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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. What a treat for a weekday. David Remnick is with us, editor of The New Yorker and host of The New Yorker Radio Hour. Heard weekends here on the station, one of our most listened to shows, and it's with such pride that we produce The New Yorker Radio Hour for national consumption on public radio stations everywhere, in conjunction with The New Yorker. David has an article on what the death of Yahya Sinwar could mean to any possible peace process in the Middle east.

The New Yorker's editors, led by David, have also made an endorsement in the presidential race. Spoiler alert, it's Kamala Harris. Are you surprised? This coming weekend will be the annual New Yorker Festival with all kinds of events, including David himself interviewing Rachel Maddow and Liz Cheney live on stage. Hey, David, always great when you come on with us. Welcome back to WNYC. I mean, to the show.

David Remnick: Well, I'm delighted to be here with you, and I thank you for having me always. I can only echo what you said before about the need to support WNYC. It is tough going out there because the media environment has changed so radically, and I think you and I are joined in this, that what WNYC does, independent of what you and I do, is absolutely vital to the life of the city. Without our listeners, we're nowhere.

Brian Lehrer: Thanks for that, David. Want to start with your Kamala Harris endorsement? Nobody in red or blue America will probably be surprised that The New Yorker is endorsing Kamala Harris and not Trump. What's the purpose of an endorsement in The New Yorker?

David Remnick: I think that's a totally legit question. No, we're not going to surprise anybody. Amazingly enough, The New Yorker did not endorse an authoritarian who seems to be losing it in real time and who poses a terrible danger to the country, but I think you need to express that and find ways to express it eloquently, honestly, rigorously, and not fall down on the job. I think to do the opposite, which is to be rather blase about it and just assume all your readers are going to think the same, would be a dereliction of duty.

With the help of some colleagues, I wrote a 5,000 word endorsement, which is something we only began in 2004. The New Yorker didn't do that before.

Brian Lehrer: I will say I read the whole thing and I still had time to watch the playoff games this weekend. Would you-- [crosstalk]

David Remnick: It's a tender subject for some of my colleagues.

Brian Lehrer: I know. Would you-- [crosstalk]

David Remnick: I met friends, but I'm a Yankees guy, so I'm riding high, and the WNBA.

Brian Lehrer: Liberty. Would you say your endorsement, in all seriousness, is more about ending what you call the poisonous era defined by Donald Trump or seeing possibilities from what a President Harris administration might accomplish for Americans?

David Remnick: Well, can't we do both? I mean, I think if Harris wins, and it is a total jump ball, I think we all know that and understand that, but if Harris wins, that doesn't necessarily mean that Trumpism, that right wing populism, that the distortion of the truth and some of the many other aspects that Trumpism stands for just burns out automatically. I mean, half the country, half the country is willing to overlook the many facts of who Donald Trump is in order to vote for him.

I don't think they're voting for him because he's been found liable for a sexual assault. I don't think they're voting for him because he seems to be losing his mind and dancing for 45 minutes on a stage or saying horrible things about every group in American life that you can possibly think of, Jews, African Americans, Latinos. I don't think that's the reason for most people voting for him, so there's a lot that ails us and a lot that troubles the American mind that needs journalistic investigation more and more.

I don't think election day, if it goes the way I hope it does, to be honest with you, with Kamala Harris winning and Trump losing, I don't know that that necessarily, as they say, breaks the fever. In fact, in the short term, it may intensify it.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Well, I wonder, with all the reporting that you've done and edited and your eye on this kind of thing for so long, how have you come to understand why Trump has as much support as he does?

David Remnick: Well, I don't think I'm going to surprise you with my answer. I think there's a complex of reasons. The easy reasons for people who are left leaning will say that, well, Kamala Harris is a woman of color, she's a woman, and yes, I believe there are some people who can't wrap their heads around voting for a person of color.

Brian Lehrer: Over the whole last nine years, since he started running for president.

David Remnick: Yes, and I think also there are a lot of people who feel overlooked and concerned about the direction of the country and feel left out, that despite stock market being terrific, they don't feel any part of that, and despite inflation going down rather markedly, they are still getting hammered. People can't afford housing, not only in red states, but in blue. There's a lot that ails this country and makes people anxious, and I don't think there's any one single reason.

As far as Trump is concerned, he is an extremely talented postmodern autocrat, which is to say that he has somehow found a way through personality and what reads as to so many people as authenticity, to be attractive to them. It may elude you, it may elude a lot of our listeners, but it should be of enormous concern that half of our brothers and sisters in this country find him either attractive enough to be president or they're willing to overlook all his many deficiencies and vote for him.

Brian Lehrer: David Remnick is with us, editor of The New Yorker and host of The New Yorker Radio Hour here on WNYC. Let's go into your article about the death of Sinwar, then we will finish by previewing The New Yorker Festival, which will be taking place this weekend. Your article on Sinwar opens with an Israeli dentist and intelligence officer, I guess we'd call him, who you spoke with there recently named Yuval Bitton. Why him?

David Remnick: Well, so I wrote two pieces, one quite a long piece while Sinwar was alive, insofar as you can write a profile of somebody and not have access to him. Obviously, I wasn't interviewing Sinwar. He was mainly in the tunnels of Gaza. I wanted to do as comprehensive a profile of Sinwar as possible through Israeli and Palestinian sources and get a sense of who he is, what are the forces that created him, why is he in any way unique, and what do we know about how he planned October 7th.

That was quite a long piece, and it ran at the end of the summer in The New Yorker. Obviously, the hunt for Sinwar has been going on since the very beginning, since October 7th of last year, and he, for all the reasons we know, had managed to elude-- I went back to one of my old sources is Yuval Bitton, who was, in fact, a prison dentist, and then eventually became an intelligence officer in Israeli prisons in the south of Israel, and he got to know Sinwar very well. He spent, in his estimation, hundreds of hours talking with Sinwar.

Why did they have this relationship? It wasn't over just matters of dental ailments. Sinwar had an interest in learning Hebrew, in knowing his enemy, in knowing as much about Israeli life and Israelis as he could so when he went back to Gaza, he could help lead Hamas more effectively. He was a real maximalist and an extremely violent, rather cruel leader in the constellation of Hamas leaders. Bitton was just fascinated by Sinwar and wanted to know as much as he could about his enemy.

Sinwar made no pretense of who he was, what he wanted. He's held fast by a kind of eliminationist ideology. He thought that Israel had no place on what he saw as Muslim land, which is a familiar ideology in Hamas, and he also made it very plain that if tens and tens of thousands of people had to die, Palestinians had to die in order to, in his view, liberate Palestine and eliminate Israel, then so be it. He was very blunt about all this.

While he was in jail, he developed an ailment, and it caused him to be dizzy and fall down and so on, and Bitton thought, well, maybe he's having a stroke and he sent him off to doctors, and those doctors saved Sinwar's life ironically. They operated on him and removed what was probably a tumor or some sort of abscess in his brain.

Brian Lehrer: Now he's dead, and in these days since Sinwar's death, there's been plenty of fighting still from both sides on the Gaza front and the Lebanon Hezbollah front. As someone who has covered the Middle East for a long time, do you see a path to peace in the death of Sinwar and the Hezbollah leader Nasrallah recently, or just the latest episode in a long war? Give me about a minute on this before we have to take a break.

David Remnick: Well, it's not up to me. It's up to Netanyahu and the players in the region. One hopes for peace. One hopes for a two-- at least speaking for myself, a two-state solution, which, I mean, like it or not, it seems to me that the solution, unfortunately, has always been partition. These are not two peoples that are going to live together easily. What hopes we had in the '90s have long since collapsed. I fear that they're going to remain in a state of perpetual violence unless both sides have both the courage, the vision, and the political ability to put this on another track.

Netanyahu clearly sees this, and with some reason, as a regional war, not just one about the Palestinians. He sees Iran as the center of aggression toward Israel, and so it's going to be extremely hard. To talk this through in a minute is unimaginable.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue with David Remnick after a short break, and we will preview The New Yorker Festival coming up this weekend, including David interviewing live on stage Rachel Maddow and Liz Cheney. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Few more minutes with David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, host of The New Yorker Radio Hour here on WNYC. Let's talk about The New Yorker Festival coming this weekend. For people who don't know it, what is The New Yorker Festival?

David Remnick: This began almost at the same time that I started as editor in 1998. We wanted to figure out a way to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the magazine in 2000. Magazine began in 1925, and we all had the idea of doing this festival of the arts, politics, of ideas, of performance, and this is long before these things were thick on the ground. It became an instant hit. It goes on through the weekend. I mean, I think to this day I still have nightmares, Brian, about the couple of times I played guitar behind Patti Smith at a couple of festival events.

I wake up in the middle of the night and I've forgotten all the chords and it's a nightmare. It's been one of the great pleasures of being at The New Yorker to be involved with the festival.

Brian Lehrer: This is Friday and Saturday-

David Remnick: And Sunday.

Brian Lehrer: - and Sunday, multiple events. Check out The New Yorker's page-- [crosstalk]

David Remnick: Just go on our website. I don't want to do the pitch thing. Just go on the website, newyorker.com, go to the festival stuff. There's still some tickets available here and there, although lots of things are sold out, and there's something for everyone.

Brian Lehrer: Am I seeing right that you'll be doing two interviews? Am I missing any? Rachel Maddow and Liz Cheney?

David Remnick: Yes, they're kind of different. They're kind of different. Yes, I'm going to talk to Liz Cheney on Saturday afternoon and Rachel Maddow on Sunday. I think it's important to talk to somebody like Liz Cheney to get not only an insight on why she turned against Trump, but also to get an insight into a Republican party that has become a MAGA party and how she left it and what she thinks the future of this party that she's been devoted to all her life.

I mean, you can, as I do, disagree strongly with her politics to say the least, but she's going to offer an insight that I think is of great value. Her book is really quite interesting too. Rachel Maddow I find to be somebody who's a kind of unique storyteller, the way she goes about the combination of reporting and telling a story in the opening 15, 20 minutes of her show. I find it quite interesting what she does. I want to talk to her about her method as well as her politics.

Also, she's written very eloquently on what should concern us today, which is the rise of authoritarianism in a country that thinks it's beyond that, that it's utterly Democratic. She did that about the 20th century. We want to talk about if that's happening again in the 21st.

Brian Lehrer: Well, I'm sure those are both going to be really, really interesting. In our last minute, David, do you like doing that kind of thing, live interviews on stage? I've said this to you before, but you made your name as a print reporter and editor, but you're magnificent as a radio person. Not many print people-

David Remnick: Oh, you're really kind.

Brian Lehrer: - can pull that off. Was it always one of your dreams to do these kind of conversational, live to tape, or even edit it after the fact, but in this case, live on stage interviews? We've got about 30 seconds left.

David Remnick: I grew up in the area, and I was an adolescent with a sleep problem. I couldn't sleep, and I would listen to radio all night, so Long John Nebel, Barry Gray, all these crazy people taking calls, enchanting me through the night, all WBAI as well as public radio. I have a real taste for it, and it's interesting to see what's old is new and what's new is old in the world of podcasting too. I see a lot in the podcasting world of what I kind of grew up on, so yes, it's of great interest to me.

Brian Lehrer: David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, host of The New Yorker Radio Hour, and with The New Yorker Festival coming up in the city Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. David, thanks for a few minutes today.

David Remnick: You're the best, Brian. Thanks for having me.

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