Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.

Summary

Summary of "Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I." on The New Yorker Radio Hour

Podcast Information:

• Title: The New Yorker Radio Hour
• Host/Author: WNYC Studios and The New Yorker
• Host: David Remnick
• Episode Title: Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.
• Release Date: February 7, 2025

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Introduction

In the episode titled "Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I.," hosted by David Remnick, the conversation centers around the Trump administration's aggressive stance against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. David Remnick engages with Jelani Cobb, a historian, dean of Columbia University's journalism school, and a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, to dissect the administration's motivations, strategies, and the broader implications for academia, journalism, and American society.

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Trump's Assault on DEI

Characterizing DEI as Discrimination

David Remnick opens the discussion by highlighting how the Trump administration has labeled DEI programs as discriminatory. He notes, "Many of the most draconian measures have been justified as emergency actions to root out DEI" (00:46). These measures include:

• Freezing Federal Grants: The administration temporarily froze trillions of dollars in federal grants, later rescinding them, under the guise of anti-DEI actions.
• Blaming Tragedies on DEI: Remnick mentions the president's suggestion that a tragic plane crash in Washington might be a result of DEI policies (09:11).

---

Impact on Academia and Journalism

Concerns in Academia

Jelani Cobb discusses the fears within academic circles, particularly at Columbia University:

• Funding Restrictions: Scholars worry that research touching on sensitive subjects may not receive necessary funding. Cobb states, "there are people who worry that their work... won't be able to get funding" (02:52).
• Political Pressure and Tenure: Junior faculty fear that research related to race, gender, or sexuality could jeopardize their tenure prospects (03:53).

Challenges in Journalism

Cobb also touches upon the media's struggles under the administration's pressure:

• Reconciliation with Trumpism: The mainstream press has shown signs of reconciliation with the Trump administration, possibly due to corporate interests. Cobb observes, "the reconciliation has happened... emerging on a much bigger scale" (19:11).

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Understanding DEI and Its Abuses

DEI at Its Best

According to Cobb, DEI initiatives aim to:

• Promote Inclusive Participation: Ensuring that diverse groups have opportunities within institutions.
• Address Disparities: Tackling historical and systemic barriers that impede equal participation. For example, only about 16-17% of journalists belong to African American, Latino, Asian American, or Native American groups, despite these populations comprising nearly 40% of the U.S. (05:48, 07:12).

Abuses and Criticisms

Cobb acknowledges that DEI can be misused:

• Superficial Implementation: Critics argue that DEI sometimes amounts to "checking boxes" without meaningful change. He notes, "If anyone said that this institution discriminates, they can say, look at our DEI policies" (07:14).
• Ineffective Training: DEI training sessions often fail to leave participants with substantial knowledge or impact (08:30).

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Historical Parallels with McCarthyism

Comparing DEI Opposition to the Red Scare

Cobb draws parallels between the current administration's tactics and the McCarthy era's anti-communist campaigns:

• Scapegoating DEI: Similar to how anything labeled as "communist" was tainted, DEI has become a catch-all excuse for various societal issues (26:11).
• Broad Accusations: DEI is blamed for unrelated tragedies and problems, reminiscent of McCarthy's broad and unfounded accusations (26:11).

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Political and Community Reactions

Impact on Minority Voting Patterns

Contrary to expectations, Trump has seen increased support among Black and Latino communities:

• Strategic Appeal: Cobb explains that Trump's ability to "own both sides of an issue" and leverage gender dynamics has attracted votes from these communities, despite traditional alignments (11:37).

Public Disengagement and Psychological Fatigue

There is a growing sense of exhaustion among the general public regarding news consumption:

• Media Avoidance: Many individuals, including those outside the media industry, report avoiding news sources entirely, feeling overwhelmed and protective of their mental well-being (21:01).

---

Implications of Executive Orders on Education

Restricting DEI in Schools

Trump's executive orders aim to:

• Divert Federal Funds: Prevent schools from teaching what he terms "discriminatory equity ideology."
• Sanction Non-Compliance: Threaten schools with sanctions if they teach that individuals can be oppressed based on race (12:55).

Practical Challenges for Educators

Cobb highlights the uncertainties teachers face:

• Fear of Harassment: Educators might become targets of harassment, both online and offline (13:19).
• Curriculum Constraints: Unclear guidelines make it difficult for teachers to navigate what can be taught without repercussions (13:19).

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Media's Response and Challenges

Corporate Influences and Conflicts of Interest

Cobb points out that major media corporations may prioritize their broader business interests over journalistic integrity:

• Settling Lawsuits: Examples include ABC News settling with Trump for $15 million, suggesting that corporate interests can override editorial impartiality (19:11).

Journalistic Morale and Purpose

There is a palpable decline in morale among journalists:

• Sense of Ineffectiveness: Many journalists feel that their efforts to highlight injustices are not making a significant impact, leading to disillusionment (22:12).
• Encouraging Perseverance: Cobb advises emerging journalists to continue their work despite unpredictable outcomes, emphasizing the importance of persistence (22:12).

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Strategies of the Trump Administration

Flooding the Information Space

Remnick discusses Steve Bannon's strategy of overwhelming the media with information to distract and dominate the narrative:

• Short-Term Effectiveness: Cobb likens this to a boxer's strategy of incessant attacks, which may work temporarily but is unsustainable over the long term (23:42).

Sustainability Concerns

Cobb argues that such strategies are not viable indefinitely:

• Aging Leadership: The physical and strategic limitations of a 78-year-old president like Trump mean that the flooding strategy cannot be maintained forever (24:26).
• Emerging Crises: Future crises may require genuine governance, which the current tactic does not address effectively (25:04).

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Future Outlook on DEI

Potential Decline of DEI Opposition

Cobb believes that the intense focus on DEI as a political and cultural target is likely a temporary "fever":

• Governance Realities: The necessity to address actual governance issues will eventually shift the focus away from perpetual attacks on DEI (27:23).
• Public Fatigue: Continuous negative campaigning may lead to diminishing returns as public attention wanes (27:25).

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Conclusion

The episode "Trump’s Boogeyman: D.E.I." provides a comprehensive analysis of the Trump administration's targeted assault on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives. Through the insights of Jelani Cobb, the discussion reveals the multifaceted impact on academia, journalism, and societal norms. Historical parallels with McCarthyism underscore the deep-seated strategies used to scapegoat DEI, while the sustainability of such tactics remains questionable. As the political landscape evolves, the long-term effects on DEI and American institutions will continue to unfold, highlighting the resilience and challenges faced by those advocating for inclusivity and equity.

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Notable Quotes:

• Jelani Cobb on Academic Fears: "There are people who worry that their work... won't be able to get funding." (02:52)

• On DEI's Best Intentions: "DEI represents an effort... to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to participate." (05:48)

• Historical Parallels: "If there's a terrible tragedy... that can be blamed on DEI." (26:11)

• Journalistic Morale: "We keep doing the work until we get to that breakthrough moment where it actually, really, really does make a difference." (22:12)

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Timestamp Reference Key:

• [00:46] – Introduction of Trump's actions against DEI
• [02:52] – Concerns in academia
• [03:53] – Tenure and career fears
• [05:48] – DEI at its best
• [07:12] – Historical disparities in journalism
• [07:14] – Criticism of DEI as mere policy
• [08:30] – Skepticism toward DEI training
• [09:11] – Blaming DEI for tragedies
• [11:37] – Shift in minority voting patterns
• [12:55] – Executive orders on education
• [13:19] – Practical challenges for teachers
• [14:21] – Continuation of discussion with Cobb
• [19:11] – Media's reconciliation with Trump
• [21:01] – Public and media exhaustion
• [21:30] – Journalistic morale
• [22:12] – Encouragement for journalists
• [23:42] – Trump's information flooding strategy
• [24:26] – Sustainability of Trump's strategies
• [25:04] – Importance of navigating crises
• [26:11] – DEI as a scapegoat
• [27:23] – Potential decline of DEI attacks

Transcript

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[Jelani Cobb]

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[David Remnick]

Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick.

Well, the opening weeks of the Trump administration seem to have followed a mantra from Facebook's earlier years. Move fast and break things and break them into a thousand pieces before anyone will notice. Last week we woke up to Elon Musk bragging that he was feeding a congressionally authorized agency with a 40 plus billion dollar budget into, and I quote, a wood chipper. Breaking things at warp speed is very much the point now. Many of the most draconian measures have been justified as emergency actions to root out dei, diversity, equity and inclusion. These are typically programs put in place by large companies or institutions or government agencies to encourage more diverse workplaces. But the administration characterizes DEI as discrimination and broadly as the root of so much of what ails this nation. The temporary freeze of trillions of dollars in federal grants since rescinded was described as an anti DEI measure. And the tragic plane crash in Washington the president also suggested might well be the result of, yes, dei. To understand what's happening here and why, I sat down the other day with Jelani Cobb. Jelani Cobb is a longtime staff writer at the New Yorker, and he's a historian and the dean of Columbia University's journalism school.

Jelani, barely two or three weeks in office, Donald Trump has gone after academia, journalism, and diversity. So you're a dean, you're a journalist, and guess what? So how are you holding up?

[Jelani Cobb]

You know, it's kind of like a barrage from all directions. And the one thing that those disparate communities all seem to have in common is a sense of despair about, you know, what happens next and how do we navigate the trials of this moment?

[David Remnick]

Let's break this down then. What are the fears that you're sensing? For example, in academia, where you're spending most of your days, you're at Columbia University.

[Jelani Cobb]

In academia, the fears range. So there are people who worry that their work, if it touches upon any sensitive subject matter or anything that the Trump administration looks unfavorably upon, that they won't be able to get funding. And in some instances, these are projects that people have worked on for years. And so that's a huge fear for people. And then there's the kind of political pressure. I've talked to untenured junior faculty who worry that if they research a subject related to race or related to gender, related to sexuality or gender identity, that that may make it more difficult for them to get tenure or more difficult for them to get grants and that kind of thing. So very much connected to career concerns.

[David Remnick]

Are those reasonable concerns, Jelani, since the people that are making the tenure decisions are senior faculty and deans.

[Jelani Cobb]

Well, I think that there's a question of whether or not university administrators will stand up for faculty who research topics that are unpopular. There's the maybe not so unreasonable fear that you could become a target of a news story that paints you to be, you know, a kind of caricature of what you actually are interested in researching. One of the things that's really notable is the extent to which people have begun kind of pulling the historical literature on universities during the McCarthy period that talk about how we navigated that particular crisis.

[David Remnick]

What executive orders that have been issued so far related to DEI concern you most?

[Jelani Cobb]

In the conversations I've had with people, some of whom are fairly knowledgeable on this, they've been of the more than one way to skin a cat persuasion. So if they're not able to freeze federal funds around DEI or related subject matter, there may be other ways of kind of arm twisting people into compliance. There's fear about endowment taxes being levied against large universities, particularly wealthy ones. There are fears about whether or not students from abroad will be able to get visas with the same sort of ease that they once did. And that will of course, have a financial implication. And then there's the kind of other power of the purse string, which is the ability coming out of the civil rights movement, the ability to withhold federal funding for institutions that discriminate on the basis of race. The conversation around DEI has overwhelmingly pointed to DEI as a kind of anti white discrimination.

[David Remnick]

Well, Jelani, what is DEI at its best, in your view, and are there abuses of it, and how would you describe them?

[Jelani Cobb]

So at its best, DEI represents an effort from companies, institutions, various kind of walks of American life to make sure that everyone has an opportunity to participate in the actions or the work of those institutions. And recognizing the kind of disparities that are baked into American life, it is an attempt to undo them. So, for instance, for African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and Native Americans collectively represent almost 40% of the population in this country, but only about 16 to 17% of the journalists in this country belong to one of those groups. And often those disparities reflect age old prohibitions and barriers to entry for different groups. And sometimes they just represent a kind of inertia of networks that people hire people who they know, people who they know tend to have similar backgrounds and that kind of thing. And diversity is meant to be a kind of self aware approach to saying, hey, as opposed to just operating in the way that we always had. Let's try to make sure that we reach out to people who might not have been considered previously.

[David Remnick]

And what's so terrible about that?

[Jelani Cobb]

Well, here's the thing. Prior to the last few years, certainly prior to the rise of Donald Trump as a political force, most of the criticism you saw of DEI was from the left. You know, people felt that it was toothless. That was kind of checking boxes. When you looked at between 2010 and 2020, the number of non white lawyers in the United States, you know, according to the American Bar association, went from 11% to 14%, which means that the number of white lawyers in the United States was. Went from 89% down to 86. But steep drop in that time frame. Yeah, that kind of progress was seen as really incremental. And in fact, the most cynical views of DEI saw it as a kind of corporate insurance. If anyone said that this institution discriminates, they can say, look at our DEI policies. Well, yeah, and they may be toothless.

[David Remnick]

And there was a book about this called Diversity Inc. I don't know if you read this and you know, if you stick around long enough at any company, sooner or later you'll be sent to a diversity training.

[Jelani Cobb]

Right.

[David Remnick]

Which I have to say, certainly one of them that I went to seemed like beside the point at best and a racket at worst, you know, and didn't really have any positive impact on anybody's consciousness, much less hiring. So there can be an abuse of it. No.

[Jelani Cobb]

So, I mean, I think that there's a kind of skeptical way of looking at this. And certainly having sat through various trainings of various sorts, I didn't necessarily leave any of them feeling as if I was brimming with new knowledge.

[David Remnick]

Yeah, that's put in a much more elegant way. I appreciate that.

But here's what causes.

What causes a President of the United States on the eve of a horrible tragedy like a plane crash.

With seeming.

Sincerity and all the chutzpah in the world to blame that horrible accident and the deaths of dozens of people on DEI and get away with it.

[Jelani Cobb]

So I think that what's happened around Trump, and, you know, we mentioned, you know, the McCarthy era before, and I think there's an important parallel between Trump and McCarthy, lots of important parallels. But in this one particular case, you know, everything that was associated with Joseph McCarthy happened prior to Joseph McCarthy. He didn't originate any of these things, but he did have the instinctive ability to see where the crowd was headed and run out to the front of it. And I think that Donald Trump did very much the same with the politics of racial resentment that have come to be a defining feature, among other things, of the Trump era. He understood that there was a set of people, and this is kind of statistically borne out, who felt that white Americans were particularly disadvantaged, and what they were seeking was a kind of public redress, something that would say that the government was looking out for them, too. And so for all of the toothlessness of dei, in some circumstances, it still made a really potent target to say that you're uprooting it, that you're removing it. And then you've also heard that language bandied about from lots of people in Trump's circle, particularly Elon Musk, to a point that it becomes kind of pretty close to the old race science. You know, the ideas of inherent intelligence and IQ measuring and those kinds of things. And so the belief is that everything that has gone wrong with America is a product of not operating at a meritocracy, and that meritocracy would necessarily result in these institutions being more monochromatic than they have become over the years.

[David Remnick]

And yet we've seen the vote for Donald Trump among the black community, among the Latino community, increase this last time around.

[Jelani Cobb]

So I think the thing that's interesting. Well, there are two things here. One is that that increase benefited from the absence of enthusiasm from other people in those communities who just opted for the couch over the ballot box in this most recent election. The other, however, is that. And the thing that I think Trump has done more masterfully than probably any other modern American politician is the ability to own both sides of an issue and the ability to operate with particular kinds of wedges. And so for African American men whose voting behavior had been more predictable based upon their race, all of a sudden it became clear that there were gender ideas, and the very masculinist dynamics of the Trump movement appealed to a certain portion of that population, I think people saw the same thing with Latino male voters, too. And so it is a kind of house of cards in terms of the structure of all of it. Once you start pulling at how people understand their interests, this doesn't add up. But Trump is a master salesman. The idea is that you don't really think about what you've bought until you've left the store, and by that point it's too late.

[David Remnick]

Trump also released an executive order saying he would divert federal funds from schools teaching what he calls discriminatory equity ideology. It also said the government would sanction any school that taught that people can be oppressed due to their race, which is kind of amazing. What does that mean in practice? And how can a teacher reasonably deal with this?

[Jelani Cobb]

You know, if a president says something like that, people should reasonably take it seriously. And even if this doesn't come from the federal level, in which we'd run into a lot of First Amendment complications, at the very least it sets a tone in which a person might well become the subject of digital harassment or in person harassment. Or they may find, you know, pressure placed upon their employers in various kinds of ways. And so we've seen this over the course of the years. If you remember the anti CRT hysteria.

[David Remnick]

Which theory?

[Jelani Cobb]

Yeah, critical race theory, which just a few years ago turned every school board meeting in the country into the Hunger Games practically, or wwe, where people were concerned that their children were being indoctrinated with ideas that really were not being taught in elementary and junior high schools in this country.

[David Remnick]

I'm speaking with Jelani Cobb. He's the author of the Substance of Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress and many other books. We'll continue our conversation in a moment.

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[Jelani Cobb]

This.

[David Remnick]

Is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Ramnick. I've been speaking today with Jelani Cobb, who's a historian and a staff writer at the New Yorker. We're talking about the Trump administration's wholesale assault on DEI programs in the federal government and elsewhere that encourage diversity, equity and inclusion. DEI is a singular obsession for Donald Trump and his allies. So I'll return now to my conversation with journalist and historian Jelani Cobb.

So in 2023, the Supreme Court issued its ruling that ended affirmative action as we knew it. Coupled with that, how are these executive orders going to affect the environment that you're in at Columbia and academia writ large?

[Jelani Cobb]

Everyone is trying to figure that out. I'm at my own institution daily and I'm in contact with scholars from around the country. And everyone is trying to figure this out. So affirmative action has been ended by the Supreme Court. And there's a significant vin overlap between affirmative action and dei, but they're not necessarily the same thing.

[David Remnick]

Explain.

[Jelani Cobb]

And so one of the parts of inclusion would be like if we say that we don't have enough African American or enough Latino engineers. Well, we're going to create a pipeline program in high schools that have significant numbers of Hispanic or African American students and say, would you like to be an engineer? Well, this is a voluntary thing, and it's giving people access to something. It's not giving them any consideration they didn't already have. That would fall very much on the dei, but it wouldn't fall necessarily under affirmative action. Is that permissible? People don't know. And what may be legally permissible may or may not be politically permissible or culturally permissible in this particular moment. And so we're really waiting in an almost case by case basis to see how all of this shakes out. And no One has marching orders just yet.

[David Remnick]

How do you evaluate, as both a journalist and somebody leading a journalism school, the reaction of the press in these early weeks to what's been going on in Washington?

[Jelani Cobb]

Certainly for mainstream press, it has been notable the extent to which the reconciliation has happened, or what has been perceived as a reconciliation with Donald Trump and Trumpism. You know, of course, during the campaign, we saw the LA Times and Washington Post both spike editorials that would have endorsed Kamala Harris. Subsequently, we saw ABC News settled a lawsuit with Trump for $15 million that many people felt that they had a good chance of winning. And we now have seen reports that Paramount may be in talks with the Trump people about settling the lawsuit over the 60 Minutes case, which Donald Trump felt was defamatory towards him.

[David Remnick]

Paramount controls CBS in almost every one of these cases, though it seems the problem is that the corporations that own these media outlets have much bigger fish to fry in the corporate world than their media outlets. So Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post and bought it for $250 million, that to him is nothing compared to the scale of Amazon itself.

[Jelani Cobb]

Critics on the left of American media have been pointing out the potential for this kind of conflict of interest forever. Even when we think about the old ads, advertisement supported model of newspapers which has gone by the wayside, it was at best an imperfect solution that we had the, what we call the separation of church and state, you know, the separation from the revenue side and the editorial side. That was never a great situation. And I think that we're seeing this play out on a much bigger scale. This isn't a new problem.

[David Remnick]

What I notice sometimes, speaking with friends who aren't in the press, who are doing all kinds of other things, they don't want to engage with the news too much. They feel exhausted. They feel psychologically self protective in the way that is very different from 2017. Any number of people say, you know, I just, I refuse to watch CNN or I refuse to read the paper. And I'm kind of shocked by it.

[Jelani Cobb]

David, I heard this in the past few weeks from people who are themselves very highly placed in the news business.

[David Remnick]

That's not encouraging at all.

[Jelani Cobb]

It's not encouraging.

[David Remnick]

It seems like a dereliction of duty.

[Jelani Cobb]

It's still true. I think that also there's another part of this. Like the parallel to this is there are many people who feel like they don't want to watch the news or listen to the news. There are journalists who wonder what the point is. And I've had those conversations too, like Is anyone listening to us? Does anyone care if we point out things that are outrageous or.

[David Remnick]

But don't they need to dangerous? I'm sorry, but don't they need to buck up and stand up too?

[Jelani Cobb]

Sure, but I think that we have to at least begin by acknowledging that we have this particular problem. Morale is not great. And we have people who think that they've done their job to the best of their ability and it hasn't really made the difference that they hoped it might make. The thing that I point out when I'm talking with my students is we should never allow young or emerging journalists to have the idea that there's a one to one relationship between our effort and the outcome. I quote you, as a matter of fact, in talking about the number of stories that highlighted the misdeeds and misbehaviors of powerful men that somehow never generated a MeToo movement. And then all of a sudden there was one. And we don't know what the ratio is. It's unknowable, unpredictable, completely random. And my version of encouragement has been that we keep doing the work until we get to that breakthrough moment where it actually, really, really does make a difference.

[David Remnick]

For a long time now, Steve Bannon has been talking about the importance of flooding the Zone to cause a kind of blitz of news and orders and activ from the White House with the idea that the media would never be able to focus their attention. I have to say, that seems to be working out just fine for Donald Trump at the moment, at least.

[Jelani Cobb]

I tend to think of this as a short term strategy. You know, there was a boxer back in the 80s that you might remember named Frank the Animal Fletcher. I do.

[David Remnick]

And you're the first person today to mention Frank the Animal Fletcher.

[Jelani Cobb]

To me, that's shocking. I find it hard to believe, but you recall his strategy was just to overwhelm his opponent, to just crowd him and throw all kinds of punches nonstop and so on. There was a flaw in that strategy, which is that eventually you run out of steam, that you can throw up flack and shrapnel and the kinds of things, and you can do this in terms of flooding the Zone for a limited period of time.

[David Remnick]

You're saying a 78 year old president can't keep it up forever.

[Jelani Cobb]

Yeah, exactly. I think that at some point this becomes a counterproductive exercise in its own right.

[David Remnick]

I think there's an awareness among Trump's people that that's absolutely the case. But in many presidencies, the first burst of activity, the first hundred Days, certainly the first two years before the midterms is what's most crucial in getting things done. So a lot of activity can register as accomplishment for him very quickly because of our inability to account for it, sort it through.

[Jelani Cobb]

That's true. It also rests upon the presumption that the things that Trump and his people have foregrounded in the past feels like past hundred days. It's actually been the past two weeks that that aligns with the things that people really care about. And that remains to be seen. The culture war things. He's to great profit. But as we saw, you know, large reason why he lost the reelection bid in 2020 was the pandemic, which was a national crisis that he mishandled. There are other crises that are going to come up, and there are other crises that are emergent even at the moment. And how they navigate those things, I think will be at least as important as their ability to flood the zone with all sorts of different distracting concerning kinds of actions.

[David Remnick]

You mentioned McCarthyism earlier, and you're a scholar of the Cold War, among other things. What are the similarities that you see between the Red Scare, the anti communist campaign of the 50s, and what we're seeing now with DEI during the Cold.

[Jelani Cobb]

War, you could taint anything by just saying that it was communistic or Marxist. And the interesting kind of connection with the civil rights movement is that when I was kind of young, I was like, why were people connecting racial equality with communism, just saying that if you integrate the schools, it's communism. And then at some point it became clear to me that their definition of communism was integration. It didn't have anything to do with redistributing the means of production or expropriating wealth from. It was, this is communism can be anything that you don't like. And so now DEI is the boogeyman for anything. If there's a terrible tragedy, something we would normally have processed in a nonpartisan way, we can all grieve. People who've died in a plane crash or a helicopter crash, particularly people who are parts of the military now, all of a sudden, that can be blamed on dei. If there is something going wrong in any part of your life, you can just. If there are fires happening in California, then you can bet that somehow or another DEI is there.

[David Remnick]

Do you think this will fade?

[Jelani Cobb]

I tend to think that these things are like fevers, you know, they. They break at some point. And the fact is that you do have to, irrespective of how masterful Trump and those around him have been in playing on particular social anxieties and fears. At some point you do have to actually govern and that is not easy. And so we'll see.

[David Remnick]

You'll let me know when he does. Jelani Cobb, I appreciate your time. Be well.

[Jelani Cobb]

Thank you. Good talking to you.

[David Remnick]

You can read Jelani Cobb on politics, Race and much [e-mail] and at the very same website on the eve of our hundredth anniversary. You can subscribe to the magazine there too. I'm David Remnick. That's our show for today. Thanks for joining us. See you next time.

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And we had help this week from Evan David Roberts.

[New Yorker Radio Hour]

The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.

[Chris Marocco]

Hey podcast listeners. Chris I'm Chris Marocco, food director of Bon Appetit and Epicurious and host of the Dinner SOS podcast. Every week on Dinner sos, my Test Kitchen colleagues and I help listeners figure out what they should be cooking right now. And this winter, we're helping you embrace all things cozy cooking, letting you join the Ba Bake Club and getting back to basics with simple strategies to level up your home cooking. So don't miss out. Listen to and follow Dinner SOS wherever you get your podcasts. And if you have your own kitchen question, email us at dinnersos at bonapetit.

[David Remnick]

Com.

[Chris Marocco]

Happy Cooking.