The New Yorker Radio Hour - Trumpcare Revisited

Episode Date: July 14, 2017

An Obamacare veteran keeps fighting the fight—even into the White House. And Jill Lepore explains the century-long battle for universal coverage. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

Hi, it's David Remnick. And just quickly, before the episode, I want to thank all of you who took the time to write about our new format of two shorter podcast episodes a week. Here's Alexis from Woodside, California, who writes, The New Yorker Radio Hour is one of my very favorites, and I think it's great that you get the hour-long-time problem. It's like you read my mind, likely lots of other listeners, too.

Aaron from Brooklyn writes, this is something a little vulgar, I'm not going to read it, and it kind of hurts my feelings anyway, Aaron, and so let's forget it. But thank you because we do want to know how this is working out for you. And I want to remind you,

especially those like David S, who wants to know, who thought of this ridiculous idea, you can always get the full hour show, exactly as you were hearing it before at New YorkerRadio.org. Okay. Now let's get to it.

They're trying to answer questions about upward mobility in America. He was the military strategist. It was profiled brilliantly by somebody... So I think if you could, you know, the subculture of people. With a kind of form of life on this planet that we haven't really seen before.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Since the day it passed, the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, has been the clearest and biggest target of Republicans in Washington. The way Donald Trump was talking, Obamacare was going to be history the Monday after inauguration.

But as we've seen, a repeal or replacement of Obamacare is much, much harder to do than to talk about. An oncologist and health policy expert named Ezekiel Emanuel, everybody calls him Zeke, was one of the architects of the ACA. He helped the Obama administration figure out just how to expand health care without exactly blowing up the national budget. And with the ACA on the chopping block, Emmanuel is trying to influence what the Republicans can come up with. to replace it. In this climate, it's almost impossible to have a cool-headed conversation about health care. But Emmanuel insists we've got to try and he's had closed-door meetings with the Trump administration. I spoke with Zeke Emanuel early last week as the Senate was poised to release a revised health care bill. Now, if I'm not mistaken, you met with President Trump about it. Three times.

So what were those conversations like? Those conversations were quite good. The last time I met with him was the end of March just before the Paul Ryan pulled the bill because he didn't have the votes. And I basically told him it was a terrible bill and would leave many people uninsured. It didn't address cost control. It was undermining of the market. Does he have a grasp of the details? He asked sufficient, appropriate questions.

In the room was not just him. It was Price and Ryan and Pence and Mulvaney. So congressional leaders. Yes. And we had a very thorough discussion, I would say, of the bill. You're being diplomatic. Yes. I mean, it's for the president to reveal the details if he wants to.

I would just say. But why be diplomatic? I am not for this bill. So I'll tell you why I think I want to be diplomatic. I'm not for this bill. I've made it clear to everyone, and I've said it on many media outlets. This bill is cruel, throwing 22 million people off insurance, creating uncertain. so that premiums go up.

This is the original Senate bill you're referring to. Correct. Eliminating the expansion on Medicaid, forcing the states to cover more of Medicaid, thereby denying them, resources to put into other things like education, highways, infrastructure, I think is not a way forward in America. Do you have the view, as many Democrats do, that this bill is all about a setup to create a tax cut down the line for the wealthy? Well, actually, this bill is a tax cut for the wealthy. Forget down the line. You don't need down the line.

You're getting rid of taxes where the rich have to pay and added 2.9% on their Medicare bill and other taxes that they need to pay to support universal coverage. And I think the data are that, you know, someone like Warren Buffett makes, you know, millions of dollars if this bill, if the Republican health care reform goes away and poor people have to pay a lot more. That is totally cruel. That is totally backwards. But when you're in the room with them, when you're in the room with Paul Ryan and other congressional leaders who are for such bills,

they obviously don't see the bill that way or don't reveal themselves to see the bill that way. What is their logic? I can't tell you. You're totally bewitched by it. There isn't the logic that is focused on health care. That's quite clear. It's a logic focused on...

Focus on something besides health care. This bill does not advance health care in this country. That's quite clear. There's no positive step, no positive step in this bill minus two. It keeps young people age 26 on their parents' plan. Who benefits from that? Well, largely upper middle class kids. You know, I was giving a lecture at Yale in a class on health care.

There's about 120, 130 kids in the class. I said, how many of you are still on your parents' health insurance plan? 95% of the hands went up, right? So the parents of kids at Yale are benefiting. right. And then it does lower the ability to get subsidies down to zero percent of the poverty line. Now it's 100 percent of the poverty line. So the people who are caught in the so-called Medicaid gap, that is, a state hasn't expanded Medicaid, but they can't get subsidies to buy insurance and the exchanges. They now can get some subsidies. Those are the two positives in this bill.

And that's it. That's it. Everything else in this bill totally undermined. health care and the health care system that we've built. Is there a medical system, medical slash economic system that exists in the world that you look at, you know, piningly, if only that were ours? I'm going to talk out of two sides of my mouth now. Okay. So, first of all, I don't like that question. The political scientists have this notion of path dependence. Once you go down one path, you've got all these institutional structures, legal structure, administrative things.

We can't go out and say, oh, you know, Sweden, it's the best. We're just going to take it and plop it down in the United States. On the other hand, I am in the, my next book is an international comparison of 12 different health care systems. So to see what we can learn from all of them. And interestingly, this book is not about how we pay for health care so much. I mean, it does have an element that paying is important. But this book is about how do we at the call face, how doctors interact with patients,

how hospitals interact with patients, how nurses, and how can we change? that because ultimately our poor performance in the healthcare space, you know, we don't do so well on infant mortality. We don't do so well on maternal mortality. We don't do so well on a lot of metrics. How do we change that? And that's something to do with the payment, but much, much more to do with how doctors are actually structuring the delivery of care in the office and in the hospital and things like

that. Your book starts off with an extended, not an anecdote, but story about an elderly woman named Miss Harris. Tell me a little bit about her. So Ms. Harris, when I saw her, was 95 years old. Now, she has very high and labile blood pressure goes up and down. As a result, she had some kidney problems. She also has heart failure. She was at her sister's house. It was a hot summer day, and she keeled over. Her sister, you know, calls 911. They take her to a nearby hospital, Doc in the emergency room determined she doesn't have a stroke, doesn't have a heart attack, but she has this rhythm thing called Six Sinus Syndrome, sends her to an affiliated hospital a little further down with a cardiac unit,

and they put in a cardioverter that is an implantable shock device and a pacemaker, all of one device, into her heart. When you ask her about it, it's very unclear that she actually consented to this. Is the system failing her? in some way? She's getting a lot of care that it's not clear she consents to. One of the things that the pale of care nurse did almost immediately is ask her, well, would you want to go on dialysis if your kidneys fail? No. Would you want to go into the intensive care unit if something disasters happen? No. As she says very prominently, you know, I'm ready for God to take me. And by the way, going to the doctor is a big effort for her. The only time she leaves a house is to go to her kidney doctor,

order one of her two cardiologists. And it was quite clear she was dreading the need to ask a neighbor, to drive her to the doctor. This was not what she wanted. Yeah, I got to tell you, I remember John Stewart once saying, he said, you know, he's talking to somebody who is very stoic about their health care and whatever. He said, look, I'm Jewish. I get gas and I go to a specialist. And yet you, Zeeke, wrote an amazing article in the Atlanta. some time ago, saying that when you hit 75 and you're 59 now,

correct. Any medication that you might be on, you're going to stop, whether it's a thing like a statin or something minor or even something serious. That's it. Why? And what are you telling us? So what I said is that any medication where the justification for taking that medicine is to prolong my life.

Now, not every medicine is like that. Some medicines are to relieve pain. Some medicines are to relieve some other deprivation. My hearing's not perfect anymore. I survive three kids. How else could it, you know, you survive three kids unless your hearing's not perfect. So if I need a hearing aid, I would do a hearing aid or if I needed some pain relief, I'd do pain relief. But I'm not trying to prolong my life after 75.

And partly, I think lives have an arc. But they've gotten longer. Not necessarily better. You know, if you look at the curve, low levels of dementia until about, turns out 75, and then it shoots up. And at 85, it's, you know, between 33 and 50 percent of population has dementia. If you talk to the experts in Japan, everyone at 100, definitely demented. I think there are three components to a meaningful life. I'm not looking for happiness.

I'm looking for meaningfulness and fulfillment. meaningful work, meaningful relationships, and fun. It's quite clear if you look at the data for almost all of us, meaningful work will go down by 75. Very few people after 75 are productive in their work. Okay, so then you're left with fun and meaningful relationships. Interestingly, both require pretty good cognitive function. And if you don't have that, then, you know, and I don't want to risk. you know, being deteriorated and being a big burden on my kids, I think that would be the

worst situation. My just hanging on and being a burden on my kids just to have more years. That does not seem valuable to me. And a life where the dominant thing is only fun or play or, you know, doing crossword puzzles, watching TV, reading a few books, seeing the grandkids once every month or something, that's not a meaningful life. I don't want that life. I don't think anyone should find that life fulfilling.

I guarantee you. I guarantee you, Zeke, when your article came out or people listening now, you can almost hear the voices saying, now, wait a minute. It's meaningful to me. I'm 82. I'm seeing my grandchildren on Tuesday. It's meaningful to me. You think that's diluted. I would challenge them if that really is meaningful or if what they have done is narrowed down.

what constitutes meaningfulness for them to accommodate their limitations, physical, cognitive, and whatever. And that's, I think, part of the big issue. I think it changes your idea if you know that, you know, at 75, it's really going to be, I don't know that it's going to be over, I'm going to die, but it's going to be very different. My certainly ability to work and be productive that way is going to go down. And so I think you change how you approach now and the living. Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel. His new book is Prescription for the Future. By the way, we checked back with

Emmanuel after the Senate released its most recent bill, and he said the revisions, as far as he's seen, don't really change his opinion at all. We're going to stay on this topic and in a minute, the long, strange history of universal health coverage, a battle that's been fought now for fully 100 years. It's the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. You're listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. My colleague, Jill Lippur, is not only a great journalist here at The New Yorker, but he's a professor of history at Harvard and a terrific one, and we depend on her to actually know things.

Jill, while Congress and the political class are slugging it out on a medical bill, it's worth going back to the history of this. Universal access to health care in the United States was first seriously considered in the 1910s, right? where early health care activists were drawing inspiration from where? Well, from their own experience in the U.S., the United States had all kinds of provisions for federal assistance after the Civil War. It spent a quarter of the federal budget on aid between 1880 and 1910, but especially from Europe, where sickness insurance had started in Germany in the 1880s,

and in 2011, Parliament passed a National Insurance Act. And there was a lot of optimism in the United States during the height of the progressive era before the First World War, that nationalized health insurance was pretty much on the docket in the 19-teens. It was on the docket, and where did it go? What was its fate? It went down into the trashman of history, to be long forgotten. So it really was by about in 1916 that the measure had gained a lot of momentum. It had been introduced in a lot of states, especially in California.

There was discussion in Congress. And there were a few different obstacles. The chief one that didn't affect the U.K. and the reason for the delay, so the U.K. had adopted the reform in 1911. In 1912, the United States began to consider it, but the U.K. doesn't have a written constitution. And our written constitution was a real impediment for progressive reformers for all kinds of reform that was attempting to regulate the suffering of ordinary people under mass industrialism, that the Constitution hadn't foreseen that. And it was very difficult to imagine how to defeat constitutional arguments, people who are opposed. to sickness insurance could call it unconstitutional. And so there was a question of whether or not there was going to be a need for a constitutional amendment. It involved all kinds of delays. So it really wasn't until 1916 that there was enough momentum to get kind of over that constitutional hurdle. And then months after that, the United States entered the war with Germany.

And the people who were arguing against insurance were able to successfully defeat it by pointing out that it was born in Germany. Well, this is it. There were claims that universal health care would cause the Prussian is. of America or that somehow insurance for all would give the Kaiser a foothold in California? What did all that mean? Well, it is very effective political rhetoric is what it mainly meant. And you can see how effective it was because people keep going back to it again and again. And if you look at the whole century between then and now of this struggle, it's not,

sometimes people say, oh, we're rushing into health care, rushing into anything. We're doing this for a century. But the arguments against it always are xenophobic. First, it's the Germans. then by the time we get to the Germans. What does that mean? It's the Germans have to do with us. Don't, I have to say this issue confounds me no end. Why, what is wrong with universal health care? Why is it somehow un-American? It grants too much power over the individual to the state.

So it's statism. It's collectivism. And what form of collectivism it is changes over time, right? Because it's a specious argument. So either it's socialism, sometimes it's communism. By the time Obama was elected and it was just sort of vaguely European. And now it's actually liberalism. But remember that this debate started in the United States during the kind of heyday of social Darwinism.

So a lot of the people who opposed national health insurance were social Darwinists, who just sort of felt like, hey, if you can't make it, that's, this is survival of the fittest. Is there an element of social Darwinism now? I think there is. I mean, there's a kind of laissez-faire kind of reborn free marketism that is fundamentally social socially Darwinist. And the trick there is how insufficient have been the arguments made by the advocates of national health insurance because they're so easily capped. by these critiques of collectivism, as if republicanism isn't a form of collectivism, as if we are not tied as a nation by bonds of affection and community and solidarity and and sacrifice and institutions that bind us to one another, right?

Like that's how people could be so easily silenced. I mean, you can understand at particular moments like World War I, okay, we're fighting a war with Germany, it's going to be really hard to get this through. You can kind of understand the heyday of the Cold War. If they're going to call it Stalinist, it's going to be tough for us. Well, let's pause on that. In 1945, the Second World War ends. The governor of California is Earl Warren, who would eventually, obviously, go to the Supreme Court.

And Harry Truman and Warren both try to institute universal health care insurance. Was there something about that political moment that made both men think they could win? There were two things about that political moment. There was the prosperity of the moment and the whole. hopefulness of the moment. There was the GI Bill and the support that that had received, and GI Bill is nothing, if not federal legislation that is essentially welfare for veterans. The idea that we have come out of the war with a sense of common cause, having defeated forms of collectivism and statism, and cherished what makes the United States distinctive, the success of the

New Deal reforms. Truman wanted to continue. the new deal with his fair deal? Now, personally, I've always understood that the Constitution of the United States imposes upon the government of the United States a responsibility with respect to the general welfare of its citizens. And certainly, no one can pretend that good health is not a matter of first importance so far as the general welfare is concerned. That is why, ever since I've been President, I have recommended programs which I believe will provide better medical health and services for all our people.

So as I understand it, Warren and Truman run into the most unlikely kind of opposition. They were sunk by a pair of consultants, namely on Baxter and Clem Whitaker, who ran an organization called Campaigns Inc. Who were Whitaker and Baxter and what was their approach to politics? They were both former newspaper people who had gone into the advertising industry at the outset. In the 1930s, they eventually marry. They're this incredible team. They're both pistols.

They run a newspaper feature service, and they become incredibly successful running political campaigns as a kind of offshoot of their advertising agency. They run to the right, and they are hired by the American Medical Association. when Truman announces his national health insurance plan because their work in California defeating Warren's California health insurance plan was so phenomenally successful. You know, Jill, the California State Archives gave us a transcript of a 1950 radio spot produced by Whitaker and Baxter, and we've tried to recreate it.

This is what we imagine it sounded like. The American people are registering their firm and outspoken opposition to socialized medicine. Public opinion is rapidly crystallizing on the crucial. crest of a wave of resolutions opposing any form of compulsory tax-supported sickness insurance. Today, more than 5,000 national, state, and local organizations are on record and have advised their senators and congressmen in Washington that they want no part of any paternalistic, bureaucratically controlled system of political medicine. They have emphatically stated that their members are against compulsion or regimentation

in any field. The millions of citizens represented by these groups are a mobilization of free-thinking people who believe in the preservation of individual initiative and the American way of life. Today's private system of medicine has produced the highest health standards in the world. That system must be preserved.

What do you make of that, Joe? Well, remember this moment, right? It really is the height of the fear of a worldwide communist conspiracy. So, 1949, China becomes communist, Soviet Union gets the bomb, 1950, Alger Hiss, the Whitaker, Chambers, hearings. People are convinced that the United States, the American way of life, is under threat,

that the Soviets are just about to take over, that the secret subversion of the American way of life at the hands of people in the State Department and in the federal government is part of a worldwide conspiracy. So Whitaker and Baxter very effectively play on those fears. And a measure of just how successful they are and also of how much people wanted this reform, the first thing they did when they were hired to work on the national campaign was go to Washington, and they talked to a lot of members of Congress, and they asked if they could look at constituent mail. And they read a whole lot of mail, and they found that Americans wanted favored Truman's proposal four to one when they started.

They had a huge $3 million budget from the AMA. And nine months later, they looked at the mail again, and Americans were opposed to Truman's plan, 4 to 1. And that was pretty much just the money that they spent making their argument, which was the Truman's plan. It was sort of like a domino theory, right? That this was the first step in the descent into socialism. So why did the AMA, the American Medical Association,

which was for universal insurance during the progressive era, go to being opposed to universal insurance. What happened to the AMA? Medical expenses rose. And this is actually the great tragedy of the long delay of the United States federal government and actually finally facing this issue. With each passing year, the cost of medicine rises.

And it's much more difficult to institute the reform, both because it's just more money at stake and it's hard to figure out where the money's going to come from, but also because doctors are making more money. And in the 1940s and 1950s, the AMA is hugely opposed because it's going to, doctors are making a lot of money. And they would like to not have their pay limited by the federal government, by reimbursement, that's rates that are going to be set by the federal government. Now, eventually, President Johnson was able to expand health care coverage in the United States in 1965,

creating programs that are still very much with us, Medicaid and Medicare. I'm so proud that this has come to pass in the Johnson administration. But it was really Harry Truman of Missouri, who planted the seeds of compassion and duty, which have today flowered into care for the sick and serenity for the fearful. Jill, how was Johnson able to pull this off? L.V.J. flew in deer meat from Texas to feed to members of Congress at breakfast that he held every week to get them to pony up to his legislative agenda. And he would meet with them every week with a kind of poster board on an easel and give them just an incredible Texas breakfast with big slabs of bacon and eggs and toast.

And he would make this chart and he would tell them exactly what they needed to do that week to get through the Great Society. And he had this, you know, he had this urgency about it. He knew that he had a limited amount of time. He had swept into office. He had the sympathy of people because of Kennedy's assassination. and he got through these programs that he couldn't actually really run, but that he instituted with incredible effectiveness right down to flying out to Missouri to sign the Medicare Act in the Truman Presidential Library in front of Truman, who got nearly wept.

I mean, the beauty of that for Truman 20 years later to see that this reform that FDR had tried to get through, that Wilson had tried to get through, that. had been this long, simmering, lingering piece of American suffering was going to be addressed. Elvjay knew what he was doing, is the thing. In this town and a thousand other towns like it, there are men and women in pain who will now find ease. There are those alone in suffering who will now hear the sound of some approaching footsteps coming to help. There are those fearing the terrible darkness of despairing poverty, despite their long years of labor and expectation, who will now look up to see the light of hope and realization.

Well, we're looking at a situation in which people seem to not know what they're doing, especially politically. What do you make of the current effort to repeal Obamacare and maybe replace it with the American Health Care Act? Is it unusual for Congress to pass a bill which takes benefits away from people? Has that ever happened? I think you might think about Clinton's welfare to work plan. I think very much that was pitched as a rearrangement of a set of benefits. The scale of this, no, this is its own particular crisis. I mean, what's I think kind of terrifying about this current moment is that the enemy is now no longer foreign.

The enemy is within the United States. Well, I guess it leaves us with the question, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the fate of universal health care? Has the argument, to any degree, whether it's during the Clinton time or now during Obamacare, has the argument for universal health care, coverage made any significant advance so that one day we might see universal health care coverage? I think that Republicans in Congress are obviously floundering. They don't know what they're doing. They have a hard time talking about anything. But rhetorically, the Democrats in Congress are the ones who would need to step up for us to achieve universal health care. And they would need to

reclaim an argument about the common good. They would need to be able to speak with the kind of universalism of liberalism that animated Johnson and Johnson's more soaring speeches on this subject. And until they do, they cannot defeat even a weakened argument against health care. Jill, thank you very much. Thanks, David. My colleague Jill Lepore, you can find her piece on the history of universal health coverage and everything else she's written for the New Yorker at new yorkeradio.org.

How are you? Great. You look younger. I wouldn't have figured out. I'm getting a little bit more all the time. The Israeli writer Edgar Carrot was in town recently, and I wouldn't miss a chance to catch up with him. In the New York, we've published some of his terrific short stories,

but his most recent book in English, The Seven Good Years, is more of a memoir. Edgar talks about life and death, fatherhood, terrorism, politics, angry birds, prenatal yoga. It's as funny and as dark and simple. somehow as sweet as his stories. As a writer of fiction in Israel, I'd love to know, and I bet you other people would want to know, what's going on in the world of Israeli fiction?

We usually hear, to be honest, the same four or five names for a long period of time. You're considered a young, young writer, and you're how old? I'll be 50 this year. Yeah, so what's happening in the fictional realm in Israel that we don't know about, and we should, and might soon? I think that the biggest new name is Ayed Gunder, who had written a novel that was very well accepted in Israel. And I think that it just came out or about to come out in the state. What's it called?

I don't remember the title. I remember the story. I think it's about a doctor who by mistake hit and kills an illegal African worker. and basically runs away, and the wife of this, or the widow of this man, it kind of extorts him to open some kind of a hospital, an illegal hospital in which he'll take care of illegal foreign workers, and it's about how basically this kind of encounter changes his perception and challenges his worldview, you know.

You've got a book coming? Well, I'm supposed to finish it by the end of the year. And do you have time to read or watch, see movies, or do anything on your own lately? You've been writing a lot. Well, actually, when I came here to New York, I came with my son. So I've seen the kind of stuff that would interest him, too. How old is he? Eleven.

What's his name? Lev. And what interest in? So his English isn't that great. So we went to a musical. We saw Groundhog Day. How was it? Very good.

Yeah? Very good. It's actually the second... Has you seen the movie? I've seen the movie and really liked it. The musical is kind of different in a good way because the idea of making a musical based on a film sounds like a bad idea.

It's always sounds like a bad idea. A very capitalistic one, you know. But it actually is different and makes sense. And it's the second musical I see in my life. You're kidding. The first one was a... Starlight Express. Oh my God. And I didn't like it.

Wasn't that on roller skates or something? On roller skates, I was 10 years old. Oh, my God. I really didn't like it. And I said to my parents, please don't ever take me to the musical again. And this was my second one. And it's kind of, I've seen the light.

I've danced, tap danced all the way back home, you know. And no roller skates? No roller skates. I should tell you, just as a matter of information, the majority of musicals do not have roller skates. the majority. No, it wasn't a moralic sketch that killed me. I think that there is something about it, about musicals,

that usually, like, people there are amazing. You know, they know how to sing. They know how to dance. And so usually, like, they're so busy showing you, they're amazing that you don't get any time to do anything else. It's like those people in American idols that, you know, that have amazing voice and they can sing very well, but they're so busy singing very well

that they don't really think what they're thinking about, you know? So this was my impression of musicals, like, you know, You see it's like kind of a circus, you know. But this one was really nice. Like they, you know, they acted well. And it was even philosophical in a sense because the premise is very philosophical. It's the nature of time. Yeah.

And the idea of this kind of eternal repetition, you know, it's very niche. Nature. Yeah, in nature, really, because this idea of like, if you revisit something, what would you think about it, you know? And the thing about me, I'm the kind of person who usually, when. I live so much in the present, you know, that I usually don't kind of take into account anything that I've done. So when I see this, I suddenly say, wow, like, you know, if I would have gone through that, maybe I too would have became a better person and knew better how to sing and dance. And your son enjoyed it? He enjoyed it a lot.

You know, when we said there. Even though his English is not so great. Even, yeah, I think the story or the premise is very simple. And before he said, he said, Father, I just want to say to you straight, I prefer films. And I said to him, you know what, like as a rule of thumb,

I also prefer films because when it's not good, it's really embarrassing because the people are there in front of you. But when it's good, it's better than films. And when the show was over, you said, you know, Dad, you were right, this was better than a film. Some, it's like I'm stumbling forward,

hustled forward, Jostled from behind by time And some, it's like I'm being dragged Yet always lacking, Trying to keep in time with time. That's Edgar Carrot. The novel he mentioned by Ayelet Grunder Goshen is called Waking Lions.

And it was published in English this year. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and that's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks so much for listening. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios, and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tuneiards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron,

Emily Boatine, Ave Carrillo, Brianna and Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sarah Nix, Michael Rayfield, Mithelie Rao, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Susan Morrison, Emma Allen, and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.