The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss the revival of Arizona’s hundred-and-sixty-year-old abortion ban, what role the issue of reproductive freedom will play in the November election, and how the position of reproductive health care in politics has evolved over the decades. This week’s reading: “Donald Trump Did This,” by Susan B. Glasser “The Fight to Restore Abortion Rights in Texas,” by Stephania Taladrid To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker.com wi ..read more

Election deniers are mobilizing their supporters and rolling out new tech to disrupt the November election. These groups are already organizing on hyperlocal levels, and learning to monitor polling places, target election officials, and challenge voter rolls. And though their work was once fringe, its become mainstreamed in the Republican Party. Today on WIRED Politics Lab, we focus on what these groups are doing, and what this means for voters and the election workers already facing threats and harassment. Listen to and follow WIRED Politics Lab here. Be sure to subscribe to the WIRED Polit ..read more

The New Yorker staff writer Eric Lach joins Tyler Foggatt to provide a preview of Donald Trump’s first criminal trial, which begins next week in Manhattan. Trump faces thirty-four felony counts for falsifying business records related to hush-money payments made to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels in 2016. Lach and Foggatt discuss the features of the controversial case and what six straight weeks of court appearances could mean for Trump’s campaign.  To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send feedback on this episode, write to themail@newyorker ..read more

Across much of the country, Republican officials are reaching into K-12 classrooms and universities alike to exert control over what can be taught. In Florida, Texas, and many other states, laws now restrict teaching historical facts about race and racism. Book challenges and bans are surging. Public universities are seeing political meddling in the tenure process. Advocates of these measures say, in effect, that education must emphasize only the positive aspects of American history. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times Magazine reporter who developed the 1619 Project, and Jelani Cobb, the ..read more

The Washington Roundtable: Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos discuss how the Israeli strike on World Central Kitchen workers in Gaza could factor into a policy shift by the Biden Administration on Israel and the war. President Biden realized that he needed to “catch up to where the country was,” Osnos says. Then the British barrister Philippe Sands, a prominent specialist in international law who represents the state of Palestine in the case against the Israeli occupation before the International Court of Justice, joins the group to discuss whether the laws of war have been violated ..read more

Kara Swisher landed on the tech beat as a young reporter at the Washington Post decades ago. She would stare at the teletype machine at the entrance and wonder why this antique sat there when it could already be supplanted by a computer. She eventually foretold the threat that posed to her own business—print journalism—by the rise of free online media; today, she is still raising alarms about how A.I. companies make use of the entire contents of the Internet. “Pay me for my stuff!” she says. “You can’t walk into my store and take all my Snickers bars and say it’s for fair use.” She is disappoi ..read more

The New Yorker staff writer Jay Caspian Kang joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the tension between protecting children from the effects of social media and protecting their right to free speech. Kang considers the ways in which social-media companies have sought to quell fear about misinformation and propaganda since Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election, and why those efforts will ultimately fail. “The structure of the Internet, of all social media,” he tells Foggatt, “is to argue about politics. And I think that is baked into it, and I don’t think you can ever fix it.” Read Ja ..read more

In 2016, before most people imagined that Donald Trump would become a serious contender for the Presidency, the New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik wrote about what he later called the “F-word”: fascism.  He saw Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric not as a new force in America but as a throwback to a specific historical precedent in nineteen-thirties Europe.  In the years since, Trump has called for “terminating” articles of the Constitution, has marked the January 6th insurrectionists as political martyrs, and has called his enemies animals, vermin, and “not people,” and demonstrated cou ..read more

The Washington Roundtable reflects on the books they’ve been reading to understand the 2024 Presidential campaigns and the state of international politics. Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos swap recommendations of works about all things political, from the anger of rural voters to the worldwide rise of authoritarian rule, including a fictionalized imagining of a powerful real-life political family. Read with the Roundtable:  “America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators,” by Jacob Heilbrunn “Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism,” by Rachel Maddow ..read more

Long before gender theory became a principal target of the right, it existed principally in academic circles. And one of the leading thinkers in the field was the philosopher Judith Butler. In “Gender Trouble” (from 1990) and in other works, Butler popularized ideas about gender as a social construct, a “performance,” a matter of learned behavior. Those ideas proved highly influential for a younger generation, and Butler became the target of traditionalists who abhorred them. A protest at which Butler was burned in effigy, depicted as a witch, inspired their new book, “Who’s Afraid of Gender ..read more