Lesley Stahl, a linchpin of CBS News, began at the network in 1971, covering major events such as Watergate, and for many years has been a correspondent on “60 Minutes.” But right now it’s a perilous time for CBS News, which has been sued by Donald Trump for twenty billion dollars over the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris during the 2024 Presidential campaign. Its owner, Paramount, seems likely to settle, and corporate pressure on journalists at CBS has been so intense that Bill Owens, the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” and Wendy McMahon, the head of CBS News, resigned in protest. Owens’s departure was “a punch in the stomach,” Stahl tells David Remnick in a recent interview, “one of those punches where you almost can’t breathe.” And far worse could happen in a settlement with Trump, which would compromise the integrity of the premier investigative program on broadcast news. “I’m already beginning to think about mourning, grieving,” Stahl says. “I know there’s going to be a settlement. . . . And then we will hopefully still be around, turning a new page, and finding out what that new page is going to look like.” Although she describes herself as “Pollyannaish,” Stahl acknowledges that she is “pessimistic about the future for all press today. . . . The public has lost faith in us as an institution. So we’re in very dark times.” 

In honor of The New Yorker’s centennial this year, the magazine’s staff writers are pulling out some classics from the long history of the publication. Louisa Thomas, The New Yorker’s sports correspondent, naturally gravitated to a story about baseball with a title only comprehensible to baseball aficionados: “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.” The essay was by no less a writer than the author John Updike, and the “Kid” of the title was Ted Williams, the Hall of Fame hitter who spent nineteen years on the Boston Red Sox. By happenstance, Updike joined the crowd at Fenway Park for Williams’s last game before his retirement, in 1960. Thomas, looking at subtle word changes that Updike made as he was working on the piece, reflects on the writer’s craft and the ballplayer’s. “Marginal differences really matter,” she says. “And it’s those marginal differences that are the difference between a pop-up, a long fly, and a home run. Updike really understood that, and so did Williams.”Plus, a visit with one of the great modern practitioners of the earworm, Charles Strouse, who wrote music for “Bye Bye Birdie” and “Annie,” and the theme to “All in the Family.” Strouse died this month at ninety-six. In one of his last interviews he gave, in 2023, he spoke with the Radio Hour’s Jeffrey Masters about his rivalry with Stephen Sondheim. “Stephen and I were friendly enemies. He didn’t like me much. I didn’t like him less.” 

In recent years, there’s been a stark uptick in the level of violence and hate crimes that Asian Americans have experienced, but the “precarity of the Asian American experience is not new,” Michael Luo tells David Remnick. Luo is a longtime New Yorker editor, and the author of a new book about the Chinese American experience. He looks at how tensions over labor—with native-born workers often blaming immigrants for their exploitation by business interests—intersected with racial and religious prejudice, culminating in episodes of extraordinary violence and laws that denied immigrants civil rights and excluded new arrivals from Asia. “The way politicians, craven politicians, talk about immigrants today could be just torn from the nineteenth century,” he points out. “I do think that the ‘stranger’ label is still there.” But Luo also uncovers the extraordinary support of Chinese Americans from Frederick Douglass, who argued extensively for the immigrants’ political participation and civil rights. “Asian American history is American history,” Luo says. “I want all the dads who are reading about World War Two, . . . who are interested in Civil War literature, to read about this different racial conflagration.” Luo’s book is “Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America.”

As Donald Trump continues to launch unprecedented and innovative attacks on immigrants, civic institutions, and the rule of law, the Democratic response has been—in the eyes of many observers—tepid and inadequate. One answer to the sense of desperation came from Senator Cory Booker, who, on March 31st, launched a marathon speech on the Senate floor, calling on Americans to resist authoritarianism. Booker beat the record previously held by Senator Strom Thurmond’s twenty-four-hour-long filibuster of the Civil Rights Act, in 1957, and he spoke in detail about Americans who are in desperate straits because of federal job cuts and budget slashing. “We knew . . . if I could last twenty-four hours and eighteen minutes, that we could potentially command some attention from the public,” Booker tells David Remnick. “That’s the key here . . . to deal with the poverty of empathy we have in our nation right now.” Yet Booker bridles as Remnick asks about Democratic strategy to resist the Administration’s attacks. Instead, he emphasized the need for “Republicans of good conscience” to step up. “Playing this as a partisan game cheapens the larger cause of the country,” he argues. “This is the time that America needs moral leadership, and not political leadership.”

Elon Musk, who’s chainsawing the federal government, is not merely a chaos agent, as he is sometimes described. Jill Lepore, the best-selling author of “These Truths” and other books, says that Musk is animated by obsessions and a sense of mission he acquired through reading, and misreading, science fiction. “When he keeps saying, you know, ‘We’re at a fork in the road. The future of human civilization depends on this election,’ he means SpaceX,” she tells David Remnick. “He means . . . ‘I need to take these rockets to colonize Mars and that’s only going to happen through Trump.’ ” The massive-scale reduction in social services he is enacting through DOGE, Lepore thinks, is tied to this objective. “Although there may be billions of [people] suffering here on planet Earth today, those are miniscule compared to the calculation of the needs of the billions of humans that will one day ever live if we can gain escape velocity from planet Earth. . . . That is, in fact, the math that lies behind DOGE.” Lepore’s BBC radio series on the SpaceX C.E.O. is called “X-Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story.” Plus, an organizer of the grassroots anti-Musk effort TeslaTakedown speaks with the Radio Hour about how she got involved, and the risks  involved in doing so. that poses. “It’s a scary place we all find ourselves in,” Patty Hoyt tells the New Yorker Radio Hour producer Adam Howard. “And I won’t stop. But I am afraid.”

Katie Kitamura’s fifth novel is “Audition,” and it focusses on a middle-aged actress and her ambiguous relationship with a much younger man. Kitamura tells the critic Jennifer Wilson that she thought for a long time about an actress as protagonist, as a way to highlight the roles women play, and to provoke questions about agency. “I teach creative writing, and in class often ... if there is a character who the group feels doesn't have agency, that is often brought up as a criticism of the character,” she tells Wilson. Other students will say, “ ‘She doesn't have any agency,’ as if a character without agency is implausible or in some way not compelling in narrative terms. But of course, the reality is very few of us have total agency. I think we operate under the illusion or the impression that we have a great deal of agency. But in reality when you look at your life, our choices are quite constricted.” “Audition” comes out this week.  

The microchip maker Nvidia is a Silicon Valley colossus. After years as a runner-up to Intel and Qualcomm, Nvidia has all but cornered the market on the parallel processors essential for artificial-intelligence programs like ChatGPT. “Nvidia was there at the beginning of A.I.,” the tech journalist Stephen Witt tells David Remnick. “They really kind of made these systems work for the first time. We think of A.I. as a software revolution, something called neural nets, but A.I. is also a hardware revolution.” In The New Yorker, Stephen Witt profiled Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s brilliant and idiosyncratic co-founder and C.E.O. His new book is “The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip.” Until recently, Nvidia was the most valuable company in the world, but its stock price has been volatile, posting the largest single-day loss in history in January. But the company’s story is only partially a business story; it’s also one about global superpowers, and who will decide the future. If China takes military action against Taiwan, as it has indicated it might, the move could wrest control of the manufacturing of Nvidia microchips from a Taiwanese firm, which is now investing in a massive production facility in the U.S. “Maybe what’s happening,” Witt speculates, is that “this kind of labor advantage that Asia had over the United States for a long time, maybe in the age of robots that labor advantage is going to go away. And then it doesn’t matter where we put the factory. The only thing that matters is, you know, is there enough power to supply it?” Plus, the staff writer Joshua Rothman has long been fascinated with A.I.—he even interviewed its “godfather,” Geoffrey Hinton, for The New Yorker Radio Hour. But Rothman has become increasingly concerned about a lack of public and political debate over A.I.—and about how thoroughly it may transform our lives. “Often, if you talk to people who are really close to the technology, the timelines they quote for really reaching transformative levels of intelligence are, like, shockingly soon,” he tells Remnick. “If we’re worried about the incompetence of government, on whatever side of that you situate yourself, we should worry about automated government. For example, an A.I. decides the length of a sentence in a criminal conviction, or an A.I. decides whether you qualify for Medicaid. Basically, we’ll have less of a say in how things go and computers will have more of a say.”Rothman’s essay “Are We Taking A.I. Seriously Enough?” appears in his weekly column, Open Questions.

With congressional Republicans unwilling to put any checks on an Administration breaking norms and issuing illegal orders, the focus has shifted to the Democratic opposition—or the lack thereof.  Democrats like Chris Murphy, the junior senator from Connecticut, have vehemently disagreed with party leaders’ reversion to business as usual. Murphy opposed Senator Chuck Schumer’s negotiation to pass the Republican budget and keep the government running; he advocated for the Democrats to skip the President’s joint address to Congress en masse. Murphy believes that the Democrats have a winning formula if they stick to a populist, anti-big-money agenda. But, he concedes, some of his colleagues are playing normal politics, “where we try to become more popular than Republicans. People like me believe that it won’t matter if we’re more popular than them, because the rules won’t allow us to run a fair election.” By attacking democratic institutions, law firms, and other allies, he thinks, Republicans can insure that their party wins indefinitely, as in failed democracies around the world.  “If you think that democracy is the No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 story,” Murphy tells David Remnick, “then you have to act like it. You need to show that you’re willing to take a political risk.” 

The far right in Israel has long dreamed of settling all of the West Bank, and Gaza, too—annexing the territories to create the land they refer to as Greater Israel. The Trump Administration might not object: Elise Stefanik, Trump’s pick for Ambassador to the United Nations, has agreed that Israel has a “biblical right” to the West Bank. “I think Israel is just more emboldened with Trump in office,” says Hisham Awartani, who lives in Ramallah and is now attending Brown University. The reporter Suzanne Gaber has been covering Awartani and his family since he was left paralyzed by a shooting in Burlington, Vermont. (Two other Palestinian students, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ali Ahmad, were also shot and injured.) Gaber visited the Awartanis recently in Ramallah to find out how people in the West Bank are thinking about annexation. But, rather than a future event that might happen, the Awartanis describe annexation as a process already well underway. “I’m twenty-one years old,” Hisham tells Gaber. “ In the period of time that I’ve been alive, it’s been a slow push.  It’s, like, I’m the frog in the boiling pot.”

Kaitlan Collins was only a couple years out of college when she became a White House correspondent for Tucker Carlson’s the Daily Caller. Collins stayed in the White House when she went over to CNN during Donald Trump’s first term, and she returned for his second. Trump has made his disdain for CNN clear—and he’s not a big fan of Collins, either. At one point during Trump’s first term, she was barred from a press conference; he called her a “nasty person” during a Presidential campaign interview. There’s never been a White House so overtly hostile to the press than the second Trump Administration, penalizing news organizations for not conforming to the President’s wishes. But, as Collins tells the staff writer Clare Malone, she believes that Trump is “someone who seeks the validation of the press as much as he criticizes them publicly. And so, you know, it doesn’t really bother me when he gets upset at my question.”

Two weeks after the Inauguration of Donald Trump, Elon Musk tweeted, “We spent the weekend feeding USAID into a wood chipper.” Musk was referring to the Agency for International Development, an agency which supports global health and economic development, and which has saved millions of lives around the world. “A viper’s nest of radical-left lunatics,” Musk called it. U.S.A.I.D.’s funding is authorized by Congress, and its work is a crucial element of American soft power. DOGE has decimated the agency with cuts so sudden and precipitous that federal workers stationed in conflict zones were stranded without safe passage home, as their own government publicly maligned them for alleged fraud and corruption.  Courts have blocked aspects of the federal purge of U.S.A.I.D., but it’s not clear if workers can be rehired and contracts restarted, or whether the damage is done.    In January, 2022, Atul Gawande, a surgeon and leading public health expert who has written for The New Yorker since 1998, was sworn in as assistant administrator for global health at U.S.A.I.D. He resigned as the new administration came to power, and is watching in shock as Trump and Musk make U.S.A.I.D. a guinea pig for the government-wide purge now under way. U.S.A.I.D. was, he admits, a soft target for MAGA—helping people in faraway countries. Gawande calls U.S.A.I.D. “America at its best.” But with Trump and Musk, “there’s a different world view at play here,” he says. “Power is what matters, not impact.”

Recently, the former New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez was sentenced to eleven years in prison for accepting bribes in cash and gold worth more than half a million dollars. He is the first person sentenced to prison for crimes committed in the Senate in more than forty years. Menendez did favors for the government of Egypt while he was the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, and intervened in criminal cases against the businessmen who were bribing him. In New York, he broke down in tears before  a federal judge, pleading for leniency. Upon emerging from the courtroom, he made a thinly veiled plea to the man he had once voted to impeach. “President Trump is right,” Menendez declared to news cameras. “This process is political, and it’s corrupted to the core. I hope President Trump cleans up the cesspool and restores the integrity to the system.”  WNYC’s New Jersey reporter Nancy Solomon explores how the son of working-class immigrants from Cuba scaled the heights of American politics, and then fell dramatically. But will he serve the time? Solomon speaks with the constitutional-law professor Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, who says, “It’s hard to know who Trump will pardon next. One of the more recent pardons was for the former governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich. He was a Democrat. . . .  [Trump] seems much more  interested in undermining anti-corruption laws left, right, and center.”