeth Linus to join us.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
She's the Emma Bloomberg Associate Professor of Public Policy and Management at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and director of the People Lab, which does research on how to recruit, retrain, and support the government workforce and integrate evidence-based policymaking into government.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Earlier in her career, she was a policy advisor to Prime Minister George Papandreou of Greece, pursuing government reform at a time of financial crisis. Well, Elizabeth Linos, welcome to Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
There's a perception in all of this recent activity that the public payroll is bloated, not just inefficient, but just too many people. How does the federal workforce compare with past decades?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
So let's talk about what's happened here. Do we know how many government employees have been taken off the payroll so far by Doge, more or less?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Let's pause on that for a second. I mean, what does that tell you about how government employees feel about their jobs and about this buyout offer, if we can call it that?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
McKay Coppins is a staff writer for The Atlantic and the author of two books, The Wilderness, about the battle over the future of the Republican Party, and Romney, A Reckoning, a biography of Mitt Romney. The online version of his new article is Growing Up Murdoch, James Murdoch on mind games, sibling rivalry, and the war for the family media empire.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
You know, there was an extraordinary move, and I mentioned this in the introduction, which I think is a measure of Musk's influence in the government, that he got these emails sent to people last weekend instructing them to reply with five bullet points stating what they'd accomplished the previous week. There was some pushback. Some agency had said, you don't have to do that.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
But, you know, Musk added in this social media post that failure to respond would be taken as a resignation. What was your reaction when you heard about this?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Dave Davies. Today, a real-life succession drama. Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins describes the rivalry among the children of 93-year-old media titan Rupert Murdoch over who will control his business empire when he passes from the scene.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
You know, I wonder if workers are, while they're getting these messages from the top, are having their personal supervisors reassure them at all saying, look, this is not something we're doing. What you do is important. We want to keep doing it. Hang in there. Have you heard things like that?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
It's on The Atlantic's website, and it's also the magazine's April issue cover story. Well, McKay Coppins, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thanks for having me. All right. Well, let's talk about this story, the Murdoch story. I mean, Rupert Murdoch actually inherited a newspaper from his dad who had an interesting background in journalism.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
There have been media reports of people who were discharged with language about poor performance or similar language, but who have said in interviews that they've had nothing but positive performance reports. Generally speaking, what kinds of rights do they have to appeal these firings?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
You know, in writing about these recent reductions, you wrote, the administration seems to be weakening or fully eliminating teams that were doing exactly the kind of work DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, claims to value. Focus on data evaluation and customer service teams that have spent years.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
reducing bureaucratic red tape, modernizing service delivery, and bringing in critical tech talent. In other words, there were people out there doing the kind of work that Doge was supposed to do, how to get more for the taxpayer's dollar. Some might be skeptical of that statement. Can you give us an example of this?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
And then he went off on this swashbuckling campaign to acquire one paper and then use the leverage on that to get another and another. And at the time, he was 40. He was the most powerful media owner in Australia. He moves to the United Kingdom and
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
The administration's response to some of the complaints that have arisen is essentially that, look, extreme times sometimes demand extreme measures. Government spending is out of control. Musk himself has said, yes, we will make mistakes, but we will correct them quickly. What's your reaction to that? Do you think things could get better with time?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
buys tabloids and eventually a broadsheet there, eventually ends up in the States where he gets the Wall Street Journal and starts Fox News, which was a big success. I wouldn't normally assume that someone who owns media businesses would necessarily want his kids to get involved in the family business. They have resources. They could get educations, do whatever they want.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
You know, something like 80 percent of the federal workers live outside the Washington, D.C. area. What might be the economic impact of these job cuts on communities where workers live?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
This effort is really just underway. I mean, it's been a few weeks really. Do you have any idea what to expect in the future? Where do you think this is going to go?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
What's an example of one of these cuts that will be apparent to citizens soon?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Did Rupert Murdoch consciously try to bring his children, get them interested in the media?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Elizabeth Linos, thank you so much for speaking with us.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Elizabeth Linos is the Emma Bloomberg Associate Professor of Public Policy and Management at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Now, he had two sons, Lachlan and James, born 15 months apart. Lachlan was a little older. James was a little younger. And the other major character in this is their sister, Liz. Those three were the children of Murdoch's second wife, Anna. There was a fourth, Prudence, known as Prue, and she was the daughter of his previous marriage.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
But those three, James, Lachlan, and Liz, were the main characters for most of this drama. James and Lachlan would both eventually play prominent roles in the businesses and would be rivals for succession over the years at various times. But James didn't start out that way, did he? I mean he went a whole different direction out of college and thereafter.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Murdoch's effort to ensure his elder son Lachlan inherits the throne led to a no-holds-barred legal brawl that unearthed painful family stories of manipulation and betrayal.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
So I want to move us into the Trump era here. Lachlan Murdoch, the elder son, had left the company. He had been in Australia for many years. And then in 2015, he moves back, gets an office in Los Angeles. He's with the company. James, the younger brother, has an office in New York, putting them in kind of an awkward position, both being prominent executives in the company.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
Also, we'll talk with Harvard professor Elizabeth Linos about the extraordinary measures Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has taken to shrink the size of the federal government and what that means for federal workers and the rest of us who depend on government services. And John Powers reviews the animated film Flow, which he says is wonderful.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
And then in 2015, Donald Trump appears on the scene as a presidential candidate. One question I've always had is how much Rupert Murdoch is motivated by an ideological agenda as opposed to accumulating in wealth and power. And you write that in 2016, Rupert Murdoch was openly scornful of Trump's candidacy at first saying his election would be the end of the Republican Party.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
But once he had momentum, you write the Fox News primetime lineup turned into a four-hour Trump commercial. How did James regard this, this turn in Fox News?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
And Lachlan was still in the company. Do we know what his attitude was towards the Fox News embrace of Trump and what his relationship was like with James during this time?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
So James gradually became a bit more public about his views. I mean particularly he put out a statement about Trump's remarks on the march in Charlottesville saying – Trump saying that there were very fine people in the tiki torch march there. And then there was another occasion when there were terrible forest fires in Australia.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
And some media, I think the Daily Beast, asked for comment about, well, what about the fact that the Murdoch papers in Australia ignore climate change as an element of all this? What happened?
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
McKay Coffins is a staff writer for The Atlantic. His new article is Growing Up Murdoch, James Murdoch on mind games, sibling rivalry, and the war for the family media empire. He'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. So let's get to the court battle that's at the heart of this story.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
There was a plan in place for many, many years, a trust, which said that when Rupert Murdoch passed away, that the voting rights in the company would be split among four siblings, Lachlan and James, the two boys, Liz, their sister, and then Prue, who was their sister from a previous marriage.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Growing Up Murdoch / DOGE's Cuts To The Federal Workforce
And to a lot of observers, that meant that it might be James who had the upper hand over Lachlan because it was assumed that the two sisters might work with him in terms of the future direction of the company. This was problematic for Rupert Murdoch, right? So he hatches a plan. What does he do?
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Right. And this is fascinating because Pope Paul VI, he issues this encyclical called Of Human Life, which fully rejects the findings of this commission about liberalizing rules on birth control and rejects it completely. What was the reaction in the church among Catholics? How was it received?
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Right. Polling showed that Catholics everywhere disapproved of this, and clergy in the Netherlands basically revolted, right?
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
You know, this backsliding and essentially rejection of the reforms of Vatican II lasted over the next four popes that followed John XXIII, all who were different from each other in one way or another. But they pretty much used their power to impede or roll back these reforms.
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
I wonder, have you reflected on what motivated so many of these popes to resist change and embrace practices out of step with the lives so many Catholics were leading?
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
We need to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Philip Sheenan. He is a veteran investigative reporter. His new book is Jesus Wept, Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church. He'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
I wanted to return to a moment with Pope Paul VI, who was the one after John XXIII. In the 60s and 70s, he was the pope, and he had affirmed the church's ban on birth control despite the recommendation of a commission that had been established, which favored relaxing the rules.
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
And this happened in the late 60s when there were a lot of sweeping cultural changes including the sexual revolution, which certainly troubled church conservatives. And in 1975, Pope Paul was so angry about the criticism he received about the birth control issue and the rejection of his views.
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
He is known for not having spoken out against Nazi crimes despite substantial evidence that he was aware of them. But there's even more. You tell a story in the book which was new to me of this Pope Pius before he was pope, when he was an archbishop in Munich, meeting personally with a then rising Adolf Hitler. What happened here?
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
that he directed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, that's a unit within the Vatican, to release a long declaration on sexual morality, which had hardened condemnations of extramarital sex, masturbation even, homosexuality. That really prompted some revelations in the press about Paul's personal life. What happened?
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
And you note that this raised the question among some whether the church's failure to address sexual abuse among the clergy was influenced at least in part by the fact that high-ranking church officials themselves had their own closely guarded sexual secrets. Yes.
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
You note that there have been some studies by former clergy on this issue who have some professional training in mental health. I mean there was a Father Kennedy who was a Loyola psychologist and then later a former priest and monk, Richard Seip, who became a psychotherapist and treated clergymen. Both of them kind of mused upon what the celibacy vow that is imposed on clergy was.
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
the psychological effect that it had that might have played a role in this abuse scandal? What did they conclude?
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Pacelli being the name of the cardinal before he became pope, yeah.
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
You know, the scandal of sexual abuse in the church has been widely reported. And I think it's fair to say from a reading of your book that none of the popes that you write about confronted this terrible problem honestly and forcefully, all of them in varying degrees protected predators. In your research, did you come across any documents on this that really surprised you?
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. We in the media regularly cover the decisions of powerful leaders in government and business and how they affect our lives. My guest today, veteran investigative reporter Philip Sheenan, has spent much of the last 10 years examining the impact of seven powerful men who've exercised a different kind of authority.
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
I want to take one more break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Philip Sheenan, a veteran investigative reporter. His new book is Jesus Wept, Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church. We'll continue our conversation after this break. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Well, I want to talk about Pope Francis, the current pope who, as you and I record this, is suffering from pneumonia. I hope he does well and recovers. He was elected in 2013, and he took the name of Francis of Assisi, the 13th century cleric who wore rags and focused on the needs of the poor. It's interesting that when he took office—
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
The initial impression kind of reminds you of John XXIII, the guy who initiated the Second Vatican Council in that Francis sort of rejected some of the finer trappings of the office. Tell us about that.
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
So, you know, what about some of the rules that had been in place for so long that had been controversial, like the refusal to provide communion to Catholics who had been divorced, giving, you know, sacraments to gay couples, that kind of thing? What's actually changed?
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
And what about the attitude towards birth control and abortion? Any change there?
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
This housekeeper, Sister Pascalina Leonard, it turns out was a very close advisor of Pius and wrote these interesting diaries. And it said that she actually advised him to speak out against the Nazis during World War II when all this was happening, right?
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
One of the ways that a pope has impact apart from what he says about doctrine and practice is who he appoints. I mean there's a lot of authority. They appoint cardinals. And I'm wondering – it seems you think that there might be some liberalizing impact of his appointments within the Vatican, right?
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Does Francis have a better record in terms of dealing with the sexual abuse crisis within the church than his predecessors?
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
You know, the Pope and the Vatican have been portrayed in various films and movies over the years. Recently, we had the movie Conclave starring Ralph Fiennes. How do you find the portrayals of Popes and the Vatican in PVN movies that we've seen?
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
You know, in the movie Conclave, there were these details about how the cardinals are truly kept isolated and unable to communicate. You know, windows are covered. Cell phones are not available. Is that true?
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
And are there caucuses among like-minded cardinals on the side?
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
You know, in this book, you point out a lot of hypocrisy and corruption in the church. And some may regard the book or maybe this interview as anti-Catholic. After all of these years of research, how do you regard the value or harm of this institution?
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
And yet it endures. I mean, more than a billion people are still there, right? Presumably getting some comfort and value from it.
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Well, Philip Sheenan, thank you so much for speaking with us.
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Philip Sheenan is a veteran investigative reporter who spent 20 years with the New York Times. His new book is Jesus Wept, Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church. Coming up, John Powers reviews a new autobiographical novel by Brigitte Giroux, which looks back at the accident that killed her husband. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
In the new autobiographical novel Live Fast, Brigitte Giraud looks back at the accident that killed her husband. She speculates on the many ways that tragedy could have turned out differently. The book won the French equivalent of the Booker Prize. Our critic-at-large John Power says that he read it in a sitting, and it left him thinking about how we all want to rewrite the past.
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
John Powers reviewed the novel Live Fast by Brigitte Giroux. On tomorrow's show, we get a revealing look at the children of an aging billionaire as they maneuver for control of their father's media empire when he passes away. It's not HBO's Succession, but the real-life family drama surrounding Rupert Murdoch and Fox News. We'll speak with The Atlantic staff writer McKay Coppins.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
I hope you can join us. The Atlantic Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman, and Joel Wolfram.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Before we leave Pope Pius, I want to mention the will. When he died, there was a very short will which was discovered and, well, it was kind of surprising. What did it say?
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
So in 1958, after Pope Pius dies, the cardinals in the Vatican gather to select the new pope. We're all familiar with this ritual. They settle on an Italian bishop, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, who takes the name Pope John XXIII. He's short, quite overweight, not the most imposing figure visually.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
They're the last seven popes of the Catholic Church, whose intense power struggles and doctrinal debates affect more than a billion Catholics in countless ways. Whether they can use birth control or get an abortion or divorce and remain in good standing in the faith,
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
But you say, without saying so directly, he made it clear quickly that things were going to be different from the grim sobriety of the previous pope. What did he do?
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
All right. Let's talk about some of the issues of potential reform that came up at the Vatican II Council, some issues that the church was confronting. One of them was the longstanding practice of requiring priests to remain unmarried and celibate. Now, there's a fascinating history here, right? This was not always the case, right?
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Whether priests must forever remain unmarried and celibate, a rule with little biblical authority that fuels a drastic shortage of priests and leaves millions unable to regularly attend Mass or receive sacraments. Whether same-sex couples can be accepted in the church. And whether sexual predators will be stopped and held accountable.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
So there's this requirement that priests can't marry and can't have sex. This has created a problem for the church, hasn't it? A real shortage of priests.
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
There was another issue involving sexuality and that is birth control. I mean it was against Catholic doctrine. There was thought that perhaps it's time to change that. You write about a Belgian bishop, Leo Joseph Sunans, who talked about his experiences hearing the confessions of women and what this restriction meant for them in their lives.
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
There was one really significant change, which was it was decreed that they didn't have to – priests did not have to conduct mass solely in Latin, which meant that people around the world could understand more of what was being said. That was really the one enduring change, wasn't it?
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
Sheenan's book is the story of a bold attempt to reform the church in the early 1960s and decades of backsliding that followed under pontiffs more comfortable with conservative traditions and power concentrated in the Vatican. Philip Sheenan spent more than 20 years at the New York Times covering the Pentagon, the Justice Department, the State Department, and Congress.
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
And I guess another thing that Pope John XXIII did make some progress on is changing church doctrine on how the Catholic Church regarded other faiths, particularly Protestant faiths, but also particularly the Jewish faith. It was pretty harsh before that, right?
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
So Philip Sheenan, we talked about how Pope John XXIII with the Second Vatican Council initiated a lot of reforms in the Catholic Church. Some were enacted. The four popes who followed by and large didn't advance those efforts and in many cases kind of reversed them.
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The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
The pope who immediately followed John XXIII was Pope Paul VI, the guy who was kind of reluctant to take it on and seemed to have come under the influence of some of the more conservatives in Catholicism. Vatican. One of the things that John XXIII had done was he had developed a commission to investigate the subject of birth control. This was a pretty serious effort, wasn't it?
Fresh Air
The Battle For The Soul Of The Catholic Church
His two previous books focused on the 9-11 investigation and unanswered questions about the Kennedy assassination. His new book is Jesus Wept, Seven Popes and the Battle for the Soul of the Catholic Church. Philip Sheenan, welcome back to Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. In 1949, a Republican activist named Suzanne Stevenson formed an organization called the Minute Women of the USA to fight what she perceived as the creep of Soviet communism in America.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
And they met with their lawyers preparing. And one of the things that you write about in the book is that their lawyers met with Eric Johnston, who was head of the Motion Picture Association of America, the chief industry trade group, who told the lawyers for these artists who were expecting a tough time before this committee, don't worry, there will never be a blacklist, right?
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
I mean, this is remarkable, but things changed.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Yeah. And what about the unions, the Screen Actors Guild, the Screenwriters Guild?
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
So it was hard to find friends if you were one of these actors or writers who was targeted.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Because I guess there was a national consensus that Soviet communism was a danger.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
You know, new rights for organized labor, the beginnings of the social security system, etc., Roosevelt was enormously popular really as the result of these programs. What were the greatest objections to those changes and what form did the opposition take?
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
All right, let's take another break here, then we'll talk some more. We are speaking with Clay Risen. He is a reporter and editor for The New York Times and the author of eight books. His latest is Red Scare, Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. He'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Going back to Hollywood for a moment, there was never a blacklist exactly as you say. But as close as it came was a book called Red Channels, a report of communist influence on radio and television produced by something called the American Business Consultants. Who were they? What did they do with this?
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Makes you think of social media today. It does. Somebody sees an opportunity. Yeah, let's push this farther.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
We haven't talked about Joe McCarthy. His story is better known than some of the others that we've talked about. But he was certainly the shining knight of the anti-communist crusade.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
A senator from Wisconsin who made many speeches beginning in 1950 claiming to have lists of communists in the State Department or the Defense Department or whatever, but never really seemed to come up with much credible evidence. That run lasted until about 1954 when he was embarrassed in a in a really dramatic Senate hearing and was then censured by his colleagues at the Senate.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
It struck me when I read, particularly the way he interacted with Republicans, that this in some ways reminds me of Donald Trump, not completely, but the firing from the hip with accusations that he couldn't prove and the fact that Republicans, a lot of Republicans in Congress didn't particularly respect him, didn't think he was credible, but wouldn't challenge him, right?
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
The group would attract tens of thousands of members, and they were told to meet in small cells and appear as individual concerned citizens when they wrote letters or heckled liberal speakers or packed a city council meeting to oppose public housing. The story of the Minutewomen is one of many told in a new book by our guest, journalist and historian Clay Risen.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
It was also striking that there would be hearings in which – in some cases, the chair of the hearings thought, OK, we're going to get McCarthy on the record here and prove that he doesn't know what he's talking about. So he would make some charges and then witnesses would come in who would completely debunk the charges that he had made.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
But by then, he'd opened up the fire on somebody else and had two or three more new charges. And somehow just kept it rolling and the media – I mean he knew how to play the media. They would always report a new charge because, oh my heavens, if this official really is a subversive, we don't want to miss that story. He really manipulated the media pretty effectively, didn't he?
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Let's take another break here. We are speaking with Clay Risen. He is a reporter and editor for The New York Times. His book is Red Scare, Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. We'll continue our conversation after this break. This is Fresh Air. You know, it's a fascinating story that you tell here. And it did kind of have an end, right? It lasted about a decade, I guess.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
And there are really two things that seemed to help close the door on this frenzy of anti-communism. One was Republican President Dwight Eisenhower. What did he do?
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
We're going through a remarkable transition in national policy now with the Trump administration. And you write in the book that you think you see a through line from the events in the Red Scare to our current political moment. What do you see as the relevance of these events for us understanding what's happening now?
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Right. So you had that thing going on. There's this people who were angry, felt that they had been pushed aside, left out, that their way of life was ignored and replaced with something alien. The second strand you cite, of course, is the emergence of the Cold War and the fear of the Soviet Union. And that was connected to a communist presence in the United States.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Clay Risen, thanks so much for speaking with us.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Clay Risen is a reporter and editor for The New York Times and the author of eight previous books. His latest is Red Scare, Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. This is Fresh Air. Our TV critic David Bianculli has been impressed by two new TV series that tell their stories using time in a very inventive fashion.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
One is the new Max medical drama The Pit, which presents new episodes each Thursday through April 10th. The other, now streaming in its entirety, is the four-part Netflix series Adolescence, which follows the case of a murdered teen from several different perspectives. Here's David's review.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
And we should note that while Soviet-style communism is discredited among Americans today, it was different in the 30s and 40s, right?
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
David Bianculli is a professor of television studies at Rowan University. He reviewed The Pit on Max and Adolescence, now streaming on Netflix. On tomorrow's show, we speak with Seth Rogen, star and co-creator of the new TV comedy series The Studio. It's about a freshly appointed movie studio head trying to keep the company afloat as Hollywood changes around him.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Episodes include Martin Scorsese, Zoe Kravitz, and Ice Cube playing versions of themselves. I hope you can join us. Thank you. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
You know, I often think of... The excesses of the Red Scare as being driven by congressional hearings, people demanding loyalty statements and the like. But Harry Truman, the Democratic president who followed Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was actually pretty active on this front as well. Tell us why he embraced this idea of asking citizens to commit to loyalty hosts and the like.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Risen examines the frenzy of anti-communist activity that swept the nation after the Second World War, most often associated with the Hollywood blacklist and the relentless and mostly unfounded charges of communist infiltration leveled by Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Right. I mean, it's interesting. He comes up with this loyalty oath that he expects government employees to swear to. People identified problems with this approach. What were they?
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Risen describes the red-baiting hysteria of the period in colorful detail, and he writes that there's a through-line to be found from that era up to our current political moment. Clay Risen is currently a reporter and editor at The New York Times, now assigned to the obituaries desk, and is the author of eight books, some about American history and some about whiskey.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
So the organizations could have been civil rights organizations or people opposing Franco and Sprain, a whole lot of things, which communists might or might not support but which were not per se communist fronts.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
The dimensions of this program were astonishing when I read them. 4.76 million background checks, which resulted in more than 26,000 FBI field investigations. The result being 6,800 people who resigned or withdrew their applications for employment, 560 who were fired, and no spies identified, by the way.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Did Truman ever express regret about this as far as we know?
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
You know, some of the most memorable sounds and images of the Red Scare comes from hearings on the movie industry. You know, there's not a lot of espionage in Hollywood as far as I know. Why was it such an early and attractive target?
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
Before writing obituaries, Risen was a senior editor on the Times 2020 politics coverage and before that an editor on the opinion desk. His new book is Red Scare, Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America. Clay Risen, welcome to Fresh Air. Thanks for having me.
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
You know, these hearings were of the House Un-American Activities Committee were extensively covered by the media. And, you know, you can see the film of this and like reporters jammed all around the witness table, you know, right in the faces of the witnesses. And, you know, TV coverage wasn't really a thing yet.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
But back then, movies and theaters would often, before the movie is shown, open with newsreels of, you know, stuff going on and hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee happening. appeared in them, which is why some of this film footage is preserved. And I thought we would listen to a little clip here. This is a piece of testimony from Hollywood screenwriter Howard Lawson.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
There's a lot of detail in this book, but there's also a big picture sense of what was really happening with this outbreak of anti-communist fervor. And one of the strands, you say, was a culture war, a long simmering resentment among conservatives about the changes that had taken place in the nation with the New Deal.
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
And with about 35 wraps of the gavel there, boy, intense stuff. This is the House Un-American Activities Committee, Howard Lawson, who himself was actually a member of the Communist Party, right?
Fresh Air
The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
And it was not illegal to be in the communist party then?
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The Red Scare & America's Conspiratorial Politics
You know, it's fascinating to read how quickly this anti-communist movement gained momentum. And the events around this particular hearing are a case in point. You know, there were 10 witnesses who were all screenwriters, I think, who everyone knew were going to be really targeted by the committee. And they flew as a group from L.A. to New York. to get ready for the hearing.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
I want to talk with a basic staple of sports reporting, and that's the locker room interview after the game when guys gather around athletes. And I want to just call on my limited experience here. Back in the 1980s, NPR relied on its member stations for a lot of its sports reporting. And although I mostly covered politicians and elected officials, I did cover some big sporting events.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And what I noticed in the athletes' locker rooms was how relatively timid the sports reporters seemed to be about asking a tough question. And it occurred to me that elected officials and politicians need the media. They have some obligation to talk. Athletes really don't need sports journalists, do they?
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Right. And a lot of your book is about the business of getting meaningful access to players and coaches, moments in which they may be candid. How did you learn that?
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Right. But then the athlete thinks he's having a conversation when he's in fact giving you on-the-record comment. Is that an issue?
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Now, the other issue you have is you establish friendly relationships with athletes, and then you have to sometimes be tough on them. How do you handle that?
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
You've written a lot about golf, some great stuff. And I have to ask you about Tiger Woods, who was just such an incredible talent when he arrived. I mean, he dominated his sport in a way that is rare in athletics. What was he like when you first got to know him on the tour?
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And one of the things you'd written about his father was that his father was the kind of manipulative sports dad.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
You have some great stories in here about tennis. And one of them I liked was when you followed John McEnroe into the locker room at the U.S. Open because he wasn't talking to anybody. And this was an example of you just getting access that other people couldn't get and it paying off. Tell us what happened.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
One more thing. I've noticed in my career writing mostly about things other than sports that when I occasionally have done a story at a newspaper that dealt with sports, like I did a piece once about Philadelphia Eagles tickets and whether they were distributed fairly. And I got many, many times the email that I did when I did something about the mayor.
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50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
And it's clear that sports is something that people are really, really passionate about. But I also wonder, are there times that you want to just tell people, folks, these are games. This is not life and death.
Fresh Air
50 Years Of 'Rocky Horror'
Well, John Feinstein, thanks so much for spending some time with us.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
You know, I thought we would listen to a piece of tape from an NPR report. This is from 2012, a reporter named Greg Allen. And it's based on his conversation with a guy who survived Dozier named Jerry Cooper and what happened when he had committed some offense and was taken to the White House for some discipline. Let's listen.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
And that's from a report from NPR reporter Greg Allen about abuses at the Dozer School. The story has inspired the novel by our guest Colson Whitehead. It's called The Nickel Boys. That really is the way it happened, isn't it?
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Right. And what would it do to a student's back to get 100 of those kinds of lashes delivered with that kind of force?
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
We're listening to my interview with Colson Whitehead. His novel The Nickel Boys has been adapted into a film of the same name, now in theaters. We'll hear more of the interview after a break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Coulson Whitehead, welcome back to Fresh Air. It's good to have you, and the book is remarkable. I thought we would begin with a reading. I mean, your book is about some students at this thing that's called the Trevor Nickel Academy.
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
So a lot of kids were beaten and there are a lot of stories about this. Do we believe that kids were murdered?
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Right, or get the flu. We should note that no one has been criminally accused of killing anybody there. Of course, a lot of this happened decades ago, and so the evidence isn't easy to acquire, and some of the perpetrators are now deceased. The kids did work and produce stuff. Was the school a source of profit for some local people?
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Thus, The Nickel Boys is the book, but it's based on the story of the Dozier School in the Panhandle of Florida, which is now closed and where many abuses were discovered. This is a reading about a group of ex-students, right? Just set it up for us.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
There are quotes from Martin Luther King in the story because they come from this record that Elmwood loved to play. And one of them you quote a couple of times and it's striking. It's in which King describes the nonviolent resistance and the importance of loving your oppressors. And kind of an abridged version of the quote is he says, throw us in jail and we will love you.
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
We will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. We will not only win freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory. Tell me why that quote was something you wanted to use in the story.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
In the last part of the book, we meet some of the characters later in life. And I don't want to say more than that about it because it would spoil it for readers and they deserve to experience this. But I have to say the narrative structure here of how the course of their lives is revealed I think is pretty brilliant.
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
And I wonder if you can, without giving away the story, just talk a little bit about how you – decide to reveal the outcomes?
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
You know, the book is a lot about the struggle between optimism about social change and kind of a pragmatic acceptance of the world as it is. And we're in some pretty turbulent times in this country these days. How optimistic are you for positive change?
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. In 2019, Colson Whitehead landed on the cover of Time magazine next to a caption that called him America's storyteller. He's earned that honor over the course of nine novels that have ranged from wry speculative fiction to zombie apocalypse to sobering historical fiction, all of them in various ways considering the topic of race in America.
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
So the older one especially is in a position to be aware of a lot of things.
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
While you were writing this book, I'm wondering what was happening in the country on race relations. I mean a lot has happened in the last few years. I'm wondering what events might have informed your thinking as you were writing this.
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
This is your ninth book and your last one, The Underground Railroad, won a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize selected by Oprah Winfrey, which I'm sure boosted sales a lot and gave it a much bigger profile. As you finished and published this book, did it feel like a completely different experience because of where your career is?
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The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Is it true you had to sign 15,000 copies of this one?
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
All right. Well, congratulations on the book. Colson Whitehead, it's been great to have you back. Thanks so much.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Novelist Colson Whitehead. His novel The Nickel Boys has been adapted into a film now in theaters. Whitehead won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his previous novel, The Underground Railroad, which was adapted into a miniseries of the same name by Barry Jenkins.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
After we take a short break, guest jazz critic Martin Johnson will review a new recording featuring two of the giants of jazz, McCoy Tyner and Joe Henderson, in concert in 1966. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Mention of the label Blue Note Records will evoke a sound familiar to most jazz fans. Pristine, warm, as if the greatest musicians of the 60s were playing in your living room. Yet very few live recordings exist of the stars from the label's golden era. But that's been changing. A new recording features two giants of jazz, McCoy Tyner and Joe Henderson in concert from 1966.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Guest jazz critic Martin Johnson says you can hear jazz changing in several ways.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
And that is Colson Whitehead reading from his new book, The Nickel Boys. This school really changed people's lives, didn't it?
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Martin Johnson writes about jazz for The Wall Street Journal. He reviewed McCoy Tyner and Joe Henderson, Force of Nature, live at Slugs. Coming up, film critic Justin Chang reviews Mike Lee's new film, Hard Truths. This is Fresh Air. In 1997, Marianne Jean-Baptiste became the first black British actress to receive an Oscar nomination for Mike Lee's drama Secrets and Lies.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Now, nearly 30 years later, she and Lee have reunited on the comedic drama Hard Truths, in which she plays a profoundly unhappy woman living in North London. The performance has earned Jean-Baptiste best actress prizes from several critics groups. Our film critic, Justin Chang, has this review.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Your last book, The Underground Railroad, which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, was a look at slavery. What made you want to write about Dozier, about this school?
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. He reviewed Mike Lee's new film Hard Truths. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. On Monday's show, President-elect Donald Trump will be sworn in for a second term in the White House on Martin Luther King Day.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
We'll speak with scholars Tressie McMillan Cottom and Eddie Glaude to talk about what lies ahead and the legacy of Dr. King. I hope you can join us. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our senior producer today is Thea Chaloner. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld, and Al Banks.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Susan Yakundi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
And how did you research the subject? Did you go down and visit Dozier?
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
But you didn't feel the need to go there?
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
His 2016 novel The Underground Railroad was adapted into an Amazon TV series directed by Barry Jenkins, who directed Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk. Whitehead's 2019 novel The Nickel Boys has been adapted into a film of the same name, now in theaters.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
So how did you get the texture of the place to write about it?
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
How did kids get into a school like that? What sort of offenses or circumstances would cause them to be sent to this school?
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Right. In a lot of cases, kids who just ran away, right, because they came from places where they were abused or unwanted.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
So the teenager – well, the young man who is at the heart of our story, Elwood, isn't a kid who has come from an abusive home. Do you want to just talk about this character and why he's the kind of kid you wanted to take us into this school?
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
And we should just note this. He's in Tallahassee, Florida, in the Jim Crow South in this late 50s, early 60s, right?
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
It's based on the true story of the now-closed Dozier School for Boys in Florida, where former students have reported being brutally beaten or sexually abused. The central character of Whitehead's book is Elwood, a hardworking, college-bound African-American high school student who believes in the promise of the civil rights movement. Here's a clip from the film directed by Rommel Ross.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
So what happened when you were pulled over in handcuffs? What happened?
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Right, right. Or you could be misidentified by somebody.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Elwood is in high school in the early 60s when the civil rights movement is really rolling and he has a teacher, Mr. Hill, who's interested in this and kind of committed to the battle for civil rights. There was a very compelling moment when you described the first day of school when the kids in this segregated school get their textbooks. Do you want to share that with us?
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
So Elwood, he is committed to the principles of the civil rights movement and looks forward to participating. What's his attitude towards – You know, the life ahead of him where he's got to deal with segregation and deal with a white power structure and limited opportunities. How does he conduct himself?
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
Elwood, played by Ethan Harisi, is speaking to Turner, a fellow schoolmate played by Brandon Wilson. Elwood has just been beaten by the school staff after he intervened to help a student being attacked by a bully. If everybody looks the other way, then everybody's in on it.
Fresh Air
The True Story Of Abuse And Injustice Behind 'Nickel Boys'
So Elmwood, this optimistic young man, ends up in this reform school because he hitches a ride with a guy who happens to have stolen a car. He gets convicted of car theft and he's in this place. How do his values mesh with the experience that confronts him?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Let's back up a second. You said that you knew you wanted to be a stand-up comedian. How did you know that? What got you interested in comedy?
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Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
At the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo? That's great. Yeah.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
How old were you when that happened? I was nine. Oh, wow. You were little. And how did you start doing it? You start cracking your friends up. Did you do it in front of a mirror? How did you develop stand up as a kid?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Well, you know, one thing I observed in the performances that I've seen of yours is the way you use your voice. Like an instrument, you can quickly get loud and kind of come up in pitch in a way that totally works. Was that something that you always did or is it something that you worked on?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Mo Ammer, recorded in 2022. He stars in the Netflix series called Mo. After a long hiatus, season two is now streaming. He'll be back to talk more after this short break. And later, Justin Chang reviews Black Bag, the new spy thriller directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
So you spent a lot of years traveling as a comedian. Before you got your citizenship, what was your immigration status and how did you travel?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Moe, short for Mohamed, has made a name for himself in comedy, starring in stand-up specials, touring in the U.S. and other countries, and co-starring in the Hulu series Rami. In his Netflix series Moe, he's close to his mother and autistic brother, his Mexican-American girlfriend, and a kaleidoscope of ethnically diverse friends.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
And they would read that back to you. This is not a passport.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
How would you big time it with a skeptical border agent or airline employee? You have to be super confident.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
And I learned that from my mom. It took you, I think, 20 years roughly from when you got to Houston before you got your citizenship. Why did it take so long?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Season 2 eventually takes him to his ancestral home in the West Bank, where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is integral to the story. A review in The Guardian says season two of Mo brings together food, identity, immigration, family, and Middle Eastern politics in a way that's as fresh and intriguing as the falafel tacos that become central to the plot.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
So your family applied for asylum and you were waiting for a hearing and a decision for all those years.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
You traveled a lot and I happen to know that there's one occasion when you got upgraded to first class and seated next to Eric Trump of all people. Tell us that story.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
When you gave him the business and said, you know, talked about the Muslim ban, how did he respond?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Mo Amherst stars in the series based on his life called Mo, which is in its second season on Netflix. We'll hear more after this short break. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Today we're going to listen to my 2022 interview with Mo Amr when the first season of Mo aired. Mo Amr, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you for having me. I got to tell you, I struggled a little bit when I was writing your introduction because I feel like if I describe you as Palestinian, that doesn't quite capture the Mo Amr I see in your stuff. You kind of have more than one identity, don't you?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
One of the interesting things about your career, I read that relatively early in your career, you got gigs performing before American troops in Europe and then in the Middle East, right?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
What kind of stuff did you do before then? Did you – I don't know. Did you play upon your ethnic background or –
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Yeah, you know, it's been 21 years since then. And there's a generation of people who didn't experience that. And people can forget the intensity, you know, of the... Well, I mean anti-Arab and anti-Islam feeling which rippled through the population and I'm sure through service people that you performed for. Did you get blowback? I mean how did you deal with it?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
So how did you lean into this discomfort? What did that sound like on stage?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
And the emotional moments that you had with soldiers, what kind of things did they say to you?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
You know, in your Netflix special, Mohammed in Texas, you end with a really touching story of you that now that you got your American passport, you went and paid a visit to the village near Nablus where your family had come from. Was that your first time in Palestine?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Yeah, well, you know, what happens in the stand-up special is you see you describing some things about this visit, and we see footage from the documentary. And, you know, you talk about tender moments with your family, aunts and cousins, and then you— see a mosque and you go and pay a visit to this mosque in the middle of this town where you pray.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
And then men in the mosque insist that you say the call to prayer, which is, you know, broadcast from a little sound system in the mosque and the whole village hears it and knows that it's time for prayer. And you say, no, no, no, no, I can't do this. And well, they go, well, don't you know the prayer? You say, well, don't you know the call?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
And you say, yes, of course I know the call, but I can't, I can't. They just absolutely insist that you agree to do it. And so now I want to, at this point, I want to pick up the story from the special where you're describing the moment when you have agreed to go and do the call for prayer. Let's listen.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
And that's our guest, Mo Amr, from his Netflix comedy special, Mohammed in Texas. Does it still give you a chill to hear that?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. Season two of the comedy series Mo is now available on Netflix. It's based on the life of Mo Amr, a comedian of Palestinian descent who grew up in Kuwait and Houston and is fluent in Arabic, Spanish, and English.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Yeah, I mean, it's like the mosque is centuries old, and there's this thread pulling you back to it.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Well, Mo Ammer, it's been fun. Thanks so much for spending some time with us.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Mo Ammer recorded in 2022. The second season of his Netflix series Mo is now streaming. Coming up, Justin Chang reviews Black Bag, the new spy thriller directed by Steven Soderbergh. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Right. And when people first met you, I mean, given your skin color, they probably assumed you were Mexican-American. And I can tell from the series that you speak obviously Arabic. You speak Spanish pretty fluently to me and at least a couple of three dialects of English too, right? Yeah.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
In the new comic spy thriller Black Bag, Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender play a married couple who both work as British intelligence agents and who are drawn into a web of intrigue concerning a possible in-house mole. Steven Soderbergh directed the film, which opens in theaters today. Our film critic Justin Chang has this review.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
I wanted to listen to a scene from the series Moe, which, as we said, premieres on Netflix tomorrow. And this will give us a little bit of sense of some of your linguistic ability to fit in.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Justin Chang is a film critic at The New Yorker. He reviewed Black Bag. On Monday's show, writer Clay Risen describes a political movement which destroyed the careers of thousands of teachers, civil servants, and artists whose beliefs or associations were deemed un-American.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
His book, Red Scare, is about post-World War II America, but he says there's a through line connecting that era to our current political moment. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Sam Brigger is our managing producer.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorrock. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Joyce Lieberman and Julian Hertzfeld. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Leah Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman, and Joel Wolfram.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
The series is about you, a character named Moe, kind of pretty much you in your 20s, I guess, single, living in Houston, dating a Mexican-American woman, which, of course, your Palestinian mom sort of disapproves of. This is a scene where you've just lost a job you had in an electronic shop because the owner – was concerned about an immigration raid and you didn't have your papers.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Our digital media producer is Mollie C.V. Nesper. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
So you've returned to an old side hustle of selling knockoff merchandise out of the trunk of your car. And this scene happens in – you've got your big car backed up to the edge of a strip mall, which you see plenty of in Houston. And there's this heavyset guy, white guy in a cowboy hat walking down the sidewalk. And you engage him and say, hey, he looks like he got orthopedic shoes there.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Does that hurt your back? And try and sell him a pair of shoes from the trunk. And there are these – they're imitations of these odd-looking shoes marketed by Kanye West kind of in part made from the foam – The easy foam runners.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
Well, here, you open this, and then you pull out a little stool. You've got a little portable store there. So it begins with you engaging this fellow. Let's listen.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
As the first season ended, Mo was trying to stop the theft of his family's olive trees from a Texas farm when he ended up trapped in the thieves' truck and transported to Mexico. As season two opens, he's stuck in Mexico City because he's undocumented. He sells falafel tacos from a vending cart and plays in a mariachi band to get by.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
And that is Mo Ammer making a sale in the series Mo, which premieres on Netflix tomorrow. You know, we hear you speaking kind of the Texan version of English, which I will say I grew up in South Texas. I recognize that accent. You used that to connect to people, I guess, lots of times growing up, didn't you?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
So you did sell knockoff stuff on the street. This is a real thing.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
That's how it worked. Imagine you develop some kind of skills for reading people and communicating that probably helped in stand-up when you got to that.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
And when it's time to close things up and split too, I imagine.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
You know, we mentioned earlier that your family left Kuwait and ended up in Houston. Tell us a bit more about that. Your family was in Kuwait, had a comfortable life. And then the first Gulf War happened, which was Saddam Hussein invading Kuwait. How much do you remember of that departure?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
But he's desperate to get back to Houston, where his long-awaited asylum hearing is fast approaching. Here he's talking to a clerk at the American Embassy in Mexico where he's been seeking a travel document to get into the United States. You know me. This is like the 12th time I've seen you. I've seen your colleague like six times.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
So tell us what happened in Kuwait. I mean, you were there. Your dad was working in telecommunications, making a good living. You had a pretty comfortable life. What happened that forced you to leave? I mean, I know the Iraq invaded, but how did your family experience that?
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
So you were describing how your family left Kuwait after the invasion by Iraq in the first Gulf War in 1991. You and your mom and your siblings eventually made it to Houston. Your dad wasn't there for quite a while. He got there a couple of years later. And you got into school. And as we heard in that clip, it was a weird beginning.
Fresh Air
Texan-Palestinian Comic Mo Amer
You were used to wearing a bow tie to school and speaking with an English accent. And everybody assumed you were Mexican-American. And You managed. You made your way. And then your father died. You were 14. Is that right? What was the effect of that on you?
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. David Johansson, a founding member of the legendary 1970s band the New York Dolls, died last week. He was 75. The New York Dolls never sold many records, but the band had lasting influence, paving the way for punk rock. He also performed in his persona Buster Poindexter, a pompadour-wearing lounge lizard.
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Terry's interview starts with a track from the album called Looking for a Kiss. The Dolls used to play this one in the 1970s. It was written by David Johansson, who also sings lead.
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
David Johansson, co-founder of the 1970s band The New York Dolls, speaking with Terry Gross in 2004. He died last week at the age of 75. Johansson is the subject of a 2022 documentary, co-directed by Martin Scorsese on Showtime, titled Personality Crisis, One Night Only. Later, film critic Justin Chang reviews Mickey 17, a futuristic action comedy by Bong Joon-ho, starring Robert Pattinson.
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Here's David Johansson performing in his lounge lizard persona Buster Poindexter from the documentary. We'll continue our conversation after a break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
David Johansson, who co-founded the 1970s band the New York Dolls, speaking with Terry Gross in 2004. He died last week. He was the last surviving member of the band. We'll hear more after a break. This is Fresh Air.
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Thank you, Terry. David Johansson, co-founder of the 1970s band the New York Dolls, speaking with Terry Gross in 2004. He died last week. He was 75. He was the subject of a Showtime documentary, co-directed by Martin Scorsese, titled Personality Crisis, One Night Only. Here's David Johansson performing in his lounge lizard persona buster Poindexter from that documentary.
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
In the futuristic action comedy Mickey 17, Robert Pattinson plays a space traveler who's repeatedly killed and resurrected for scientific research purposes as part of an expedition to a distant planet. It's the first movie from South Korean writer-director Bong Joon-ho after his Oscar-winning film Parasite. Mickey 17 opens in theaters this week. Our film critic Justin Chang has this review.
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
And he played the blues with his band David Johansson and the Harry Smiths. Johansson was the subject of a 2022 Showtime documentary co-directed by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi called Personality Crisis, One Night Only. Much of the documentary is built around Johansson's 2020 performance as Buster Poindexter at the Cafe Carlisle in New York City.
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. He reviewed Bong Joon-ho's new movie, Mickey 17. On Monday's show, Terry speaks with comic Bill Burr about his anger issues, which are hilarious on stage but not so much in real life, and how therapy, mushrooms, and becoming a father have helped. Terry says the interview was a wild ride and she really enjoyed it.
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
Burr has a new Hulu comedy special and is the star of the new Broadway revival of Glengarry Glen Ross. I hope you can join us. Our senior producer today is Thea Chaloner. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
The film also featured newly discovered and archival interviews with him and others. Here's a clip from the documentary with English singer and songwriter Morrissey. He says he was obsessed with the New York Dolls as a teenager because they brought a sense of danger to rock. Their music was loud and rough, but more than that...
Fresh Air
Remembering New York Dolls Frontman David Johansen
English singer Morrissey from the Showtime documentary about the New York Dolls. Terry Gross spoke to David Johanson in 2004. The surviving members of the band had just reunited at Morrissey's request for a festival in England. Their performance was recorded on a CD and DVD titled The Return of the New York Dolls, live from Royal Festival Hall.
Fresh Air
Celebrating 20 Years Of 'The Office'
Your character, Jim, and then Pam, the receptionist, were important characters throughout The Office and the relationship – evolved and you eventually got together and got married, had a kid. What is it like to have a long-term fictional romance with somebody that lasts that long?