Kai Wright brings race, health and history to Guardian podcast

The Guardian has put Kai Wright at the center of Stateside with Kai and Carter, its flagship U.S. video podcast, with new episodes scheduled for every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Wright arrives with a career built on race, health and history, and with a personal habit that fits the anti-upgrade lens he has long brought to his work: he still refuses to buy a new phone.

Wright has spent years reporting on racial justice, economic inequity, healthcare, sexuality and public-health issues. His bylines and editorships have run through The Nation, Colorlines, The Root, City Limits and the New York Daily News, and his books and essays have tracked Black, Brown and queer life through pressure points that are often treated as separate stories. He is the author of Drifting Toward Love: Black, Brown, Gay, and Coming of Age on the Streets of New York and a contributor to Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019.

The same through line runs through his public radio work. WNYC Studios says Wright is host and managing editor of Notes From America with Kai Wright, a live call-in show that airs nationally on Sundays at 6 p.m. Eastern. The program grew out of The United States of Anxiety, and WNYC has described it as “a show about the unfinished business of our history and its grip on our future.” The show has reached nearly 100 public radio stations, giving Wright a national platform long before the Guardian brought him to its video podcast lineup.

Wright’s recent history work has been especially pointed. Blindspot: The Plague in the Shadows premiered in January 2024 as a co-production with The HISTORY Channel and WNYC Studios, and it focused on the early years of the AIDS epidemic and the people who refused to stay out of sight. The project won a Peabody Award in 2024, adding to the credibility Wright already carried as a journalist who has chronicled the AIDS crisis, the foreclosure crisis and the politics that shape both.

That record helps explain why Wright’s reluctance to replace his phone lands as more than a private quirk. It echoes the same resistance to planned obsolescence that runs through his reporting on communities forced to make old systems work longer, with fewer resources and less room for error. In Wright’s hands, longevity is not nostalgia. It is a practical and political question about who gets to keep working, keep listening and keep being seen.