[music]

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Hope you had a good weekend. In case you missed it, from a reproductive rights standpoint, the weekend began with maybe one cheer for the Supreme Court. Around 6:30 Friday evening, the court announced a seven to two decision to allow the abortion medication, Mifepristone, to remain on the market with no changes to how people can get it, at least temporarily, while the underlying challenge to its 23-year availability goes back to a lower court. We'll talk about that in just a minute with Rebecca Traister from New York Magazine who has an article called Abortion Wins Elections.

We'll also touch on other Monday morning politics that Rebecca has been writing or thinking about, including that President Biden is expected to announce for reelection probably tomorrow, we are told, the attack on gender studies in Florida and elsewhere, and also relevant to judges power over abortions but not getting as much press, the desire of an increasing number of Democrats for 89-year-old Dianne Feinstein who's been too sick to vote in the Senate to step aside.

Mitch McConnell is playing hardball on this prohibiting Feinstein from temporarily being replaced by another Democrat on the Judiciary Committee so they can keep confirming judges in her absence. McConnell had the power to veto that and did. With us now is Rebecca Traister, writer for New York Magazine and its website, The Cut, and author of bestselling books, including All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation and Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger. Rebecca, always good to have you on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Rebecca Traister: Thanks so much for having me here. It's nice to talk to you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: One cheer for the Supreme Court from Friday night?

Rebecca Traister: No cheers. I was going to tell you, no cheering in the Supreme Court.

Brian Lehrer: No cheers? Half a cheer? Why not?

Rebecca Traister: No. This is actually one of my fears about this decision. To say that they cleared the lowest possible bar on Friday by not making this farcical horrific ban on an incredibly safe medication that has been on the market for 23 years and is crucial to people's ability to get the healthcare that they need, the fact that they cleared the bar of not making that ban permanent right now, congrats on not hitting absolute bottom, but first of all, there's still time. This is a delay. There are many more decisions about this case.

The fact that the Texas judge, Kacsmaryk, made the decision that he did was horrific. Two members of the Supreme Court actually sided with him and wanted to create this ban. I think it's really important to avoid a situation where we accidentally legitimize a Supreme Court that has been making terrible decisions by congratulating it on barely getting above the ground in hitting a bar of not passing bad law right now.

Brian Lehrer: Well, what do you make of the fact that the vote for at least this was seven to two, with only Thomas and Alito dissenting, that means all three Trump appointees, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett allowed the pill to remain on the market while the underlying challenge to it is heard. Does that signal to you that they may not just vote reflexively against reproductive freedom from the bench like they did in overturning role last summer, but they may actually see the issue as belonging in the political sector, not in the courts?

Rebecca Traister: No, I don't think I see a signal that's that clear. Again, I'm not a Supreme Court specialist as some of my colleagues are so tea leaf reading of the Supreme Court isn't exactly my specialty, but what I would say is, again, this case was at absolutely, I used the word already, but I can't think of another, farcical and opens an incredible precedent well beyond reproductive healthcare. To be able to take safe medicines off shelves is beyond anything we could for no reason, absolutely there's no medical reason to have done this. I think this case was so bad that their inability at this point, and again, I want to reiterate, this is a delay.

We don't actually know what's going to happen or what the final decision is going to be, but the unwillingness to do it right now, I don't think signals anything about their reflexive habits regarding reproductive healthcare. I do think it signals that the case was actually so terrible and so far-reaching in its implications around all kinds of other medication that they couldn't quite bring themselves to do it right now, but we don't know what's going to happen moving forward. This is temporary.

Brian Lehrer: I guess we should say, technically, we don't even know if it was seven to two. We know it was at least five to four, but we know because of the nature of the way this kind of decision comes out, we don't know the actual vote. We know that the two, Thomas and Alito, dissented, so it was at least a five to four majority, not necessarily a seven to two majority. Two others could have been against it, but just didn't say anything.

The Alito dissent said availability should at least be rolled back to the pre-2016 rules while the case is heard. That would have meant fewer weeks into a pregnancy, plus you couldn't get it by mail or be prescribed it by telehealth, but none of those old restrictions are back in effect. I think it's important just to say that so women know the availability, for the moment, has not changed. What's the status of Mifepristone in states that have since banned most abortions? Can women obtain it by mail order there or use it in the privacy of their own homes because it's legal to ship?

Rebecca Traister: I think one of the things that you're getting to that is absolutely crucial is that part of what the goal of an anti-abortion right now is, is to create confusion so that people don't know. I'm really grateful to you for pointing out that, in fact, Mifepristone is still legal in states where abortion has been banned. State by state, every one of these things is different.

That is one of the things that happened with the overturn of Roe via the Dobbs decision a year ago, almost a year ago. There was this sense that like, "Well, it'll just go back to the States," as if that was some clean answer. That's what I had been told for years leading up to the overturn of Roe. "It'll just go back to the States. Don't worry, Rebecca. It's not going to be a total ban. It's just going to go back to the states," as if there were then be clear-cut rules.

The reality is that the rules from state to state not only are different but are changing all the time. The questions of which states, and even within states, which district attorneys are going to prosecute. There was a really important story actually done about that in Michigan. I think it was actually reported before the Dobbs decision about how it would differ from district to district about whether people would be prosecuted for seeking abortion care. There actually are very few blanket answers except that Mifepristone is still available by mail.

Are there states where people are being prosecuted for accessing it? Yes. Are there states where it is banned? Yes, but there are also all kinds of people who are working to help get people who need abortion care, the care that they need. Those helpers are in various states being targeted legally and criminally. This kind of confusion and the fact that there aren't clear answers and that the answers change every day state by state and often within states is actually part of the effect that anti-abortion forces and the hard right are trying to produce so that people are operating in fear and it is how you get confusion even amongst medical practitioners who may or may not be providing abortion care.

I'm sure you saw that in Idaho, some weeks ago, a hospital shut down its labor and delivery unit because doctors who were of course doing abortive care as part of reproductive healthcare which can be for elective abortions or DNCs were too worried legally about their ability to continue to do their work that they wound up having to shut down the entire labor and delivery unit.

Just last week, there was a story about how residencies in obstetrics and gynecology dropped by more than 10% since the Dobbs decision because doctors are very scared of being prosecuted for doing the work they do, which involves abortion care in lots of different circumstances. The creation of these confusing questions and ever-changing perils is actually one of the effects that the anti-abortion and hard right campaign is trying to produce.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, your calls, welcome, with comments or questions about the abortion pill, temporary reprieve from the Supreme Court on Friday night. Whether you want Joe Biden to run again, which we're going to get into whether you want Dianne Feinstein to resign so Biden judge nominees can get through, Dianne Feinstein is long-term ill with shingles, or anything else related for Rebecca Traister from New York Magazine, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 or Tweet a comment or a question @BrianLehrer, we'll watch your mentions go by.

By the way, we're working on alternatives to Twitter to add other ways, those of you who don't want to use Twitter anymore will have new options soon coming up on the show for comments and questions. For the moment, we'll watch our Twitter mentions go by @BrianLehrer.

Staying on the abortion rights question, Rebecca, and looking at another state, you were just talking about Idaho, Florida, as you know, just this month tightened its ban from 15 weeks of pregnancy to just 6. That is especially discouraging for reproductive rights because Florida at 15 weeks had been a refuge for women traveling from the even more restrictive southern states nearby. Here is Governor Ron DeSantis at a campaign-style appearance on April 14th, the morning after signing the bill.

Governor Ron DeSantis: We have protected the rights of parents, we have elevated the importance of family, and promoted a culture of life.

Brian Lehrer: One thing commentators noted about that appearance, and that that was the only reference to the bill was that Governor DeSantis seemed to downplay the six-week ban despite signing the bill, and I think this starts to get to your article, Abortion Wins Elections, Rebecca.

Rebecca Traister: Yes. It's very complicated because we have right now a Republican Party that has gained power over all institutions, including the Supreme Court, including state governments like Governor Ron DeSantis and his extremely conservative hard right state legislature in Florida. They've gained their power over the past 50 years by wielding this language that you just heard him talk about the culture of life, families, he talks all the time about freedoms, even though every single move he makes as governor in Florida reduces freedom, freedom to reproductive and gender-affirming health care, to freedoms within educational systems, he's banning all kinds of curricula.

They've used this language over 50 years and leveraged anti-abortion politics to gain the stranglehold they have on so many institutions in American politics. In fact, the issue itself, one of the ways they did this was that there was an assumption that after Roe v. Wade, abortion wasn't ever really going to be inaccessible even though under Roe v. Wade, it grew ever more inaccessible as the hard right and anti-abortion right gained power in states. In fact, it's an incredibly unpopular position to want to criminalize abortion and make it inaccessible.

They now, the Republican Party and figures like Governor Ron DeSantis, who want national power, who want to be president of the United States, are facing a really tough quandary. Their party power has been built on an anti-abortion position, that position is wildly unpopular. We just saw that in the midterms where by every conceivable metric, Democrats, the party of the sitting president who didn't have high popularity ratings in a period of high inflation and high gas prices, Democrats should have gotten wiped out.

They absolutely did not in the fall of 2022, in part because of people coming out and voting to protect access to abortion which is what the majority of American voters want, and they want it not only in states like California and New York, they want it in Kansas, they want it in Michigan, they want it in Kentucky. Republicans now find themselves in a position where they have gotten what their base wanted, which was the overturn of Roe v. Wade.

They have in fact a younger generation of true believers who want to do things like a six-week abortion ban, and I hate the term six-week abortion ban because what that means is an abortion ban, the phrase six-weeks makes it sound like there's a period where you can still get an abortion. Most people who need abortion care do not know that they are even pregnant until after six weeks, so it is basically a total ban. DeSantis doesn't want to have to run on this, but he also cannot sign the bill because it is what his fevered base wants and in fact what the generation of politicians who gained office in many of these legislatures want.

He's either a rhino and a Republican turncoat if for some reason he steps away from a hard anti-abortion position, but it also is leaving him more broadly imperiled. Now, of course, one of the other things I want to point out is that in the Republican's diligent work over these decades to gain power over state legislatures, they have also managed to work it out so they don't always need majority support in order to win, that's what gerrymandering and redistricting has done for them, it is what, remember that the appointees on the Supreme Court were appointed by presidents who won the presidency without the popular vote, the Electoral College works to ensure that candidates who have not won a popular vote can still be President of the United States.

Brian Lehrer: We forget, that was Bush, not just Trump.

Rebecca Traister: It was Bush and Trump and they are the ones and in fact, many of the justices on the Supreme Court who just overturned Roe worked to help on George Bush's legal team in 2000 to help him gain that president, to gain the White House, despite having not won a popular vote. I don't want to pretend that just because they're running on an unpopular issue, they're going to lose. There are all kinds of mechanisms that, in fact, the Republicans control that can help them win and it's what the voting bands are about. All of this is working as a piece to ensure the right can still enjoy what it has now, which is a minority rule over American majorities.

Brian Lehrer: Of the 50 states, if you've gone through it like this in any way, how many of you think abortion rights would win in in a well-worded referendum?

Rebecca Traister: 50?

Brian Lehrer: You think?

Rebecca Traister: Yes. There's an interesting story about this. Their polling was done for years about abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade that showed abortion being this lightning rod issue 50/50, 50 for, 50 against. That polling bolstered the sense, I think, especially for Democrats, and it was this really explosive difficult issue whether Americans wanted abortion to be legal. In fact, one of the things I write about in the piece that I published a few weeks ago, the cover story of abortion wins elections was the way that the Democratic Party did not full throatedly embrace abortion as one of its central values.

It talks in euphemistic terms about choice but didn't embrace that language of family and freedom, which you absolutely could and in fact, young lawmakers are doing now around abortion, because they thought because of this polling, that abortion was a dangerous electric issue and that half the country didn't want it. Then about 10 years ago, a new generation of pollsters began to ask the questions differently, and they began to ask in two parts, one, "Do you yourself believe in abortion?" That first question, you'd get that 50/50 response, pretty evenly split. Then the second question was, "Do you believe that it should be criminalized? Do you believe that the government should have a role in restricting it?"

Once you started to ask that second question, you got majorities anywhere between 65% and 75% of Americans in states again, not just the ones we think of as blue states, but in states like Kansas, where you just saw that referendum pass last year. Yes, the majority of Americans in states that are not just blue, but purple and red, do not want the state regulating abortion access and abortion care. Yes, I would say 50 states.

Brian Lehrer: Republicans, I saw on TV just this morning, are trying to stop referendums from appearing on the ballot next year. Is that one of the current battles, because different states have different rules for getting a question on the ballot?

Rebecca Traister: Yes, and they're all, I mean, the state's rules are, again, like everything else we spoke about earlier, they're ever-changing and being constantly debated. This is what I said about the Republicans taking over state legislatures over the past 50 years, so they control the mechanisms for democracy itself, and that we understand how that's true when it comes to voting restrictions and the enormous battles that have taken place over the past 15 years around a right wingers effort to limit access to the ballot box.

That's also true for something like this around abortion referendum because we have now seen in every case, certainly during these midterms and last year post jobs, that abortion referendums work for the side that is on the side of abortion rights, which is the Democrats in this case. Yes, the right is working in state after state in Ohio to keep abortion off the ballot. I believe that in Wisconsin where you just had a proxy vote on abortion in the Supreme Court election that took place a couple of weeks ago there, the State Supreme Court election. Tony Evers wanted to put a direct question about abortion on the ballot and Republicans said no.

That was a contest between two people to sit on the state Supreme Court and make decisions about abortion and also perhaps about gerrymandering. The liberal judge, the woman who was on the side of abortion rights won in a landslide. Yes, Republicans are very invested in suppressing democracy. A lot of this fight is about democracy itself, the mechanisms of democracy, and what we spoke about earlier, the right use of the electoral college to win the White House, the use of state legislatures to limit the franchise and to redistrict and gerrymander. That is also true when it comes to trying to keep people from using their voices democratically to vote for access to reproductive healthcare including abortion.

Brian Lehrer: There's so much more that I want to get to with you including Joe Biden and Dianne Feinstein, but you just mentioned your desire for more Democrats to place abortion rights in the context of being pro-family and pro-freedom which are phrases that we usually hear from the right. In that context, I want to replay that little nine-second clip of Ron DeSantis and come at it from a different angle with you. Again, this is DeSantis at a campaign-style appearance on April 14th, the morning after signing the six-week abortion ban bill.

Ron DeSantis: We have protected the rights of parents. We have elevated the importance of family and promoted a culture of life.

Brian Lehrer: Promoted a culture of life was all he wanted to say in that long campaign-style appearance about that bill for all the political reasons you were just describing, but the rest of it is rich, isn't it? Lauding parents' rights while removing your right to become a parent or not and removing a parent's right to approve gender-affirming care for their trans teen kids under 18 and having the state make that decision instead of the parents.

Rebecca Traister: Oh, there's no question. This has been true of the Republican Party for years, but Ron DeSantis has really an apotheosis of it. DeSantis crowing about freedom while again enacting these incredibly punitive horrifying limits on what your parents' rights when what he's saying is that your parents have no right to send their kids to schools that can teach them about racism as a fundamental building block of how this nation was created politically and economically.

That's history. He's preventing kids from learning about history. The education bills that he's got out there are about preventing kids from learning about homosexuality and trans identities and certainly, not getting gender-affirming healthcare or abortion care. It is the direct opposite of freedom. Right-wing hypocrisy is not new. There's a starkness about it right now that I think is really startling and gripping and DeSantis is that vision of what does freedom mean?

What's interesting to me about it and this is a positive thing I'd say about it is watching a newer generation of Democrats pull back that language and point to the hypocrisy very directly and not only point out the right-wing hypocrisy but to talk about things like freedom and family in the way that really they could have been for decades but have been reluctant to. A new generation of Democrats really wants to talk about access to abortion care and gender-affirming healthcare as a family issue certainly as an issue of freedom. You heard a lot of Democrats running on abortion care, connecting it to freedom and democracy in the midterms and running very successfully that way.

I heard in Michigan when I was reporting my story on abortion as a winning issue, Gretchen Whitmer, who ran very directly to be reelected as Michigan's governor, she ran very directly on abortion rights and speaking about trans rights very directly talking about them as a family issue and talking about how all our parents, I watched this in January when she gave her state of the state address having won again in a landslide in Michigan and talking about how all of us who are parents want our kids to stay in the state.

How can we ask them to stay in a state that would deny their identity or keep them from controlling their bodies? Let's codify those freedoms so that we can have our kids stay with us. It was a really innovative and interesting way to talk about abortion as a family issue and it's something that Democrats could have been doing for years but they haven't and I see them doing it a lot more.

Brian Lehrer: Callers, we'll start taking your calls for Rebecca Traister from New York Magazine right after this. Stay with us.

[music]

Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue in our Monday morning politics segment with Rebecca Traister, writer for New York Magazine and its website, The Cut, and author of bestselling books, including All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, and more recently, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger. Her recent articles on The Cut and New York Magazine include the one we've been talking about called Abortion Wins Elections. Joanne in New Rochelle, you're on WNYC. Hi, Joanne. Thanks for calling in.

Joanne: Good morning, Brian. Love your show. I just wanted to say that Dianne Feinstein needs to resign and if she's somehow not capable of making that decision, maybe there is someone in her family who can make it for her because I don't even know what her mental status is right now.

Brian Lehrer: I don't think the question is mental status, and I don't know that anybody has the right to make that for her in a legal sense. Rebecca, I want to invite you to put this in context because I know you wrote a long article about Dianne Feinstein's whole career recently but on the immediate issue should she resign?

Rebecca Traister: Yes. I did write a piece almost a year ago about Feinstein and her career and her choice to serve another term which she is currently in the middle of. She is 89 years old. She's had shingles. That's the immediate cause of concern is that she has had a case of shingles and has been out of the Senate for weeks. She holds positions that actually matter. Part of the argument for why she should have served this term that she's in the middle of right now is that she had high up seniority on all kinds of committees including the judicial committee. She's not doing her job. I think the question of whether or not Feinstein should resign and yes, absolutely I think she should.

Brian Lehrer: The Mitch McConnell power play on that. I guess he could have signed off on allowing what the Democrats tried to do last week which was to have Feinstein temporarily remove herself from the judiciary Committee because that's, I guess, where the immediate consequences are. Judiciary is where, "Oh, talk about judges. That's where Biden's Judge nominees get approved." McConnell says most of Biden's judge nominees do get approved with the bipartisan vote in the judiciary committee. It's only the most extreme who would get Democrats only and so he's not going to enable that by allowing Feinstein to step aside. Any reaction to that?

Rebecca Traister: Yes, of course, he's not. McConnell is one of the greatest practitioners of everything that we were talking about in the last segment in terms of the Republicans gaining control of the institutions and making sure the things go their way. McConnell has done that in the Senate for years. He deprived a sitting president of his Supreme Court choice, talk about exercising judicial power. Of course, he wasn't going to let Democrats do what they could to move forward. McConnell interestingly has also been out himself.

One of the bigger issues here that certainly applies to Feinstein and McConnell is that the Senate is a gerontocracy. The number of very elderly senators who have accrued enormous amounts of power in that institution is mind-boggling. In the case of McConnell, he's been very effective into his own old age and continues to be at power hoarding and making the institution work for his party and to do his bidding. Feinstein, I think, is somebody who has become less and less effective as she has gotten older.

After the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, which was an abomination, and again, an instance of the Republicans pushing through in the last days of a presidency, a Supreme Court confirmation where they had prevented Barack Obama from fr from having his nominee even get a hearing in the last presidency. Feinstein hugged Lindsey Graham after the hearings and said, "Those were just about the best hearings I've ever had." She has not been an effective Democrat in that very powerful position for some time. It's also an institution that rewards longevity in a way that creates incentives for people to stay longer than they should.

That's something that I think is worth looking at structurally. Then there are differences in terms of how the Democratic Party and the Republican Party treats its young people versus its older people. Again, my piece about Dianne Feinstein, which I think really did ta tackle big questions of whether or not it was pastime for her to have retired, was published more than a year ago. She is still serving, and she is not there because of the shingles case, which is much more recent. It's a real structural problem theoretically for both parties, but right now, especially for Democrats.

Brian Lehrer: Linda in Mercer County, you're on WNYC. Hi, Linda.

Linda: Good morning, Brian. Brian, there's two issues with Mifepristone that I haven't heard discussed. I'm 68, I take it when I have to have a biopsy done. It serves to make the biopsy. I have done it, it's a female procedure. It softens the cervix and it makes it less painful. If they do away with it, I don't get that drug if they do away. Nobody talks about the non-abortion use of this drug.

The other issue about mailing the drugs to your house not being able, most pharmacy, people who have insurance, most pharmacy plans give you a zero copay if you have your drugs mailed to your house. If you pick it up at a drugstore, you have your copay, is it $25? Is it $50? That directly impacts working poor middle class. It affects everyone. Most of the state of New Jersey public sector employees have that kind of prescription plan. How dare they take that option out of their hands? Those are two points I haven't heard discussed. Thank you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for both of those points. You're a journalist, not a lawyer, Rebecca, but there is the question of the other uses of mifepristone if the anti-abortion movement is going to try to get judges to remove it from the marketplace after 23 years of use.

Rebecca Traister: Now, see, that extends beyond Mifepristone. There are many other uses, drugs that are used in reproductive care and abortion care are also used to treat autoimmune diseases, people who have cancer and suffer from ulcers. That's true also of surgical abortion procedures, which we mentioned, we touched on earlier that surgical abortion is also part of miscarriage care.

It can be the kinds of procedures that are being banned are procedures that save the lives of people who have ectopic pregnancies, who have pregnancies that are endangering their lives. That's the stories that we've seen about patients who have begun to have sepsis with pregnancies that are not going to go on. This is the truth about a lot of medical care said there are many uses for many medications and many surgical procedures.

That's why banning something legally, it's simply doesn't work with medical realities. There's not a way to make laws that acknowledge medical complexity in the way that I think conservatives want to persuade people it's possible to do around abortion. The other issue that she brings up that's so important and that extends before Dobbs is the way that these bans and restrictions of all sorts disproportionately have an impact on poor people, on young people, on rural people.

When Roe still stood before Dobbs, in fact, just a few years after Roe was decided in 1973, Congress passed the Hyde Amendment, which prevented federal insurance programs, people who relied on federal insurance for their healthcare insurance to use that insurance money to pay for abortion care which meant that people who relied on those state and federal programs could not have economic access to abortion care.

That has been in place and undercovered and underattended to as a severe limitation that disproportionately affected poor people, and people of color. That has been in place since the late '70s. In this post-Dobbs moment, I think some of those inequities, the punitive inequities, are becoming more obvious. It's a critique of journalism itself, of a democratic party of my profession, and of the Democrats said, that this wasn't more of a blaring alarm before the Dobbs decision.

Brian Lehrer: We're running out of time and we're not going to get to Biden really unless you want to throw something in that you feel strongly about as we anticipate his reelection campaign announcement, they're saying probably tomorrow. Let me read this one tweet that came in from listener, Martha Kay. It says, "I wonder what would happen if doctors just did the procedures, civil disobedience, enough of them need to do it." You think that's a plausible scenario?

Rebecca Traister: Well, I think there are all kinds of forms of civil disobedience that are going to be a future necessary scenario. I also want to really acknowledge. There needs to be organization around all kinds of forms of civil disobedience because the reality is that what's going to happen, again, depending on where you live and who your local prosecutor is, and who your state legislator is, and what state you're in, is that doctors who individually move forward and do this procedure are going to face criminal risk.

What is it going to mean? I'm not saying so people shouldn't do it. I think that every form of resistance and organizing needs to be on the table. I also think that we can't just turn to the medical providers and say, "You take the risks by doing the civil disobedience." This call is on all of us. There are very real criminal risks right now.

We certainly cannot ask people individually, especially those who would be the ones who would do it, who would be the most committed to providing people with the care that they need. We cannot shift the burden to them if we are not willing to take risks ourselves, and that's something that we need to think about in terms of how we organize, protest, and resist moving forward into what is going to be perhaps a very long fight.

Brian Lehrer: Rebecca Traister from New York Magazine, thanks a lot.

Rebecca Traister: Thanks, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Much more to come.

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.