The New Yorker Radio Hour29 Okt 2024

How Alpha Kappa Alpha Shaped Kamala Harris; Plus, Bill T. Jones

One aspect of the Vice-President’s background that’s relatively overlooked, and yet critical to understanding her, is her membership in the sorority Alpha Kappa Alpha. “In one of the bylaws,” the writer Jazmine Hughes tells David Remnick, “it says that the mission of the organization, among many, is to uplift the social status of the Negro.” Far from a Greek party club, A.K.A. "is an identity” to its members. When Donald Trump insinuated that Kamala Harris had “turned Black,” in his words, for political advantage, “a lot of people pointed to her time at Howard, and her membership in A.K.A., [as] a very specific Black American experience that they did not see from someone like Barack Obama.”

Jazmine Hughes’s reporting on “The Tight-Knit World of Kamala Harris’s Sorority” was published in the October 21, 2024, issue ofThe New Yorker.

Plus, Kai Wright, who hosts WNYC’s “Notes from America,” speaks with the choreographer Bill T. Jones. This week, the Brooklyn Academy of Music is re-mounting Jones’s work “Still/Here,” which caused a stir when it débuted at BAM, thirty years ago: The New Yorker’s own dance critic at the time, Arlene Croce, declared that she wasn’t going to review it. Now “Still/Here” is considered a landmark in contemporary dance, and Jones a towering figure.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(1068)

Malcolm Gladwell on “The American Way of Killing”

Malcolm Gladwell, a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, often uses ideas from the social sciences and epidemiology and applies them to surprising topics. But his new book tackles an issue that’s ...

18 Sep 24min

From In the Dark: The Journey

A woman who acts as a surrogate, carrying a child for someone else, is said to be going on a “journey.”Kayla Elliott started her surrogacy journey at the age of twenty-six. She gave birth to a baby gi...

16 Sep 53min

John Wilson and “The History of Concrete”

John Wilson is a documentary filmmaker, a comedian, and a contemporary philosopher. On his hit HBO show, “How To with John Wilson,” he wandered around New York City filming everyday life, pontificatin...

15 Sep 19min

Colin Kaepernick, Ten Years After Taking a Knee

Colin Kaepernick had a stunning rise as an N.F.L. quarterback after becoming a full-time starter, in 2012. He was a legitimate dual threat—as effective running the ball as he was throwing it. And, to ...

11 Sep 49min

Edwidge Danticat on Haitian Americans in a Time of Peril

For more than thirty years, Edwidge Danticat has written about the experiences of Haitians and Haitian Americans in fiction, memoir, and journalism. In The New Yorker, she has covered the ways in whic...

8 Sep 22min

Sarah Longwell, a Former Republican, on “How to Eat an Elephant”

The political consultant Sarah Longwell runs focus groups of voters, and she has a lot of advice for Democrats seeking to wrest control of the government from MAGA. Longwell, a former Republican disaf...

4 Sep 27min

Gloria Steinem in Conversation with David Remnick, from 2015

Gloria Steinem, who died on September 2nd, at the age of ninety-two, was one of the most influential figures of our time in politics and feminism. Her work shaped the ideas of generations of Americans...

3 Sep 15min

Ian Frazier and Samy Burch on “Coyote vs. Acme”

In the film “Coyote vs. Acme,” which was released this week, the ingenious but unlucky Wile E. Coyote sues the Acme Corporation for damages caused by its malfunctioning merchandise. That is also the p...

1 Sep 16min