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For as long as we’ve had homes, we’ve had neighbors—which is to say, we’ve had neighbor problems. Hammurabi’s Code, written in circa 1750 B.C., best known for its helpful guidelines regarding taking out eyes and cutting off hands, also includes some rules for how to deal with agriculture-related neighbor disputes, conjuring images of ancient Babylonians accidentally flooding one another’s fields and bickering over crop losses. As the years go on, the fights get pettier, and the laws become more precise: a digest of Roman law, compiled around 533 A.D., contains a remarkably specific provision about what to do if fruit from your neighbor’s tree falls onto your property. (Your neighbor has three days to retrieve the fruit, and, no, you may not use force to prevent him from gathering it.)

This kind of conflict—heightened, in modern times, by the advent of the doorbell camera and the erosion of the social contract—is the stuff of “Neighbors,” a new documentary series on HBO created by Dylan Redford (grandson of Robert) and Harrison Fishman (ancestry unknown). The show focusses on disputes between homeowners that, in many cases, have evolved into debilitating, years-long feuds. In Kokomo, Indiana, a man named Darrell rages at his neighbor Trever, who has started a makeshift farm, livestock and all, in his grandmother’s yard. Out on the Florida Panhandle, oceanfront-property owners squabble with the public over beach access. In West Palm Beach, Melissa and Victoria battle over a comically small patch of grass that each claims is on their property. The women used to be friends; now, they are rivals, united only by their joint willingness to be filmed for HBO.

Getting people to participate was perhaps an easier task than one might expect. As Redford explained to the Times, “Consistently, all of their friends and family are like: ‘Shut up about your neighbor. We don’t care anymore. You need to let this go.’ ” Then, Redford and Fishman came along.

Much like “How To with John Wilson,” another docuseries on HBO, “Neighbors” has a deep, methodical interest in the mundane, recognizing that such a focus is often the best way to stumble into genuinely revealing portraits of people. But “How To” is a quiet, somewhat hopeful ode to the surrealism of the everyday, whereas “Neighbors” is consciously more of a freak show à la “Hoarders.” As the characters take a break from bitching about their neighbors to explain their various conspiracies—“My entire planet is run by a satanic cult,” a man says in the first episode, his face filmed through a fish-eye lens—one desperately hopes, as an American, that there are no Europeans watching.

Sometimes, in a “Jerry Springer Show”-like twist, a character’s true nature doesn’t emerge until later on, forcing the viewer to swap allegiances. The third episode involves a story line in Palm Bay, Florida: Johnny, a former male dancer, has been feuding with Andy, a grizzled Vietnam vet, over lawn maintenance. (It seems that there’s potential for an entire spinoff series about Florida, or perhaps about grass.) Eventually, it becomes clear that Johnny is fully paranoid, having convinced himself that he is in a “Truman Show” situation where his neighbors are watching his every move. “I haven’t seen any of my family since 2012,” Johnny says, insisting that he’s unable to leave his house during the day. He adds that he has a step-aunt who lives in the neighborhood. “I don’t even know if she’s still alive.” We also discover that Johnny is obsessed with Ellen DeGeneres; he has attended several of her live tapings, deliberately placing himself next to a child in the audience under the assumption that it would increase his chances of getting photographed. (The gambit worked.) As the series continues—there are six episodes, four of which have already aired—it becomes more structurally ambitious, introducing conflicts within conflicts. I howled when a woman, in the middle of a rant about her next-door neighbor, got interrupted by a sound coming from her hallway: “There are two other individuals in my house that are what I call squatters,” she explains.

The most shocking aspect of “Neighbors” is probably how quickly the discord escalates to threats of violence. Not since “The Act of Killing” have I seen documentary subjects so eager to advertise their bloodthirst on camera. Andy, the Vietnam vet, threatens to throw acid in Johnny’s face. (“You’re going to be walking around like the Elephant Man.”) Johnny somehow manages to one-up him, suggesting that, if the show were to get him into trouble, he might kill the children of the documentary crew. Numerous characters show off their firearms; “I hope it’s unloaded,” one woman says, before pulling a gun out of her closet. Fishman told the Times, “In the beginning, we were like, ‘Hey, do you have a gun?’ They’re like, ‘Yeah, I do.’ As the season went on, we’re like, Everyone has a gun.”

Yet despite all the characters brandishing weapons, the only person in the entire series who seems capable of getting away with murder is Jeff Wentworth, a former Texas state senator who objects to an imposing wall that his neighbor Alexa has constructed around her property, in San Antonio. Jeff defeats Alexa and her wall, which he likens to “the compound where Osama bin Laden hid out,” without his pulse rising above sixty b.p.m.; he determines that Alexa ignored a city ordinance limiting walls to three feet, and he whittles her down with stop-work orders, before getting a final decision from the city that the wall must come down. One gets the sense that, for Alexa, the decision may be the defining trauma of her life; for Jeff, it’s just another item that he can check off his to-do list. By episode’s end, the wall is gone, and Alexa has put her house on the market.

Many of the characters seek the help of some kind of outside authority to adjudicate their neighbor disputes. We watch them make their cases to police officers, county commissioners, and zoning boards. Occasionally, they end up in court, with one demanding a restraining order against the other; one pair end up in front of Judge Judy. The most hilarious attempts at resolution involve the use of a mediator. In the first episode, the peacemaking mission between Josh and Seth, in rural Montana, completely falls apart, and the mediator—who explains that this is his first official mediation—mostly just stands there as the neighbors trade insults and issue threats. In the third episode, Melissa and Victoria meet with Stanley Zamor—a man we saw, earlier in the episode, selling Melissa a gun. “Besides doing this as a hobby,” he says, standing in front of a cabinet of Glocks, “I also am a Florida Supreme Court-certified mediator and qualified arbitrator.”

One watches “Neighbors” and can’t help but wonder, How did they find these people? I had a similar question while watching “How To with John Wilson,” and therefore wasn’t surprised to learn that the two shows share a casting executive, Harleigh Shaw. (“Neighbors,” which has the distinction of being the first unscripted series from A24, also counts Josh Safdie, and others from the “Marty Supreme” creative team, among its executive producers, which might have something to do with the series’ dynamic casting, as well as the generally chaotic, brash, and fast-paced nature of each episode.)

About ten minutes into the first episode, it becomes clear how one of the characters likely got on the production team’s radar. Josh, one of the angry neighbors in Montana, reveals that he’s famous on TikTok, where he’s known as the Bearded Bard. On his account, which has more than two million followers, he advertises for his woodworking and blacksmithing business, and sometimes role-plays as Dungeons & Dragons characters. He also complains about his neighbors. “The neighbor-drama videos were reaching into the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of views,” he explains.

Many of the characters in the show are active on platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, where they have accounts almost entirely devoted to their neighbor drama. (One character switches between posting neighbor videos and sultry bikini footage, and it’s unclear which one the woman next door is more upset by.) The series offers the best depiction of social media—and the experience of being on it—that I’ve seen on television. Of all the arguments captured in “Neighbors,” the most compelling is the one made by the show itself, about the way in which social media forces users—creators, if you will—to commit to a certain line of action. “People like those videos because they like drama,” the Bearded Bard says, about his neighbor-focussed TikToks. “And, I’ll be real, I probably fed into that a little.” The characters in the show are constantly surveilling one another, if not for fame, then for their own protection, or under the guise of accumulating evidence—but they seem completely oblivious to the way in which recording a conflict can radically escalate it.

The starkest—and saddest—example is in the fourth episode. Steven, who lives in Nashville, used to be best friends with his neighbor Joanne, who took him in, almost like a son, after his divorce. Steven is white and Joanne is Black; he explains that she once asked him, jokingly, if she could “borrow that white-privilege card you’ve got.” As a gag, Steven purchased a fake white-privilege card on Amazon for $7.99 and gifted it to Joanne—who was gravely offended by the gesture. It seems like there might be more to the story; Steven also claims that Joanne and her husband once gave him permission to say the N-word, and badgered him until he finally complied, which is partly why he’s confused when Joanne ultimately decides that he’s a virulent racist, and builds a fence to create some separation between their two yards. The problem is that the fence is built in the wrong place; it encroaches on Steven’s property by three feet. When Joanne initially refuses to take it down, he creates a Discord channel called “My Neighbor Karen,” and begins posting videos of Joanne online, raking in millions of views on YouTube.

Looking at the comments, there’s no mystery why Joanne might think that her neighbor is racist. She begins experiencing heart troubles, and she blames Steven for causing her stress. You can tell that he doesn’t want her to die because of their feud, but he’s reluctant to remove the videos, which he’s been earning revenue from. He uses A.I. to craft a note to Joanne, prodding it to embellish on the emotion “just a little bit,” after reading the first draft. Later, the two meet at a bar, and he tells Joanne that he’ll take the videos down—if she’s willing to compensate him. She tells him to kiss her ass. ♦

Realism, even loosely defined as movies of people doing observable and possible things, is never simple or uniform. One of its richest and most original forms is on view in “Yam Daabo,” from 1987, the first feature by Idrissa Ouédraogo, which has recently come to the Criterion Channel. (It’s also streaming on other platforms and available as a Criterion DVD.) Set mainly in rural Burkina Faso, the director’s homeland, the movie was made in the amateur format of 16-mm. film, with a low budget, a small crew, and a largely nonprofessional cast, including several of the filmmaker’s family members, as befits its family-centered drama: a young woman named Bintou (Aoua Guiraud) and a young man named Issa (Moussa Bologo) want to marry, but another man, Tiga (Rasmané Ouédraogo), aggressively pursues Bintou and threatens Issa’s life. Although the central story is intimate in scale, the film’s scope is large and its social purview deep, and this vast amplitude is a function of Ouédraogo’s way of staging action, or, rather, of envisioning it. Using modest means and methods, “Yam Daabo” (whose title means “The Choice” in the Mooré language) proves to be more than just engaging—it’s exemplary.

The romantic tale, of one kind of choice, is nested in a dramatic frame, of another choice, that’s at once local and international. The movie opens with labor in a drought-stricken village: men feed a flame with bellows, hammering metal into a blade, while other residents wait nearby, baskets in hand. An engine’s growl pierces the calm: a truck approaches, kicking up dust on a long and winding dirt road, and the villagers all rush toward it—all but one man. The truck bears sacks of grain, marked as gifts from the United States, and the villagers press the bearers for their portion. The one who holds back is Bintou’s father, Salam (Ousmane Sawadogo), who makes a choice: rather than depend on outside help, he wants to be self-reliant, and he decides to leave the village in search of more fertile land. He and his family—his wife (Fatimata Ouédraogo), Bintou, and a young son (Madi Sana)—load up a donkey cart and guide it into a parched, sandy plain studded with wizened trees. As they pause during their journey, Issa shows up, having followed them from the village. Reaffirming his love for Bintou, he teams up with the family and helps them traverse the harsh and stony ground. The journey is hampered by lack of money and other misfortunes, and it’s eventually interrupted by a gunshot, announcing the cantankerous presence of Tiga. Issa bitterly but regretfully prepares for the inevitable showdown.

From the start, Ouédraogo emphasizes the arduous struggle of daily subsistence—the preparation of food, the fetching of water in fragile vessels, the tilling of fields. The family sells possessions for cash, purchases supplies to continue onward, hires a driver but can’t afford to be driven the full distance. Still, these many practicalities fuse with the film’s emotional stories of indignant independence and romantic conflict thanks to a sense of analytical observation that is inherently social. For Ouédraogo, personal relationships are inseparable from material demands, and friendly visits involve participation in chores. What’s striking about his vision is that it’s literally visual—and that’s where his ramped-up and reconceived sense of realism displays its startling and thrilling originality.

Though the movie is shot entirely outdoors and largely features people on the move, mostly in the countryside but also in several turbulent city sequences, Ouédraogo (working with three cinematographers) composes images with poise and concentration. Most of the shots, whether with fixed frames or fluid motions, suggest a camera set on a tripod. Although the drama has a quasi-documentary authenticity, the taut images convey a sense of thought along with action, as if the observed events were being discerningly excerpted not only for what they show but for what they imply. The peculiarity of Ouédraogo’s seemingly straightforward and classical practice is to evoke distances, conjuring wide spaces between the images—which is to say, between the characters depicted in them—and to bring those spaces to life. Avoiding documentary-like methods that presume to grasp events in large visual gulps, Ouédraogo offers visual fragments (however ample) that conjure a spectrum of experience that goes beyond what’s onscreen. Those unseen spaces have a kind of electrical charge, the power of bonds and conflicts, of underlying tensions and demands. His technique evokes a social sphere that’s filled with norms and rules, traditions and laws.

It’s a strange trope of modern cinema to film staged fictions with a camera that roves and prowls and reacts impulsively as if it were that of a documentary filmmaker plunged into unplanned and unpredictable situations. In its inspired and original forms, as in Shirley Clarke’s “The Cool World” and many of the Dardenne brothers’ dramas (“Rosetta” being a prime example), the sense of spontaneity and immediacy yields emotional intensity and symbolic resonance. But, like any method, this one risks becoming a mere habit, ossifying into a new convention both visual and thematic. (Visually speaking, I vote for a moratorium on using the Steadicam to follow characters, showing the backs of their heads as they walk.) And, thematically, the overuse of a documentary style for stories about poverty and social conflict makes it seem as if only privileged characters deserve the dignified artifices of an avowedly fictional style. Ouédraogo yielded to neither temptation—and, at the same time, he avoided the familiar tropes of unquestioned classical realism, with its posed groupings, its patterned editing from wider scene-setting to expressive closeups.

One of the marks of “Yam Daabo” is the reliance on point of view, on the shift from objective to subjective standpoints—exactly the sort of conspicuous composition that draws a line between documentary and fiction, as filmmakers, in lieu of observing characters, take their place. The movie’s story covers a long span; it involves death and crime and punishment; it enfolds another romance, between Bintou’s friend (Assita Ouédraogo) and another, long-absent man (Omar Ouédraogo); it involves an unplanned pregnancy and the resulting familial crisis; but it betrays no sense of haste or sketched-out action. In observing the characters as much, in effect, from within as from without—and in intertwining their individual perspectives with the lines of force that surround them—Ouédraogo builds the movie in two directions at once, internal and external, deeply personal yet broad in range. The result is that the dimensions of time are implicitly filled in, as naturally and as richly as the spaces where the action takes place.

Ouédraogo, who died in 2018, at the age of sixty-four, had a plentiful directorial career in both film and television, but one that, after an auspicious start, has been hard to track from the U.S. The films immediately following, which premièred between 1989 and 1992, brought him greater prominence: “Yaaba” (“Grandmother”) is a finely written drama of superstition, adultery, and young love; “Tilaï” (The Law), a grand and tragic historical legend about family honor, won the Grand Prix at Cannes, in 1990; “Samba Traoré,” which won a Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival, is a modern moral tale of crime, guilt, and the lure of ill-gotten gains. But since then, as far as I’ve been able to find, none of his subsequent features, through to his final one, “Kato Kato,” from 2006, has had a U.S. release, and few have even made it to film festivals here. (Ouédraogo does, however, make a crucial appearance as an interview subject in Jean-Marie Téno’s documentary “Sacred Places,” from 2009, about movie theatres and the state of filmmaking in Burkina Faso.)

My recent first viewing of “Yam Daabo” proved illuminating not only in terms of appreciating Ouédraogo’s aesthetic but also in terms of highlighting what’s been lacking in some less satisfying movies. Oddly, the one it resonated off most forcefully was Emerald Fennell’s new “Wuthering Heights,” whose image-making I found to be both showy and inadequate to the story’s passions and premises. Alongside “Yam Daabo,” its shots seem like closed-off frames that dispense information and prefabricated moods—that reek of sufficiency and self-sufficiency. By contrast, the images in “Yam Daabo,” though of course conveying information and evoking emotions, do so with a built-in drive toward connectedness. One image needs another, awaits another, builds on another, and the effect isn’t just the telling of a story but the implication of a world. ♦

Late last March, after being held incommunicado for nearly two weeks in a mega-prison in El Salvador, a group of Venezuelans learned that Kristi Noem, the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, had arrived to tour the facility. “We were happy when she got here,” a twenty-nine-year-old refugee named Roger Molina Acevedo told me. He thought that she might be interested to know that prison guards were torturing the detainees; perhaps the information Noem collected would prompt the U.S. government, which had sent him and two hundred and fifty-one other men to the prison without due process, to reverse course. Inside the prison, Noem wore a navy baseball hat, a tight white long-sleeved shirt, and a fifty-thousand-dollar Rolex watch. Just before she reached Molina Acevedo’s cell, she turned around and left. “She didn’t speak to anyone,” he said. Instead, Noem addressed the cameras. “I want to thank El Salvador and their President for their partnership with the United States of America to bring our terrorists here,” she said. “I also want everybody to know, if you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face.”

Noem, who was known by critics as “ICE Barbie”—accessorized for any law-enforcement scenario—spent most of her time in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet performing for the cameras. She dressed up in Coast Guard fatigues and in the green uniform of Border Patrol; she posed in flak jackets, and demanded that ICE agents record their arrests for social-media videos. In one case, as part of a two-hundred-and-twenty-million-dollar ad campaign, she recorded a message on horseback in front of Mount Rushmore, wearing a cowboy hat and tasselled chaps. “You cross the border illegally, we’ll find you,” she said. “Break our laws, we’ll punish you.” The ad was shot on the second day of a government shutdown. White House staffers told the Wall Street Journal that Trump was annoyed. He demanded to know where she got the money for the junket. It turned out, according to ProPublica, that the political-consulting firm that landed the contract for the shoot had extensive ties to Noem and members of her staff.

On Thursday, Trump removed Noem from her post, saying on Truth Social that her next role in the Administration would be as special envoy to the Shield of the Americas, a new initiative with no governing power. There are two ways to summarize Noem’s disastrous tenure at the Department of Homeland Security: one as a tragicomic story of vanity, vacuousness, and self-obsession, and the other as a grim account of how the department has imploded under her leadership. In either case, she will be remembered not only as the most incompetent Secretary in the department’s twenty-three-year history but also as the person who succeeded where many progressive activists had failed in discrediting much of the D.H.S.’s institutional legitimacy.

Early in Trump’s 2024 Presidential campaign, Noem, who had previously been the governor of South Dakota, was frequently mentioned as a potential running mate. Her chief credential was that she was loudly and unabashedly pro-Trump. Five years earlier, Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign strategist, began advising Noem on how best to ingratiate herself with the President. Her prospects for joining the ticket seemed solid until the publication of a political memoir, in which she recounted, in explicit detail, how she’d killed her family’s dog, Cricket. “It was not a pleasant job,” she wrote, but “it had to be done.” Trump was reportedly “disgusted” by the story. “Even you wouldn’t kill a dog, and you kill everything,” he told his eldest son, according to Alex Isenstadt’s 2025 book,“Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power.” After Trump’s reëlection, however, the incident was said to have struck the President as an example of the sort of tough-mindedness that would be important for a Homeland Security Secretary. As John Oliver recently put it, “Noem didn’t bring a lot of non-dog-murdering experience to the job.”

The D.H.S. is the third-largest federal department, with more than a dozen agencies and some two hundred and sixty thousand employees. Past Secretaries, from Republican and Democratic Administrations, used to complain that immigration enforcement tended to overshadow, and undermine, all of the department’s other work, which includes cybersecurity, disaster relief, and the Secret Service. “Immigration is overheated and over-politicized,” Jeh Johnson, who served under President Barack Obama, once told me. “It has overwhelmed D.H.S.” With Trump in the White House, given both his obsession with the issue and his expectation of total fealty, it was virtually impossible to create a veneer of gravitas and impartiality at the department. Noem seemed almost gleeful about dashing whatever pretense may have remained after Trump’s first term. In her inaugural address to department staff, she walked out to a country song called “Hot Mama,” with the chorus, “You turn me on, let’s turn it up, and turn this room into a sauna.”

Even before Noem took over the department, there were rumors that she and Lewandowski were having an affair, something both of them have denied. But Noem’s leadership was inextricably tied to Lewandowski. He reportedly signed documents as Noem’s “chief advisor,” despite not being a member of the department or the Administration. Technically, he was “a special government employee,” a status reserved for private citizens who can consult with the federal government for no more than a hundred and thirty days a year. Department officials nevertheless described Lewandowski as a ubiquitous presence. He travelled in a private cabin with Noem on a seventy-million-dollar 737 MAX jet that the department leased and is seeking to purchase. (This was nearly double the cost of each of six other commercial planes that Noem had the department buy to carry out deportation flights.) At one point, according to the Wall Street Journal, Lewandowski fired a Coast Guard pilot who forgot to fetch Noem’s blanket from an aircraft. And he often avoided swiping into department buildings to stay under the service limit as a special government employee.

Much of Lewandowski’s influence appeared to be about consolidating power and control. Last summer, Noem created a policy requiring her to personally sign off on any department expenditure that was more than a hundred thousand dollars. Almost immediately, the agencies’ work ground to a halt. The policy coincided with hurricane season, and relief efforts in states such as Missouri, North Carolina, and California were delayed, angering the public and, in many cases, their Republican representatives. “People are hurting in western North Carolina from the most significant storm they’ve ever experienced,” Thom Tillis, the Republican North Carolina senator, told Noem at a recent hearing. “It begs the question: why?” Kevin Kiley, a California Republican, citing a two-and-a-half-million-dollar grant that has languished since June, told her, “My constituents are not being well served by your department.”

In Noem’s defense, Homeland Security’s marginalization of the Federal Emergency Management Agency was a goal shared across the Administration, which has sought to systematically redirect federal resources to immigration enforcement. Yet for all of Noem’s public bluster about immigration—the speeches baselessly villainizing immigrants as violent criminals, the routine threats and insults—she still managed to alienate potential allies inside the government. Noem and Lewandowski elevated Greg Bovino, the now disgraced Border Patrol commander, over more seasoned agency hands to carry out violent arrest operations in American cities. She also found herself at frequent odds with Tom Homan, Trump’s so-called border czar. When Homan appeared on television, Noem reportedly demanded to know how he got booked instead of her.

Noem’s insistence on filming arrest operations was both disgraceful and counterproductive. In some instances, according to reporting by CBS News, she had agents arrest protesters so that they would appear in cuffs on social-media spots, only to release them afterward without charges. One of the ironies of her obsession with cameras was that videos of abuses perpetrated by ICE and Border Patrol started to go viral. When Trump demanded answers, Noem blamed others, including those who’d cautioned against the very policies she pursued.

The beginning of the end for Noem was the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, two American citizens, in Minneapolis. Both of them clearly posed no imminent threats to federal agents. But Noem didn’t hesitate to call them “domestic terrorists” anyway. When pressed by journalists and lawmakers, she doubled down. This was a lie but also a bad political bet, because although Trump’s chief adviser, Stephen Miller, had said the same thing, she quickly became the face of both the department’s aggression and its mendacity.

Under Noem, immigration agents have arrested, assaulted, and killed citizens and noncitizens alike. They have patrolled American cities wearing masks and driving unmarked cars, and have, by Noem’s own admission, entered people’s homes without judicial warrants, apparently in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Racial profiling is virtually a stated part of the department’s strategy, and ad campaigns have openly espoused white-nationalist rhetoric and talking points. Immigrants with legal status have been deported. Others have been arrested by agents at immigration courts and during routine administrative interviews. Federal judges have issued hundreds of orders to block the department’s actions, but Noem and her staff have ignored them.

The D.H.S. is currently under a partial shutdown after congressional Democrats refused to appropriate further funds without certain checks on the power of federal immigration agents. In this sense, Noem has achieved a rare feat of bringing together Democrats on a matter of immigration policy. But the most alarming fact of her political demise is that none of the department’s most egregious actions seemed to have been the reason that she was ultimately fired. What triggered Trump’s displeasure was the feebleness of Noem’s responses to mounting criticism. The story, in other words, had become about her—the shameless ad campaigns, the alleged affair, and, earlier this week, her shambolic appearance before Congress. Smelling blood, Republicans circled, accusing her of self-promotion and corruption. Her answers were canned and defensive.

In Noem’s place, Trump has nominated the Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin, a former M.M.A. fighter with a thin résumé and an excess of bravado. In a Senate hearing, in 2023, Mullin challenged the Teamsters president, Sean O’Brien, who was giving testimony, to a fistfight. “Stand your butt up,” Mullin said, as he rose from his seat. Bernie Sanders, who was chairing the hearing, ordered Mullin to sit down. “You’re a United States senator,” he told him, though Mullin continued to issue taunts. If Noem had a male counterpart, Trump deserves credit for finding him. ♦

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As Iran’s retaliation hit American allies throughout the Middle East this week, David Remnick was joined by two New Yorker writers with decades of experience reporting from the region. Robin Wright has reported from Iran extensively, and she met with Ali Khamenei before he became the Supreme Leader of Iran; Dexter Filkins covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he has been reporting on the Pentagon and military readiness. Filkins and Wright discuss the possibilities for future leadership in Iran; the Trump Administration’s chaotic statements in regard to its goals and time frame; and the economic impact of the war, which is already being felt around the globe.

Further reading:

• “What Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Meant to Iran, and What Comes Next,” by Robin Wright
• “How Marco Rubio Went from ‘Little Marco’ to Trump’s Foreign-Policy Enabler,” by Dexter Filkins
• “The Forever War,” by Dexter Filkins

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

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

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When the Oscar nominations were announced this year, Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” set a record. It received sixteen nominations, the most for any film ever. The fact that it’s, in part, a vampire movie, made by a director who’s not yet forty, makes that feat all the more remarkable. Coogler—who previously directed “Creed” and “Black Panther”—sat down with the New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb to discuss the recurrent themes of history, faith, and race in his work, and how he refracted them through the lens of horror in “Sinners.”

This segment originally aired on April 11, 2025.

Further reading:

• “Ryan Coogler’s Road to ‘Sinners,’ ” by Jelani Cobb

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

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