The Brian Lehrer Show

Jonathan Lemire, co-host of Morning Joe on MS NOW, writer for MS NOW and staff writer for The Atlantic, talks about the latest developments in national politics, including the state of the Iran war and the midterms.
Photo: US Democratic Senate candidate from Michigan Abdul El-Sayed attends the Labor Day parade in Detroit, Michigan on September 7, 2026. (Photo by Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images)


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New York Times science and global health reporter Apoorva Mandavilli talks about the new CDC director's challenge of Pennsylvania's report of two measles deaths in the state.
Photo: The exterior of CDC′s Tom Harkin Global Communications Center in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by: James Gathany, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention via Wikimedia Commons)

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As we approach the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Peter Bergen, national security analyst for CNN, a vice president at the New America Foundation and the author of All the Presidents' Wars: Twenty-Five Years of America's War on Terror (WW Norton, 2026), reviews the history of the U.S. War on Terror.
Photo: UAF 175 crashes into the south tower of the World Trade Center complex in New York City during the September 11 attacks. Photo by: Flickr user TheMachineStops (Robert J. Fisch) via Wikimedia Commons.


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For Labor Day, we've put together some of our favorite recent interviews, including:

As the Democratic Socialists of America rack up electoral wins during primary season, the group is pushing an expansive definition of who counts as working-class. Gothamist and WNYC reporter Elizabeth Kim and Christopher Maisano, editor of New Labor Forum, a labor journal from the Murphy Institute at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, discuss who counts as working class and why the definition matters.

Noam Scheiber, New York Times reporter focusing on white-collar workers and the author of Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2026), talks about the conditions leading young college-educated workers to lead unionization efforts.

Ann Larson, a fellow with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and the author of Cleanup on Aisle Five: Essential Work, Poverty Wages, and the View from Behind the Supermarket Register (One Signal/Atria, 2026), talks about what she learned about the economy and workers when she went from reporting on low-wage work to taking a job during the pandemic at a local supermarket

On Labor Day, listeners weigh in to answer what is 2026's "song of the summer."



These interviews were lightly polished up and edited for time, the original versions are available here:

Who Counts as Working-Class? (July 23)

White-Collar Workers Unite! (April 15)

What's Unseen at the Grocery Store (July 13)

Song of the Summer 2026 (July 20)



Photo: Thousands of New Yorkers and laborers march during the New York City Labor Day parade, America's oldest Labor Day Parade, along with members of more than 200 unions and organizations, on Saturday, September 6, 2025, in New York City, USA (Photo by Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)

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Three of our favorite segments from the week, in case you missed them.
Extreme Weather and El Niño (First) | Back to School Report (Starts at :30) | Goodbye, WQXR's Jeff Spurgeon (Starts at 1:03)
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Photo: Higher-than-normal sea surfaces (red) are visible in the central and eastern Pacific on June 8, 2026, a few days before El Niño was declared. (NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

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