In the 2026 midterm elections, close finishes in crucial swing states have put a spotlight on the divide between the Democratic Party’s moderate and progressive wings. Jon Lovett straddles that divide. He was a longtime speechwriter for Hillary Clinton and then for Barack Obama, but, as a host of the podcasts “Pod Save America” and “Lovett or Leave It,” he’s been critical of the Party’s establishment. Lovett sat down with David Remnick to answer listeners’ questions about the midterms and what they suggest about the 2028 Presidential election. In a “broad trend,” Lovett says, centrist Democrats “put up candidates, and they say, ‘Vote for us, or else.’ And [voters] just keep picking ‘or else.’ . . . Across the board, I don’t know what this establishment of the Democratic Party stands for, and neither does the country.”

Further listening:

• “ ‘Pod Save America’ ’s Jon Lovett on Trump: ‘The Threat of Jail Time Sharpens the Mind,’ ” an episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker.

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Since a famous case against a California utility, the name Erin Brockovich has become synonymous with a fighter taking on big polluters. Earlier this year, Brockovich began receiving e-mails from people worried about the construction of A.I. data centers, which is happening at a frenetic rate all over the country. People expressed concerns about the loss of farmland and natural areas; disruptions to the water table; deleterious noise; and substantial usage of electricity and water, leading to rising utility bills. She speaks with David Remnick about her mapping project to document data-center construction and environmental complaints. “In my thirty years,” she tells Remnick, “I’ve never really seen the people show up like they are at a very local level.”

Further reading:

• “A.I. Is Now a Major Election Issue,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells
• “Inside the Data Centers That Train A.I. and Drain the Electrical Grid,” by Stephen Witt

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The data centers that power artificial intelligence are being built at a rampant pace, and are spurring resistance all over the country. Apart from public concerns about A.I.’s impact on jobs, privacy, and other aspects of life, data centers consume vast amounts of electricity and water. New York has passed a moratorium on new data centers; fourteen other states have considered restrictions. The Vermont senator Bernie Sanders is taking this fight to the national level. He and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have introduced legislation that calls for a nationwide moratorium on data centers to allow time for more research and public input on the issue. The furor, Sanders tells David Remnick, cuts across political divisions. The opponents “are conservatives, they are progressives, they are moderates,” he adds. “They’re saying, What the hell are we doing? What is this gonna contribute to? Is this gonna result in my kid not being able to have a job? Is this gonna result in my not having any privacy? Why am I aiding these large corporations owned by the wealthiest people in the world who [couldn’t] care less about me? Let’s stand up.”

Further reading and listening:

• “When Bernie Sanders Headed for the Hills,” by Jill Lepore
• “Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Fight the Oligarchy,” by Emily Witt
• “Geoffrey Hinton: ‘It’s Far Too Late’ to Stop Artificial Intelligence,” an episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sam Smith burst onto the music scene in 2014 with their début album, “In the Lonely Hour.” It was one of the best-selling albums of the decade and won Smith three Grammys, for Best Pop Vocal Album and both Record and Song of the Year, for the massive hit “Stay With Me.” Smith’s early hits were ballads of heartbreak and unrequited love, so their new album marks something of a change: it’s an album of love songs, requited in this case. Many were written about Smith’s fiancé, the fashion designer Christian Cowan. Smith talked about the writing process that led to their new album “Hazel Eyes,” which comes out August 21st, with New Yorker Radio Hour producer Jeffrey Masters.

Further reading:

• “Sam Smith’s Sugary Loneliness and the Choir Effect,” by Doreen St. Félix
• “Getting the James Bond Song Right,” by Ian Crouch

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

One of the biggest stories of this election cycle is the emergence, for the first time in a long time, of socialism as a force on the national stage. Inspired perhaps by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani, D.S.A. candidates are running in congressional and state-level races all over the country. But some of those candidates, David Remnick thinks, talk more like F.D.R. Democrats than like students of Marx. How socialist is democratic socialism, and how does it square with the future of the Democratic Party? Remnick talks with a co-chair of the D.S.A., Megan Romer, who recently went viral for a lightning round of questions pitched at her on Fox News. Romer defends controversial D.S.A. positions on workers’ ownership of the means of production, U.S. support of Israel, the war in Ukraine, and defunding the police.

Further reading:

• “Will Left-Wing Democrats Reinvent the Party or Hurt Its Chances in November?,” by Isaac Chotiner
• “Which Way Should the Democratic Party Go Now?,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells
• “An Idea for Democrats to Keep It Together in 2028,” by Bill McKibben
• “Can Zohran Mamdani Sway the Commie Corridor’s ‘Civil War’?,” by Naaman Zhou
• “The Woman Who Made the Machine That Made Zohran Mamdani,” by Molly Fischer

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

An incumbent mayor of Los Angeles normally faces smooth sailing for reëlection, but for the Democrat Karen Bass her term has been marked by criticism of her handling of last year’s devastating wildfires and the city’s ongoing homelessness crisis. The city-council member Nithya Raman was a former ally of Bass who now faces her in a November runoff election. Raman is aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America, and she talks with David Remnick about her frustration with Democratic leadership, which she says is lacking “urgency around the issues that I felt mattered most, and, in some ways, a moving away from the direction that I felt L.A. needed to be moving.”

Further listening:

• “Mayor Karen Bass on Marines in Los Angeles,” an episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Michigan’s Senate seat is a must-win for Democrats hoping to take control of the Senate in 2026. The midterms are reflecting a surge of energy behind left-leaning Democratic candidates—sometimes known as the Mamdani effect—challenging their party’s establishment and its tarnished image. Abdul El-Sayed, a former health official, firmly supports Medicare for All and the abolition of ICE. He’s ahead of his moderate Democratic rival, Haley Stevens, in most polls. But that has some Democrats worried that El-Sayed is too radical to win the general election in a state that narrowly voted for Trump in 2024. El-Sayed talks with David Remnick about being “radicalized in medical school,” the trap of expressing righteous anger as an Arab candidate, how Robert F. Kennedy’s anti-science views have taken such a hold on the public, and why AIPAC and other lobbying groups have spent sixty million dollars opposing him in this election.

Further reading and listening:

• “Michigan Is the Next Big Test for the Democratic Party,” by Jason Zengerle
• “Can the Democrats Get It Together?,” by Amy Davidson Sorkin
• “Governor Gretchen Whitmer on COVID-19, Trump, and the Accusations Against Joe Biden,” an episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Though President Donald Trump came back to the White House with broad support for his border policies, his Administration’s immigration crackdown has been broadly unpopular. The staff writer Jonathan Blitzer spoke with two representatives in Congress about the blowback: Jason Crow, of Colorado, and María Salazar, of Florida. Crow is one of the Democratic Party’s recruitment co-chairs for the midterm elections, a role that entails helping candidates figure out what to say about issues that have proved controversial for their party. Salazar, whose district includes much of Miami, is a diehard Trump supporter, but many of her Republican constituents are outraged at how ICE has been operating, and she remains hopeful that the Administration might make a sharp turn. “Mr. President, you’ve got to change the way when it comes to immigration,” she’d like to tell him. “Otherwise, we’re not going to have a Republican Party.”

Further listening:

• “A Member of the ‘Seditious Six’ on Reviving the Democratic Party,” an episode of The Political Scene featuring Jason Crow

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Join host David Remnick as he discusses the latest in politics, news, and current events in conversation with political leaders, newsmakers, innovators, New Yorker staff writers, authors, actors, and musicians.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.