The Booker prize winning novelist Arundhati Roy looks back at her foremost influences in her memoir, Mother Mary Comes To Me. While her writing and activism are shaped by early circumstances – both financial and political – at the centre is her relationship with her mother, who she describes as ‘my shelter and my storm’.
The poet Sarah Howe won the TS Eliot prize for poetry for her debut collection, Loop of Jade. In her new work, Foretokens, she returns to the complex inheritance of family and language, as she tries to piece together the fragmentary, often mythical, early life of her Chinese mother, given away at birth.
The academic Lea Ypi travels through the history of Ottoman aristocracy to the making of modern Albania and the early days of communism as she attempts to retrace the life of her beloved grandmother. In her new book, Indignity: A Life Reimagined, she reveals the fragility of truth, as her own memories collide with secret police reports and newly discovered photographs.
One month after sending the National Guard into Washington, D.C. saying they would fight crime there, President Trump is so pleased with the results that he is discussing how to put federal troops onto the streets of cities across the country — from Chicago to New Orleans. It’s a potentially dramatic expansion of what has already become an unprecedented military deployment on domestic soil.
Today, we hear from residents of Washington about what life is like with the National Guard in town.
Guest:
Jessica Cheung, a senior audio producer at The New York Times
Background reading:
The District of Columbia sued the Trump administration last week, challenging the National Guard deployment and describing it as a “military occupation.”
Here’s what we know about Mr. Trump’s crime and immigration crackdown across the U.S.
For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.
Photo: Alex Kent for The New York Times
Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
When Amy Coney Barrett was appointed to the Supreme Court, she was in some ways an unlikely choice. She was living in South Bend, Indiana, not New York or D.C. She went to Notre Dame Law School, making her the only justice that didn’t go to Harvard or Yale. She’s the mother of seven kids. And, at the time of her appointment, she’d largely spent her career as a professor, with just under three years on a federal appeals court.
To put it bluntly, Amy Coney Barrett was an outsider.
But people close to President Donald Trump saw something: She was an originalist. A former clerk for Antonin Scalia. A devout Catholic with real intellectual bona fides. And a rising star in the conservative legal movement. In short, she was the ideal jurist to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
After her 2020 nomination, the left called her inexperienced and a religious zealot. They said her confirmation hearing was rushed, and that she would undermine trust in the Supreme Court.
But with a 52–48 vote, just six weeks before the 2020 presidential election, Barrett was confirmed—without one Democratic vote. She took her seat at the highest court at just 48 years old, and became only the fifth woman to ever serve on the Supreme Court.
Considering how our nation’s most powerful people stick around into their 80s, she’ll likely have a major impact on American law and life for decades to come.
We’re now five years into her time on the bench. And in a turn of events, CNN ran a piece last year titled “The Last Best Hope for Supreme Court Liberals: Amy Coney Barrett.”Newsweek ran “Amy Coney Barrett Is Liberal Justices’ ‘Best Chance’: SCOTUS Analyst ”and The New York Times ran “How Amy Coney Barrett Is Confounding the Right and the Left.”
How did we get from “dangerous, religious zealot” to “last best hope”?
On one hand, Barrett has done what one would expect of a Republican appointee: voting to overrule Roe v. Wade; voting to outlaw affirmative action; and voting against the administrative state.
At the same time, she has voted with liberal justices in some of the most pivotal cases—and in Trump-related cases, she is the member of the conservative supermajority who has sided in Trump’s favor the least.
In short, Barrett surprises. She just wrote a new book called Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution, where she makes the simple but salient points: Her job is not to like all of her decisions, nor is it to please the media or a president. It’s to follow the text of the Constitution, full stop.
On Thursday night Bari sat down for a rare conversation with Justice Barrett at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall in New York City.
Bari also asks her about key cases like Dobbsv. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the birthright citizenship case, nationwide injunctions, the shadow docket, transgender minors getting medical treatment, her willingness to dissent with liberal justices, her response to people who call her an “evil DEI hire,” and so much more.
Texas is now making it easier for parents to exempt their children from school vaccination requirements. This comes just after the state saw the worst measles outbreak in a generation that took the lives of two children. Meanwhile Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is limiting eligibility for the covid vaccine—just as the virus is spreading once again.array(3) {
[0]=>
string(20) "https://www.tpr.org/"
[1]=>
string(0) ""
[2]=>
string(1) "0"
}
As kids across America head back to school, Gilbert Cruz, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, is thinking about the books he read when he was in school.
On today’s Sunday Special, Gilbert talks with the Book Review editor Sadie Stein and the author Louis Sachar (“Wayside School” series, “Holes”) about the books they read when they were students, and ways to encourage young readers today to keep reading.
Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
It can feel like all is lost under Trump 2.0, but America has faced extremely dark chapters before and come out on the other side. Heather Cox Richardson—professor, historian and author of the most-read newsletter on Substack, Letters from an American—joins the show to share her long-view approach for this shortsighted era. She walks Dan through the biggest challenges to American democracy throughout history, how she believes we got to this MAGA moment, and what fuels her optimism about the future of the country.
For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.
In a few weeks the government’s funding will run out. If Democrats vote for a new spending bill, they will be funding Trump’s autocratic takeover. What should they do?
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
This column read was produced by our executive producer, Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Jack McCordick. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with mixing by Aman Sahota. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
It’s the Saturday Show: one from the week, one from the vault. Mike revisits his take on immigration—spurred by a CNN piece and a Pesca Profundities post—arguing the media too often flattens a hard issue into easy labels. Courts have now allowed parts of Trump’s approach, forcing a distinction between “shameful” and “unconstitutional.” From the vault, David Leonhardt on why Democrats’ stance can sound like “more is good, less is racist. Come See Mike Pesca at Open Debate
Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Meanwhile, Putin told officials in Kyiv he was willing to try and negotiate the end the war in Ukraine should “common sense prevail.” However, he also threatened that he was prepared to continue should he not find terms agreeable.
Find more of our programs online. Listen to 1A sponsor-free by signing up for 1A+ at plus.npr.org/the1a.
