With Michael Bloomberg’s twelve-year term as mayor of New York City coming to an end, Ken Auletta and Ben McGrath—who have both written about Bloomberg for the magazine—joined host Amelia Lester on the Political Scene podcast to discuss his time in office and the mark he has left on the city.

McGrath says, “In a way, I think his biggest legacy will be some of the things that he wasn’t personally passionate about at all, which are public health and the environment.” McGrath attributes many of the changes most closely associated with Bloomberg’s tenure—bikes lanes and the smoking ban, for instance—to the Mayor’s businesslike tendency to “delegate authority to commissioners who show him numbers that he trusts.” Auletta says that Bloomberg’s background in business has been one of his strongest assets—“As an administrator, as an executive, Mike Bloomberg is first class,” he says—as well as one of his greatest liabilities, in that it has resulted in a tendency to over-rely on quantifiable measures of success. And it is impossible to discuss Bloomberg’s mayoralty without bringing up his vast personal fortune, which gave him a certain freedom from partisan politics. It has also caused many observers to ask the question Lester raises: “To what extent did he buy his way into office?”

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Photograph by Damon Winter/The New York Times/Redux

On this week’s Political Scene podcast, Hendrik Hertzberg and John Cassidy join host Amy Davidson to talk about President Obama’s proposals to make the National Security Administration’s surveillance programs more transparent and more sensitive to civil liberties. The President’s plan includes appointing an independent lawyer to argue against the government before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court and reforming the Patriot Act to strengthen safeguards against the government listening in to citizens’ phone calls. “The steps he outlined,” Hertzberg says, “were gestures in the right direction, but they were really kind of feeble.” What’s more, as Cassidy says, the politics of security and counterterrorism may stand in the way of any substantial policy changes. “The political incentive for Obama and everybody in the White House is to act as tough as possible on all this national-security stuff, including this N.S.A. thing,” he says. “Even though there’s going to be a big brouhaha over this, the policies are basically going to continue.” After all, as he notes, no President wants to risk opening the doors to another terrorist attack.

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Photograph by Andrew Burton/Getty.

On Monday, the Washington Post Company announced that it had agreed to sell its flagship newspaper to Jeff Bezos, the founder and C.E.O. of Amazon, for two hundred and fifty million dollars. The sale is a story that extends beyond the numbers of the deal and even beyond the uncertain direction of the newspaper industry—it has political reach, and, for many people, a personal element, too. “I think his heart is broken,” David Remnick says on this week’s Political Scene podcast, referring to Donald Graham, the chairman and C.E.O. of the Washington Post Company, and one in a long line of members of his family to have run the paper. Remnick continues:

The Grahams knew that the only way to make it with the Post financially was to undermine the thing itself, was to cut and cut and cut. And he couldn’t do it. He’d done it too many times, and he knew in his heart that the paper was less than it was.

The important question now is about where things are going, not where they’ve been. John Cassidy, who joins Remnick and host Dorothy Wickenden on the podcast, says, “I’ve been more interested in the other side of it—what Bezos brings to the party.… I wish the Post all the best, but I’m skeptical about its future.”

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“The easiest way to talk about” rape culture, Ariel Levy says on this week’s Political Scene podcast, “is in action as opposed to in abstract definition. Rape culture in action simply means taking a situation where a woman—by virtue of the progress that our society has made over the last hundred years—where a woman is in a situation where something has nothing to do with sex and where sex is forced upon her.” In the latest issue of the magazine, Levy writes about the presence and role of rape culture in the Steubenville High School case, but, as she and Ryan Lizza discuss with host Dorothy Wickenden, it’s not restricted to such places—in fact, sexual violence has retained a stubborn hold on the U.S. military that is only now finally being addressed as a political matter.

In a span of just six days, starting last Friday and ending today, President Obama addressed the country twice, speaking on two very different subjects. But both events appear to signal new post-reëlection messages. On this week’s Political Scene podcast, David Remnick and Ryan Lizza join Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the two speeches and what they suggest about Obama’s plans for the future.

Last Friday, Obama surprised the White House press corps with remarks on Trayvon Martin and race that Remnick calls “very effective, very affecting.” It was, Remnick says, a rare glimpse into the President’s true feelings:

From my experience of the Obamas, the degree to which they downplay their interest—and I think in the best sense—in race and in raising up African-Americans, from the distance between the podium at the White House and at home, is really marked.

And on Wednesday, Obama gave a speech on the economy and rebuilding the middle class that Lizza says was his “opening argument in the resumption of the economic battles in Washington.” “The sequester and the debt limit and the budget battles,” Lizza notes, “are all set to return in September, and he’s laying out his argument for what he wants out of these coming budget negotiations.”

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Photograph by Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty.

Trayvon Martin’s death and George Zimmerman’s acquittal have a lot of people talking about race, guns, and the nature of self-defense. That hasn’t been an entirely good thing. “I have been just shocked by the polarized, angry reaction that I have seen on social media about this case,” Jeffrey Toobin says on this week’s Political Scene podcast. There are some things that really do need discussing, though. “It’s difficult to say that the jury got it right. In terms of being in accordance with the law, it seems as if they were,” Jelani Cobb says. But getting it right “raises other, thornier questions about what, exactly, are the parameters of self-defense, and whether or not the law is constructed in such a way as to produce verdicts that might be legal, but not necessarily just.” Listen as Toobin and Cobb join host Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the placement of this case in America’s politics, culture, and history.

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Photograph by Orlando Sentinel/AP

The recent governments in Egypt have been difficult to pin down: democracy, military regime, or just a series of military dictatorships? And the recent overthrow of President Mohamed Morsi is “a reminder that at some point these labels can be a distraction,” Peter Hessler says on this week’s Political Scene podcast, noting that, although Morsi was elected by a majority of voting Egyptians a year ago, “people in the police and in the Army are not allowed to vote.”

As Hessler says, moving from the Mubarak era to a functioning democracy is “not an easy transition to make,” and Egypt never quite finished the process before kicking Morsi out. Morsi would almost certainly have been defeated in a reëlection campaign; instead, he was simply toppled. Egyptians, Hessler observes, “felt that they couldn’t be patient any longer.” He joins Jon Lee Anderson and Dorothy Wickenden on the podcast to discuss how Egypt got to this point, where it might be going, and where the country’s flurry of revolutions fits in with the turmoil of the greater Arab world.

How moderate is Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote Wednesday’s decision striking down much of the Defense of Marriage Act and is considered the Supreme Court’s swing vote? Not very, Jeffrey Toobin says on this week’s Political Scene podcast. “He’s actually rather extreme in his views; he just has eccentric enthusiasms,” Toobin explains. “Fortunately for the world, I think, one of his enthusiasms is gay rights.” Kennedy’s opinion opened the door for greater marriage equality, but we need only look at the Court’s decisions on the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action to catch a glimpse of his—and the Roberts Court’s—conservatism. Ariel Levy (who witnessed the reaction of the plaintiff Edith Windsor to the DOMA decision) joins Toobin and Dorothy Wickenden on the podcast and reports on how supporters of gay rights reacted to the V.R.A. and affirmative-action decisions: “At Stonewall, many of the speakers brought up ‘No one’s free until everyone’s free.’ And this is a civil-rights struggle…. This was a huge setback this week, with the Voting Rights Act.” Toobin offers a helpful reminder: “The Supreme Court is sometimes thought to be, or hoped to be, a refuge from the political fray that is so familiar to us in Congress. But it’s not.”

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“What’s amazing,” John Cassidy says of the immigration-reform bill making its way through the Senate, “is that given the sheer compelling logic… it’s still very difficult to get a deal. And we still don’t know if this thing will go through.” He’s right: the electoral imperative for both parties is clear. Republicans desperately want to grab a larger share of the growing Hispanic segment of the electorate—Mitt Romney won just twenty-seven per cent of the Hispanic vote last year—and Democrats don’t want to relinquish any ground. Ryan Lizza, who writes about the Gang of Eight’s role in shepherding the reform bill in this week’s issue of the magazine, points out that there’s another factor working in favor of passage: “From Schumer and McCain’s perspective,” he says of two Senators who are working on an immigration deal, “it’s about proving that the Senate is not broken.” Cassidy and Lizza join Dorothy Wickenden on the podcast to discuss the chances that the bill will pass, and what the political ramifications will be either way. For supporters of reform, Cassidy says, there is still one reason to hope: “They’re not completely stupid, the Republicans.”

We still don’t know what to make of Edward Snowden. In the wake of his revealing himself as the N.S.A. leaker, Americans have scrutinized him and his credibility (and his girlfriend), and have begun to look inward at what we really care about. “Do people regard him as a spy? Is he working for a foreign power? Is he trying to harm the United States,” asks Jane Mayer on this week’s Political Scene podcast, “or is he a dissenter who is trying to help the country?” Mayer joins James Surowiecki and host Dorothy Wickenden on the podcast to discuss the tensions between privacy and national security that Snowden has exposed. “The ability of companies and now the government to collect and hold enormous amounts of data on a routine basis” is something that Surowiecki says Americans haven’t “fully thought through.” These are complicated issues, after all; much in our culture encourages the sharing of information, and such data can indeed be very useful to law enforcement. But should the potential effectiveness of a policy influence a conversation about its morality—or its constitutionality? As Mayer notes, the government and Facebook are hardly the same thing: Facebook just wants to show you advertising; the government can throw you in jail.

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