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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. My team and I are taking a holiday season break today, and we're re-airing some segments from 2025 that we think you'll enjoy or enjoy again, lightly edited for clarity and time. We can't take your calls today, but you can listen to these conversations on things like a proposal to pay grandparents for childcare, a new documentary on some of The New Yorker's cartoonists who happen to be women. You will learn, and you will laugh with that one. We start with Jelani Cobb and his reflections on this tumultuous decade. Here we go.

Back with us now is Jelani Cobb, New Yorker staff writer and dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He's got a new book that's a collection of some of his WR called Three Or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012-2025. Let's say from Barack Obama's reelection and how he used it to Donald Trump's reelection and how he is using that today, or we could say from the killing of Trayvon Martin in February 2012 to what Jelani calls the volatile white nationalism and reactionary concern with demographics that defines the moment we're in now. The book also gets personal and granular, down to the fate of Jelani's alma mater, Jamaica High School in Queens. Jelani, always good to have you on with us. Welcome back to WNYC.

Jelani Cobb: Thank you, Brian. Always good to talk with you.

Brian Lehrer: Can I start with some context about you? You note in your article in the book from last year about the reelection of Trump, that your life, like those of many Black people of your generation, was shaped not by the brutality of segregation as your parents' lives had been, but by the success of the battles of the 1950s and '60s to uproot it. Can you talk a little about you coming of age at the exact time that you did in the arc of Black history of American history, and what mindset you started out as a journalist with in that context?

Jelani Cobb: Sure. My parents were part of a Great Migration. My father came to New York from Georgia, a small little town called Hazlehurst. My joke about that would be if you've heard of it, it means you're my cousin. Then my mother came to New York from Bessemer, Alabama, and they met in Harlem. They had very particular personal reasons for leaving the South. They felt that there was this artificial ceiling on what they could aspire to or what any Black person could aspire to in that time and in that place.

It was very much drilled into me in a way, I think, that would probably be very familiar to the children of immigrants. In some way, leaving the south and coming to New York was a immigration narrative. It was very much drilled into me that opportunities were very hard to come by, and if you have them, you have a chance to have a good education, you have a chance to have a good life, you have to be very serious, you have to take school seriously, you have to study, you have to work hard and to make the most of those kinds of opportunities.

I think part of my adulthood commitment to public institutions was my gradual recognition of just how significant quality, public institutions were to my parents' ambitions and the ambitions of a whole generation of other parents who had those same sort of hopes for their children. That's from the public libraries to public schools to even the point public hospitals, things that we have pretty much disregarded in many ways since then.

Brian Lehrer: Your first piece for The New Yorker in 2012 was called Trayvon Martin and the Parameters of Hope. In fact, you call the whole first section of the book from 2012 to 2016 the collection of your writings from then, you call that whole first section of the book the Parameters of Hope. What do you mean by that phrase?

Jelani Cobb: There are a couple of pieces from 2025, but really the bulk of the book covers 2012 to 2024. I thought you could think of those three presidential administrations and then the election that subsequently returned Donald Trump to the White House as a three-act play. The first act was the Parameters of Hope, where we had this unlikely development, the first African American president in the history of the United States, and he had campaigned on hope and change.

In the course of the campaign and right up to the election, it seemed like the parameters of that hope were limitless. Anything could happen, anything was possible. As the gifted rhetorician that Barack Obama is, he did an excellent job of convincing his audience that there were limitless possibilities. Then, as is always the case, the actual experience of governance and the day-to-day realities of intransigent opposition and miscalculations or random events that change the stakes that people are operating under, all the things that happen, in other words, what we might otherwise call life, began to make it clear that there were parameters to the hope and that there were limits, political limits or social limits of what could or would be achieved in a single presidency. That's where that first section has that title of the Parameters of Hope.

Brian Lehrer: In the epilogue of the book, at the very end, you write that you, as a person and as a writer who pondered the meaning of Trayvon Martin's death, that killing in 2012, you as a person then, were fundamentally more optimistic than the one you were when you wrote about George Floyd nearly a decade later. Can you put that into more words? What were you more optimistic about 13 years ago? Is there more to that than what you just said about Obama?

Jelani Cobb: Yes. In some ways, I don't want to put all of this at Barack Obama's doorstep. I think he was a convenient barometer in some ways for that time period. A lot of this was a product of other social dynamics. In 2012, we were still thinking about this heady, really unbelievable pinnacle of social movements that had begun decades earlier, more than a half century earlier, with the hope of furthering multiracial democracy in the United States. We hadn't really seen the contours of the backlash to that yet, which is why I think it was easier to be optimistic.

I should say I have not abandoned optimism. I just think I was more optimistic in that moment than I was when George Floyd died. You saw a moment of reckoning, as we referred to it. Very quickly, even from the outset of that, you began to see the tides pushing in a different direction, such that we have a society that is far less sympathetic than if, worse than, like George Floyd to happen now, we would have a society that is generally far less sympathetic to that kind of incident than it would have been just five years ago.

Brian Lehrer: You wrote that the earliest pieces in the collection were published during the Obama presidency. Just to cite that era one more time, when the contours of the backlash to his mere existence, as you put it, were just becoming visible. I wonder, with now 10 years of hindsight, how much of Donald Trump's election in 2016 did you, or do you attribute to that kind of racial backlash to the mere existence of somebody like Obama in that office, as opposed to the issues Trump ran on that year a backlash to illegal immigration from Mexico, a Muslim travel ban at the time of terrorist attacks by ISIS, or how much are all those things demographically related?

Jelani Cobb: I think those things, there's no real dichotomy between them, because let's remember that the first political act that Donald Trump did or took was that he declared that the president was not actually the president because he wasn't a citizen, and he wasn't qualified to even vote in the election that he actually won. The birtherism lie that he promulgated far and wide. That was directed at Barack Obama specifically, but it was also playing on nativism and xenophobic fears that are very common in American history. It was easy to pivot from that and just segue into, we should be fearful of Muslims.

The Muslim ban, by the way, not unrelated to the idea that people had accused Barack Obama of being a covert Muslim, and the idea that we had to renegotiate all of these trade relationships, which had been another barb that was directed at Barack Obama, whom Trump deemed to be utterly incompetent and a product of affirmative action, which, again, has been a target that we've seen come to the foreground in the course of the Trump era. I think that this kind of resentment to Obama was an active ingredient, but probably necessary, but not sufficient for the political tides that we saw in 2016.

Brian Lehrer: This actually reminds me of your latest article in The New Yorker. Listeners, if you're just joining us, my guest is New Yorker staff writer and dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Jelani Cobb, with his new book, Three Or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012-2025. It's a collection of his writings for The New Yorker over all that time. You single out two landmark laws from exactly 60 years ago, 1965, that you say are the animating forces of Trumpism today. Want to tell everyone which two laws from 1965 and why?

Jelani Cobb: Yes. There are two laws that Lyndon B. Johnson signed about seven weeks apart, I believe. The first was the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which, as you know, transformed the electorate of the United States, particularly in the South, where there were literally millions of African Americans who were prevented from voting through the threat of violence or other kinds of ways, mechanisms that we use to dissuade Black people from casting ballots.

The other is the Hart-Celler Immigration Reform Act, which got rid of the old and racist quotas that had prohibited immigration in any significant numbers from the Caribbean, from Latin America, from Africa, from most parts of Asia, and so on. It changed American demography. The face of the electorate was changed by the VRA, and the face of the country itself was changed by the Immigration Reform Act. It's not coincidental that the hot-button issue that we see now is immigration.

We're seeing ICE raids and people being targeted and deported, notably, overwhelmingly, people of color being targeted in these ways at the same time that the administration offers asylum to specifically white South Africans. Not just any South Africans, but specifically white South Africans. We just saw about, I guess that was a month ago, roughly a month ago, the case heard before the Supreme Court that came out of Louisiana, which, if, depending upon how it is decided, may eviscerate the Voting Rights Act even further as it relates to the drawing of congressional districts. I think that what this is about, ultimately, is trying to curate the demography of American power.

Brian Lehrer: In that context, I pulled this for this conversation after reading the book. There was a stretch in Trump's address to the United Nations General Assembly just this fall in September that I thought said the quiet part out loud about what this assault on immigration may really be about. Here's that stretch.

Trump: What makes the world so beautiful is that each country is unique. To stay this way, every sovereign nation must have the right to control their own borders, you have the right to control your borders, as we do now, and to limit the sheer numbers of migrants entering their countries, and paid for by the people of that nation that were there and that built that particular nation at the time. They put their blood, sweat, tears, money into that country, and now they're being ruined. Proud nations must be allowed to protect their communities and prevent their societies from being overwhelmed by people they have never seen before, with different customs, religions, with different everything.

Brian Lehrer: Difference as a threat to all the countries of the world compared to the people who are already living there, even as he encourages white South Africans, as you point out, to emigrate to the United States. Did you hear that, as I did at all, as saying the quiet part out loud about what this is really about, as opposed to, say, violent crime?

Jelani Cobb: Yes, incredibly so, because the initial rhetoric in 2016 was around crime and people who had committed acts of violence and who were in the country without sanction. Were not sanctioned to be in the country. That had been something that people, "Oh, well, a person who's here, who's undocumented, certainly shouldn't be committing crime here." That was a beachhead, because the real objection was to the fact that these people were here at all. Then, even in the first Trump term, you began to hear people in the administration saying that they had to target immigration, period, including legal immigration, which is not what they were saying up front, was switching the terms that they were operating under.

Then finally, we see the full flowering of their contempt and saying this language, which is utterly nativist, utterly xenophobic, and racist, spoken by a person who married two women who were immigrants and was the son of an immigrant himself. He's not talking about those kinds of immigrants. He's talking about the kinds of people who have been allowed to enter the country as a result of the 1965 Immigration Reform Act.

Brian Lehrer: Before you go, we have a few minutes left, here's a text from a listener who writes, "I saw Jelani in Brooklyn recently and was fascinated by his description of Queens and how its incredible diversity has been a trigger point for Trump. Can he talk about that?" Let me combine that with a question that I wanted to ask you about Jamaica High School, what it meant to you as a kid from that part of Queens at the time, and what happened afterwards that prompted you to write about it.

Jelani Cobb: Oh, sure. I'm a proud alum of Jamaica High School, which no longer exists. It was shut down a little more than 10 years ago. Then we created as a kind of small school within the old building. When I graduated, class of 1987, it was this perfectly heterogeneous cross-section of Queens. It reflected the fact that Queens had become the most diverse county in the United States. I think it was 400 or some languages that are spoken in Queens.

The story that I tell about my understanding of my community is best understood through the Jamaica High School baseball team, which I was a right fielder. The center fielder was South Asian, left fielder family was believed from Puerto Rico. The shortstop's family was from Nicaragua. The third baseman was Jamaican. A first baseman was Jewish. We had this incredible cross-section of people from all kinds of backgrounds, and we were there to play the sport that was the national pastime. That was my version of Queens for a person who was born in that timeframe.

Donald Trump is also famously a Queens native, but he's a generation older. He came of age in the years prior to the 1965 Immigration Reform Act. I was born after it. At that point, Queens was the second whitest borough of New York City. Little-known facts is that when Jackie Robinson played for the Dodgers, purchased a home in Queens, and a cross was burned near his property to let him know that he was not welcome there. All of those things were a different version of Queens.

Queens went from being that one thing, a highly segregated, mostly white enclave of New York City to being the polyglot, multilingual, cosmopolitan, most complicated, most diverse county in the United States in just a few years, in the aftermath of the Immigration Reform Act. For many people, they reacted with the circle the wagons mentality that I think that you see in Trump's rhetoric. Who are these people? Where are they coming from? What God are they praying to? What is this food that they're eating? That language that came to the foreground in the 2016 election was really a product of Trump being a Queen's Native in the 1960s and 1970s. That allergic reaction to diversity had become a national issue in the intervening decades.

Brian Lehrer: The book is called Three Or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here: 2012-2025 by Jelani Cobb, New Yorker staff writer and dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.

Jelani Cobb: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Much more to come. The Brian Lehrer Show is on tape today, so we won't be taking your calls.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Since the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, having children or not more broadly has become more politicized. From religious trad wives who model large families on social media to so-called childless cat ladies that slur from Vice President Vance, the message from the Trump administration is clear. Women should have more babies in America, but childbirth in the US is as dangerous in some US States as it is in countries with far fewer resources.

A new report from the Commonwealth Fund finds that Louisiana, Tennessee, and Arkansas had similar mortality rates as El Salvador, Belize, and Azerbaijan. The report warns that the overturning of Roe, plus impending Medicaid cuts, "will likely deepen coverage instability during pregnancy and after delivery periods already marked by high rates of churn and care disruptions that contribute to poor maternal and infant health outcomes."

Our guest now argues that the erosion of reproductive freedom post-ops has made pregnancy dangerous for all American women. With us now is Irin Carmon, senior correspondent at New York magazine. Some of you know back in 2015, she was co-author of the book Notorious RBG about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Her new book explores what it means to be pregnant today in America through reporting and personal stories. It's titled Unbearable: Five Women and the Perils of Pregnancy in America. Irin, welcome back to WNYC. Thank you for joining us for this.

Irin Carmon: I'm so thrilled to be back together, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: You write, "The end of Roe v. Wade, allowing about half of American states to enact abortion bans almost overnight has already brought unimaginable pain. It has also exposed how broken the existing system already is, shaped as it is by the same values that animate abortion bans." What are you looking at?

Irin Carmon: Brian, in the immediate aftermath of Dobbs, I think many people were surprised to suddenly be hearing stories about people being turned away for non-abortion care, miscarriage care, ectopic pregnancies, early labor that would never result in a live birth, being denied emergency care in these circumstances, that when people thought about banning abortion, they didn't understand that this is also abortion care or that doctors would be so afraid of providing necessary health care that they would turn patients away because of the chilling effects of these laws.

I think Dobbs was a clarifying moment. It was an accelerating moment. What I wanted to do with Unbearable is to tell a story about how we got to this point and how it's playing out, because the kinds of artificial separations in the law, they don't exist in people's lives, and they don't exist in medicine. These are all deeply interconnected medical and personal experiences of pregnancy, whether you're looking to end your pregnancy or not.

Brian Lehrer: I want to make this local for our listeners right away in a way that may surprise them because in your book, you tell the stories of five women in Alabama and also New York City. You write, "We like to congratulate ourselves in New York, but somehow the largest, wealthiest city in the country, with its world-class hospitals and universities, is also a place with a starker racial disparity in maternal mortality than Alabama." Of course, New York also has liberal abortion laws, which Alabama no longer does. Can you talk to us about the racial disparity here in New York City and why you spotlighted those?

Irin Carmon: Brian, it blew my mind to learn that our already unforgivable national disparity in maternal mortality, wherein a Black woman is, the most recent number is three or four times likelier to die for a pregnancy-related cause than a white woman. Of course, every year these numbers are slightly different, but in recent years in New York City, Black women have been 9 or 12 times likelier to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women.

I'm so glad you highlighted that passage, because I knew when I was figuring out how to tell a bigger and deeper story than just our most recent catastrophe, that I wanted to understand how it could be that right here in New York City, where I live and where I was pregnant, first during COVID and then during Dobbs, could have these unforgivable disparities like, what was the mechanism?

What I realized is that even in progressive places where you can access an abortion, this is fundamentally a story of inequality, which is part of our story of American pregnancy care, where we have some of the most storied institutions that have the most resources to provide health care, but that these riches are unevenly distributed in our city and that there are public hospitals, I focused on one Woodhull, where every day, despite some people trying to do the best they can, unforgivable mistakes are being made. Patients are being abandoned. Two different patients might be treated completely differently, depending on their characteristics.

When we tell a story of the difficulties of being pregnant in America, you're right, we do tend to say, "Okay, Alabama, their numbers for maternal mortality overall are really high. They banned abortion. They don't offer health care." Right here in New York City, one of the women that I wrote about, I met her at a preschool picnic in my own community. I tell her story of trying to find a different pregnancy care, one where she would be treated like a whole person. Unfortunately, she woke up in the intensive care unit at Woodhull.

A second woman that I write about had the same doctor, the same botched C-section four years later. As a Black woman, she was part of that tragic statistic, where she lost her life. I did want us to look in the mirror. I think it's the greatest city in the world, but we've got a lot of problems to tackle. All of these problems tend to show up at this moment of pregnancy, where people are so vulnerable in what should be a joyful moment in their lives.

Brian Lehrer: What's the message or the lesson from the experience of those two New York women, Maggie and Christine, you say botched C-sections by the same surgeon? Tell our listeners why that isn't just the story of one bad surgeon and something more systemic.

Irin Carmon: I'm so glad you asked that, because I think we are all tempted to say, "Okay, there was a bad doctor, and he can get fired, and we can all move on with our lives." I want to be clear these two women went to Woodhull Hospital because they wanted to be seen by the midwives who were known to provide a higher level of care in a community with a lot of needs and not a lot of resources. They both ended up getting C-sections, that the proper standard of care was not followed, where not only were their incisions not properly sutured and they internally hemorrhaged, but nobody noticed, and it was not reported.

In the case of Maggie, who is an artist from Canada, experiencing our American system through the eyes of someone who truly cannot understand why it's like this, understandably, and her husband Matt, are in this moment of crisis where he realizes that something's wrong and he's calling for help. Luckily for them, somebody came in time. Doctors came in time, despite first them being questioned and denied that something was wrong.

When Christine's partner repeatedly advocated for her throughout the process, he was not even allowed inside of the delivery room of the OR when she had her C-section, which she did not want, and, trying to advocate for her, they called security on him. While he was in the NICU with his son, she was left alone to hemorrhage and eventually died that night at Woodhull. This treatment that he experienced afterwards-- Again, one person, a Latino man with a Black woman as his partner, his fiancée, when he calls for help, they call security, and he's not able to save her life despite all of his attempts.

Also, the follow-up care, why was she left alone? Why were they repeatedly having to advocate for themselves and feeling like they were risking being retaliated against because they were making themselves a problem? This is a catch-22 that shows up in the research. There's also significant research that shows that that racial maternal mortality gap can partly be accounted for whether a patient goes to a hospital that predominantly serves other Black patients. It's telling us something also about the resources of these hospitals.

While both of them were treated unforgivably, the systemic issue here is both one of interpersonal racism and also a hospital that simply does not have the tools for when there is something wrong to respond to it properly. Everything that Jose has experienced in the aftermath, fighting to bring home his son, fighting to get access to their shared apartment, fighting the hospital for answers, is a story of both racial inequality and how pregnant people are treated here.

The one thing that I will say is that as horrific and tragic as the story has been, if you read the book, you'll also understand that Jose has found himself in maternal health advocacy. Actually, after the book was published, he's since become certified as a doula and is just trying to make sure that these systemic issues and matters of interpersonal racism don't take another life as they did his partner.

Brian Lehrer: Sure enough, listener text, "Midwives and doulas are the unsung heroes of maternal care. I'm proud that New York City has expanded access to doulas and midwives in recent years and hope the city continues to invest in this essential care," writes one listener. I do want to get back to the Southern states in a minute. I read out those stats at the beginning about how three states in particular have maternal death rates similar to three countries around the world that people would be shocked to hear American health care outcomes being compared to.

In New York, if this is a systemic problem, do you go in the book to what systemic solutions might be, especially to the racial disparity? We've had now two mayors in a row, and we're about to have a third, and not even to dismiss previous mayors in this respect, at least in what they would say. Mayor de Blasio got elected as the inequality mayor who was going to fight inequality. Mayor Adams certainly was focused to some degree on racial disparities in all kinds of things.

I think that expansion of midwives and doulas that the texter referred to is in Adams administration policy. Now we have Zohran Mamdani coming in, who's obviously running to improve conditions for the working class, as he frames it, to reduce all kinds of disparities, certainly health outcome disparities. What's the systemic answer if word of whatever you say can get back to Mayor Elect Mamdani?

Irin Carmon: I certainly think that expansion of midwives and doulas is extremely important. I will say that, having reported a little bit on the citywide doula program, I know some incredible advocates who are doulas who have been in the system who had to drop out because they weren't being paid in a timely fashion, and they needed to support their own families. I think also making these programs sustainable, midwives provide much of the same care that obstetricians do, but they're reimbursed for less.

It's often an economic problem providing access to this kind of care. Somebody just said to me, I just did an event with a midwifery practice, Oula, where I delivered my second child, this idea of everyone needs a midwife, and some people need a doctor too. I think expanding access to that as the threshold of your care, making sure that people have access to healthcare before they become pregnant, to address any underlying health issues that they have.

Some people are going to need medical care, they're going to need surgery, they're going to need emergency care, and I think the hospitals in people's communities are failing them when it comes to that critical care. The doctors there are paid less. The staffing ratios are more challenging. Many people quit during COVID. Many people were put on long night shifts. In the cases that I wrote about, they were put on night shifts when the doctor in this story was 72 years old and had just been hospitalized for COVID. I think actually giving them the resources that they need when they need to provide advanced care, because it shouldn't be that people have to leave their community just to not end up a statistic.

Brian Lehrer: Chloe in Washington Heights, you're on WNYC with Irin Carmon. Hi, Chloe.

Chloe: I wanted to give my perspective on this as a midwife who works in a hospital that serves almost exclusively patients who receive Medicaid. I just wanted to provide that perspective because a lot of people don't know this, but midwives are the primary care workforce in the public hospital system, serving low-income patients, doing the best that we can with very little resources and even less institutional support, including abortion care. I would love to see these conversations include the input of midwives because I find that they rarely do.

Brian Lehrer: Here you are. What would you like to add?

Chloe: I just wanted to highlight the fact that, like you mentioned at Woodhull, there are midwives who are really on the front lines, really, and I know many of them personally, trying their best to deliver the very best, safest, and most respectful care. It's just little resources and little support for our work, little understanding for our work, and also the pay is not very good either.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for your work, and thank you for your call. Anita in Queens, you're on WNYC. Hello, Anita.

Anita: Hi, Brian. I participated in a documentary several years ago, exactly mirroring the book, where two families tragically lost family members because of the lack of care and attention. I feel like we're screaming into the void because we've been talking about this for so long. There's been some progress, but as the author points out, it depends on where you are, what you have access to. I currently have a daughter-in-law who's expecting for the first time time who had to go to the emergency room the other day. It's a part of Georgia that I'm terrified because the attention, the experience to me is a window into what I'm afraid for, the lack of access, the lack of care, and all of that. It's absolutely terrifying to me.

Brian Lehrer: Anita, thank you very much. Disturbing as that is. As we start to run out of time, Irin, I did mention in the intro that new report from the Commonwealth Fund, and she talks about Georgia, obviously a southern state report that finds Louisiana, Tennessee, and Arkansas had similar maternal mortality rates to El Salvador, Belize, and Azerbaijan. Obviously just an incredible outrage in a country with the resources of the United States.

Irin Carmon: In the Alabama chapters of the book, I lay out some of the challenges. I write about a heroic obstetrician who's trying to partner with midwives and open up a birth center in the former abortion clinic once Dobbs makes it impossible for her to provide abortions there. The barriers just to providing access to safe birth in a so-called pro-life state are significant. We have our own set of challenges here in providing this kind of care. In Alabama, expensive real estate and regulatory challenges are not the issue. The issue is the doctors have a monopoly on birth, and they don't want to give it up.

I think that we're also, as you mentioned, on the precipice of many people losing access to Medicaid. There's a pregnancy carve-out technically, but we understand that somebody is a person before they become pregnant who deserves access to health care. I always say that although the book is called Unbearable, that the unbearable does not have to be inevitable. Pregnancy is inherently a time of both vulnerability and power. There are so many mechanisms in the United States where we choose to take that power away from the pregnant person, and we leave them in dangerous situations at a point where what we need is support.

These are all intentional choices. They show up differently depending on where you live. By the way, to the caller who's worried about her daughter, all week I have been hearing from people who are saying that they're specifically choosing not to have children because they're so concerned about the healthcare environment in this country, post-Dobbs, getting even worse. At the same time that you have the Trump administration telling people to have more babies, RFK called it a national security threat that people are choosing to have fewer babies. Patients are being abandoned at a point where they might otherwise undertake this. This is a choice.

Brian Lehrer: I want to play, before you go, one clip. You can't put a sound bite in a book, but we can pull it on the radio, something that you referred to in the book, because you tell the story of Dr. Yashica Robinson. This is a clip of her in 2022 in a House Judiciary Committee hearing about abortion access, being questioned by future House Speaker Mike Johnson. Johnson speaks first.

House Speaker Mike Johnson: Do you support the right of a woman who is just seconds away from birthing a healthy child to have an abortion?

Dr. Yashica Robinson: I think that the question that you're asking does not realistically reflect abortion care in the United States.

House Speaker Mike Johnson: In that scenario, would you support her right to abort that child?

Dr. Yashica Robinson: I won't entertain theoreticals.

House Speaker Mike Johnson: It's not a theoretical, ma'am.

Dr. Yashica Robinson: That's not a reality.

House Speaker Mike Johnson: You're a medical doctor.

Dr. Yashica Robinson: I am a medical doctor, and that has never happened.

Brian Lehrer: Dr. Robinson, we should say, provides both abortions and maternal care in the South. Why did you reference that exchange in the book?

Irin Carmon: The question he was asking had nothing to do with making any pregnancy safer, having any healthier outcome. The barriers that a doctor faces trying to provide reproductive health care, whether it's abortions for as long as it was legal or safe births where the patient is respected and heard, are so significant to then show up and have the powerful members of Congress use you as a rhetorical target. It's just an added disrespect at the same time that they're telling people to have more children.

I did really want to say that the reason that I wrote about Dr. Robinson, too, is that historically, abortion care and birth care were not separated. They were both provided by midwives. Abortion was not illegal at the founding. This is a 19th-century phenomenon when doctors took over medical care. I wrote this book because when Dobbs was handed down after my entire career of covering abortion rights and the court, and how it plays out in the country, I was eight months pregnant.

Just as I was listening to Mike Johnson, I was reading Sam Alito describe what he thought a pregnancy was by quoting the Mississippi law, by saying, "At this point, this happens. At this point, this fetal development happens, and the unborn child has taken on the human form in all relevant respects," is what he quoted. I looked in that decision, and I could not find a single mention of the reality of being pregnant in America, even for me as a joyfully pregnant person, what it was doing to my body, my very bones. It was leaching my calcium. It was changing the shape of my eyeballs and my feet.

It was putting me at great risk of death, as you say, commensurate with countries that have far fewer resources than we do. Instead, that burden and that transformation were completely erased. I hear that same disrespect in Mike Johnson, questioning someone who, after all, is trying to provide care to their patients regardless of what kind of pregnancy care they need. It's how we got in this situation in the first place, is that disrespect.

Brian Lehrer: Irin Carmon, senior correspondent at New York magazine, her new book is Unbearable: Five Women and the Perils of Pregnancy in America. Thanks very much for coming on and sharing your book with us.

Irin Carmon: Thank you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: More to come on The Brian Lehrer Show. Stay with us. The Brian Lehrer Show is on tape today, so we won't be taking your calls.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now we'll look at one solution to the child care affordability crisis that might seem obvious to people living outside the United States in many cases. Pay grandparents. What? Yes, pay grandparents. Marina Lopez, author of Please Yell at My Kids, a guide for Americans seeking to learn from parenting cultures around the world, has a new piece in The Atlantic that suggests that Americans looking for affordable, high-quality childcare should consider paying their parents to watch their kids, using Singapore as an example where this model is not only successful but extremely popular. Marina joins us now to make her case and maybe take some of your stories or questions. Marina, thanks for coming on for this. Welcome to WNYC.

Marina Lopez: Thank you so much for having me on, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: I guess we should say what a lot of people are probably thinking first. This would depend, at very least, on the relative financial status of the grandparents compared to the parents, right?

Marina Lopez: In Singapore, that's actually not the case. I'm a foreign correspondent. I moved to Singapore in 2021, and I have two young kids. I would go pick my kids up at school pickup, and I noticed something was off. I was the only mom surrounded by grandparents. These grandparents were showing up at ballet. They were showing up at soccer. I learned that grandparenting is a very serious job in Singapore, so serious that it's often underwritten with a financial allowance.

Most Singaporean adults give their parents a monthly allowance of around 10% of their income. It doesn't matter what financial situation they're in, and it doesn't really matter what financial situation the grandparents are in. Of course, if they need more money and the children are able to help, they will give more money, but regardless of their financial situation, this is given as a sign of respect. What it does is it under it reinforces a system of reciprocal caregiving that I think has really powerful lessons for us here in America, where we're facing an unprecedented child care crisis.

You have grandparents who offer care for their grandkids in their 60s and are repaid with care in their 80s. The financial statement also makes it so that they are able to show up for their grandkids every week. They are able to take on this extra job of caregiving and provide them with a kind of care that is really difficult to find, flexible, quality, and affordable.

Brian Lehrer: When you describe yourself in that instance as being the only parent who is picking up a kid, everybody else is a grandparent, what about the many older people who want to remain in the workforce and may not be available at three o'clock or whenever pickup is?

Marina Lopez: Absolutely. Singaporeans would say that this is not a transactional relationship. The allowance doesn't depend on the amount of hours that your parent is putting in taking care of their grandkids. However, I found that even grandparents who have jobs who want to stay in the workforce find ways of helping, whether it's helping with homework after school once they're home from their jobs, helping to take the kids on the weekends so that the parents can have a break. They try to fill in as many hours as they possibly can, contributing to the household by taking care of the grandchildren.

Brian Lehrer: Does the Singaporean government provide financial assistance to families for child care? Because that's the debate in New York City and elsewhere in the United States right now.

Marina Lopez: Absolutely. The government does back this form of caregiving with significant financial support. Families who want to live within 2.5 miles of a grandparent qualify for a housing grant, and that's worth $15,000. Working mothers who rely on grandparents or other family members to help care for their children are also eligible for over $2,000 a year in tax relief. They're underwriting this relationship and this familial support with government help. That makes a huge difference for families who might not be able to afford to move closer to their grandkids or for adults who wish that they were able to care for both aging parents and children closer together.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a grandparent whose interest I think you have piqued. Sharon in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Sharon: Hey, Brian, love you. I am a grandparent, and I take care of my granddaughter. My daughter is a principal in the middle school, and I am committed to helping my daughter by taking care of her child. It's a win-win situation. It keeps me fit, alert. I also feel that my daughter could not make it. Women cannot work without child care, especially after school. They just can't get there to get the child. I think it's a win-win situation because I love taking care of my granddaughter, and she loves me taking care of her. It's costly. I have to do meals, I have to do pick up and drop off, so that's transportation costs. You know what? When the government realizes that women need child care assistance to begin with, then we'll have a thriving community.

Brian Lehrer: You're putting it on the government, but are you now going to go home to your daughter and say, "I heard this woman, Marina Lopez, on The Brian Lehrer Show, and she said, maybe you should be paying me to take care of the grandkids [unintelligible 00:49:42]

Sharon: My daughter pays me in various ways. She knows she couldn't make it without me. I don't require monetary. I just tell her when there's a need, when I need to go food shopping, you need to go with me. I'm feeding your child. She takes care of me, and I take care of her. I don't think it's about the money, Brian. It's about a legacy of care that we need in our children, that it's falling by the wayside, and we're paying for it. The guns, the violence, the kids are running wild after school. They need somewhere to soft land.

Brian Lehrer: Very eloquent, Sharon. Thank you very much. Marina, what are you thinking, listening to that call?

Marina Lopez: That's a beautiful sentiment, Sharon, and I think a lot of people in Singapore would echo that as well. It is about the legacy. What we find is exactly what you said. The benefits here are they ripple out throughout the family. Of course, parents get reliable, flexible, affordable child care. Children get love and a closer bond with their grandparents, who they might not see as often. As you mentioned, grandparents are able to stay fit, use their minds, stay active, and of course, get to know their grandchildren.

Now, if you're not comfortable with a monthly direct deposit in your bank account, if that feels like too much of a financial transaction in a relationship that's supposed to be more about love, I completely recommend what Sharon said, creating a system where you can ask for help when you need it. Whether that's asking for your daughter to accompany you to a medical appointment, asking for help with major purchases. I've seen people in Singapore do this as well, asking to go along on vacation, asking your kids to pay for your vacation to go along with them. Things like that can make a difference.

Now I have seen financial stipends in the way that it is done in Singapore work really well for families where grandparents don't live close but wish they did. I interview a family in my article in Seattle. Their mother was living in Kentucky and wanted to live close to the family, but just couldn't afford housing prices in Seattle. They decided that $1,000 a month was a stipend that would help facilitate that move and help support the grandparents while they did child care.

The other thing that I just want to mention is that we are already paying other people a lot of money to care for our children. Half of American families pay 20% of their income to child care. That's when they can find spots available when they can find quality childcare to send their kids to. If you are one of those families, instead of spending 20% of your income to send your child to a child care that might be overcrowded or not even have availability, giving some of that money to a family member is a great way to ensure that they are taken care of and that your child is receiving the best quality care. Of course, this doesn't work for all families, but it is a solution that I think is worth considering here in

the US.

Brian Lehrer: Another grandparent calling in. Cheryl in Pittstown in Jersey. You're on WNYC. Hi Cheryl.

Cheryl: Hi Brian. Long time, first time. Thanks for taking my call.

Brian Lehrer: Glad you're on.

Cheryl: I moved from California to the East Coast 12 years ago when my first grandson was about to be born. My daughter is my only daughter, and I didn't want to be on the other coast from her when she and her husband were starting their family. I have been here ever since. I played a big role all along, especially when the second child came along very close to the first one. I had been working the first year that I came. I took early retirement so that I could be close by and help my daughter with two babies just 16 months apart. That's where we've been.

They were living in Brooklyn at the time. I ended up, when I retired, moving to Brooklyn. I really relate to how there could be some financial assistance. My interest was piqued when I heard your guest describe how there were subsidies for housing in some of these situations, because that was my biggest challenge. I suddenly went on retirement to my Social Security only, and I was paying market rent in Brooklyn. My son-in-law and daughter did help to subsidize me until I could get into low-income housing, which I did eventually.

Brian Lehrer: Wonderful story of, again, I guess like the first caller story, Marina, that it's different for every family. There was a particular financial arrangement helping her with housing until she was able to get her own feet on the ground, this grandma who moved across country to be with her daughter and grandchild.

Marina Lopez: Exactly. I think a lot of this labor is already happening. We know already that more than 40% of grandmas see their grandkids weekly. A lot of that time involves childcare. I think making that labor visible and acknowledging that it is work. Taking care of two young kids is a lot of work. Retiring early to do it comes at a financial cost. If we can acknowledge that as a society and individually in our families, figure out the best way to compensate grandparents for the time that they spend with their grandkids, it helps make this system more sustainable. This is what Singapore understands. This is a system that can work for a lot of families if you put in the financial underpinnings to make it sustainable.

Brian Lehrer: We're getting a pushback on this from people who say the problem with this is that it seems to either institutionalize or at least reinforce the idea of family care detached from outside the nuclear family, that there should be social supports, there should be government supports, and it's the wrong emphasis to be lauding putting this on the family.

Marina Lopez: I would say that this definitely should not be on the backs of families alone. We are not meant to do this by ourselves. However, the reality on the ground is that Americans are relying on their families for help. We need more help than we're getting. There is a child care crisis in play today. For a lot of parents, the choice is not between sending their kids to a subsidized daycare or a free government program or keeping them home. The choice is between quitting their jobs or sending them to a grandparent for help.

A lot of families do not have a plethora of options here when it comes to child care. I think acknowledging that is part of the solution. We need to see what the situation is on the ground, subsidize what we can to help families that have these types of arrangements in place, and then, of course, build up a public option for families that don't have grandparents close by that can't rely on their families. This isn't a solution for everybody, but it does address a lot of the problems that are already happening in the current situation on the ground today.

Brian Lehrer: As a last question, let me go to the culture of depending on nuclear families, or maybe in addition to what you write about in the article, which probably goes to the deepest difference in this context between American culture and Singaporean culture, which was the example you were using, what you call an entrenched culture there of filial piety. What does that mean?

Marina Lopez: In Singapore, children view the relationship between their parents as a relationship of honor. Grandparents have a place of honor in society. Part of the way that you honor their role is through these financial allowances. You are showing your gratitude for the people that raised you by making sure that they're provided for financially, making sure that they also get to go on vacation, making sure that they can afford their appliances, et cetera.

This is something that is so entrenched in Singaporean culture that it is nearly universal there. So many grandparents get these allowances. Of course, in the West, one of the things that I love about American culture is our emphasis on individualism and independence. I think that can work really well until you have children. We see that this system of depending solely on the nuclear family for support once you have kids is not working. Parents are burnt out, they are cash-strapped, they are having fewer children. If you want to create an environment where you are supporting parents, part of that is going to require a change in culture so that parents can also feel like they can rely on their extended family, in addition, as I mentioned, to government support.

Turning to your extended family for help is not an ambition of failure. It is the way that children have been raised for generations. We were never meant to do this alone. We were always meant to have a village. I really encourage parents to recreate that village, whether it's with biological family, if that's available to you, whether it's with chosen family, or whether you are able to string together public support for raising your children.

Brian Lehrer: One more piece of pushback from a listener, and then we're out of time. Listener texts, "I find this conversation kind of frustrating. Who is this article for? I find it hard to believe that people aren't figuring out any way how to find care for kids, including from family members."

Marina Lopez: They are finding care for kids from family members, but crucially, that care is often invisible financially and in terms of acknowledgment. This is for people who either are considering asking grandparents for help, are already asking grandparents for help, but have not thought of the financial element that might support this kind of framework. You need to be able to make sure that the grandparents in your life are able to do this sustainably. Part of that involves making this care visible. The financial piece is something that I think needs to be included in the conversation here in the US.

Brian Lehrer: We leave it there with Marina Lopez, author of Please Yell at My Kids. We should talk about that concept to say to other people, "Please yell at my kids," on another visit, but her new piece in The Atlantic suggests that Americans looking for affordable, high-quality childcare should consider paying their parents to watch their kids. Marina, thanks so much.

Marina Lopez: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: It's the Best of Brian Lehrer show on tape today, so we won't be taking your calls.

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Julia Ioffe is with us. You may know her reporting as a founding partner and Washington correspondent at Puck News. She now has a new book, chosen as a finalist for the National Book Award before it was even in stores, with a surprising history of how Russia, of all places, led the world in feminism until it didn't.

Yes, there's a parallel with what's going on in the United States right now, but the path to a global right-wing merger of retrograde sex and gender roles was very different in the last century of Russian history than it's been here. The book is called Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy. Julia, always great to have you on. Congratulations on the book and welcome back to WNYC.

Julia Ioffe: Oh my goodness. Brian, thank you so much.

Brian Lehrer: Can you start, as you do in the book, with your own family history of four generations of women in your family practicing medicine? How far does this go back, and what was the context of how that got started?

Julia Ioffe: Well, my mother is a doctor. Her mother was a doctor, a cardiologist. Her mother was a doctor, a pediatrician. I had two great-grandmothers who were doctors, another great-grandmother who was a PhD in chemistry and ran her own lab and wrote scientific papers in the 1930s. My other grandmother was a chemical engineer who oversaw the lab at the water purification plant that provided drinking water to parts of Moscow and the Kremlin.

What I kept encountering was that Americans who would hear this lineage would say, "Wow, that's so extraordinary." I think in an American context, it is absolutely extraordinary. In a Soviet context, it is not. In the Soviet context, 70% of doctors were women. Women had been working full-time since the 1920s. They made up over half the workforce by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. They were heavily represented in the sciences and engineering, and STEM professions that in the US are considered male-dominated.

The context of how that happened is what the book is about. It's me trying to explain to an American and a Western audience while frankly learning about this myself, because in 20 years of learning and writing about Russia and the Soviet Union, I didn't know this history either. I was not taught it, and it was not readily accessible.

The context is a very radical socialist social experiment that, when the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, they sought not just to remake the Soviet man, but they wanted to make a new Soviet woman and a new Soviet society where women were emancipated, where they worked, and where they parented like the men did, where child rearing as well as domestic labor were collectivized, and where women were initially given a tremendous amount of rights. No-fault civil divorce in 1918, paid maternity leave in 1918, child support, free higher education, legalizing abortion in 1920.

Brian Lehrer: Abortion in 1920. That was amazing to read in your book.

Julia Ioffe: Yes. Then the secondary question is, what happened? How did Russia go from that, from a country that produced women who thought nothing of being a doctor or an engineer, and where women thought nothing of picking up a gun and going to join the fight against the Nazi invasion in 1941, where they were all female bomber regiments? Going from that to a population of women that want nothing more than to marry rich so they can be stay-at-home wives and mothers.

Brian Lehrer: Hold the story of how it all went bad for a minute and talk about one of the names from history that may be worth saying out loud, and tell me if I'm mispronouncing it, Alexandra Kollontai?

Julia Ioffe: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Who is she?

Julia Ioffe: She was a very prominent revolutionary that was originally not on Lenin's side and then switched to his side in 1917. If the big names in Marxist philosophy, like Marx himself and others, kind of yada yada'd the part about how socialism would liberate women and emancipate women, Kollontai actually fleshed it out in her writings and explained what a socialist society would need to do specifically to emancipate women. It would be to treat childbearing as a collective good that is supported by the larger society.

Free child care, cafeterias, laundromats that the state runs, that take the domestic burden off of women's shoulders, emphasizing the importance of work and creative work to a woman's sense of self-worth, liberating women's sexual desires from the confines of marriage. Pretty revolutionary stuff when she was writing it at the turn of the 20th century. It sounds revolutionary even now, but imagine what it sounded like 120-some years ago.

Brian Lehrer: Tell us a little bit more about how that fit into the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 philosophy. We usually hear about it as an attempt that eventually went very bad to erase class distinctions, but so many people will only be hearing for the first time, through your book and through your book appearances like this, that they also set out to erase gender. How did the two go together?

Julia Ioffe: It wasn't so much that they set out to erase gender, it was that they set out to erase the disparities in how the genders were treated.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, I said that wrong. Gender inequality, not gender.

Julia Ioffe: No, that's okay. Basically, the idea was that the family, the bourgeois nuclear family, is the building block of a capitalist bourgeois society. At the time, they were writing about a time where women entered into marriage, mostly for economic reasons. They couldn't really work on their own. To be able to feed themselves and have a roof over their head, they went from their father's house to their husband's house. Whether they wanted to be married to that person didn't really factor into it.

Some of the early socialists wrote very movingly about how it wasn't all that different from prostitution and that a sex worker or prostitute could stop. She could say, "Okay, I don't want to do this anymore," or "I no longer want to sleep with this client." A woman in a bourgeois marriage in the 19th century couldn't readily excuse herself from the arrangement. She would be destitute, and divorce was almost impossible to obtain.

One of the first things that the Bolsheviks-- they also felt, I should say, that to get rid of capitalism and this kind of bourgeois arrangement, they had to get rid of this basic building block. What they went about doing was liberating women from the confines of these arrangements, so making divorce-- taking the divorce and marriage away from the church, making no-fault civil divorce very easy to obtain, freeing women from needing their husband's permission to do everything.

Brian Lehrer: I see free higher education for women as well. That's from your book.

Julia Ioffe: Yes, that's right. I just mentioned that. Yes, free higher education, and also erasing the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate offspring. A woman could get child support from a man she suspected of being the father of her child, even if they weren't married. She would get paid maternity leave. These are reforms in 1918. We're still fighting over this here today. They just instituted this in 1918. They also forced, they said, "All women have to work." For them, for socialists at that time, the idea of work was central to a person's self-worth and value and self-conception.

Brian Lehrer: What we call work outside the home?

Julia Ioffe: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Who took care of the kids?

Julia Ioffe: Well, the idea was that the state would do it, that there would be state-run nurseries, and there would be state-run laundromats to do the laundry and wash the cloth diapers, that there would be state-run cafeterias to feed everyone. Lenin put it, I think, very funnily, where he said it's very inefficient to have a million women slaving away in a million stinky kitchens. Why don't we just consolidate it? You'll be surprised to know that not everyone liked that. It also didn't really pan out.

The state had other priorities, especially when it was broke after a world war and a civil and artificially created famines and political repressions, and then a second World War, and then a Cold War with a very expensive arms race. A lot of these things just never panned out while women were still expected to put in a full day at the factory or the lab or the hospital without the support that the state had originally promised.

Brian Lehrer: If you're just joining us, my guest is Julia Ioffe, usually Washington correspondent for Puck News. We're also talking about Julia Ioffe's new book, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy. How did it start to go bad? Maybe you were just giving us an inkling of that because the actual take care of the family collectively piece didn't get fully implemented because-

Julia Ioffe: That's right.

Brian Lehrer: -it started to go bad way before Vladimir Putin, right?

Julia Ioffe: Yes, there's that part where the state just had other priorities. At the same time, the men at the top, because once the Bolsheviks seized power, they stopped being so egalitarian. They were quite egalitarian when they were in the underground, and basically, the stakes were very low. Once they seized power, they were like, "Okay, let the men take care of this." Women, very quickly, disappeared from positions of power. The men had other priorities and were themselves quite traditionalist and conservative in their view of the family of gender. They didn't like all the stuff that Kollontai was writing about. She was soon exiled, and they didn't love this. The policies reflected that.

They also needed women to keep working because they kept killing the men. They were building an industrial state at breakneck speed. What took Britain or the US 100 years to build, they were trying to do in 5. They needed all hands on deck, but they didn't build the nurseries, they didn't build the laundromats, they didn't build the cafeterias. Food was always scarce. Clothing was always scarce. Then, after World War II, women were also expected to have more babies. For that, the state doubled down on this kind of traditionalist view that many held at the top but didn't really put into policy. After World War II, they really were like, "Your first role is as a mother and a wife, but you have to keep working."

Soviet women, in addition to being pressed into reproductive service and just productive labor outside the home, they also had to run households full-time by themselves that lacked the mechanization and conveniences that their peers had in the West. There were no dishwashers. There were no washing machines. Oftentimes, there were no refrigerators. It was hard to get food. A lot of times, you had to go forage in the forest or wait in endless lines just to get something that passed for meat so you could make a soup for your family. Child rearing fell exclusively on the women.

By the time the Soviet Union was falling apart, women were exhausted. They were exhausted of carrying this double, triple burden and carrying their entire families, their country, on their back. There was a sense of, like, "If you're telling us that our primary role is as wives and as mothers, can we just do that part and let the men do the other half? Because we are exhausted of having to do everything all at once, as if it were our only occupation."

Brian Lehrer: Did you say this already? Stalin imposed a tax on not having kids?

Julia Ioffe: Yes. In 1944, this was actually a program designed by Nikita Khrushchev. When it was becoming clear, the catastrophic human losses that the Soviet Union suffered in World War II, most of whom were men, there was a state project to, as they called it, replace the dead. They wanted to have a baby boom the same way that the US was going to have a baby boom. The problem was that there were many fewer men to have these babies with.

The state created all kinds of legal and social categories, like the idea of a single mother trying to take away the social stigma that came with being a single mother with a child born out of wedlock, and incentivizing women who were or were not married to have as many children as possible. People who did not have children had to pay a tax. If you had one child, you paid a little less. If you had two children, you paid a little less. Then you only stopped paying it if you had three children. You replace the mother, the father, and you add one person into the state's coffers, as it were.

Khrushchev also borrowed this idea from Nazi Germany of giving military style medals to mothers for having astronomical numbers of children. The top was 10 children or above, and you would get a kind of medal. Vladimir Putin has recently reintroduced this idea.

Brian Lehrer: Have you told Vice President Vance about this? Maybe we would have it here.

Julia Ioffe: [laughs] I'd like not to.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe your last couple of answers have started to neutralize this, but we're getting a few texts that go something like this. Here's one. "Maybe Brian should read a few real-world books regarding the success rates of communist countries. I believe the citizen death toll is about 100 million between 1900 and now." For people who had heard the very beginning of this and thought that you were glorifying the history of Soviet Russia.

Julia Ioffe: Oh, goodness, no.

Brian Lehrer: You're really not?

Julia Ioffe: No. I mean, if you read this book, this book is a tragedy. This book is not a success story. This is not a triumphalist history of the Soviet socialist experiment. This book is a tragedy. What I've heard from a lot of readers is that there are many parts that are quite painful and hard to read because it does document how deeply this promise, as well as its betrayal, hurt the very women it was supposed to emancipate, and how deeply it hurt and betrayed them, as well as the broader society, but specifically women.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe it's worth saying, since you started with your family story and how many generations of women doctors there have been in your family, that you and your parents came to this country as refugees from the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Why did your parents feel they needed to take you and flee?

Julia Ioffe: Because of institutionalized, legalized anti-Semitism that drastically curtailed how Soviet Jews could live their lives. We were second-class citizens. There were many schools and universities we were not allowed to attend, many jobs that were completely closed, and professions that were closed to us. Casual anti-Semitism for my parents, for my mother, the deciding factor was the summer of 1988, which marked the 1,000th anniversary of Russia becoming Christian. There were rumors that there would be pogroms and that the police were handing out the names and addresses of Jews.

For my mother, whose grandmother survived a pogrom in 1919 and watched her mother be executed, my mom, even in the year of 1988, felt it was absolutely feasible and plausible for this to happen again, and decided-- My father had long wanted to leave, but she finally gave him the green light. That was on top of living in a totalitarian dictatorship where you can't read what you want to read, you can't associate with whom you want to associate, you can't say what you want to say, and there's no food and no clothing, and it's just society is kind of in a shambles.

The reason that you and I are having this interview in English, that I wrote this book in English, is because the Soviet experiment, also in internationalism and egalitarianism, not just by gender, but by nationality, religion, failed, and people like my family were driven from the country.

Brian Lehrer: Enter Vladimir Putin, eventually. What kind of sex or gender role politics did he grow up with or develop as an ambitious political adult?

Julia Ioffe: Well, he grew up in the post-war traditionalism that had been imposed by Stalin, this return to normalcy, return to traditional gender roles, and that seemed to have resonated deeply with him. He's a very traditional guy. Under his rule now, a lot of that has come roaring back and has become state policy. Again, Putin's government has explored reintroducing attacks on childlessness. He has reintroduced these medals of motherhood.

Russian students in schools are being taught lessons about religiosity and chastity, and the value of having many, many children. Cabinet ministers in his cabinet, women, are going around telling young women to forego a higher education so that they can start having children early, so that way, they can have many more children. The state has also decriminalized domestic abuse.

Brian Lehrer: What?

Julia Ioffe: Yes. This has become a hyper-masculine, hyper-traditionalist, aggressively so, state. Some of that is because of the post-war traditionalist context in which he grew up.

Brian Lehrer: You tell the story of when Boris Yeltsin handed power to Putin around 25 years ago. Putin didn't even tell his wife it was going to happen. You excerpted that part on POC. Can you tell that story?

Julia Ioffe: Yes. Boris Yeltsin, who had been ailing and increasingly useless as the president of Russia on New Year's Eve 1999, went on TV and said, "Basically, I'm stepping aside, and here's this new caretaker president, Vladimir Putin." This was all televised. Then Putin gives a little speech, and his wife at the time, Lyudmila, did not know this was happening. She got a phone call from a friend congratulating her, and she thought it was kind of a New Year's greeting. Everybody was calling each other and saying happy coming New Year, et cetera.

She's like, "Yes, congratulations to you, too." The friend was like, "Do you not know what just happened?" It turned out she didn't. That her husband apparently had been in these talks for weeks to become Boris Yeltsin's successor. She hadn't even known to turn on the television, so she didn't see her husband take on this new role. She was incredibly upset. She understood immediately that her personal life was over with all this.

Brian Lehrer: Julia Ioffe, our guest from Puck News, with her new book, Motherland: A Feminist History of Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy. Want to hear another person's family story. Karina in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hello, Karina.

Karina: Hi. I was born in Ukraine in '73. Both my parents were engineers. They were treated equally. The opportunities provided to my mom in the workforce were very much equal to men. My mom had a very strong position. She felt power and empowered in the workforce. What I wanted to point out is what I have found is, once the women entered the home, so you could be boss at work, but once you entered the home, you were subservient to your husband, and you were responsible for raising the kids, running the home, and anything that was associated with that, and that was maintained throughout my childhood. That then obviously started to peter out.

There were these examples of strong women in the workforce that really empowered, I think, young girls, but there always was this double standard of what happened once you were back at home.

Brian Lehrer: Did you hear stories like that in your family, Julia?

Julia Ioffe: Oh, absolutely. The book is full of them. What Karina describes is exactly what happened. Not only that, these women were often subservient to husbands that were quite useless and were dissolute drunkards who didn't bring home their salaries, or were these overgrown man-children that they also had to take care of full-time. It wasn't just that they were raising and taking care of their children full-time, they were also taking care of their husbands full-time. That's if they had husbands.

There was this very, very strong pressure after the reforms that Khrushchev and Stalin introduced in 1944 on women to get married, but there wasn't a lot of men around. There is this panic that develops in women that you have to get married, you have to have a child, no matter what, and this becomes even more important than your career. There are these incredible pressures on Soviet women.

On top of that, I think what Karina said was incredibly astute, and that's exactly what was happening across the entire Soviet Union. The other thing is that they were running a household, not in America, where you could go to the supermarket quickly, fill up a shopping cart, go home, have some pre-prepared meals, a TV dinner you could pop in the oven or the microwave. Everything had to be made from scratch every single day. There were no washing machines, so a lot of people lived in communal apartments. They were washing their clothes by boiling them in pots on a stove, with every other family that was boiling their laundry in a pot on the stove.

After spending a whole day at work being the boss, you then had to grab your kids from school, run to the store, get in line to order whatever kind of paltry selection of foodstuffs they had in the store, then get in another line and wait to pay for it, then get in a third line and wait to pick it up, which took up tremendous amount of time. Then you have to go home, and you have to cook the dinner. There's oftentimes no refrigeration. You have to help your kids with your homework, you have to feed your husband. Then you put your kids to bed, and you darn their socks and make clothes from scratch, because you couldn't get clothes anywhere.

It was incredible that Soviet women were able to do it as long as they did because it was just so much work, both at work and at home. As one historian said, Soviet women did each of these jobs, the job in the workforce, the job as a homemaker, the job as primary child rearer, as if it was their sole job, even though they were doing three of them.

Brian Lehrer: When did they sleep?

Julia Ioffe: They didn't. They didn't. They didn't. Again, by the time the Soviet Union fell apart, they were exhausted. As one woman wrote into a newspaper in the late '80s, when things were freer under glasnost, she said, "Sure, Soviet women can do everything. We just don't want to anymore."

Brian Lehrer: Back to the present. How does Putin use traditional gender roles in his autocracy today? Use the word autocracy. How similar or different would you say it is to how Trump or others on the political right use it in this country? Use the term Christian nationalism to apply to both. Of course, the Soviet state was officially non-religious. Christian anything had to make a comeback. How does Putin use traditional gender roles in his autocracy today, and how similar or different from anything Trump is doing or his allies on the Christian right here?

Julia Ioffe: The church has come roaring back in Russia, in part because the Kremlin has asked it to and has empowered it to. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there wasn't a governing ideology anymore. There was no national idea. The church stepped in to fill that void, just as it had pre-1917. Then the idea of the Russian nation becomes a Christian one, and the Russian Orthodox Church is quite, quite backwards. It's the idea that men are men, and men are violent, and men naturally want to conquer and go to war. Women are women, and they should be subservient to their husbands, and their primary role is to be a mother and a homemaker, and to have as many kids as possible.

Of course, for Putin, that suits him quite well because he needs more and more people as he sends more and more people to die in trying to take over Ukraine. There had also been this kind of hollowing out of masculinity under the Soviet Union, in part because so many men were killed and traumatized, and alcoholism took off. Now, in the recruitment ads for the Russian military, because the Russian military just needs more and more and more bodies, they really play on this idea of the defeated emasculated man and say, "Get off the couch, pick up a gun, and go be a man. Go fight in Ukraine. Do this for your women, protect your women."

We hear a lot of this similar rhetoric, kind of violent patriarchal traditionalism, here in the US, this idea that gay people are psychologically aberrant. Putin's government labeled the global LGBTQ movement, whatever that is, as an extremist one. Now gay Russians are on par with ISIS or Al-Qaeda terrorists. The Russian authorities have been breaking up, raiding gay bars, but even private parties and private people's homes, and saying these are gatherings of extremists, these are extremist cells. They're beaten up on camera, and these videos are then blasted to various Telegram channels. These people are given insane prison sentences.

Again, there's this idea that the government is propagating that men are men, women are women, and the men are in charge.

Brian Lehrer: There are only two genders.

Julia Ioffe: Absolutely.

Brian Lehrer: Where did we hear this?

Julia Ioffe: It's interesting because Putin, even in declaring the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, said very clearly that one of the reasons he was going to fight in Ukraine and try to conquer Ukraine wasn't NATO. What he said was the Western imposition of values that are alien to Russia. The idea that there's more than two genders, the idea that there's radical feminism.

He explicitly said this, that this was one of the reasons he is fighting in Ukraine. He has come back to this idea over and over and over again, as have other members of the elites, saying that they're fighting in Ukraine because Russian soldiers, when they're fighting in Ukraine, discover gender-neutral bathrooms. Oh, my God. Of course, we have to conquer and destroy this country.

Brian Lehrer: How do the women, given even your previous answer, if you can know as a reporter, given how close to society Russia is at this point, how do the women feel about this and the men being encouraged to be men and pick up a weapon and go fight in Ukraine? Are women all behind this, or are they scratching their heads and saying, "Why are we doing this again?"

Julia Ioffe: Well, women, as you know, are not a monolith. There have been different responses. There are some women who have completely bought into this hook, line, and sinker. There have been stories of mothers calling their sons who have fled the draft, saying, "You're a scoundrel and a coward. You've betrayed your motherland. You need to go and fight, and I don't care if you die. At least you'll die a hero. Right now, you fled your duty, your patriotic duty, and I don't even want to be associated with you." There are some mothers like that.

There are mothers and wives who have gotten in their cars and driven behind the convoys taking their drafted sons and husbands down to Ukraine and demanding that they be freed, demanding that they be released from the clutches of the Ministry of Defense. There are some women who see the massive financial incentives that men are given to fight in the war in Ukraine. I mean, massive orders of magnitude more than they can make in their civilian jobs. They're being offered to them in the military, plus a massive signing bonus, plus ₽3 million if you're injured and ₽5 million to your family if you're killed. This, in a country where the average salary is about ₽40,000, 50,000 a month. These are astronomical numbers.

There have been some women who smell an opportunity in this. There was a real estate blogger influencer who went on a podcast, and somebody asked her, "If I'm a young woman in my 20s, real estate prices are so high, how can I buy my first apartment?" She said, "Well, find a man, marry him, and then make him sign up for the military, get shipped to Ukraine, where he'll inevitably get killed. You'll get this ₽5 million payout, and you can buy an apartment." She, of course, got in tremendous trouble.

There are some women who see it as a financial opportunity, and there are others who have gone out and protested and risked their own safety and liberty to protest their sons and husbands being sent to fight in a senseless, bloody war.

Brian Lehrer: Julia Ioffe, founding partner and Washington correspondent for Puck News, is now the author of the book, Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy. Congratulations on that, and thank you for sharing it with us.

Julia Ioffe: Thank you, Brian. Thank you for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. More to come. The Brian Lehrer Show is on tape today, so we won't be taking your calls.

[music]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We will end on a lighter note with a preview of a new documentary from New Yorker cartoonist Liza Donnelly, Women Laughing, brings us into the world of the women who make some of your favorite side-splitting cartoons in The New Yorker each week. Here's a 40-second preview of the documentary.

Liza Donnelly: Back when I started in the 1970s, there were just four of us among the dozens of male contributors.

[music]

Liza Donnelly: Now, almost half of the people drawing for the magazine are women. We're all freelancers, working separately, mostly in solitude, in our studios, sometimes out on the street, but not today.

Brian Lehrer: With me now today is Liza Donnelly, writer and cartoonist at The New Yorker, and the author of Very Funny Ladies: The New Yorker's Women Cartoonists, 1925 to 2021, and the Substack Seeing Things. Hey, Liza, welcome back to WNYC.

Liza Donnelly: Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me. It's so great to be back.

Brian Lehrer: The documentary opens with your story. Remind us, how did you first get into drawing cartoons at a time when, per that preview, maybe not that many women were being hired to do that?

Liza Donnelly: That's right. I started drawing to make my mother happy, and I was really shy, so it was a way to be by myself and just draw, and just kept doing it. Once my mother laughed, I just couldn't stop, and my classmates laughed. I submitted during college to The New Yorker. I found myself attracted to The New Yorker, in part, because it had political cartoons in it, and I was a political animal, even at a young age, because I grew up in Washington during Watergate. I just wanted to be a cartoonist. I didn't think about my gender at all. There were four of us.

Brian Lehrer: You just mentioned working alone, as I guess most cartoonists do. You sit there at a desk, and you draw, and you write captions, and you think, "What's funny?" You and the other women you spoke with in the documentary, besides working in solitude for the most part, apparently got together for this. Why did you want to gather everyone together?

Liza Donnelly: I thought it'd be fun. The camaraderie of cartoonists has been strong as long as I've been submitting to The New Yorker. My whole idea for this film, which I co-directed with Kathleen Hughes and the producer's, Judith Mizrachy, wonderful, wonderful people. My idea initially was to have it be about the creative process. I wanted to talk with my colleagues one-on-one. That's how we started. The film has sections where it's one-on-one, talking with them and drawing with them.

We're sitting across from each other, there's a big piece of paper in front of us, and we're just drawing and doodling and talking about why we do this crazy thing, and what's it like to be a woman in this business, does it make any difference? Then I thought, "We should have everybody come together," and we got access to The Algonquin Hotel. Thanks very much to The Algonquin Hotel. They were very generous in giving us space and a roundtable. Ten of us sat around the roundtable and did the same thing, talking and laughing and teasing each other and drinking wine and drawing. This movie, Brian, is a lot of fun, and it's joyful, but it also has some serious elements to it.

Brian Lehrer: We'll play another clip. Now, this is just 20 seconds. We're going to hear Amy Hwang first, followed by Sarah Akinterinwa. Here we go, Amy first.

Amy Hwang: A lot of things about being a woman can be negative. There are problems-

Sarah Akinterinwa: There are problems.

Amy Hwang: -and they make great cartoons.

Sarah Akinterinwa: I just think women are the funniest. We're the funniest gender, to be honest.

Brian Lehrer: Do you agree with Sarah? Are women the funniest gender?

Liza Donnelly: [laughs] I don't want to disagree with her, but both genders are funny. She goes on to talk more specifically about what she means, and that she believes that for women, it has been a coping mechanism, as is true with humor in many other demographics. Right now, we're using humor to get through the politics that's going on.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have any favorites of your own that you would describe or mention the caption of, or of some of your colleagues?

Liza Donnelly: When you asked me that question, all kinds of cartoons flooded my brain, and I don't know how to choose.

Brian Lehrer: Let me reframe the question so I don't make it a favorite. Just one that comes to mind.

Liza Donnelly: Two come to mind of mine is a woman on a swing. I use the swing metaphor a lot in my drawings. She's on the swing swinging, and she's saying to a little boy or a little child, I don't know if it's a boy or not, she's saying, "Fun can happen to adults, too." My cartoons are pretty quiet. That was a New Yorker cartoon. The other one is not a New Yorker cartoon. It's, again, a woman and a young person. I don't always just do that, but the little girl is looking up at her mother, and she's saying, "Mommy, what did you do in the war on women?" Which, if you remember, was a phrase that was in the news 10 years ago, was actually being used in the news cycle. Those are just two ideas, two different cartoons.

Brian Lehrer: Are there topics or types of humor that you feel you can explore as a woman cartoonist, or just that were previously overlooked in the magazine that you and your colleagues brought to it?

Liza Donnelly: Oh, yes. Not me specifically, but my colleagues, the younger ones, are branching out into topics that were not previously covered in The New Yorker or anywhere in my time in this business. Things like menstruation, menopause, and dating from a woman's perspective. It's not like men and women have different senses of humor, per se, but we have different experiences in the world. We're going to draw and write about how we are moving through the world, which can be different than how men move through the world.

Brian Lehrer: Looking up something else, I was flipping through a few old New Yorkers recently, and one back from 2001 had a cartoon in it that caught my eye since I knew you were coming on. I don't know who the cartoonist is or if it's somebody that you knew, but it's two women speaking at a bar, talking to each other. One of them, I guess, talking about a relationship, says, "Sex brought us together, but gender drove us apart."

Liza Donnelly: [chuckles] That's Barbara Smaller, who is a friend of mine. See?

Brian Lehrer: I guess I wondered if a man would have come up with that cartoon. Maybe, but maybe less likely.

Liza Donnelly: Maybe. There's some men drawing great feminist cartoons, but in terms of our experience, only we can draw about that.

Brian Lehrer: Another one was a woman with a cat. Again, this is from a decades-old New Yorker, a woman with a cat going to the municipal offices and saying, "We'd like to register for a domestic partnership."

Liza Donnelly: [chuckles] I don't know that one. That's great.

Brian Lehrer: I would have to pull it out and see if I can read the signature of who the cartoonist was. I thought, "Oh my goodness, if that was today, it would either be out of touch or it would be relevant with JD Vance and his childless cat ladies poking fun at him."

Liza Donnelly: Yes. Cartoons can be timeless, but they can also lose relevancy or be offensive after 10 years even. I love how cartoons can make people think differently. Somebody said to me recently-- it was Heather Cox Richardson. I did a panel with her. I did a one-on-one with her, the historian. She said that cartoons, they stay in the realm of reality a little bit, and when they adjust slightly, if they twist reality slightly, hopefully you'll understand what the point is, you'll get the joke, but it'll make you think, "Oh yes, I hadn't thought of it that way." Humor's great that way. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Emma in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Emma.

Emma: Hi. Quick question. Do you have any advice for older women who have been in the business, they have had their illustrations and cartoons published, maybe back in the '90s or the early 2000s? Any advice for women who have to adapt to the newer technological skills that editors and publishers are expecting? Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you.

Liza Donnelly: I don't know what you mean by newer technological skills. A lot of us do draw on machines. I draw on iPad and on paper. You just have to keep drawing. I love technology, so I try to adapt to what tools that are out there, such as the iPad or using my phone over my hand and drawing for people that way, a video. I do a lot of that on my Substack. Just playing with the new technologies is--

Brian Lehrer: Let me ask you this new technology question to close. After women cartoonists have fought to achieve nearly equal representation at The New Yorker, just as you're reaching this milestone, AI image generators are becoming capable of creating cartoons and illustrations without any human. I'm curious if you and the women you spoke with for the film are thinking about AI's impact on your profession and career prospects in any way.

Liza Donnelly: We didn't talk about it in the film. We didn't go there, but certainly it's being talked about among my colleagues because there's an app out there now that says, "Draw your own New Yorker cartoon." I shouldn't be saying this on the radio because people will go try to find it, but I worry. I worry. There's nothing like a human sense of humor, and they can't recreate that. The computer can recreate the semblance of a joke to make it funny, but it's nothing like humor coming directly from the heart of another person or directly from the hand of another person. I don't know. I'm not anti-AI, but hopefully, we will figure out a way to work around this.

Brian Lehrer: Do you use it at all to help you come up with cartoons?

Liza Donnelly: No. No. I wonder who does. It's a good question.

Brian Lehrer: I wonder who does. Maybe that'll be a follow-up segment. For today, my guest has been Liza Donnelly, writer and cartoonist at The New Yorker, author of the book, Very Funny Ladies: The New Yorker's Women Cartoonists, 1925 to 2021, and the Substack, Seeing Things. The documentary, Women Laughing, is brand new. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.

Liza Donnelly: Thank you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: That's the Brian Lehrer Show for today, produced by Mary Croke, Lisa Allison, Amina Serna, Carl Beisrand, and Esperanza Rosenbaum. Zach Goddard Cohen edits our national Politics podcast, which is an edit of this show. Megan Ryan is the head of Live Radio. We have Julianna Fonda and Milton Ruiz at the audio controls most days. Stay tuned for All Of It.

 

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