Talk | History's Lessons for Today with Writers and Editors for The New Yorker

What are history’s lessons for today? Writers from The New Yorker make sense of the backlash against immigrants, the war on "wokeism," and other aspects of the second Trump presidency by looking back.

Michael Luo is an executive editor at The New Yorker and writes regularly for the magazine on politics, religion, and Asian American issues. He joined The New Yorker in 2016. Before that, he spent thirteen years at the New York Times, as a metro reporter, national correspondent, and investigative reporter and editor. He is a recipient of a George Polk Award and a Livingston Award for Young Journalists. His new book, Strangers in the Land, is a masterful narrative history of the Chinese in America, tracing their more than century-long struggle to belong.

Jelani Cobb joined the Columbia Journalism School faculty in 2016 and became Dean in 2022. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2015 and was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Commentary. Dr. Cobb has a B.A. in English from Howard University and completed his M.A. and doctorate in American History at Rutgers University in 2003. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the American Journalism Project and the Board of Trustees of the New York Public Library. In 2023, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Geraldo Cadava, PhD, is a historian of the United States. He focuses on Latinos in the United States, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and Latin American immigration. Cadava is the author of two books. Most recently, he wrote The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of An American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump. He is a Contributing Writer for The New Yorker, Co-Editor-in-Chief of Public Books, and author of the Substack newsletter Latinos in Depth.

David Remnick was named the editor of The New Yorker in 1998. He is the author of seven books, including King of the World, Resurrection, and Lenin’s Tomb, for which he received both the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and a George Polk Award for excellence in journalism. Remnick has written hundreds of pieces for the magazine and, in 2015, became the host of “The New Yorker Radio Hour,” a national radio program and podcast. In 2016, Remnick was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.