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Early in 2016, before most people considered Donald Trump a serious contender for President, the New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik invoked the F-word: fascist. Gopnik tells David Remnick that the evidence has come into starker relief during Trump’s Presidency, the years that have followed, and now that his 2024 campaign has begun in earnest. In a new essay for the magazine, Gopnik writes about what seemed, at the time, like Hitler’s unlikely rise to power. In both men, he sees “someone whose power lies in his shamelessness.” Also this week, the wildly imaginative, prolific, and acclaimed author Percival Everett’s new novel, “James,” offers us a fresh perspective on the character of Jim, who has escaped slavery, in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” by Mark Twain. Here, readers are privy to Jim’s inner life. Everett tells the New Yorker writer Julian Lucas that it’s not a story Twain wrote “because he’s not capable of writing Jim’s story—any more than I’m capable of writing Huck’s story.”
Trump’s Authoritarian Pronouncements Recall a Dark History
Adam Gopnik considers how Hitler came to power, and what it tells us about the 2024 election.
Percival Everett and the Reinvention of Mark Twain’s Jim
The author creates a new inner life for a “Huckleberry Finn” character.
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
