What Exactly Does “Woke” Mean, and How Did It Become so Powerful?

What Exactly Does “Woke” Mean, and How Did It Become so Powerful?

Many on the right blame “wokeness” for all of America’s ills—everything from deadly mass shootings to lower military recruitment. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, recently signed a so-called Stop WOKE Act into law, and made the issue the center of his midterm victory speech. In Washington, there has been talk in the House of forming an “anti-woke caucus.” “I think ‘woke’ is a very interesting term right now, because I think it’s an unusable word—although it is used all the time—because it doesn’t actually mean anything,” the linguist and lexicographer Tony Thorne, the author of “Dictionary of Contemporary Slang,” tells David Remnick.

Plus, the poet Robin Coste Lewis talks with the staff writer Hilton Als about how suffering a traumatic brian injury led her to a career in poetry. Her most recent book, “To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness,” was published last month.

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Episoder(1021)

Conan O’Brien on What Can Go Wrong at the Oscars

Conan O’Brien on What Can Go Wrong at the Oscars

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Richard Brody Presents the 2026 Brody Awards

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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. You...

10 Feb 25min

Ben Shapiro Is Waging Battle Inside the MAGA Movement

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Ben Shapiro, the host of his eponymous podcast and the co-founder of the conservative website the Daily Wire, has lambasted the left and the Democratic Party for decades. Recently, though, Shapiro has...

6 Feb 49min

The City of Minneapolis vs. Donald Trump

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The staff writers Emily Witt and Ruby Cramer discuss the situation in Minneapolis, a city effectively under siege by militaristic federal agents. “This is a city where there’s a police force of about ...

30 Jan 49min

How Bari Weiss Is Changing CBS News

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Last October, Bari Weiss—best-known as a contrarian opinion writer who launched the right-leaning Free Press—was appointed the new editor-in-chief of CBS News. Donald Trump has called her new regime “...

27 Jan 23min

How Tucker Carlson Became the Prophet of MAGA

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Tucker Carlson has long been a standard-bearer for far-right views, such as the racist conspiracy theory known as the “great replacement.” He recently did a chatty interview with the white supremacist...

23 Jan 27min

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