08/31/2025: China Spies, St. Mary’s, Sounds of Cajun Country

60 Minutes

CBS News

Cbs, Tv & Film, Society & Culture, News

4 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 1 September 2025

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Chinese hackers have infiltrated U.S. government systems, the private sector and critical infrastructure, but hacking has not replaced Beijing’s pursuit of old-fashioned human intelligence, aka: spying. Norah O’Donnell reports on Chinese covert agents who monitor and influence events outside their own borders and surveil and intimidate Chinese dissidents right here in America. Correspondent Bill Whitaker visits New Orleans, where two high school seniors solved a mathematical puzzle that was thought to be impossible for 2,000 years. Whitaker speaks to the students, their families and the teachers at their school, St. Mary’s Academy, which has been fostering academic excellence and boundless possibilities for its student body of African American girls since the end of the Civil War. Correspondent Jon Wertheim visits southwest Louisiana, where the sounds of Cajun and zydeco music – long the soundtrack in this singular pocket of America – are experiencing a remarkable revival. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Right now, we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known.
0:07.0	I'm David Remnick, and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening,
0:12.1	alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Walts,
0:17.7	Katanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Charlemagne the God, and so many more.
0:24.6	That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.
0:32.5	What has this 76-year-old retired historian been doing in the United States?
0:43.0	Were you spying for the Chinese government?
0:45.2	According to U.S. intelligence, he was part of a massive network of covert agents,
0:50.7	recruited by China to spy for its Ministry of State Security.
0:56.0	This is in scale and in scope and in brazenness the biggest espionage operation
1:03.0	against the U.S. in its history.
1:06.0	So are you math geniuses?
1:10.0	Not at all.
1:11.6	How did these high school students prove an ancient mathematical equation that was thought to be impossible for 2,000 years?
1:19.6	We start with just a regular right triangle where the angle in the corner is 90 degrees.
1:24.6	Then we start creating similar but smaller right triangles, and then it
1:30.0	continues for infinity. Am I going a little too?
1:32.8	You've been beyond me since the beginning.
1:38.7	You need no passport to enter Cajun country, but it's an exotic land like nowhere else. Home to a cuisine, a language, a landscape, even a pacing all its own.
1:49.0	And then there's the singular sound.
1:53.0	What defines the Cajun sound?
1:55.0	Typically, Cajun music has a Cajun accordion, fiddle sung in Cajun French.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from CBS News, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of CBS News and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.