The New YorkerModify

Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Wherever You Listen

Sign up for our daily newsletter to get the best of The New Yorker in your inbox.

Ben Shapiro is a conservative provocateur. Ever since he was a teen-ager at U.C.L.A. writing op-eds for the Daily Bruin, he has shown a penchant for the rhetorical grenade. Women who have abortions are “baby killers.” Western civilization is “superior” to other civilizations. “Israelis like to build,” he tweeted in 2010. “Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage. This is not a difficult issue. #settlementsrock.” Shapiro is now forty-two, and his rhetoric has mellowed only somewhat. On college campuses and on his podcast, “The Ben Shapiro Show,” he has been an advocate for the Trump Presidency, even though he refused to vote for him in 2016 and allows that the President is—as we discuss here—financially corrupt and morally wanting.

Earlier this week, I spoke with Shapiro for The New Yorker Radio Hour, mainly about the battles within the MAGA movement in which he is currently engaged. Recently, Shapiro has gone into attack mode against some of his fellow MAGA media stars, including Tucker Carlson, for their indulgence, if not outright support, of antisemites like Nick Fuentes. It is a drama that has implications not only for the Trump era but for what might follow. J. D. Vance, for one, has refused to join Shapiro in rebuking Carlson. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

You worked at Breitbart, which was an ur-publication of the MAGA movement. You were acquainted with Steve Bannon and all kinds of people. When you look back on your Breitbart days, what do you think was positive about that time, and what do you look back on with some regret?

I had worked at Talk Radio Network, which was the syndicator for Michael Savage and Laura Ingraham, and then I ended up being hired by Andrew. I’d known Andrew since I was at U.C.L.A.—

Andrew Breitbart, the founder of the publication. Who died in his forties.

Yeah, he was very young. I’d known Andrew for about ten years. He came to me and said, “Will you come on board and join Breitbart?” It was the middle of the 2012 election cycle, and he died three, four weeks after I’d signed on. Suddenly the leadership structure was completely upended, because Andrew had been sort of a one-man band. He was the person from whom all thoughts sort of sprang, in terms of the direction of the site. The leadership structure changed pretty dramatically. Steve Bannon—who’d been kind of hanging around on the fringes of the Breitbart universe; he’d been making a documentary about Andrew—was brought in by Larry Solov, who was Andrew’s [business] partner, to essentially be president of Breitbart.

Did you have problems with Steve Bannon and the like, and their treatment of rhetoric and truth or non-truth and conspiracy theory, when you first encountered it?

It was never, sort of, a bed of roses with Steve Bannon. There are a lot of people in the Breitbart infrastructure who are not fond of Steve, or the way that he was running things, making editorial decisions and the like. I think that there were some wonderful things—

But how did you assess what Steve Bannon wanted in this world? He wasn’t just a conservative. He was and remains a kind of MAGA warrior who’s willing to say and do what is necessary to push that battle forward. And I’m being gentle about this.

Yeah, I mean, if you look at Breitbart’s coverage circa, say, 2012 or 2013, those were fairly mainstream conservative talking points. It was certainly a mainstream conservative website at that time. I think by the time we hit 2015, 2016, things had started to evolve, especially because of the rise of President Trump. I was not a supporter of President Trump in the 2015-2016 election cycle. I was much more supportive of Ted Cruz in the primaries, and then, in the general election, I actually didn’t vote, because I was unhappy with both candidates.

Obviously, after that, President Trump did many things that, as a conservative, I like. He’s certainly a non-ideological figure, which is why so many people try to sort of claim that MAGA is a part of their movement. You have Reagan conservatives who will say that MAGA is Reagan conservatism. You’ll have national populists who say that it’s national populist. Trump is none of those things. Trump is Trump, and he has instincts—

Which means what to you, Ben? “Trump is Trump” means what?

His instincts are sort of naturally those of a 1975 conservative. That means that he likes a strong America on the world stage, but tempered by a sort of hard-nosed realism about non-interventionism. When it comes to domestic policy, he has a weird mix of not liking the government to be involved in everything, but also wanting to use the government in ways that I don’t particularly approve of. He seems to be more about: What is the solution at hand? Will I try it? And then, if it doesn’t work, then he pulls out of it. People have termed that “TACO”—“Trump Always Chickens Out.” I don’t think that’s right. I think that President Trump is a person who is willing to try different things and then will shift on a dime if he thinks those things aren’t working.

Do you think Trump is honest?

In some ways yes and in some ways no.

There was an article in the Wall Street Journal just a couple of days ago describing the fishy investments from Abu Dhabi into the Trump family. Our reporter, David Kirkpatrick, who’s extremely conservative in his calculations, has said that the Trump family has enriched itself to the tune of four billion dollars since taking office again in 2024. Does this concern you at all?

Of course. I’ve been calling this out since, I think, before pretty much anybody else. I mean, early on in the Trump Administration, when World Liberty Financial was pretty clearly making a fair bit of money over in the Middle East, I raised red flags on my show, consistently, about how I thought this was wrong. If the name were Biden instead of Trump, people would be screaming bloody murder. And this was not beneficial to President Trump’s agenda, either. So, sure, that concerns me.

Not beneficial to his agenda, or corrupt?

I mean—both, obviously. I do think that if you are taking what I perceive to be digital assets that are not particularly worthwhile, and then you have people who are politically interested in investing massive amounts of money into those things, that is not a good thing.

You voted for him the second time?

I voted for him in 2020, and then I campaigned for him in 2024.

Why?

Because it was now a binary choice between Trump and Kamala Harris, and I liked a lot of what he did during his first Administration. I felt the guardrails would largely hold, which I believe they have, with regard to President Trump. I know many on the left believe they’ve not, but what I would say is that—

You believe the guardrails have held this time?

Yes. I’m hard-pressed to see—

Help me on that, Ben.

The Trump Administration has not bucked the judiciary by saying that if an appellate court or the Supreme Court rules in a particular way, it will still go ahead and do whatever it is it wants to do. The President does cite legal authority for the things that he’s doing—

So, you’re confident that the Justice Department will pursue corruption charges against the Trump family?

No, I’m confident that the President will likely pardon himself and his children in the same way that Joe Biden did on his way out. [Laughs.]

You’re laughing, but that’s radically corrupt, is it not?

I think that it was radically corrupt when the D.O.J. did not pursue, with alacrity, a lot of the issues surrounding the Biden family, too. So the answer is yes, and it applies to all parties. What I hear from the left is a constant drumbeat of accusations about President Trump, to which I acquiesce, in part, but I find them utterly unconcerned with the same sorts of issues arising on their side of the aisle. They see President Trump as the person who’s constantly violating the standard, the person who’s constantly setting the new standard, the person who is responsible for the death of American politics, or the decay of American politics.

And, as I’ve said publicly before, I think President Trump stumbled on the prone body of American politics and said, “This is a dead body.” I see him much more as a coroner than as the murderer. Now, that doesn’t mean that there’s not some of both, meaning that I think things can get worse under President Trump than they were heretofore, and I’m not going to deny that he’s done things that I think are bad and wrong. I was very critical of his rhetoric, for example, between the election of 2020 and January 6th. But I do think that—

But do you not see any of these things as disqualifying, in a moral-political sense? January 6th, for example.

I don’t know what disqualifying means, in the sense that I did not support him in the primaries—

That he would lose your faith and vote and support forever.

Well, I mean, the only way to lose my faith and support and vote forever would be for there to be an alternative that I find superior to him. This is the problem when you’re making voting decisions. Would I want Donald Trump marrying into my family? Probably not. The problem is that once you say that the candidate is “disqualified,” then you either have to sit out the election—which I did in 2016. And then whatever damage President Trump had, I thought, done by being elected in 2016, he did a bunch of things I liked between 2016 and 2020, and then I did not like what he did with regard to the election of 2020, and the falsehoods that he told about winning that election. And then I didn’t support him in the primaries, and then he ended up winning the nomination. He was running against Kamala Harris. So I can either sit out the election again, which doesn’t really achieve the—

So what you’re saying is that the potential of Kamala Harris, in your view, politically, outweighs the support for what, in essence, was an insurrection on Capitol Hill? That’s hard for me, to say the least.

I think that that’s a pretty poor way of putting it. That’s not the way that we assess candidates in the real world. The way that we assess candidates in the real world is: Who is more likely to perform the agenda that I see as important versus who is more likely to inhibit that agenda. And so I can fully disapprove of what happened on January 6th and think it was quite terrible, and still acknowledge that Donald Trump as President, from 2017 to 2021, did a better job than Joe Biden did.

There are many people in the Republican Party who consider themselves Never Trumpers. Not a decisive number, certainly, but there are a number of people who see his moral transgressions as so serious that they make a very different calculation than you do, electorally.

I mean, sure. And they’re entitled to that calculation. The question to me is always one of iteration. Voting is one decision, but just because you vote for someone doesn’t mean that you support everything that they do.

Ben, what initially attracted you to conservatism?

I grew up in a household with two Reagan Republicans—my parents are pretty conservative. The basic idea that lies behind a good conservatism, I think, is personal responsibility, duty, a requirement that you do the right thing, a basic moral stance about how individuals should act in a free country. And I think that’s still largely what drives my conservatism today.

A kind of personal rectitude.

Yes.

Do you find that that’s antithetical to liberalism?

It doesn’t have to be, but I think that liberalism very often is a way of shielding people from the consequences of their own decisions, or an attempt to shift individual responsibility onto systems in a way that is frequently unjustified.

The difference between right and left—in my definition of it—is that the right acknowledges that when people fail, because human nature is fallible, very often that is your own responsibility. And the best way to actually treat that problem is to self-correct. And the left, because they have, I think, a rosier view of what human nature is, tends to attribute to systems that which I think more properly lies in responsibility with the individual.

How much did religion influence your becoming a conservative? You were raised an Orthodox Jew—I think you’re still a practicing Orthodox Jew, am I correct?

Yes, that’s right. We became Orthodox when I was eleven. So I remember eating at Kentucky Fried Chicken. But I was fairly young when we became Orthodox. My mom and dad started going to a synagogue down in Venice Beach, actually, and they were very taken with the rabbi, and I think that they got more and more interested in that. They decided that they wanted to send me to a Jewish day school. And so I’d go to the Jewish day school—it was an Orthodox school—and I’d come home and say, “Mom and Dad, I don’t understand why we’re doing X, Y, and Z, when at school they’re teaching me that this is what we’re supposed to be doing.” And my parents were, I think, smart enough to see the inherent conflict, and, instead of saying, “Your school is doing it wrong,” or “You’re doing it wrong,” or “They’re teaching the wrong thing,” they said “Well, we’re probably doing it wrong,” and so probably we need to actually rectify that breach.

Let’s talk about the debate that you’re having inside MAGA. You’re at the center of a fight—a feud—that’s developing in the conservative movement, and it has to do with antisemitism and conspiracy theories related to antisemitism. Not long after Charlie Kirk died, you spoke at the Turning Point USA Conference, America Fest, and you called out Candace Owens and attendees like Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson—these are very influential figures now on the right, and the media, of the MAGA movement. Talk to me a little bit about this divide, how it’s developed, and what it’s done to your relationships inside the MAGA movement.

First of all, as people may suspect, I’m not particularly interested in my personal relationships with others in the political sphere. I have a family that’s very tight-knit. I have four children, going on five. I have a dog. I have plenty of things going on in my social calendar, and I don’t see it as particularly important to hang out with people who are in sort of the same career milieu.

There were two speeches that I gave back to back. One was a speech that I gave at the Heritage Foundation the night before, and one was the T.P.U.S.A. speech that I gave that night. The Heritage Foundation speech was specifically directed at Tucker Carlson, because I believe that Tucker Carlson is not a conservative in any real marked way that I can identify, and I was pointing that out at the Heritage Foundation.

How would you describe his politics?

Conspiratorial populism would probably be a fair descriptor of his politics.

Our colleague Jason Zengerle knew him as a young wise-guy reporter who leaned, maybe, center right. What happened to Tucker Carlson?

I try not to speculate about people’s motivations because I don’t have a window into their head. All I can say is that the stuff that he has been promoting for the past several years is very much in line with the philosophies of people like Alexander Dugin.

The Russian nationalist philosopher, said to be close to the thinking of Vladimir Putin.

Yes. Carlson’s view of America in the world is a view that is actually closer to Howard Zinn than to that of traditional conservatives. This idea that America is a nefarious and terrible force in the world that has committed myriad sins and must withdraw from the world, both for its own good and for the good of the world. His belief that a conspiratorial coterie of people is manipulating American policy. Those people very often happen to have crossover with Jews, according to his guests whom he routinely launders onto the air.

So, when it came to T.P.U.S.A., in the aftermath of Charlie [Kirk]’s death, Candace Owens, in particular, had started speculating, openly, that people at T.P.U.S.A.—up to and including, in my interpretation, Erika Kirk, Charlie’s wife—had been complicit in his murder or at least complicit in a coverup of his murder. Her bizarre conspiratorial rantings had been treated as legitimate and worthwhile by people ranging from Tucker Carlson to Megyn Kelly. And so I felt that it was necessary to make a speech about the gap that has emerged on the right between a conspiratorial view of politics—that sort of conspiratorialism has taken over large parts of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.

Candace Owens is, I believe, somebody that you worked with at the Daily Wire?

Yeah, we hired her in 2021—

What did you see in her then?

—and then we fired her in 2023. In 2021, what we saw was a fairly mainstream conservative who said inflammatory things, and who had been telling us that she—

Inflammatory things that you liked?

Most of them I liked, some of them not as much. And so, as people who hired her, we thought that she was going to develop in intellectual directions. She had said that she was learning with Shelby Steele, for example, and reading the works of Thomas Sowell, and this kind of thing. But, by 2022, it was apparent that she was moving in another direction, and then it took until 2023 for that direction to come to full fruition—

And what was the direction in 2023?

By 2023, she was spouting antisemitic conspiracy theories, among other conspiracy theories, including the idea that Emmanuel Macron’s wife is actually a man, and this sort of stuff.

So that was your limit with her?

Well, to be fair, I am not an officer of my company. The people who made that decision were Jeremy Boreing and Caleb Robinson, the co-C.E.O.s of the company.

You specifically criticized Tucker Carlson for a really soft interview he did with a guy named Nick Fuentes, who is, I think it’s fair to say, a Nazi apologist. You said, “If you have that person on your show and you proceed to glaze him, you ought to own it.” You point out how outrageous he is. But isn’t that exactly what Carlson wants in his guest? Attention?

I mean, I think that the attention doesn’t hurt, but, at the same time, I think there is probably some ideological overlap between some of the things that he believes about America and some of the stuff that Nick Fuentes believes. Tucker has a habit of bringing on guests who spout the most conspiratorial form of a theory, and then he sort of buys it back about five per cent. And then he allows those views to be predominant in the public discourse while talking about what wonderful people these folks are.

I get that, and I can’t help but agree with that. But then you have Donald Trump, who had dinner with Nick Fuentes. How does that affect your feeling about Donald Trump?

I mean, I condemned that at the time. When it comes to his dinner with Fuentes, and I believe it was Kanye West—

A good combination.

Yeah, pretty awful combination. People say that I grade on a curve, but I think I grade realistically here: I’m not surprised by what President Trump does. He likes being with famous people. He very often does not know who they are. He will say bad things about them five minutes later. He is as inconstant as the changing wind when it comes to his feelings about people. He will like Steve Bannon until he calls him “Sloppy Steven” and fires him, whereupon he will welcome him back into his orbit and like him again. And so these sort of—

But you’re taking this too casually. He’s having dinner with a Nazi apologist.

I didn’t take that casually.

And then doesn’t go off and blast him. He just kind of says, “Oh, I kind of didn’t know who it was, and Kanye brought him along.” First of all, that’s bad staff work, to say the least—

Terrible staff work.

And it’s bad behavior on the part of the President of the United States, no?

I agree that it’s bad behavior on the part of the President of the United States. I’m not sure what else to say about that.

At America Fest, Vice-President Vance said this: “President Trump didn’t build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless self-defeating purity tests. I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or de-platform, and I don’t really care if some people out there, I’m sure, will have the fake-news media denounce me after this speech.” He was attacking you, wasn’t he?

I mean, I assume that he was disagreeing with the thing that I had said, sure. And I will point out that I don’t think the Vice-President is being very accurate about his own approach to various conservatives and other people online. He’s quite fond of attacking people online from time to time.

I remember when a bunch of young Republican leaders had their Signal chat exposed and they were making all kinds of antisemitic remarks. The Vice-President didn’t denounce that either. In fact, he just thought it was, you know, kids being kids.

And again, I highly disagree with this as both a matter of morality and as a matter of tactics. I think tactically it’s foolish. I think it’s immoral.

Then what’s going on? This is so prevalent and excused at the top end of—at least part of—the conservative media sphere and the White House.

I mean, I think it’s a mirror image of what’s going on on the left. I think to pretend that antisemitism is not rising on both the right and the left is to be whistling past the graveyard. And one of the things—

Fair enough. But stick to the right, and anatomize that.

But the reason that I’m pointing this out—

Because they’re in office—

I understand, but Democrats would like to be in office. And so to go back to the original point with regard to President Trump and voting for him and not voting for him—if the question is binary choice, then you’re going to have to make a decision between one of these parties. These are the two major parties. And so that’s why I think it’s important to bring into perspective what’s happening in both parties.

But Ben, do you see antisemitism in the mouths of leading Democratic contenders for the Presidency?

I see antisemitism in the Democratic Party apparatus’s willingness to not only humor but to promote everybody ranging from New York mayor Zohran Mamdani to Rashida Tlaib, the congresswoman from Michigan, to Ilhan Omar, the congresswoman from Minnesota, to the bizarre attempt to mirror all of the excesses of the anti-Israel movement. And I don’t just mean anti-Netanyahu—I mean anti-Israel.

Listen, I asked Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, about this. I was on Gavin’s podcast, and he acknowledged that this sort of stuff has become quite prevalent in Democratic circles. So the reason that I’m pointing this out is, No. 1, because I think it’s important, just as a matter of description, to be realistic about the rise of antisemitism in the United States, period. And then I’m happy to discuss the problems on my own side of the political aisle—which I have, repeatedly.

Did the degree of antisemitism on the right take you by surprise?

Yes. The rise of it over the course of the last couple of years has certainly taken me by surprise. The willingness to aid and abet and promote antisemitic conspiracy theories has been shocking.

To understand what’s happening, I think we first have to understand what antisemitism actually is, because when people mischaracterize the definition, that allows their particular side to escape. So people tend to define antisemitism in a way that excuses their side, and that throws all of the blame on the other side. What they will say is “Well, I’m just anti-Israel, I’m not antisemitic,” or “I’m not personally antisemitic, I’m just against Jewish control of the media.”

The definition of antisemitism—antisemitism at its root—is a conspiracy theory about the power of Jews as a group in the world. And that can be channelled into an anti-Zionism that says that Israel is controlling American foreign policy, and that Israel has befuddled the world, and it’s all about the Benjamins—which is the kind of thing that Ilhan Omar says—or it can be channelled into: Jews in America are too powerful in the media and they’re cliquish and they are controlling the circumstances of my life.

And yet, Ben, as somebody who’s written from Israel and Palestine for years and years—the reaction to some of the things I write is that I’m an antisemite, which is, I’ve got to say, news to me. And so I worry that that term, which is highly potent, is slung around in a very dangerous way sometimes.

So this is why I’m trying to be more precise about the definition. Being critical of Israeli policy is not the same thing as saying, for example, that Israel’s government designed and implemented a genocide, which is a lie, and that is a lie that can be chalked up to a nefarious view of what Jews are doing in the world, because it is also part and parcel of a broader lie, which is that the Jews have then sold the idea that they’re capable of doing whatever they want under the guise of America’s banner, and they’ve done so because of their inordinate power. It’s part of a broader conspiracy theory.

This is why I’m trying to be particularistic in my definition about what antisemitism is. I think the broad definition of antisemitism as sort of a subset of racism is wrong. I think that that definition is both overbroad and under-inclusive. What you end up with is the emptying out of antisemitism as a worthwhile category that actually bears weight in American life. Much the same way that the right said, for a long time, “You keep calling everybody racist, therefore nobody’s a racist,” which is untrue, right? There are actual racists out there.

There are.

But the idea is that if you over-apply a category, then it starts losing its power and its effectiveness, and that actually opens the door to the thing. I think the same thing has happened with antisemitism. And so what I’ve said before is: instead of talking in categories of antisemitism, or Jew hatred, or the rest of it, why don’t we talk about what’s true and what’s false and what’s moral and what’s not moral, because that’s easier for people to get their head around.

Let me ask you about another extremely potent issue, not just in the Republican Party, and that’s the Epstein files. What do you think they prove or don’t prove, other than the absolute hideous nature of the subject himself?

Let’s put it this way: The virality of the narrative around the Epstein files says something different from what the evidence shows. What the evidence shows in the Epstein files is that you have a number of very high-profile people who were in close contact with Jeffrey Epstein, who was a convicted sex offender with minors. The indictments against Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell suggest that the trafficking of minors was about Jeffrey Epstein. There’s no one else who’s been indicted in terms of trafficking of minors except for Jeffrey Epstein. And, according to the F.B.I. under President Trump, there is no one who’s going to be, because they do not have sufficient evidence that he was trafficking young girls to other people.

The narrative that has been drawn from the Epstein story—because, presumably, people don’t know where his money comes from, although there was a deep dive, I believe, in the New York Times Magazine, looking into where his money came from—the narrative is a broader one that goes back to the conspiracy theorizing that has taken over large swaths of both parties, but it is very, very potent on the right. And that is that there is a cadre of people who are preying upon children, who manipulate everything in your life, who may be doing so because they have been honey-potted or because they’re being manipulated by a foreign intelligence service. On the far right, this is treated as Mossad, even though there is zero evidence that that is the case. Ehud Barak’s name is brought up in this context. As you might imagine, I’m not a fan of Ehud Barak, but there is no evidence that, on behalf of Mossad, he was running Jeffrey Epstein as a sex-trafficking agent. By the way, it’d be pretty terrible statecraft, considering that Epstein was already a convicted sex offender.

But I think that the broader theory here, which goes well beyond the evidence and the virality of that theory, speaks to people’s belief that they’re not in control of their own lives. I think this gets back to some of my original politics, that individual responsibility is the lodestar of a successful society. And when you have conspiratorialism take over, as Karl Popper suggested, it’s a massive problem.

Are Donald Trump and the MAGA movement healthy for this country? Do you see promise in the people that have been put forward as successors to Donald Trump, J. D. Vance among them?

I have differential opinions on a wide variety of these people. If the Vice-President were in a primary with Marco Rubio, I would be likely to support Marco Rubio in that primary over J. D. Vance. Are there options that I like better than others? Sure. Are there things about the Trump movement that I think have been good and salutatory? Sure. Is he my ideal? If I could construct in my head the ideal Republican candidate or President, would it look exactly like Donald Trump? No, but I’m not sure that he’s claiming to be that, nor do I have that magical power, try as I might, to manifest that in real life.

What do you think Donald Trump cares about?

I try not to get into motivations because I’m not a psychiatrist, but here’s the nice thing about President Trump. When you asked if he was honest—whatever is in his head is going to come out of his mouth in the next two-point-seven seconds. There is no brain-mouth barrier for President Trump.

That’s not so much honesty as impulsivity, no?

Well, I mean, it’s honesty in the sense that you are getting his honest take on what he thinks in that moment. It may be an impulsive approach to honesty, but there is a definition of honesty by which it serves.

It’s revealing, I’ll give you that.

It is revealing. It is authentic—if you want to call it authentic, it’s authentic. But as far as “What is the core of his political belief?” Again, I think he has an instinct that he wants America to be great and powerful in the world. He likes the symbolism of America being great and powerful in the world. America is strong, America is virile. These are things that clearly he does believe. And so the way that manifests, in policy, may be grabbing Nicolás Maduro and taking him back to New York for trial, or it may be an industrial policy that is more reminiscent of a 1937 F.D.R. policy than it is of a traditional sort of Reagan Republican policy.

Or finding more to be sympathetic about with Vladimir Putin than with Volodymyr Zelensky. It’s a pretty slippery slope.

Yeah. So when it comes to Putin and Zelensky, again, that one I cannot explain from a sort of America-great perspective. I think that the President—

Can’t you explain it? I mean, can’t you explain it in terms of: he is impressed by, taken with, the kind of authoritarian impulses and behavior of Putin? Same with Xi Jinping.

I think that he is attracted by powerful people, for sure. But he has sort of varied, fairly widely, actually, over the course of the last year and a half in terms of the things that he’s been saying on Russia-Ukraine. I’ve been very consistent that I think that we ought to be supporting Ukraine sufficiently enough to deter the Russian threat, and to force Putin to the table.

I want to ask you about Minneapolis. From a free-speech point of view, from a First Amendment point of view, should somebody like Don Lemon be prosecuted?

I mean, if what he was doing was performing an act of journalism, then the answer is no. The question is going to be whether they can prove in court that he was actually a conspirator in violation of the FACE Act.

Are you worried about Donald Trump’s regard for journalists? He’s obviously infatuated with them—he loves to talk to them. But he refers to them as enemies of the people. And, you know, as a student of history, that’s a phrase that comes from Robespierre, it comes from Stalin, and it has consequences.

I mean, he’s been doing that for ten years, and you seem to have a robust audience and the ability to speak freely every day. I don’t think that you’re sitting in your studio right now waiting for the F.B.I. to break down your door.

You think he’s just kidding around? The F.B.I. had no problem breaking down the door of a Washington Post reporter and taking all her devices recently.

And, if you go back to the Obama Administration, James Rosen was treated quite similarly when he was working for Fox News. And then the Associated Press, I think, had some situations with the Obama Administration, as well. This is why I go back to: Is Trump breaking new ground here or is he using tools that were left over from other Administrations in ways that people don’t like? I don’t like it, either. I mean, him suing various outlets, I think, is wrong and bad. Do I think that we are now facing a grave threat that the First Amendment has ended in the United States because Don Lemon was picked up by the D.O.J.? I don’t.

But Ben, sooner or later, he’s not going to like what you say, and your turn is going to come and you’re going to be deposed, and you’re going to be sued. Will that change your view of this?

Not particularly. Again, I think that it’s wrong for him to do the suing of these outlets. So I’m not sure what would change about my opinion, given that I’ve said already that I think that it’s wrong. It might hurt more, if he did it to me.

Let me get a little insight about—

You’ve noticed that I’m not excusing any of the things that I think he’s doing that are wrong.

I do.

And this is why, one of the things that I think that if people on the opposite side of the aisle actually wanted to be shooting for a better future here, which is, I think, what we would all like, it is not enough to simply rail against Trump and say this is not normal. It is why I think the people on the left should do some of the same with their own side. Much of what we’ve talked about here is me criticizing my own side. I’d say ninety per cent of what we’ve talked about is me criticizing my own side. But I find an extraordinary dearth of that, unfortunately, on the left. And I think people do react by supporting the right. And this is one of the things that I think is a huge mistake on the part of the media, is to sort of play this game where Trump does a thing, therefore it is a bad thing. People on the left do the same thing; they are opposing Trump, therefore it’s a good thing. And that seems to me completely problematic. I’m perfectly willing to, on each of these specific problems, say: if the evidence shows that Donald Trump is targeting Don Lemon—

Ben, there is no question that every President, and I’ll just say it unequivocally, every President, sooner or later, lies. Every President, sooner or later, misbehaves. We’re talking, though, about a radical difference in degree, are we not?

I mean, I really do not think so.

That’s where we disagree. A lot.

We definitely disagree on this. I think that the left routinely underestimates what’s done by the left, whereas I think I’m being pretty accurate in that I think both sides are routinely violating the rules and that’s why we are in sort of a political death spiral.

When you look at immigration policy, I think we can agree that there was no immigration policy—certainly no effective immigration policy when it came to the southern border—for far too long. And we can argue about the reasons for that, and what bill didn’t get passed, and so on. How do you feel about the way it’s being done, as dramatized by ICE in Minneapolis and elsewhere, and mass deportations, and people being shipped off to El Salvador, and the rest?

So these are two separate questions. Trump’s border policy is incredibly popular because the border was sealed on Day One, and it turns out that you didn’t need a piece of legislation to do that. Joe Biden could always have done that. In fact, even in the last couple of months while he was President, he sort of started to do that.

As far as internal policing of illegal immigration, I think that the approach taken by Tom Homan, the border czar, has been significantly better than the approach taken by the D.H.S. secretary or Stephen Miller, the President’s top adviser on these issues, which is: home in on the criminal illegal immigrants, many of whom are in the system. I think that Democrats are actually making a major mistake by not having local law enforcement coöperate with ICE in taking people who are in jail and deporting those people, or reporting them to ICE for deportation. I think that’s a huge mistake by Democrats politically, and just in terms of policy—

Well, as we’re constantly reminded, Obama deported many, many people, rightly or wrongly. It’s not as if this is some unique thing.

That’s true. I mean, you’re right, that’s been a consistent policy in the United States for a while, to deport criminal illegal immigrants. Ramping that up, I think, is both smart policy and good policy. I think that the Trump Administration’s reaction, which has been to set up quotas, or radically ramp up going after noncriminal illegal immigrants—by which I mean people who have not committed an additional crime other than crossing the border illegally—is a political mistake, and has been redounding not to the benefit of the Trump Administration. There are better ways to do it. But I think that Democrats are playing with fire in a lot of the stuff that they’ve been doing in places like Minneapolis. I think the idea that ICE agents are state-sponsored terrorism—I confronted the California governor about that, and he backed off of that.

Rhetorically.

Yes. When people suggest that ICE is Gestapo, when people are likening this to the Holocaust, I think it’s a massive . . . not only mistake, but—

Separate out the rhetoric from the behavior. What do you think of the behavior of ICE in Minneapolis? When people in the highest levels of government refer to people like Alex Pretti as a “terrorist”—you’ve heard this.

Yes. I literally came out that day and I said that that was a complete misapprehension of the situation, so far as I could tell on the tape. And I said the same thing about the characterization of Renee Good as somebody who was trying to mow down immigration officers by the bushel. I mean, it was stated by Gregory Bovino, I believe, that Alex Pretti wanted to kill as many ICE agents as possible, or border patrol as possible. And I said that that’s not true and I think that that’s wrong, which is why I’m very happy that Tom Homan, who seems to be more of an adult, has been put in charge of implementation of border policy in Minnesota.

Ben, there are a million things we could talk about and probably disagree about, but I do want to focus on one thing. You said—and I think quite rightly—earlier that the left and the right keep digging their trenches deeper and deeper and deeper. Who do you see in the conservative world who’s a potential leader who would not have these tremendous moral failings that you’ve described, who would do without the kind of rhetorical ugliness that you have denounced? Who would cast out the kind of characters that Tucker Carlson and company are encouraging?

I think there are a number of them. Glenn Youngkin, the former governor of Virginia; Brian Kemp, the former governor of Georgia. I think Governor [Ron] DeSantis in Florida has done an excellent job. I think that Senator Ted Cruz has spoken out very clearly against people like, for example, Tucker Carlson and his predations. I think Secretary of State Rubio would be really good. I’d like to see Vice-President Vance change tack on a lot of this; I hope that he will.

This is a systemic problem on both the left and the right: the primary system is very, very difficult for people who are not deliberately inflammatory to navigate. Because primary voters tend to be the most passionate voters, and that means that the people who tend to elevate are the people who are sometimes the most provocative.

The American system is built for gridlock. It’s meant to force us to generate large-scale approval in order to get major things done. You shouldn’t be able to do things with fifty-one per cent—you should have to have seventy per cent to do it. That’s why the system was built the way it is with all of the gridlock between the branches, and between the states and the federal government. And I think that the way that both the political parties—as vehicles for political victory—and also the commentariat in search of clicks and giggles have mobilized is in opposition to that. So people are getting more and more frustrated—

My concern is with the sustenance of democracy and democratic institutions. And I wonder if we share, or we don’t share, a concern that the period that we’re in now potentially lays waste to those institutions.

I’m worried about it, for sure, but I think that we may be worried about it from different angles. One of the things that I notice about democracies that sort of fall into crisis is, No. 1, lack of institutional trust. But if you believe that if the other side wins, it’s literally the end of the democracy—that is incredibly dangerous. That really is a problem. Because that suggests that if the other side wins, you’re never going to get to vote again, tyranny is upon you, and perhaps the only solution is a solution that breaks the system.

But Ben, when the President of the United States tries to threaten officials in Georgia to give him some votes, or he starts to talk about “nationalizing” the elections, all these things, whether it’s January 6th—aren’t these legitimate concerns? Is the worrier the problem, or the actual situation the problem?

Well, I mean, no. I think in some situations the worrier is the problem. It depends on the conclusion you’re drawing. I think the worry about January 6th was justified, because I think that the behavior of the President between the election and January 6th was morally wrong and also legally wrong. But I also think that the guardrails held. And the notion that Democrats are sitting around worrying that there will never be another clean election—that’s not true. And when Republicans say the same thing, Democrats are right to pounce on that. President Trump will say: if we don’t win this election, it was stolen. But then I’ll hear Democrats turn around and say very much the same thing about Republicans. And once both sides believe that if the other side wins, the election was stolen, then how are we supposed to ever share a polity together? That is a massive problem.

Now, I think that the founders built an incredible system. I think that the guardrails are incredibly strong. The reality is that our system is very much still functional. And, last I checked, Democrats are slated to win the House and possibly the Senate, so they don’t feel like this is the end of the road. ♦

Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen

Sign up for our daily newsletter to get the best of The New Yorker in your inbox.

Jenin Younes rose to prominence on the right by defending medical professionals like Jay Bhattacharya who claimed that they were being censored over opposition to vaccination and masking mandates. Younes worked for the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a group described as libertarian, and appeared at events with the Federalist Society. As the political winds have shifted, she says that the Trump Administration’s attacks on free speech are worse than anything that she saw during the Biden Administration. Younes is currently the national legal director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. David Remnick speaks with her about her unlikely trajectory and about how her commitment to free speech—regardless of which side of the aisle the issue arises from—has left her in a uniquely lonely political position.

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.

Sometime in the mid-two-thousands, when people would still hand you cassette tapes or CDs at shows or in record stores or during hangouts in someone’s parents’ basement or smoke-filled apartment, I was passed a dubbed copy of Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s 1986 album“Keyboard Fantasies.” It was a blank cassette in a clear case with the words “KEYBOARD FANTASY” scrawled across the front, the slight misspelling seemingly due to the fact that whoever wrote it ran out of space.

“Keyboard Fantasies” was a self-released project, made with only two instruments—a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer and a Roland TR-707 drum machine—but it sounded expansive: stabs of synth blending with high-pitched drones of flute, winding and bending electronic notes. Copeland was inspired by sounds from the natural surroundings near his home at the time, in Huntsville, Ontario—rushing water, wind cutting through trees. His father was a pianist, and Copeland, now eighty-two, trained as a classical vocalist from the age of fifteen. (In 1961, he became one of the first Black students to attend McGill University’s music program.) A standout song on the album, “Let Us Dance,” showcased Copeland’s singular voice, which ranged from swellingly operatic to deeply serene. I remember feeling stunned that a single person could hold within him that choir of sounds. The album did not have a wide audience at the time of its release; only a handful of tapes were put out and sold. But, thanks in large part to a Japanese collector, Ryota Masuko, who proselytized in the twenty-tens, Copeland built an underground reputation as an overlooked pioneer of the electronic/synth genre.

Before “Keyboard Fantasies,” Copeland had released two folk albums, but his main work was as a songwriter and performer on the Canadian children’s show “Mr. Dressup.” In a clip from around the same time that “Keyboard Fantasies” was released, Copeland, playing the head of a trading post in Mr. Dressup’s neighborhood, fishes out a birdlike puppet and sings it a song. It’s fascinating to think of him inhabiting two worlds simultaneously—performing songs for children and, in his spare hours, making complex and adventurous ambient music—but the two modes would each end up shaping Copeland’s quietly influential career. Since the nineteen-nineties, Copeland’s primary musical collaborator has been his life partner, Elizabeth, a writer and a performing artist. In recent decades, they have only sporadically released new music—“The Ones Ahead,” from 2023, was the first Copeland album issued under his own name after coming out as a trans man, in 2002. Now, on February 6th, the Copelands are releasing their latest album, “Laughter in Summer,” which comprises voice-and-piano reimaginings of past songs, many of them accompanied by choral arrangements.

The project evolved out of an informal recording session. In the summer of 2025, the Copelands were offered two free days in a studio in Montreal, and they hired a choir to sing with them. In a recent video call, Elizabeth told me, “It was just, let’s put this stuff down so we have it to listen to.” They sang a new version of “Let Us Dance” with the choir, then mixed another recording from the choir’s warmups; the two versions both appear on the album, as “Let Us Dance (Movement One)” and “Let Us Dance (Movement Two),” the opener and closer, respectively. The two takes sound similar, but they both differ mightily from the original, which was accompanied by synthesizers layered atop the note of wind chimes rhythmically clattering, and keyboard effects that mimicked the tone of short horn bursts. Copeland’s voice sounds as rich and flexible as it did back then. Elizabeth told me that the songs serve as a reminder to young musicians about the virtues of live, unadulterated recordings. “So many of them rely on the tricks in the studio–put a little Auto-Tune here, a little A.I. there, let’s add, subtract, multiply, and divide,” she said. “There’s not a lot of artists these days who can go in and do something live off the floor one time. The album is what you heard. If you were standing in the room that day, that’s what you would’ve heard.”

During our call, the couple sat, shoulder to shoulder, in a teal room in their home in Hamilton, Ontario, backdropped by books and records. Elizabeth did most of the talking. In September of 2024, Copeland revealed that he’d been diagnosed with dementia, and that they’d been managing the disease privately for some time. “Laughter in Summer” is the first album since the revelation, but it would be a moving project even without the reality of the illness’s mounting toll. There is a sense of wonder on the new recordings, a search for the depths of a single piece, or a single place, or a single emotional curiosity. The songs find an artist picking through his established works and seeing which parts of them might be illuminated anew. It’s moving, too, because there is no evading the humanness of this record—the collision of actual human voices working in tandem. Elizabeth told me, “To practice any craft, you have to be able to listen and hear the world—hear something other than yourself.”

“Children’s Anthem,” one of the first creative collaborations between Elizabeth and Beverly as a couple, written in 2007 for an anti-bullying conference, is revived on “Laughter in Summer” as a sparse piano-and-voice duet. Toward the end of the track, when Beverly and Elizabeth’s voices blend together, the singing begins to feel spiritual, more like a prayer for an aching world than an ode to those who must endure it. “Harbour,” originally from “The Ones Ahead,” features Elizabeth singing a love song that Beverly wrote to her, providing the breathtaking experience of hearing the “you” in the lyrics become a two-way mirror: “Don’t you know that you’re the deep / Where water, earth and fire meet?” This is not the transformation typical of a cover song or a rerecording. It is a confirmation of reciprocal attention and admiration. The choral elements on the record shine most vividly on the title track, which features polyphonic swells of voices humming melodies, overtaking the piano, dropping and then rising again.

There is a simplicity to a song like “Children’s Anthem” that comes, undoubtedly, from Copeland’s years of making music for children, who need to be able to hear and understand and, hopefully, sing along. I told the couple that I was hesitant to use the word “simple,” because it sounded almost derogatory. “Well, it’s not simple in an inane kind of way,” Elizabeth said. “It’s simple because it has to make a lot of space. It has to make a lot of space for much of life’s joys and sorrows. We make our songs the way we do because we want to leave room for clarity of generosity, of warmth. Because we are at a critical juncture. There are things to be terrified of. But our power is about awakening something beyond fear and cynicism in the human nervous system. Our songs attempt to remind people that simplicity, and innocence, is a kind of power.” Beverly, a longtime practicing Buddhist, told me that he doesn’t really consider himself to be the creator of his music. “I feel that the songs are sent from a higher source. And when they arrive you can say yes or no to them. The good news is that, so far, I have said yes.” Elizabeth replied that she’s never seen him say no, and Beverley smiled, then said, “No, I suppose I haven’t. But there may be a time when I no longer have the facilities to say yes.”

Copeland’s story is one of late-career adoration, but his trajectory also suggests the limitations of being a so-called cult figure. He is a Black trans elder who has built a legacy as an unsung hero of the music world; the problem is that being a symbol of wisdom or endurance doesn’t always translate to material success. In early 2020, capitalizing on the new excitement for Copeland’s music, the couple was set to take off on a world tour. Then the pandemic hit, and all of the shows were cancelled. The Copelands had sold their house not long before, with the idea that they would return from the road and settle into a new one. Now, suddenly, they had no money coming in to cover a mortgage. Beverly’s daughter, Faith, started a GoFundMe for the couple, which raised nearly a hundred thousand dollars, allowing them to buy a small, temporary home in Nova Scotia. Online today, you can find a sealed pressing of “Keyboard Fantasies” selling for more than seventeen hundred dollars. Beverly told me, jokingly, “If I were to die, they would be worth way more. Sometimes I want to fake that I’m dead.”

He and Elizabeth brought up Jackie Shane, another Black trans American artist who lived in Canada. Shane recorded a run of singles and a stunning live album on Caravan Records, in 1967, but had retired from music by the early nineteen-seventies, spending time taking care of her ailing mother and stepfather in Nashville. For years, the few people who knew of her work were unsure whether or not Shane was still alive. Beginning near the end of her life, in 2019, there was renewed interest in her music. Old albums were unearthed, bootlegged, and reissued. A documentary film, “Any Other Way,” was released in 2024. This process of rediscovery was both wonderful for the public and heartbreaking for Shane, who might have had a different life and career if she had been appreciated in her time.

Perhaps Copeland’s career was simply a series of misalignments. He was once ahead of his time, and then the world caught up, but when the world did finally catch up he could not reap the long-awaited fruits of his brilliance. Part of the beauty of an album such as “Laughter in Summer” is that it might, once again, inspire an audience to seek out the original recordings of Copeland’s songs. Elizabeth spoke of the years when Beverly was writing music prolifically with little recognition.“If he had been willing to put on a skirt and wear some lipstick, maybe his music would’ve gotten out there more, or if he’d been willing to write more to genre.” She went on, “We’ve both been focussed more on what the meaning of our work is rather than who is or is not paying attention. And the cost of it, at this point in our life, in our elder years, is that we’re just kind of hanging on.” She added, “Glenn has given a lot. I have given a lot. Maybe I haven’t had quite the fame and fortune, but—”

Beverly interjected. “But it’s coming,” he said. ♦

Ignazio Silone’s novel “Bread and Wine” tells the story of Pietro Spina, a socialist and revolutionary who is a wanted man in Fascist Italy, and who, in order to elude capture, disguises himself as a village priest in the Abruzzo countryside. The book, which was published in 1936, is partly a parable about survival and resistance: The villagers awake one morning to find anti-government slogans scrawled on the church steps. They’re alarmed, fearing that the authorities will crack down on them all until the person who did it comes forward. But Spina encourages them to see the graffiti as an act of conscience—without letting on that he, himself, wrote it. “In the land of Propaganda,” he says, “it is enough for one little man to say ‘No!’ murmur ‘No!’ in his neighbor’s ear, or write ‘No!’ on a wall at night.” Such a person may die at the hands of the state, he tells them, but the corpse will keep saying no. “And how can you silence a corpse?”

On January 25th, the day after federal agents killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Cardinal Joseph Tobin, the Archbishop of Newark, spoke during a webinar organized by Faith in Action, a global network of religious leaders and activists. He paraphrased the episode from “Bread and Wine,” and then addressed the participants directly. “How will you say no to violence?” he asked. He urged them to phone members of Congress, who were due to take up the Department of Homeland Security budget, and demand that they “vote against renewing funding for such a lawless organization.” He went on, “How will you say no—scrawl your answer on the wall? Will you help restore a culture of life, in the midst of death?” Tobin’s speech was national news; here was a prelate challenging the Trump Administration in blunt, anguished terms.

Tobin was born in Detroit, in 1952, to parents descended from Irish immigrants, and grew up as the eldest of thirteen children. He is the American cardinal who goes back the longest with the new American Pope, Leo XIV; he became friends with Robert Prevost, as Leo was then known, when they served together in Rome, a quarter century ago. Tobin also made the news earlier in January, when he, together with Cardinal Blase Cupich, of Chicago, and Cardinal Robert McElroy, of Washington, D.C., issued a rare joint statement on U.S. foreign policy. “The events in Venezuela, Ukraine and Greenland have raised basic questions about the use of military force and the meaning of peace,” and about “our country’s moral role in confronting evil around the world,” they said. The cardinals cited a speech that Leo had given to more than a hundred ambassadors to the Vatican, on January 9th, in which he warned that a diplomacy conducted in dialogue “is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force, by either individuals or groups of allies.” The Pope said, “War is back in vogue and a zeal for war is spreading.”

The cardinals’ statement was striking for several reasons. Atypically, it showed U.S. prelates weighing in on foreign affairs. (McElroy is an expert; he earned a Ph.D. in political science at Stanford, with a thesis on morality and U.S. foreign policy.) It came directly from the leaders of three archdioceses, not from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops—which has about four hundred members and a complex process for the drafting of such statements—and it was released a week after that group’s new president, Archbishop Paul Coakley, of Oklahoma City, met with President Donald Trump and Vice-President J. D. Vance, at the White House. And the new Pope is close to all three of its authors: Tobin; Cupich, who served alongside Prevost in Rome in the powerful Dicastery for Bishops; and McElroy, whom Prevost, when he was the head of that office, tapped last year for the high-profile role of Archbishop in the nation’s capital. Their statement suggested that, even if Leo is not the “anti-Trump,” as his statements on peace, immigration, the climate, and the rule of law have led a number of observers to propose, his compadres in the U.S. are speaking up in a strong, clear voice.

On Friday, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, in Manhattan, will host the installation of a new Archbishop of New York, who is likely to round out what might be called Leo’s Team U.S.A. Ronald Hicks, the former Bishop of Joliet, Illinois, succeeds Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who reached the nominal retirement age of seventy-five last year. Hicks was born in 1967, grew up in the placid Chicago suburb of South Holland, studied at a seminary on the Southwest Side, spent a year in Mexico, and served in the Archdiocese of Chicago’s parishes and seminaries. In 2005, at the age of thirty-seven, he went to El Salvador, where he worked as a regional director of Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos (Our Little Brothers and Sisters), a group of residences for orphans and at-risk children which was founded by an American missionary in Mexico in 1954.

Hicks spent five years in El Salvador—a long time for a cleric on the executive track. He has said that his favorite saint is Óscar Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador, who, as Hicks put it, “walked with his people for justice and peace.” (Romero denounced the military regime in a series of Sunday homilies broadcast nationally on the radio—in effect, scrawling “no” on the church steps. He was murdered while saying Mass, in 1980; in 2018, Pope Francis canonized him.) After returning to Chicago, Hicks served as Cardinal Cupich’s vicar-general, or deputy, then as a bishop, and was known for unshowy efficiency. The initial take on him has been that he is akin to Pope Leo, a Chicagoan who spent his thirties working with the poor as a missionary in Peru and then brought that experience to a series of leadership roles. Hicks has been involved in prison ministry since the nineteen-eighties and, as bishop of Joliet, he took steps to address the climate emergency, following Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical on the issue. He appears boyishly pious—on plane flights, he prays the Rosary and watches unobjectionable movies, such as “Harold and the Purple Crayon”—but he is likely to fit right in with the more worldly trio whose company he’ll now keep.

Hicks’s relative youth and low profile make his elevation to big-city archbishop significant. But what’s particularly notable is where he’s becoming an archbishop. Cupich is now seventy-six, so in Chicago it was assumed that Hicks would succeed him. Instead, he’ll be Archbishop of New York—historically, the most prominent post in the U.S. Church. In 1984, Pope John Paul II entrusted it to the bishop of Scranton, Pennsylvania, John J. O’Connor, who was little known to the public but shared the Pope’s culture-warrior style. “I want a man just like me in New York,” John Paul was said to have remarked. With Hicks, Leo is appointing a cleric who seems both like himself and distinctly different from the boisterous Cardinal Dolan.

A St. Louis native who worked at the Vatican Embassy in Washington in the late nineteen-eighties, Dolan led the Archdiocese of Milwaukee for seven years before being named to New York, in 2009, by Pope Benedict XVI—a staunch conservative who expected his appointees to oppose what he called a “dictatorship of relativism.” Dolan presented himself as the archbishop of plain talk and good cheer, and he revived O’Connor’s practice of weighing in on the culture wars through the media, first in the tabloids and then on a weekly radio show on SiriusXM. His strategy—some would say his shtick—was to espouse a rock-ribbed Catholic point of view in an irreverent manner. During a taping shortly before he was named a cardinal, in 2012, the Times noted, he exulted over French pastries that one of the producers had brought in and announced, “I am going to give these to a hungry person. Namely me at about 4 o’clock.”

But Dolan’s tenure was fraught in a way that no amount of bonhomie could counter. The election of Pope Francis, in 2013—and his distaste for the culture wars—left Dolan sidelined in Rome. Then the U.S. Church was overtaken by new revelations of clerical sexual abuse—which drew him into legal and financial dealings on a huge scale. Dolan commissioned a program whereby people who claimed to have been abused by priests of the archdiocese could receive compensation, as long as they waived their right to sue. (When a man used the program to accuse Theodore McCarrick, who was by then the Emeritus Archbishop of Washington, D.C., Dolan did the right thing and initiated an investigation. McCarrick, who denied any wrongdoing, was defrocked by Pope Francis.) Last fall, Dolan announced that the archdiocese planned to set aside more than three hundred million dollars to settle claims made against it by some thirteen hundred people —on top of roughly sixty-three million paid through the compensation program. To help fund these payments, Dolan has arranged for the sale of two of the archdiocese’s properties for more than half a billion dollars.

Dolan’s dealings with Trump have been confounding. He gave the prayers of invocation at both of Trump’s Inaugurations. In 2018, he called the first Trump Administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents at border crossings “unjust,” “un-biblical,” and a violation of “human dignity.” But two years later, during a mass call-in event of Catholic and conservative leaders, Dolan, greeted by Trump as “a great friend,” responded, “The feelings are mutual, sir,” and joked that his mother said he called Trump more often than he called her. On “Fox and Friends” a few days later, he said, “I really salute his leadership,” declaring that “the President has seemed particularly sensitive to the—what shall I say?—to the feelings of the religious community.” After Trump was elected in 2024, Dolan, citing their conversations, declared that the returning President “takes his Christian faith seriously.” A year ago, after Vice-President Vance claimed that the U.S. bishops ran refugee-resettlement programs with the goal of making money from the government, Dolan, on his weekly show, pushed back against that allegation, but not against the Administration’s policies toward refugees. His reticence was odd, because he has been a champion of Catholic Charities—one of the largest social-service agencies in the city—and he commissioned a vivid new mural at St. Patrick’s, which depicts the Church in New York as one of immigrants, and puts that history on view for the five million people who visit the cathedral each year. In accommodating Trump, though, Dolan aligned himself with a large proportion of American Catholics—and with plenty of other U.S. bishops and clergy.

As Archbishop, Hicks will be in a position to do things differently from the bully pulpit of New York—to carry forward Francis’s pastoral flexibility and identification with people on society’s margins. He speaks Spanish—no small thing, for a city where nearly a million people speak it as a first language. Through his work in El Salvador, he is the first New York Archbishop in memory to bring an everyday encounter with poverty to the job. And he takes office alongside the new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, whose emphasis on affordability aligns with the archdiocese’s work to provide food security and affordable housing to those in need. In these efforts, Hicks will have an apt collaborator in the new C.E.O. of the city’s branch of Catholic Charities: Antonio Fernández, a Spaniard who immigrated to Chicago and led the agency’s office first there and then in San Antonio. Fernández has already met with Mamdani three times.

Hicks’s tenure will coincide with Leo’s papacy, and it will surely unfold in close coördination with the Chicagoan in Rome. Like Leo, Hicks has been thrust into a daunting new role, and, as he settles in, he’ll doubtless get counsel from the cardinals he joins on Team U.S.A., particularly from Tobin, just across the Hudson, in Newark. He might keep Óscar Romero in mind. “When the government began killing priests, nuns and laity,” Hicks wrote, in a piece for the diocesan newspaper of Joliet, in 2022, “Archbishop Romero began to speak against the oppression with a loud and courageous voice. He became known as the ‘voice of the voiceless.’ ” This country does not remotely face the same magnitude of crisis, but the Trump Administration’s disregard of moral and legal norms will likely give the Pope’s new man in New York occasions to speak out. ♦

“My Father’s Shadow,” the first feature by the British Nigerian director Akinola Davies, Jr., has a strong yet elusive element of autobiography. Written by Davies’s older brother, Wale, the film follows two young brothers during Nigeria’s 1993 Presidential election, which offered hope for democracy after a decade of military dictatorship. In the movie’s first dramatic scene, achingly redolent of memory, the brothers—the older is eleven, the younger eight—loll in front of their family’s house, snacking, grousing, playing with paper action figures, trying to fill the solitude and the silence around them with banter and bravado. There’s a timeless feeling of childhood in the unstructured fluidity of their day, teetering on the border of dreaminess and boredom, its possibilities both expanded and limited by the boys’ imagination.

The brothers’ lives, and the movie itself, soon snap into action, with the arrival of their father, Folarin (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù). He’s been away for an unspecified while, and, instead of coming home to stay, he’s there to take the boys with him, on a bus to Lagos, where he works in a factory. (Their mother is out on a somewhat mysterious errand, and they leave before she gets back.) The experience is a novel one for the brothers, and their excited curiosity is spotlighted in glances: Davies’s narrative sensibility fastens not just on what the characters do but on what they see, and his schema of editing involves attention-grabbing cuts between observation and action, without blatant visual cues, as if to blur the distinction. The sense of events remembered is suggested by the movie’s evocation of a child’s-eye perspective and reinforced when, far into the story, the name of the younger brother is mentioned: Akinola. (Akinola is played by Godwin Egbo, and Akinola’s older brother, Olaremi, is played by the actor’s brother Chibuike Marvellous Egbo.)

Folarin’s haste in taking his sons suggests trouble. During the bus ride, the brothers glimpse headlines in passengers’ newspapers: the election has been held, but the results haven’t been announced; there have been reports of a massacre at a military base. Their father, a supporter of the opposition candidate, M. K. O. Abiola, gets into a dispute with a passenger who supports the military regime. (In the 1993 election, Abiola was widely believed to have won, but the race wasn’t called, and for nearly two weeks the whole country waited anxiously for the results.) From the children’s fragmentary observations, it seems that their father may be an opposition activist and that his trip has an unspoken political purpose.

One of the most powerful and original aspects of “My Father’s Shadow” is the richness of its context: the civic and social setting isn’t just a backdrop but an integral part of the drama, not explanatory but constitutive. At one point, the bus runs out of gas. Most of the passengers are content to wait for the driver to figure things out, but Folarin persuades a passing truck driver to take him and his sons the rest of the way. The boys don’t know Lagos at all, and Folarin, who grew up there, introduces them to the city proudly. The brothers gaze upon commonplace sights of crowds, peddlers, and buskers with fascination and wonder. But they also catch their father’s wariness when trucks filled with soldiers pass by. “Stupid people,” he says. It’s the first time that the regime’s enforcers make their presence felt but not the last, and even when they’re not in sight the menace that they represent weighs heavily on the story. It hangs over the boys’ experience of Lagos, both in their silent observation of distant events and in closeup encounters with their father’s friends and associates.

Most of the movie takes place in the span of a single day, and two clocks, political and personal, seem to be ticking out of synch, urgently and discordantly. Folarin’s political engagement emerges by chance when he runs into a long-unseen friend (Olarotimi Fakunle), whose nickname, Corridor, reflects his size and his ability to open paths through crowds. Corridor, who addresses Folarin as Kapo and “my leader,” is pessimistic about the chances for democracy. He thinks the regime is digging in and says that it has killed four of their fellow opposition supporters. The boys soon see another headline—“Military Deny Deaths at Bonny Camp”—and, when a fight breaks out in the street, Folarin hustles them away.

The second ticking clock involves an urgent private matter: Folarin hasn’t been paid in six months and shows up at the factory to confront his supervisor and demand his due. But the supervisor won’t be in until the night shift, so to kill time Folarin takes his sons on a series of visits to some friends and some favorite places. The resulting rambles through town, aboard motorcycle taxis on which all three pile up along with the drivers, become, for Folarin, trips through his own memories. He shows his sons sites of his youth, takes them to hang out with his crowd in a bar, and tells them romantic stories of his streetwise courtship of their mother. (A friend chimes in that the couple was considered “a local Romeo and Juliet.”) During a stopover for a quick swim in the sea—a scene that has overtones of the iconic swimming scene in “Moonlight”—Folarin recounts a traumatic story from his childhood: the death, by drowning, of his older brother, for whom Olaremi is named.

In this way, Akinola and Wale Davies establish two parallel awakenings for the brothers in the film, and everything that the boys see and hear—not just dialogue but all their ambient impressions—contribute to one or both. There is a political awakening, triggered by the fearful atmosphere surrounding the electoral crisis and the ensuing military crackdown, which in the film resonates as a shared national memory. The other awakening concerns a second order of memory: family memory. The brothers gradually develop a sense of their parents’ intimate history, which, given that it’s their own backstory, becomes intermingled with their identities and self-images.

All the knowledge—or ignorance—that a viewer brings to a movie, whatever knowledge a viewer gains about the making and the makers, is an inextricable part of the viewing experience. I knew little about Nigeria’s transition from military dictatorship to democracy, and so only from the film did I learn that the 1993 election was annulled by the country’s autocratic regime. In the movie, moments after the annulment is announced—on TV while father and sons are in a bar—gunshots are heard. As the streets of Lagos begin to roil with protest and repression, Folarin rushes to get his sons out of the city and to safety. I also learned, from reading interviews with Akinola Davies about “My Father’s Shadow,” that the movie’s unfolding of memory parallels his own. The brothers Davies, far from merely depicting their childhood memories, are in fact making a past for themselves and for a father they didn’t have.

Akinola and Wale Davies’s father died, of an epileptic seizure, when Akinola, born in 1985, was just twenty months old. Wale, like Olaremi in the film, is three years older, so they were just about the ages of the onscreen brothers during the events of 1993. For the movie, they have reconfigured their early days into a counterlife, drawing on what they remember, on family lore that their mother and other relatives have imprinted on them, and on their later visits to Lagos. Davies’s direction reflects the variety of threads on which the movie’s subjectivity is based; one of the film’s most striking scenes occurs in the brothers’ absence. They’ve been sent to play at a shuttered amusement park, whose elderly caretaker (Ayo Lijadu) is a friend of Folarin’s. The friend, recently widowed, reproaches himself at length for the way he treated his wife, and, for the duration of the man’s monologue, the camera holds Folarin in an extended closeup, hinting at unspoken marital discord and pangs of conscience of his own.

The conjuring that Davies and his brother perform has an overarchingly creative spirit, mirroring secondhand memories of their father in the movie’s finely observed detail and the unusual form that unites them. The action is punctuated by flash-frame collages that bring earlier and later observations together in a tumble of associations and hint at the drama’s mystical, phantasmagorical essence. Yet, at one crucial moment, the movie’s composed subjectivity detaches details from context, steering the story from piquant allusiveness into bewildering vagueness. It’s a surprising misstep for a filmmaker who, throughout the rest of “My Father’s Shadow,” evokes paternity as both symbolic and material power.

This scene aside, the director’s detective-like relationship to the movie’s fundamental matter—his father’s absence and the political clamor of his early childhood—is an emotional lever for the distinctive tone that he crafts. The historic crisis makes the personal tale reverberate with an inner immensity. The Davies brothers’ recovered memories yield a private mythology that is simultaneously familial, urban, and national. The unusual power of “My Father’s Shadow,” for all its subjectivity, comes from its elements of impersonality—from the seemingly scriptural authority with which memory is sublimated into myths and relationships into destinies. ♦

In Belle Burden’s memoir, “Strangers,” she describes the end of her marriage. It happened suddenly: until learning of her husband’s infidelity, through a voice mail from a stranger, she had no idea anything was wrong. Burden and her husband shared an apartment in Tribeca and a house on Martha’s Vineyard. They enjoyed romantic Friday-night dinners at a favorite restaurant. Their children thrived at élite private schools. Everything in their lives was curated and refined—ideal to a degree that suggested perfection. “I loved his clothes, the way he dressed for work,” Burden writes—“a navy or charcoal-gray suit, a crisp shirt, a tie with some color . . . the attire of a responsible and trustworthy man.” United in their distaste for “the modern version” of the Hamptons, with its “competing, dressing up, and traffic,” they felt at home at their club on the Vineyard, where members “gathered for cocktail parties in linen blazers and colorful dresses.” Even the smallest details were fine-tuned: Burden writes that, although her husband was busy at his hedge fund, he “started sourcing Halloween candy in September, looking for hard-to-find brands of sour candy to fill our bowl.”

Most of us aren’t as glamorous as Burden, who is a descendant of the Vanderbilts and a granddaughter of the fashion icon Babe Paley. (She remembers how, when she and her husband moved in together, she brought along her youthful belongings—“a mahogany bed, my grandfather’s desk, my father’s Sally Mann photographs.”) Still, we get it when she recounts falling for him: “As I saw him confidently descend the wide, steep stairs at the back of the apartment, tucking in his striped oxford shirt as he held the heavy door for me, I thought, I am going to marry him.” Even if we’ve only read F. Scott Fitzgerald, instead of living in the rarefied world he describes, his particular vision—poised, elegant, just a little debauched—can make us swoon. Or maybe we prefer some other vision: the James Dean good-girl aesthetic in Taylor Swift’s “Style,” or the Beth and Rip thing from “Yellowstone.”

Although style can be superficial, in the best case it reflects something more fundamental—knowledge, judgment, intention, discernment. Taste, in short. “Taste governs every free—as opposed to rote—human response,” Susan Sontag wrote in “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” from 1964. “There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion—and there is taste in acts, taste in morality,” even “taste in ideas.” In her essay, Sontag explored the notion of camp, the appreciation of which requires having “good taste in bad taste.” Today, meanwhile, artificial-intelligence researchers talk about “research taste”: they hope to create algorithms that have intuitions, as the best humans do, about which problems are interesting and which will hit dead ends. We use our taste to perceive, to decide, to think.

All this makes it sound like having taste is something we do—like a tool that we can wield. Often, though, the reverse is the case. “Either you think—or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you,” Nicole Diver muses, in Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night.” The world is always telling you what to like; as a result, taste is suspect. When are you expressing your true self, and when are you allowing others to reshape you? Visit one beautifully appointed Brooklyn apartment, and you’ll admire the owners’ taste. Visit ten identical apartments, and you’ll wonder if having perfect taste actually means having none at all.

The worry that taste is deceptive or distracting haunts seemingly every narrative in which it figures. In “Strangers,” Burden wonders how she failed to notice her husband’s unhappiness, and asks how he might have failed to notice it for himself. “I thought I was happy but I’m not,” he tells her. “I thought I wanted our life, but I don’t.” It’s a brutal way to leave a marriage. And yet later a friend tells Burden that the divorce has liberated her real personality, revealing someone who is “lighter, easier, more relaxed. . . . You seem to be letting go of a bigger set of cultural standards, of some sort of externally imposed idea of who you should be.” Living tastefully requires making many small, good decisions, and doing this successfully can give you the sensation of heading in the right direction. But the risk of crafting a picture-perfect life is that you’ll lose sight of the big picture.

Anna and Tom, the protagonists of Vincenzo Latronico’s novel “Perfection,” are “creative professionals” living as expats in Berlin. “Their exact titles varied depending on the job,” Latronico writes. “Web developer, graphic designer, online brand strategist”—the bottom line is that they create “differences.” When a new boutique hotel opens, it needs to communicate its uniqueness within the crowded landscape of taste. Anna and Tom accomplish this through minute shifts to the color palette, or the nuanced application of fonts. “Their style was simple, intimate, in keeping with an aesthetic that was starting to be seen all over the world,” Latronico explains—a “casual coolness” familiar from “every gourmet burger joint and concert poster.”

The couple’s good taste flows from their screens into the physical world, and then back into their screens. On social media, they see an endless grid of airy apartments filled with “stunning plants in bay windows, on plywood shelves, against herringbone parquet.” Soon, their apartment is a greenhouse, too—“Plants appeared out of nowhere, a fully developed skill,” Latronico writes—and this enriches the photographs that they post, when they list their apartment online, so that tourists can rent it. Similarly, after years of making the same sandwiches and spaghetti sauce, they become serious cooks, along with everyone else. Dinners at friends’ houses suddenly involve “elaborate salads sprinkled with seeds and fruit,” and each course is “accompanied by a chorus of compliments and technical remarks.” Latronico notes that “their interest hadn’t been planted by sly marketers, but appeared as if by osmosis, as they observed the little differences all around them.” As members of a tasteful generation, “they were all learning together.”

Collecting vinyl, clubbing at Berghain, contemplating polyamory—this is cool. But Anna and Tom don’t feel free. They’re trapped in the taste matrix that they’ve helped construct. It was their own good taste, after all, that originally compelled them to flee their provincial home town for Berlin; when newer incoming cool-hunters push up the cost of living in the city, it’s taste that nudges them toward Lisbon (“the new Berlin”), where they hope to repeat the cycle. The problem is that data moves faster than they do. When dinner-party pictures can instantaneously travel “to the other end of the planet, bouncing along in low Earth orbit or speeding across ocean ridges,” meaningful distinctions can’t last. In Lisbon, “it was all different, which was what they had wanted; and yet it was also somehow all the same.”

There’s something science-fictional about “Perfection,” and yet it’s an accurate account of how modern taste makes itself felt. Taste is a global force, driving migrations, shifting investments, and dividing us into groups and tribes. Because it’s been so heavily technologized, it now feels unitary, omnipresent—like a wave that sweeps us up but never breaks. Philosophers describe the “problem of expensive tastes”; today’s luxuries become tomorrow’s necessities. For Anna and Tom, that dynamic leads to exile. Driven out of the place they’re from, they’re priced out of most places they might want to go, and can’t be content in the ones they can afford. By the closing act of the novel, although their taste is everywhere, they’re citizens of nowhere.

Marguerite, the heroine of Helen DeWitt’s novella “The English Understand Wool,” is also trapped by taste. She’s spent her whole life in an atmosphere of unimaginable luxury and refinement. Her family lives in Marrakech, but she gets piano lessons from a teacher flown in from Paris. When Marguerite’s mother needs a new suit, she flies to Scotland to buy tweed from “a weaver of real gifts.” Everything in Marguerite’s life is meant to avoid being mauvais ton—in bad taste. During Ramadan, she and her parents go on vacation for the sake of their servants, who are paid anyway. “It would be mauvais ton to be waited upon by persons who were fasting,” Marguerite explains. “It would be mauvais ton to make the exigencies of religion an excuse to curtail their salaries.”

Something happens in Marguerite’s life—it would be mauvais ton to reveal it—and she is forced not just to leave her world of mannered privilege behind but to revise her understanding of who she is. She winds up in New York, where she sells a memoir in a lucrative book deal. But her editor, Bethany, isn’t happy with the draft. “Hi Marguerite,” Bethany writes. “This seems like a lot of backstory, making the reader wait for the main event.” The memoir should be a lurid tell-all, Bethany thinks; she suggests talking to a ghostwriter, who might “knock the text into shape.” Alternatively, she wonders, “Would it help if the two of us met and talked and I just recorded you on my cell to get it all down so there’s something to work with?”

In the end, it’s Marguerite’s good taste that prevents her from succumbing to the pressure to write a tawdry account of her life. This is one quite plausible theory of why taste is valuable: it’s certainly nice to make the most of the little things, but the performance of taste is actually a rehearsal for more important performances to come. If you cultivate taste today, then, later, when the spotlight finds you, you’ll have standards. Maybe you’ll draw on your experiences of discernment, propriety, and virtue as you rise to the occasion. (Of course, the inverse of this theory—that bad taste suggests you’ll perform poorly—is less appealing.)

It’s commonplace for our tastes to be better than we are. When we’re young, we can become very tasteful very quickly; we might know what to read but not how to act, or we might be easily fooled by cool. (When we’re older, meanwhile, we may be able to afford tasteful things that we don’t know how to appreciate.) In Jane Austen’s novels, intelligent young women with good taste often fall for apparently similar young men, only to discover that their suitors’ taste is only skin deep; they realize, to their further mortification, that they, too, are more tasteful than they are wise. But Austen’s heroines rally after this disappointment. Having previously concluded that pretty much everything is mauvais ton—“The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it,” Elizabeth Bennet says, in “Pride and Prejudice”—they commit to further developing their own faculties, becoming equal to the taste they’ve cultivated. This is another argument in favor of taste: it is one of our main mechanisms for self-improvement.

And yet it’s not quite right to see taste mainly as a means to an end. In DeWitt’s novella, Marguerite takes taste seriously in itself. She would never be so gauche as to chase self-improvement. Instead, she actually cares when jazz is performed with the right sort of swing. “The English understand wool,” DeWitt writes. “The French understand wine, cheese, bread. . . . The Germans understand precision, machines. . . . The Swiss understand discretion.” This understanding is focussed not on the self but on the thing. That’s the paradox of taste. Your taste can say a lot about you, and yet it’s not actually about you. Having good taste might orient you toward what’s good. It’s when you think you’re good, however, that you fall into its trap. ♦