Inside the Hive by Vanity Fair

This week, Vanity Fair contributing editor May Jeong joins Inside the Hive to examine the popular uprising against the Xi Jinping regime over its repressive COVID policies, which have held China’s 1.4 billion citizens in virtual captivity. Jeong, who visited China in 2019 to investigate what happened to the country’s biggest movie star, Fan Bingbing, sees parallels to recent uprisings in Iran—specifically, women on the front lines. “The intersectional ways in which our struggles are linked is interesting,” she says, “and something that Americans can draw from as well.” Plus, Joe Hagan talks to Emily Jane Fox about her latest feature: a look inside the gilded post–White House life of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, who want to live a normal, everyday billionaire’s existence in Miami—and have no desire to return to DC should Donald Trump win in 2024.

In the short but long weeks since Elon Musk took over Twitter, it seems like the platform, along with the social media class, has been put through the spin cycle. Between debates over who could be verified and how much that might cost, employee layoffs, and, of course, the lingering question of whether and when Donald Trump might be replatformed, there have been many questions about the fate of Twitter.    Vanity Fair’s Nick Bilton, who literally wrote the book on Twitter, joins this week’s episode of Inside the Hive, taking listeners inside his notebook to lay out the problems that Twitter faces as both a company and a barometer of the mindset of the country.    “Jack Dorsey and all the folks at Twitter used to say that Twitter is a reflection of society,” Bilton tells ITH listeners. “I think that it is a reflection of the extremes in society, and it brings out the best and, a lot more times, the worst in people because of the way it is designed.” What will happen to the platform given the political atmosphere, and can it help propel someone into the White House—or keep them out?

Gabe Sherman, fresh off his Ron DeSantis feature, and Molly Jong-Fast, the Hive’s newest contributor, join Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan for a Wednesday-morning revel in what the midterms portend for the future of the country—not to mention for pollsters and the pundit class—and how the Democrats can contend with the GOP’s “extreme gerrymandering” in battles ahead.

With less than a week to go until the midterms determine our country’s future, Joe Hagan and Emily Jane Fox sit down with The Hive’s newest star, special correspondent Molly Jong-Fast, and VF national political reporter Abby Tracy to break down the final stages of races across the country, including how abortion is playing as an issue.  Plus, CNBC’s Julia Boorstin stops by for a timely discussion about women in power as her new book, When Women Lead, hits shelves. In conversation with Fox, who recently profiled The Wing cofounder Audrey Gelman, Boorstin runs through some of the common traits she sees in women leaders, such as Lena Waithe, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Whitney Wolfe Herd, who are among the interviews in the book.

The former BuzzFeed editor and New York Times media columnist offers pushback on critiques of his new media offering.

With J.D. Vance, Kari Lake and other Big Lie Republican candidates, America is going to go down a “rabbit hole” of chaos, according to the hosts of The Circus. Plus, Anand Giridharadas toughens up progressive messaging

This week, Joe Hagan talks to James Carville, veteran Democratic strategist and cable news stalwart, about the lead-up to the midterms. On the table: abortion rights, how Ron DeSantis handled Hurricane Ian (“Do you know what Florida needs more than anything else in the world right now? I do. Immigrants," says Carville), Herschel Walker (“You cannot tell me that anybody 60 years old would trade brains with Herschel Walker, cuz you wouldn’t”), and who won the debate between Trump-approved candidate JD Vance and opponent Tim Ryan in Ohio (“That was a T.K.O.”). Given the political environment, he says, Democrats wouldn’t ordinarily stand a chance in 2022. “You have an election with 'wrong track' for the country at 65%, presidential approval at 41%—all that is a guaranteed landslide [for Republicans],” he says. "Why has this electorate been resisting this and resisting it hard? That's the question that we should be asking ourselves." Also this episode: Hagan talks to Narges Bajoghli, a professor of Middle East Studies at John Hopkins, about her recent story on the women leading uprising in Iran, and the implications for gender equality around the world. Hive senior editor Tara Golshan joins a conversation that asks: Where does the revolution go from here?

The co-directors of “The Lincoln Project,” a new five-part docuseries about the eponymous anti-Trump operation, talk to Emily Jane Fox about what it was like to embed at the peak of the 2020 election cycle, as the Lincoln Project’s star rose, then combusted amid scandal. Plus, Joe Hagan and Nick Bilton go deep on Elon Musk's latest Twitter twist.

As the Florida governor shows his bully stripes, Inside the Hive asks what his 2024 chances could be. Plus, ‘Creem’ rides again   Inside the Ron DeSantis Plan to Overthrow Trump and Trumpism This week Vanity Fair published Gabe Sherman’s profile of Florida Governor and would-be Trump slayer Ron DeSantis [https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/09/ron-desantis-the-making-and-remaking-of-a-maga-heir]. On Inside the Hive, Joe Hagan and Emily Jane Fox discuss whether DeSantis’s aggressive push for national prominence—coming as Trump's legal peril mounts and a slew of new Trump books hits stores this fall—signal the last throes of the Ex-POTUS’ political potency. The answer, if DeSantis has anything to do with it, is clearly yes. But as DeSantis' polling takes a hit following his controversial immigration stunt, the next question becomes: Can a charmless bully survive the spotlight?    Plus: A conversation with J.J. Kramer, who has revived his father’s storied rock magazine Creem decades after it stopped publishing. The irreverent 1970s magazine still bills itself as “America’s Only Rock ’n Roll Magazine,” but does rock and roll still matter? And what does it mean in 2022? Kramer, who inherited the magazine when he was four years old, has an idea—and big dreams. 

In this special episode of Inside the Hive, three guests—Vanity Fair editor in chief Radhika Jones, writer and podcaster Molly Jong-Fast, and standup comic Patton Oswalt—discuss the cultural and political legacy of Generation X. Asks Hive cohost Joe Hagan: How has the slacker generation, once known for irony and ambivalence, weathered the 21st Century?   The promise of ironic detachment may not have lasted, but Gen X-ers have become the last skeptics of the digital age. The generations that followed "introduced this 24/7 grind mentality,” says Oswalt, "where the people that wanted to live like little lives on the fringe, doing creative stuff, and making enough money to survive—those people are being pushed out…It's like if you're not grinding all the time, you should be wiped off the map. And that, to me, is really, really scary.” “We are skeptical of effort for effort's sake,” observes Jones. "So there's a way in which we're motivated by substance, and we're skeptical of anything that is not substantive.”  Thirty years ago, Generation X celebrated what’s now being called “quiet quitting," but as some recent polling has shown, a large chunk of Americans born between 1965 and 1980 also leaned toward Donald Trump in recent elections—a perplexing data point. “We had this sort of belief that we were entitled to certain things,” surmises Jong-Fast. "And if you feel entitled to something, and mad and convinced that someone else has it, that can lead to Trumpism.” If nothing else, Gen X have always been superb at spitballing from the sidelines: “We are good critics,” says Jones.

Never has there been a time in U.S. history when lawyers were as in the foreground as they have been during the era of Donald Trump. Many of them have ended up under the bus, from Michael Cohen to Paul Manafort to Rudy Giuliani. But the many twists and investigatory turns over the last half decade also made household names of a number of bright legal minds. Andrew Weissman is chief among them. As a lead member of Robert Mueller’s special counsel’s office and a professor, Weissman knows how to meticulously break down the facts when it comes to all the president’s mess.  On this week’s episode of Inside the Hive, he explains just how significant Trump’s national security breach was, without even knowing what’s in the documents secreted away at Mar-a-Lago. And what’s Attorney General Merrick Garland poised to do? Weissman has an idea. Plus, Hive media reporter Joe Pompeo on the birth of true-crime mania and his new book, “Blood & Ink.”

This week, cohosts Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan talk to Tim O’Brien, executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion and author of "TrumpNation," about the latest obstacle in the Department of Justice’s investigation into Trump’s handling of top secret documents. The decision by Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, to appoint a “special master” to review the documents and slow the investigation, reeks of politics, says O’Brien. “Does this send a signal to other Trump appointees that you should carry the bag for your handler?” he asks.  Despite Judge Cannon’s recent ruling, "the reality is this is a very robust and existentially threatening investigation to Donald Trump,” O'Brien adds, and Trump’s political power in the coming midterms is clearly on the wane. Can the law prevail over politics?  Also in this episode: Hagan talks to Edward Buckles, Jr., director of the searing HBO documentary, “Katrina Babies.” A filmmaker from New Orleans who was 13 at the time of Hurricane Katrina, Buckles explores the tragic fallout on the lives of his friends and loved ones, most of whom never returned to their homes, part of an African-American diaspora largely ignored after the tragedy faded from the American consciousness.

Virtually every poll this summer had Democrat Pat Ryan losing his campaign for Congress to Republican challenger Marc Molinaro, including one released on the day of the election. This week, Ryan joins Inside the Hive’s Joe Hagan to talk about his shock victory in a rural New York district that’s now being viewed as a bellwether for Democratic hopes this fall. Ryan’s campaign (to replace Antonio Delgado, who left his seat to become New York’s lieutenant governor) began at about the same time as the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft Dobbs opinion in May. Ryan, a former Army officer and West Point graduate, leaned into the abortion issue and discovered a highly energized Democratic base. His campaign, he says, focused on “freedom and choice and the idea that I don’t want the government telling me or my fellow Americans what to do in their personal lives. That is clearly a resonant thing, and really a patriotic thing, and so I think that's one of the big takeaways here.” Along with the Dobbs decision, Ryan says, the January 6 hearings and the Mar-a-Lago raid have underlined the fragility of democracy in the face of GOP overreach, which has become a top issue among voters. “What we’re seeing happen nationally is a wake-up call that these are sort of deeper, more foundational rights,” Ryan says. “We’re not as divided as people might want to make us out to be.”  “No one expects to agree on everything, that’s crazy,” Ryan observes. Voters “just want you to not bullshit them—no more bullshit. Be real, be a human being, be outraged that freedoms are literally being ripped away from people. And when you do that, it connects. That should not be surprising, but somehow in today’s politics the bar is so low that it somehow does connect and stand out.” Also this week: Cohost Emily Jane Fox talks to Hive correspondent Joe Pompeo about his juicy exclusive interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, amid her new role and the broader shifting landscape of cable news.

Her fame has endured. Her brand has expanded. The way the media has framed who she was and how she is talked about has changed. Paris Hilton sat down with Emily Jane Fox for an interview to talk about that shift, that sex tape, and nostalgia culture.

This week, Vanity Fair tech correspondent Nick Bilton speaks with cohost Joe Hagan about the recent leaks from Facebook that reveal the company knew of the toxic impact of their platforms, including Instagram, on users, especially teenage girls. In a world in which the social media giants—FAANG, or Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google—are too rich and powerful to be contained by limp political and regulatory systems, “we’re left to the wolves,” says Bilton. After covering the social media world for a decade, Bilton says the only way to beat the media giants is to hack the system—ourselves—by reprogramming our behaviors, which are the literal coins of the social media realm.