The Sunday Read: ‘What Alice Munro Knew’
12 January 2025 - 1 hour 1 min“My life has gone rosy, again,” Alice Munro told a friend in a buoyant letter of March 1975. For Munro, who was then emerging as one of her generation’s leading writers, the previous few years had been blighted by heartbreak and upheaval: a painful separation from her husband of two decades; a retreat from British Columbia back to her native Ontario; a series of brief but bruising love affairs, in which, it seems, Munro could never quite make out the writing on the wall. “This time it’s real,” she wrote, speaking of a new romantic partner, Gerald Fremlin, the emphasis acknowledging that her friend had heard these words before. “He’s 50, free, a good man if I ever saw one, tough and gentle li...
Series Episodes
The Global Showdown Over Greenland
President Trump has been raising tensions around the world for weeks by claiming that he would stop at nothing in his quest to seize Greenland from Denmark. But on Wednesday, he appeared to back down, announcing that he’d reached the framework of an agreement with NATO over Greenland’s future. Mark Landler, the London bureau chief, explains the ups and downs of Mr. Trump’s Greenland gambit, and why it may signal the beginning of a new world order.
33 mins
22 January Finished
On the Front Line of Minnesota’s Fight With ICE
For weeks, protests around Minneapolis have caught nationwide attention as the city shows open defiance to a federal immigration crackdown. But behind the scenes, a quieter organized resistance has taken shape. Anna Foley and Michael Simon Johnson, producers for “The “Daily,” go on the ground in Minneapolis to capture that effort, and Charles Homans, a New York Times reporter, explains why the city has become ground zero in the fight over the government’s deportation strategy.
34 mins
21 January Finished
Trump 2.0: A Year of Unconstrained Power
In the 365 days since Donald J. Trump was sworn into his second term as president, he has fired, pardoned, prosecuted, tariffed, deployed, deposed, dismantled and deported his way to a new kind of American government, one designed almost entirely in his image. In the process, he has not only transformed the federal government, he has also changed, possibly forever, the very nature of the American presidency. On today’s episode, Michael Barbaro speaks with three longtime chroniclers of Trump’s presidency about how to make sense of what Trump has done over the past year and what his next three years in office might bring.
42 mins
20 January Finished
The Sunday Daily: Hollywood’s A.I. Moment
There’s a lot of anxiety about artificial intelligence invading Hollywood; the general mood there right now could be called “doom and gloom.” But speculation about a future where A.I. actors perform A.I. scripts in A.I.-generated movies often obscures the role A.I. is currently playing in the industry. In this episode, the host Michael Barbaro talks with the Hollywood reporter Brooks Barnes and the movie critic Alissa Wilkinson about the ways that A.I. is already showing up in our movies and television today, and how they see it contributing to — and complicating — the future.
37 mins
18 January Finished
'The Interview': Kílian Jornet on What We Can Learn From Pushing Our Bodies to Extremes
The ultrarunner and mountaineer finds peace through doing unimaginably hard things.
43 mins
17 January Finished
An I.V.F. Mix-Up and an Impossible Choice
explicitFor millions of families, in vitro fertilization is a modern medical miracle. But the field is largely unregulated, and for a small number of parents, things can go terribly wrong. Susan Dominus discusses her story about how two families navigated an unthinkable I.V.F. mistake that will connect them for the rest of their lives.
46 mins
16 January Finished
