Patrick Radden Keefe on “London Falling,” His Book About a Teen-Ager’s Mysterious Life and Death

When Patrick Radden Keefe was living in London while shooting the TV adaptation of his book “Say Nothing,” he heard about a teen-ager who fell from a luxurious apartment tower in mysterious circumstances. As he looked into it, he learned that the boy, Zac Brettler, had assumed an alternate identity as the son of a Russian oligarch, and had connected with dangerous people—just as mysterious. His story in The New Yorker, “A Teen’s Fatal Plunge into the London Underworld,” became the basis of his new book “London Falling.” “It’s not crime, per se, that interests me,” Radden Keefe tells David Remnick, “but the intermingling of the licit and illicit worlds, and the ways in which people deviate from a kind of conventional morality by degrees—and then the stories that they tell themselves about doing that.” He shares recordings from Brettler’s parents of conversations that they had as they sought to uncover what had happened to their son.

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The Sounds of Summer, with Fred Armisen

The comedian Fred Armisen has a thing for sound: he’s a former punk-rocker who gets a lot of comic mileage from doing accents, and he released an album of sound effects—a modern update of a novelty ge...

7 Heinä 17min

Alicia Keys’s New York Musical Goes on National Tour

The unofficial anthem of New York City is “Empire State of Mind,” the Jay-Z song with that unforgettable hook, sung by Alicia Keys. So it was only fitting that when New York celebrated the Knicks’ N.B...

3 Heinä 32min

From The Political Scene: Donald Trump’s Dangerous Politicization of America’s Spy Agencies

The Washington Roundtable is joined by Jeff Stein, the veteran political reporter and founding editor of the newsletter “Spytalk,” to examine Donald Trump’s appointment of Bill Pulte as the new acting...

30 Kesä 36min

America at 250: A View from Britain, with “The Rest Is History”

Americans tend to see the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War as milestones in world history that inaugurated the era of modern democracy. But the British, unsurprisingly, see these ...

26 Kesä 49min

From Critics at Large: Steve Spielberg's Blockbusters

When “Jaws” hit theatres in 1975, no one—neither the studio executives involved nor the film’s twenty-six-year-old director, Steven Spielberg—was betting on its success. But it dominated at the box of...

23 Kesä 51min

Hillary Clinton on How Donald Trump Lost the Iran War

The former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sat down with David Remnick at the 92nd Street Y, in New York, on Monday evening, after the Trump Administration announced a memorandum of understanding t...

18 Kesä 49min

The Sports Journalist Pablo Torre Has a Pulitzer, but Still Feels Like the “Turd” in the Pool

The sports journalist Pablo Torre recently won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for audio reporting for an investigation on his podcast, “Pablo Torre Finds Out.” Torre talks with David Remnick about the challe...

16 Kesä 21min

Rachel Goldberg-Polin on Losing a Son in Gaza

When Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s son, Hersh, was taken hostage by Hamas on October 7, 2023, she became a prominent spokesperson for the families of Israeli hostages. Throughout Hersh’s captivity, and then...

12 Kesä 39min