Podcast – Open Source with Christopher Lydon: Recent Episodes
Christopher Lydon
We’re at sea this time on our own Odyssey, a voyage between the ancient epic that refuses to die and Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster movie version for us in this summer of 2026. It’s the story of course we all half-know about the wily old Greek warrior-king coming home ten years late from a horrible war against Troy, in maybe 1200 BC.
Daniel Mendelsohn.
Nobody knows the grip of it all better than our guest Daniel Mendelsohn, who sailed the route Odysseus took with his 81-year-old father and made an intimate mission of family discovery in it. He’s published his own translation of Homer’s whole poem, and now he’s reviewing this summer’s big movie for the New York Review of Books.
The post Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We’re high as a kite on World Cup football. The final test, coming Sunday, is down to Spain and Argentina. My question is whether this frenzied global contest might actually be rescuing our species from itself?
Our guests are soccer coach Michael LaVigne and the sports broadcaster Seamus Malin. We’re looking to confirm my intuition that this beautiful game, as Brazilians were first to call it, is humankind at its best—and maybe even a new model of civilization.
The post The World’s Sport appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We’re still in the Fourth of July spirit around the 250th birthday of our nation, hooked in particular by one grand American historian’s question to it: is the United States on the road to a new civil war?
David Blight.
David Blight, Sterling Professor of History at Yale, has been our guest before—on his Pulitzer-winning biography of Frederick Douglass: The Prophet of Freedom. And now he’s our biographer of the American experiment, looking ahead by looking back. The experiment, he says, is in deep, maybe critical trouble.
And here’s more from David Blight on the U.S. in crisis—this is a recent talk at the American Academy in Berlin:
The post After the Fireworks appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We’re in a sort of watch party for a season when World Cup soccer, championship basketball, sports of every kind, all seem to run deeper, more believable, much better played than the rest of our lives, more memorable than our politics, surely more honest and closer to our ideals as human beings, not just Americans.
Richard Johnson.
We’re sampling the global sports mania on its home ground in Boston with the encyclopedic Richard Johnson, founder and longtime curator of the New England Sports Museum, which is spread out on the walls inside the second tier of the Boston Garden. We can look down to the ice that Bobby Orr skated on for the Boston Bruins and the parquet floor over that ice that Bill Russell and Larry Bird bounced basketballs on for the Celtics. We can also see those championship banners in green and white. Bill Russell won 11 of them in 13 years. It takes the breath away.
The post The Boston Watch Party appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We’re unearthing a model writer for an anxious America. Dwight Macdonald was his own eccentric voice through the Cold War politics and culture of the 1950s and 60s. He was a peacenik at heart, otherwise unpredictable, a New York intellectual of his own school. So in this podcast, we’re just reading Dwight Macdonald aloud with John Summers, who has edited a collection he calls Atrocities of the Mind: Essays on Violence and Politics in the American Century.
John Summers.
The premise in our conversation is that a certain urgent music in Dwight Macdonald’s prose still sounds clearly enough for a world that has nobody with quite like his range today. Who was Dwight MacDonald—the pedigreed populist, sometime Trotskyite, hard left, who came to call himself a conservative anarchist?
The post America’s Orwell appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We’re entranced in Molly Crabapple’s reanimation of the Jewish Labour Bund in Europe and Russia, of a century ago. Yiddish Socialism was a nickname. You could plausibly describe that old Bund as forgotten but not gone in the wider world today. The question may be whether the Bund’s humane ideals will have another chance against the lawlessness and cruelty of the 2020s.
Molly Crabapple.
We know Molly Crabapple as a one-off writer and artist, pens and paintbrushes at the ready, a sort of global muckraker in the rough places of the world. Last time she was here, she was just back from civil war in Syria. This time, she’s just back from unearthing history, World War I time, through an epidemic of hellish and deadly pogroms in pre-revolutionary Russia.
The Bund, created in Poland, was a tough-minded working-class alliance demanding full rights for Jews at home. It was irreconcilably embattled against the rising young Zionist movement that would establish a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Molly Crabapple took it on herself—and learned the Yiddish language as part of the job—to research and write the whole story of the Jewish Bund: the old politics in it, the modern emotions that it still stirs, starting with the restored memory of her own family. And she’s made a monumental book of it under the title Here Where We Live Is Our Country.
The post Here Where We Live Is Our Country appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We’re talking about the new magic of money, or Musk-ism, as our guests call it. Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff are historians of different sorts—historians of the future. Oddly enough, their hair-raising new book is not really about the man Elon Musk or his famous money. It’s about the sci-fi system that he is creating to trap the rest of us inside it, as Jill Lepore puts it.
Chris, Ben Tarnoff, and Quinn Slobodian.
Techno sovereignty is the buzzword that rules the walled gardens of Musk World, private empires of far reaching wealth and power. Musk himself models the new class of emperors. Funny part is that the last time we spoke with Ben and Quinn, Elon Musk and his chainsaw were modeling just the opposite: his own ruthless destructive power in the chaotic post-democratic age of Donald Trump. A year and a half later, Donald Trump can look like a declining force compared with Elon Musk on the rise, at the dawn of a settled down, largely secret, post-capitalist or neo-capitalist age of Elon Musk.
The post Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We’re tuning in on the Pope and the President in what can sound like a historic showdown. Are we in the first rounds of an epic struggle between church and empire? Are we perhaps looking more nearly at two schoolboys sizing each other up? Will we get a moral test here finally around modern warfare without end?
Paul Elie.
Paul Elie writes wonderfully in The New Yorker about this very odd confrontation. “The first American pope is also a wartime pope,” he writes. His predecessor, Pope Francis, had observed a third world war in pieces all around us as he, the pope, was dying. And yet now, here we are in a war with Iran, clearly a new war of choice launched by an American president, in coordination with the Israeli prime minister, and Pope Leo, still new to the job, seems driven to do something about this. He’s not talking about strategic cards in his hand. He’s speaking rather of a moral necessity to make peace. And you could wonder: isn’t it about time?
The post The Pope and the President appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
It’s Jackie Robinson Day, 2026, when every player in Major League Baseball wears the immortal Dodger’s number 42. Listeners, if you think you know the Jackie Robinson story, think again with us around the most affecting sports book I can remember reading. It’s titled Kings and Pawns, about two all-time star black athletes, both of them race pioneers, heroes of conscience.
Howard Bryant.
First, Jack Roosevelt Robinson, who integrated big league baseball in 1947, and then the all-American college football star and singer supreme Paul Robeson, whose earth-shaking bass baritone voice made history on opera stages around the world. Howard Bryant has written a book of tragic ironies and overpowering interest. Maybe the deeper subject then and now is: how does a black man make it into the Hall of Fame of American heroes, well beyond baseball? And at what price?
The post Kings and Pawns appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
In 1854, when the escaped slave Anthony Burns was captured in Boston and returned in chains to slave-owners in Virginia, despite riotous resistance on the dock in Boston, Henry David Thoreau himself was shattered.
Lewis Hyde. Credit: The Radcliffe Institute.
“At last it occurred to me,” he wrote, “that what I had lost was a country.” The question becomes: what would Thoreau say today if he learned that hard workers and taxpayers of long standing in this country and his state were being locked up and deported for want of immigration papers? Our guest Lewis Hyde says Thoreau would blame us, citizens, for the failure of our country and our Commonwealth to keep all its residents safe and secure in their adopted communities, regardless of their immigration status.
Lewis Hyde’s essay, “ICE and our Immigrants: Lessons from the Abolitionists,” is forthcoming in the summer issue of Liberties quarterly. Thoreau’s essay, “Slavery in Massachusetts,” can be found in Hyde’s edited edition of The Essays of Henry David Thoreau (Milkweed Editions).
The post Thoreau Meets ICE appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
Who remembers Bernie Goetz? Who remembers his victims? Or was Bernie Goetz the victim—the subway shooter who, back in 1984, fired at four black teenagers in a crowded subway car in Manhattan because he felt they were threatening other riders and himself.
Heather Ann Thompson.
40 years later, our guest Heather Ann Thompson is digging up doubts—not so much about the case as about all of us who followed it and fixed it on our timeline of social history, of crime, fear, race, and poverty, the city of New York itself and its self-esteem. The book is Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage.
The post Fear and Fury appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
How should we see the Israeli-American War on Iran? How should we understand it, or maybe even escape it? The writer and historian Daniel Immerwahr is our guest, with the essential qualifications, starting with his own grip on history, and a taste also for irony, tragedy, absurdity—in his own freewheeling and unpredictable style.
Daniel Immerwahr.
The post Hit-and-Run Belligerence appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
I must say, among all the wise people commenting on this world’s situation, I honor Jeffrey Sachs especially for being relentless on the dangers out there, going back to the Biden years.
Jeffrey Sachs.
He has worn his dread on his face. And in his voice, no matter that people get tired of it. And he’s very specific about the risks: of nuclear escalation for one; about grave economic damage in the rise of the BRICS alternatives to the trading nations, the old imperial remnant; but also about sleepwalking into World War III.
The post Sleepwalking into World War III appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We’re sorting puzzle pieces from the opening rounds of war with Iran. The U.S. and Israel started it. The Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic in Iran was among the first to die in it, on the first weekend of the war, which President Trump says could go on for weeks. But to what end? On whose say-so? At what risk?
Huss Banai.
Hussein Banai, known as Huss, is our guest—the guide we turn to partly because he was born and schooled in Iran. He is informed but not official, a professor of international studies at Indiana University in Bloomington.
The post War with Iran appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We’re tracking the Bernie Sanders story from a Brooklyn boyhood to the Green Mountain socialism that he implanted in Vermont, and then to his two offbeat campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination: in 2016, and again in 2020. Our guest, Dan Chiasson, is the poet who braided the several stories here of a man—and his city, and his state, and his nation—into a big book called Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician.
Dan Chiasson with Chris.
It’s a masterpiece, full of surprises—the best I’ve read on the power game in our country since Theodore White’s Making of the President 1960, a long time ago. 60 years later, Chiasson has written the Bernie journey in Burlington as his own story. Dan Chiasson’s life is an outcome, he writes, of the Bernie years. But what are we going to call Bernie’s own story—a romance that failed, or arguably a tragedy? Maybe it’s a lesson that we were never encouraged to learn about the expansive promise lurking in our own American democracy
The post Bernie’s Journey appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We’re going off script out here in the afterlife, in the imagination of the triple-threat novelist George Saunders. He’s eminent as a writer of stories and novels, as a critical reader, and as a teacher of modern fiction, and how to write it in the great Chekhov short story tradition. He’s also a man and an artist in a moment of ecstasy that he’s recently written about in his newsletter, describing a moment of overwhelming joy and sense of connection that reminded me of Emerson finding himself suddenly, he wrote, “glad to the brink of fear.”
Vigil, the latest novel by George Saunders.
He was looking into a puddle by the road and feeling an incredible thrill of insight into daily life. And George Saunders was writing about something like it about his last few days—on Stephen Colbert’s show, seeing best friends in New York, former students also in Philadelphia.
The post George Saunders on Life and the Afterlife appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
Pico Iyer is the global citizen and now, inadvertently, the movie star—in the winter’s hot movie, Marty Supreme. Across a hundred conversations over the years, we thought we knew everything about him, the transcendentalist Buddhist who grew up with the Dalai Lama as a sort of third parent in and out of his father’s house.
He’s been the personal friend, almost, of our transcendentalists in this neighborhood, Emerson and Thoreau. He wrote a book about having the great novelist Graham Greene in his head. So who is this guy with the cameo role in Marty Supreme, standing athwart Timothée Chalamet’s raging drive to be the ping-pong champion of the universe?
The post Pico Supreme appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We’re getting our heads around the invasion of Venezuela and what feels like a rough new rule book for the so-called world order. Cue Greg Grandin, the hemispheric historian who wrote that big book America, América just in time last summer.
Greg Grandin.
The big theme in Grandin’s book is the very dicey business of sovereignty historically between North and South America. And Donald Trump has been teasing at that instability of borders and labels ever since he renamed the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf Of America.” He’s teasing us again this week when he says Cuba could be next, even Colombia on the list for invasion or regime change.
The post Age of Hemispheric Empires appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We’re talking about capitalism this time, trying to reckon the power of big money to shape—even rule—the human species. Capitalism is the one-word name given to a thousand-year-old force. It’s not a science or doctrine or mere politics. It’s a thoroughly human and ever-changing arrangement of affairs that can produce rapid and vast expansion of wealth in private hands.
Sven Beckert.
And Capitalism is the title of our guest Sven Beckert’s new thousand-page history of the whole thing. A thousand pages covering a thousand years. The opening line in his book is, “We live in a world created by capitalism.” How did it happen? Is it still happening, for better or worse? Did it have to happen?
The post A Thousand Years of Capitalism appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We’re rediscovering John Updike in the afterlife of a great writer. The Selected Letters of John Updike, just published, come to 800 pages of unguarded messages to his wives and lovers, to his mother and his editors. We’re turning to his kids for a fresh measure of the artist who cracked open the sexual revolution of the 1960s and lived it his own way.
Miranda Updike, Michael Updike, Elizabeth Updike Cobblah, and David Updike. Photograph by Jameson Sempey, Reading Eagle, courtesy of A.A. Knopf.
Couples was his breakthrough novel and bestseller in 1968. His second son, Michael, and his second daughter, Miranda, were adolescent witnesses to the story. We’re gathered in Michael’s house on the North Shore of Boston, the heart of Updike Country, to resurface the glow in John Updike’s prose and the pleasure in his company.
The post John Updike’s Vocation appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope is Brandon Terry’s long-awaited personal and philosophical case for struggle and optimism in the long civil rights movement in our country. It’s a map of our minds and our memories, a catalog of our judgments and feelings around an epic era in American history that isn’t over. I take it as a brave and deeply thoughtful response to the charge leveled by the great W.E.B. Du Bois that the real plot of the civil rights story got lost or suppressed long ago.
Brandon Terry.
The post Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
What is breaking down or what’s broken when the governor of Illinois says he’s being invaded by the National Guard of Texas under President Trump’s orders, or when the president is dueling with Oregon and California over policing a public safety crisis that mostly disappeared five years ago in Portland, Oregon? What does it tell us that a senior federal judge in Boston declared in a formal opinion last week that the Trump team is bent on crushing free speech by wayward prosecutions, if only for their power to chill and intimidate?
Nancy Gertner.
The questions keep coming. Nancy Gertner is our guest to consider them. She’s overqualified by a celebrated career as a trial lawyer, then as a federal judge, and now retired from the court as a private practitioner again, independent and outspoken about a world that she knows intimately.
The post Stress-Testing the Rule of Law appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
Call this Mrs. Dalloway’s podcast. We’re reading classic fiction from a century ago for light on the strangeness of the world in our day, or maybe just for relief reading a great old book. The dazzling young critic Merve Emre is our guest and our guide to Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece, Mrs.Dalloway, from 1925. The novel is a day in the life, or a slideshow in the mind, of a rich, ruling class lady in London, volubly in love with life, out shopping for flowers on Bond Street on a morning in June for a party she’ll be giving at home that evening.
Merve Emre.
But Mrs. Dalloway is also a novel of ruin alongside rapture. A second major character, Septimus Smith, is a veteran of World War I. Broken by combat and shell shock, considering suicide because, in his madness, he supposes that only killing himself would allow him to honor life as it should be lived.
The post Mrs. Dalloway at 100 appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We’re with the cultural historian Robin D.G. Kelly at UCLA, who has the nerve to ask: where have our thinkers gone in Trump time? Not the experts or the influencers, but the grander minds who might tell us where our country went.
James Baldwin and Noam Chomsky (by Susan Coyne).
Robin hooked us with his piece in the Boston Review on “The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Fascism and Genocide.” Whose job is it to tell us the truth in what can feel like a sort of waking nightmare or a revolution going backward? Will we ever see Benjamin Franklin’s common-sense republic again? Or put it another way: where’s Noam Chomsky, or James Baldwin for that matter? Will we ever again meet an unflinching truth-teller about our real condition in this autumn of 2025?
The post Where Are the Intellectuals? appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We’re in the fourth summer of hot warfare between Russia and Ukraine. It’s a cruel and deadly war that doesn’t know how to stop.
Anatol Lieven.
Our guest to offer a helping hand is the journalist and analyst that I’ve leaned on heavily, Anatol Lievin, an esteemed correspondent for the Financial Times in London, now at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington, with his eyes on Eurasia in general.
The post Russia and Ukraine in 2025 appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We’re grappling with the prize historian Greg Grandin’s take on the making of the modern world. There’s a 600-page version in hard covers, but also a two-word version in his title, America, América, code for his main point: that the story of global USA today has Latin America woven all through it.
Greg Grandin.
It’s a history of brutal conquest, some discovered ideals and values through five centuries, and maybe an exceptional all-American hybrid, after all, into today. In the roots, of course, were two colonial empires, Spanish and British, rivals and partners, reenacting over the decades their past far into the future.
The post America, América appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We’re retracing our steps out of the last bad-dream era in American life. Michael Ansara was in the thick of that struggle too, around war and justice. The Hard Work of Hope is his memoir of many losses and his own big mistakes that come back, 50 years later, as lessons and blight.
Michael Ansara.
The post The Hard Work of Organizing appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We’re in Saratoga, New York, with the soulful American believer Marilynne Robinson, prize novelist and teacher of novelists. She’s known over the decades as the storyteller we trust to observe the troubled heart of our country—our own troubled hearts. She’s been a voice of encouragement—somebody said: a voice that has been overheard by more readers than any other living American writer.
Marilynne Robinson with Chris.
This summer, she crossed a line, relabelling the American condition in Trump time. Our politics and our culture, she writes, are “under occupation” by a faction of our fellow citizens. And it’s quite unlike your normal, ordinary right-to-left or left-to right political shift. It is not what people mean by polarization. It’s something quite different.
The post Occupied America appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We’re in the Orwellian aftermath of what President Trump has called his 12-day war in the Middle East. It’s over, he proclaimed on Monday. “Congratulations world,” he said on his Truth Social site, “it’s time for peace.”
Huss Banai.
Our guest to watch a mystery unfolding is the Iranian-American scholar at Indiana University in Bloomington, Hussein Banai, known as Huss. He’s been my refuge and resource for 20 years and some on not just venomous politics, but high-tech warfare and now tentative, sudden peace, it appears, between two governments.
The post Trump at War appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
This week, it’s a conversation on the democracy question and the embattled fate of our own, beset as it is from within. Philosopher-historian Danielle Allen is our guest examiner of the cranky American condition. It feels to me shaken, defensive, divided, embarrassed—as I don’t remember ever before—around questions that go to our character as a country, questions about democracies morphing, sometimes disappearing, even dying.
Danielle Allen.
In all the talk we’re hearing, what’s different about Danielle Allen is her timeline. Her eye goes back to ancient days in Athens and Rome, especially to her friend Aristotle, who wrote the book on democracy and its corruptions—in oligarchy and other ways.
The post Divided, Defensive Democracy appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We’re with the writer Paul Elie, recalling the moment when popular culture came to sound like public prayer. There was Madonna in 1989, singing her number one hit “Like a Prayer.” The song is a marker for what Paul Elie calls crypto-religion. Let’s call it the artistic underground where unlabeled church themes took root in our lifetimes. It’s where religious mystery went, but not to die—almost the opposite. Crypto-zone is where pop culture stars found a space for moods and visions they had known growing up.
Paul Elie and Chris.
Think Leonard Cohen and his all-time hit with “Hallelujah.” Think Prince singing “I Would Die For You.” Think Bob Dylan and his gospel period with “Gotta Serve Somebody.” And it’s not just songs. Crypto-religion is the zone where the filmmaker, Martin Scorsese, imagined The Last Temptation of Christ. It’s where the pop artist Andy Warhol, himself a Catholic, made endless versions of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece of Jesus at the Last Supper with his disciples.
The post The Last Supper appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We’re staring down the several crises in our economy—and recalling the grand old joke that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
John Cassidy.
John Cassidy of The New Yorker magazine has written a sprightly catalog of capitalism’s critics over the centuries: who got it right, for example, about today’s inequality crisis, or the climate damage, or the threat to democracy, or the alternatives to capitalism that might still work better, or even rescue it.
The post Capitalism and Its Critics appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We’re staring down the global trade war with Mark Blyth at Brown University. He is the People’s Economist from Scotland, who takes us home to his village pub in Dundee every once in a while to tell all of us what the powers that be are up to.
Penguins on an uninhabited island that’s been hit with a 10% tariff.
We’ve been bracing for a universal trade war, not just China, but Canada, France, Mexico, you name it—uninhabited islands (where only penguins and seals live) will be touched. President Trump’s ultimate weapon of choice in such a war is a 125% tariff, on most of what comes from China, raising prices, of course, but the Trump line also says the flood of new tariff income could pay for what he calls his big, beautiful tax cut.
The post Trade, Trumped appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We have a key, finally, to the mystery of Donald Trump and where he came from. He was born almost exactly 100 years ago in the imagination of the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. What he stands for by now is a sort of MAGA question: can Donald Trump make America Gatsby’s again? As in: The Great Gatsby, published in 1925.
Sarah Churchwell.
The book makes every list of great American novels, but it’s more than that. It’s a high-style satire and prophetic tragedy about a dreamer who invented not just a fake self, but a whole cast of rich, mostly repellent characters and wannabes all around him—those famously careless people who smash things up for as long as they can and then let other people clean up their messes. Our guest, Sarah Churchwell, is not the first to make the Gatsby-Trump connection, but nobody has mapped it as broadly as she has.
The post Gatsby at 100: Fitzgerald’s Warning about Trumpism appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We’re considering the Jesus story with the historian Elaine Pagels. Her new book is a marvel, crowning a lifetime of bestselling scholarship, sifting the sources and retuning the narrative in and around the Christian Gospels. The title is Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus.
Elaine Pagels.
By the way, we’re in history class, not Sunday school, but she’s tackling the big questions about just what happened to this restless young rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, who got crucified for his ambition in his battle with the chief priests of the temple and the Romans who ruled Jerusalem at the time.
The post Miracles and Wonder appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We’re tracking President Trump’s squeeze on higher education, and the argument in the Ivy League: whether or not to make a fight of it. First, Columbia surrendered under a Trump threat to cut $400 million in federal funding. Then Princeton said, “No way, we’ll fight your flimsy charges to the end.” And then Harvard, with $9 billion at stake, tried gentle engagement with the Trump inquiry, until 800 of its professors and staff said, “No way, when free expression and democracy are at risk.”
Ryan Enos.
What’s required, they said, is open, coordinated resistance, which gives the rest of us time to learn what this fight is all about. Ryan Enos is a young professor in Harvard’s government department, among the first of the 800 signers of that petition.
The post Trump vs. Harvard appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We’re reading our way out of a ruined time with the model reader, Patricia Lockwood. She’s the poet laureate of the internet, for starters. She’s a big-league literary critic, master of social media and the Twitter joke, but also of the mysticism of St. Teresa. She’s on a field-trip to Harvard this week from her home base in Savannah, Georgia, and we’re meeting for the first time, in Cambridge.
Patricia Lockwood and Chris Lydon.
In this almost archaic culture of books, her mindset is very 2025. This side of Harold Bloom, I’ve never met a wider scope in a reader.
The post From Social to Spiritual Media appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We’re looking for our American place in what can feel like a new world order, with Stephen Walt, our first and favorite so-called realist in the foreign policy game—realists being the people who steer by the interests of nations, not their egos or their dreams. And they look beyond the headlines to the long-term effects of policy, to the results.
Stephen Walt.
By Stephen Walt’s standards, it looks like a new world since that astonishing shouting match in the White House, Donald Trump telling Ukraine’s President Zelensky that the U.S. is out of the war on the border of Russia, that we’re bent on repairing our relationship with Vladimir Putin. And Walt is in the news with a commentary and a headline that said, “Yes, America is Europe’s Enemy Now.”
The post A New World appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
Angus King is the anti-partisan, independent United States Senator from the cranky Yankee state of Maine. He is giving us a conversational civics lesson in the tradition of James Madison and also of Schoolhouse Rock, the kids’ TV explainer.
James Madison.
Senator King has been in the thick of the frenzy in Donald Trump’s Washington, with a certain distinction. His tone on the Senate floor has been measured, his language old-fashioned, and his message a deadly warning. It’s the Constitution itself that’s at risk. What’s at stake, he has been saying, is the famously balanced U.S. Constitution, “this clumsy system” of self-rule, he calls it, that is “the mainspring of our freedom.” And it is under direct assault as never before in these first weeks of a new presidency. Rescuing that “we the people” charter will mark our place in history, Angus King is telling us. Losing it would mark the end of the American experiment.
The post Angus King’s Civics Lesson appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
In the fog of Trump Two, we’re asking: what’s new? The co-presidency with Elon Musk is surely new, also the raging battle of exotic ideas among techno-optimists and libertarian anarcho-capitalists at war with the very idea of popular democracy and republican government. Further question: do citizens have to follow the action? Matt Taibbi’s headline is: Nation Shrugs as Godzilla Eats Washington.
Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian.
Here at Open Source in the first month of the Trump sequel, we’re hovering in the fog with two young historians of American finance, technology, and politics, and comparing clues about the future under construction.
The post Muskology appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We’re picking up the pieces of our country in the age of Trump, Part II. Is the USA still here? Is it still us?
Kurt Andersen.
Cue Kurt Andersen, with his finger in the wind. We want him on a mission to track the spirit of the age, because he’s been a cool, creative, wide-angle eye on events since the ’80s, when he founded Spy magazine, and then Studio 360 on public radio.
The post Trump Part II appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We’re with writer-world’s exotic traveller and truth-teller Pico Iyer. He’s been the Dalai Lama’s friend from boyhood, and our friend, too, in years now of reading and talk. In his new book, Aflame, subtitled Learning from Silence, we catch him at a turn in his thinking. His fresh question, for all of us, might just be: how do we surface our spiritual reality before we ever grasp the troubles of our world in 2025?
Chris with Pico Iyer.
This book is bigger than Pico Iyer—there’s a book here that lots of people would love to be writing called “My Spiritual Awakening.” In the new book, Iyer’s awakening happened over the last 30 years, in and out of a Benedictine monastery on the California coast at Big Sur.
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We’re here with a capsule of memory from late last year. It was a spark of generosity in Liz Walker’s story that lit up the Christmas season for lots of us, and maybe the path ahead. She’s been a pathfinder—for decades—in television newscasting in Boston; then as an ordained minister, leading the Roxbury Presbyterian Church in town; and then in the work of post-traumatic healing in her church and in the wider community. And then out of the blue came the news before Christmas that she was going to visit Palestine to witness and learn about a scene she knew mainly from the headlines.
The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.
What made it exciting to me was her saying that she had barely the dimmest picture of what she was getting into with Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank town of Bethlehem. And yet what all of us knew was that she was up to it and that she would walk us through the experience when she came back.
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We’re with the one-off diplomat, strategist, and historian Chas Freeman.
Chas Freeman.
Call this “Curious Citizen Meets the Most Knowledgeable Straight-Talker Anywhere Near the U.S. Government.” At a turn in the calendar, a transition in American politics, and a global crisis that can feel like a rolling nightmare even after the quick, almost bloodless revolt by Syrians against their own deadly dictatorship. It’s a third year in a row that we’ve asked Freeman for an end-of-the-season checkup on the American empire and the changing rules of world order.
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We’re with the celebrated Scots-accented people’s economist—celebrated above all when he’s home with the locals in his own old pub in Dundee, settling all the arguments there are around money and power, and populism on the way to plutocracy in the comeback reign of Donald Trump.
Mark Blyth.
Before we get to Trump 2, we speak of the lingering Biden paradox. The economy was said to be the saving grace of Joe Biden’s short term, specifically the drive to rebuild the industrial base at home. But the same economy was the undoing of his would-be successor, Kamala Harris—specifically, inflation, a largely hidden cost-of-living crisis in food and energy that hurt real people, poor people most of all.
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We’re with the Nobel Prize novelist from Turkey, Orhan Pamuk. It’s not your standard book chat: closer to head-butting than conversation, as you’ll hear. But it’s polite enough and nobody gets hurt.
Chris and Orhan Pamuk.
Orhan Pamuk wanted to talk about his hard-cover collection of notebook drawings and diary entries in recent years; I wanted to hear the global writer’s take on the distemper, East and West, in the 2020s. He said he doesn’t talk contemporary affairs, but then he insisted on doing just that: he said that President Erdogan’s authoritarian politics is ruining Turkey, and Donald Trump could be just as dangerous in America. The news about Orhan Pamuk himself, coming out of his notebooks, is that he has been a passionately visual artist all along, keeping an alternative record of his own life in high-color drawings and aphoristic jottings, words and pictures like nothing our listeners have seen.
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We’re saluting one man’s century in American music. Roy Haynes was the jazz drummer from Boston who shaped the bebop sound in Harlem 80 years ago. He got nicknamed Snap Crackle for his own crisp, lyrical, almost melodic touch. Over the decades, he accompanied and energized scores of jazz stars: Thelonious Monk, Sarah Vaughan, Bud Powell, Pat Metheny among them.
Michael Haynes and Roy Haynes.
Perhaps Roy Haynes’s deepest satisfaction was introducing himself as he once did to me: “I was Charlie Parker’s favorite drummer.” Roy Haynes died two weeks ago, just four months before his one hundredth birthday. We are remembering him in a Thanksgiving spirit with the historian and jazz biographer Robin Kelley at UCLA.
L-R: Charles Mingus, Roy Haynes, Thelonious Monk, and Charlie Parker at the Open Door, Greenwich Village, September 1953.
The post The Roy Haynes Century appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We’re with the writer’s writer Joshua Cohen—beyond category, but ever ahead of the game. He’s a realist, a fantasist, a satirist, New Jersey-born and at home in Israel.
Joshua Cohen.
It’s his imagination we need, just to peer through his vision of a changed world and, in particular, two force fields in motion: Donald Trump’s USA and Bibi Netanyahu’s State of Israel, two zones of huge power, not least military force, shadowed by darkness and danger.
The post Joshua Cohen’s Camp appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
Fintan O’Toole has made a brilliant career watching Ireland (his home country) transform itself—its Catholic culture, its vanishing population, its frail economy—into something very modern and profoundly different. And he’s covered our country so well this year. Does he see something of a transformation that’s comparable in the United States?
The post United States of Fear appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
In the long weekend of solemn suspense before our presidential election in 2024, our guest is Amber. I met Amber on a call-in radio show almost 30 years ago, and we’ve been talking ever since. I call Amber my oracle from underground, the voice of the unknown America, undocumented since she arrived in the United States as a child and an orphan. And she’s been without papers, as she says, ever since, despite our best efforts. When Donald Trump talks about sweeping deportations, if he gets reelected, the face I see is Amber’s.
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Richard Powers may just be the bravest big novelist out there. His new book is titled Playground, in which AI plays with the natural world. The question is whether and how the digital transformation might undo the power of death, as in the death of long ago people, the death of species today, even the death of a planet.
Richard Powers.
This is our third trip through a new book of his, aiming his imagination and hard science at the scariest maladies of modern life. First it was Orfeo, about atonal music, then The Overstory, which won the Pulitzer prize and a huge audience, about disappearing tree species. And now Playground, going deep into the breakdown of oceans—also into dementia with Lewy bodies, also fate and friendships, and damaged people who make foolproof thinking machines.
The post Playground appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
For our shattering Age of October 7, Nathan Thrall has written a double masterpiece, in my reading. Already a Pulitzer Prize-winner for non-fiction, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is a searching work of reporting on the social roots of a traffic catastrophe. It becomes also a moral meditation on whatever it is that cripples human sympathy, understanding, connection. The key word at every level is Occupation, as in Israel’s rule over Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank through decades.
Nathan Thrall.
I read Nathan Thrall’s mind-bending book over a weekend, in a sort of fever, and finished it feeling I’d spent a month in East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank. The question that burns me still is: why hadn’t I felt the force of this story before, even when I wandered through Israel, north and south, from Jerusalem to the Sea of Galilee, a decade or so ago?
The central event in Nathan’s story is a traffic accident with a rickety school bus full of Palestinian kindergarten kids that collided with a trailer truck and blew up on a highway between Jerusalem and Ramallah. A deadly but random crash, it seemed at the time, though in Palestinian memory it was infinitely more grievous. As Nathan Thrall kept hearing, if it had been an Arab kid throwing a stone at Israelis, not a burning bus full of Arab children, Israeli troops would have been on it in seconds. In fact, however, troops and fire trucks at an Israeli settlement nearby all saw the smoking bus and did nothing, letting the fire rage and the children die for more than half an hour.
The most important thing for me in this book was to give a reader a visceral sense of what it is to live in this place, what it is for a Palestinian to live under this system of domination, what it is to live in a highly segregated set of circumstances, segregation that is geographic, that’s separating families, that’s separating parents from children. And it was less important for me that people have a kind of abstract or general understanding of the facts of the situation than that they understand emotionally what it would be like if they were to simply travel there and see it with their own eyes. For a number of years I have witnessed delegations come to Israel-Palestine, often advocacy organizations, organized trips for congressional staffers or parliamentarians and others. Often it’s a week-long trip with six days in Israel and half a day in the West Bank. And the half a day that they spend in the West Bank is by far the most important part of the trip because it is a gut punch. They go there and within a couple of hours on their own, they are making comparisons to Jim Crow and apartheid in South Africa. And that feeling stays with them.
– Nathan Thrall in conversation with Chris Lydon.
The post A Jerusalem Tragedy appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We’re in Climate Week 2024, with the indispensable, independent activist and authority Bill McKibben.
We catch him packing, in Vermont, for what’s far from his first climate rodeo in New York.
The post The Climate Story’s Breaking Point appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
We’re in our very own post-debate spin room, taking the measure of Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and of ourselves, as the voters they were pitching. Did we get what we expected? Did we get what we wanted?
Fintan O’Toole, on the line from Ireland, is our guest and guide. He’s much admired now for his tart reporting on American life in the New York Review of Books. Fintan O’Toole built his reputation as a theatre critic in Dublin and to this day in New York. We’re asking him to review our presidential debate this week as live drama.
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There’s a puzzle in this podcast, and it comes with our prize sociologist, Tressie McMillan Cottom. It’s roughly this: How does Kamala Harris, after the Democratic convention in Chicago and for the rest of this campaign, come to look and sound presidential, even though no other president has ever looked like her?
Tressie McMillan Cottom.
Tressie McMillan Cottom has put it this way: that all Kamala Harris has to prove is that a woman can lead, that a black woman can be qualified, that a South Asian woman can come to feel familiar, that a childless woman can become a nation’s Momala, and that a Gen-X sensibility can resonate with boomers.
The post The Harris Machine appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
Cornel West is our guest, the preacher-teacher in a tradition of black prophetic fire, as he puts it, the line of holy anger in American history, and this time on the presidential ballot in a variety of states.
Cornel West.
His will be the first book I want to read on this 2024 campaign, because he will be recounting a moral inquiry into the American condition at least as much as the ups and downs of his own candidacy.
The novelist Marilynne Robinson has a nearly constitutional role in our heads, our culture by now. She’s the artist we trust to observe the damaged heart of America, and to tell us what we’re going through. I’ve been re-reading her early fiction, particularly Housekeeping and Gilead from 20 years ago, and remembering her conversations with Barack Obama over the years, with tables turned from the start. It was never the usual writer profiling a president or a candidate. He was the inquiring politician asking her about Iowa and the country, about the image of God in other people, the presumption of goodness in others that underlies cooperation and democracy.
Last winter she said that if she and Citizen Obama were still writing letters back and forth, she’d begin by asking him to “Say something to cheer me up . . . Say it again: that the people ultimately are wise . . . are good.” How would that conversation go today?
In the strangeness of mid-summer 2024, the cosmopolitan novelist Joseph O’Neill is our bridge between the Republican convention in Milwaukee and the Summer Olympics in Paris. He knows both sides of that gap: politics and global celebrity sports.
Joseph O’Neill.
He’s famous as an amateur cricket player in New York, of all places, and as a writer about cricket and the many meanings of sports in general. His new novel, Godwin, is deep into soccer/football in a wild intercontinental search for the next superstar, the next Lionel Messi or Kylian Mbappé.
In a forlorn Fourth of July week, in the pit of an unpresidential, anti-presidential campaign year, 2024, we welcome back John Kaag, who writes history with a philosophical flair, never more colorful than in his new account of American Bloods: The Untamed Dynasty that Shaped a Nation. It’s a family saga in three centuries of frontier settlers and folk characters with the same name: Blood.
John Kaag.
They’ve got two other strong links among them: generation after generation, these Bloods embody in life some of the wilderness, that wild streak in our history, and they grasp it as articulately as the giants of American thinking, notably, Emerson, Thoreau, and William James.
Zionism has been the question that keeps changing. Once it was: “How to build a safe home for the Jews of the world?” Today it’s more nearly: “How to build a safe neighborhood around the mighty militarized state of Israel?” Yuval Noah Harari, the Israeli philosopher-historian, put the question bluntly in the Washington Post this spring: “Will Zionism survive the Gaza War?” There’s the riddle.
Hussein Ibish, Mishy Harman, and Shaul Magid.
Depending on who’s speaking and who’s listening, Zionism can stand for refuge, or for settler statehood, or for religious ethno-nationalism. Early liberal Zionists like Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt thought we would have figured out by now how a religious nation could also be open, inclusive, democratic, and peaceful. Were they asking too much?
We’re on a hometown spree along the famous Fenway in the heart of Boston. Fenway Park is where the Red Sox play, John Updike’s “lyric little bandbox of a ballpark.” Fenway Court, built around the same time just a few blocks away, is a jewel box, a treasure house of high art, an American palazzo and museum like none other, a matching monument to quirky Boston’s eccentricity and its beauty.
Courtyard, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. (Photo: Sean Dungan. www.gardnermuseum.org.)We owe Natalie Dykstra for her new biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner—who designed Fenway Court, inch by inch. She invented this magical space where Proper Old Boston got up close and personal with the Italian Renaissance, and does to this day.
Natalie Dykstra. (Photo: Ellen Dykstra.)
Mrs. Gardner made social history, art history, women’s history on a grand scale, but there’s something more here, evident in the Titian room of her museum, with masterpieces on the walls by the giants: Velasquez, Titian himself, and Botticelli around the corner. But there’s Mrs. Gardner, too. She had the authority of an empress (and a whole lot of money) in assembling this art, one painting at a time. Somehow the final effect is unpretentious, intimate, humble, democratic.
Our banner image is from John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner, from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston—www.gardnermuseum.com.
We’re taking a drawing lesson with Nicholson Baker—yes, the multifarious writers’ writer Nick Baker; the COVID lab leak detective; the pacifist historian of World War II in his book Human Smoke; he’s also the cherubic pornographer in Vox, about phone sex; and he’s the podcaster and performer of his own protest songs.
He is a marvel, and his big new book is a life-changer, titled Finding a Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art. Listeners will hear him drawing and growing in the making of this book. And here at our site, you can see him drawing Chris (videographer: Mary McGrath).
Below: Chris Lydon and Nicholson Baker.
We’re sampling the uproar rising from American campuses: it’s a full blown, leaderless movement by now, in an established American tradition, but still contested, still finding its way, looking for its pattern. Columbia and USC have cancelled graduation ceremonies. Many more schools are threatening suspensions or worse if students don’t remove their encampments. In our neighborhood, Harvard Yard is encamped, closed to people without Harvard ID. Harvard students are catch-as-catch-can.
Zachary Samalin and Sophia Azeb.
We are dropping in conversationally on faculty players we know on either side of the country: Sophia Azeb at the University of California at Santa Cruz and Zachary Samalin at New York University in Manhattan. Santa Cruz is encamped in tents and abuzz with notably civil and inclusive debates about rights, wrongs, and history—all the arguments about Palestine that Congress doesn’t have. You could wonder: what if the 19-year-olds who have preempted the conversation from the campuses are, in fact, the leaders we have been looking for?
The key battle taking place in this American crisis year of 2024 is happening in our heads, according to the master historian Richard Slotkin. He’s here to tell us all that we’re in a 40-year culture war and an identity crisis by now. It’s all about drawing on legendary figures like Daniel Boone and Frederick Douglass, Betsy Ross and Rosa Parks, Robert E. Lee and G.I. Joe for a composite self-portrait of the country.
Richard Slotkin.
Richard Slotkin says we’re in a contest of origin stories, in search of a common national myth. His book is A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America. It is the Trump-Biden fight, of course, but with centuries of history bubbling under it.
We’re calling on Hannah Arendt for the twenty-first century—could she teach us how to think our way out of the authoritarian nightmare? Arendt wrote the book for all time on Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. And then she famously covered the trial in Israel of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi minister of death. Her study of the origins of totalitarianism keeps her current fifty years after her death and, pointedly, in our own rancorous presidential campaign of 2024.
Hannah Arendt.
Lyndsey Stonebridge.
In this podcast, the surprise turns on finding a profound humanity and hope, believe it or not, in the collected wisdom of Hannah Arendt. She noted in one essay, “We are free to change the world.” Our guest, Lyndsey Stonebridge, lifted that line for the title of her gripping, fresh take on Hannah Arendt. We Are Free to Change the World is her title, and thinking has everything to do with it.
We’re going to school on Taylor Swift, in the Harvard course. And all we know is, as her song says, we’re enchanted to meet her. Taylor Swift comes out of literature but she’s more than a poet, or a pop star. Maybe the word is “enchanter” for the artist who gets it all into a song, who knows the fusion power of sharp words with the right minimum of melody.
Stephanie Burt and M.J. Cunniff.
We’re anticipating Taylor Swift’s next album, her “Tortured Poets Department,” coming in April. Stephanie Burt and M.J. Cunniff have made a hit course of it all for Harvard undergraduates. Professor Burt has been a critical gateway to contemporary poetry. And she knows her songwriters as well.
We speak of the mystery of Herman Melville, or the misery of Melville, the American masterpiece man. For Moby-Dick alone, he is our Shakespeare, our Dante—though he fled the writing of prose for the last half of his life, and in death The New York Times misspelled his name.
Jennifer Habel and Chris Bachelder.
This podcast is a demonstration of another way, a better way to crack the riddle of Melville: read the book aloud with someone you love and jot down every question that comes to your mind. Before you know it, you’ll have written your own novel on a few hundred Post-it notes. Our guests, Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel, call their novel Dayswork, and it’s a marvel.
The subject, in a word, is despair, both public and private. The poets and spiritual seekers Christian Wiman and his wife Danielle Chapman are back to goad us, each with a new book. Their project is staring into the abyss, in the Nietzsche formula, to see if the abyss stares back, or talks back. And I think it does.
Christian Wiman and Danielle Chapman.
Listeners, you be the judge. Christian Wiman’s new book is Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair. It’s more interesting because the woman who broke his life open in love, most of 20 years ago, is in on the conversation. And it’s more urgent when we can all feel despair out there, coming on like a cold front—some say an epidemic of loneliness or melancholy.
Frantz Fanon is our interest in this podcast. The man had charisma across the board in a short life and a long afterlife. A black man from the Caribbean, he went to France, first as a soldier to help free the French from Germany, then to become a medical doctor and a psychiatrist, and then to North Africa to serve a revolution against France in Algeria. Along the way, he wrote about politics with the touch of a poet.
Adam Shatz.
To this day, when the world talks about healing itself, Frantz Fanon hovers and gets quoted among the giants of modern thought about race and justice, about post-colonial wisdom, if there is such a thing. So how to draw on Fanonism anew and test it in the real emergencies of a divided world in the 2020s? Adam Shatz is our idea of a public intellectual of the widest range, and all the while, it turns out he’s been hooked on Frantz Fanon and gathering string for his big new book: The Rebel’s Clinic. Readers will feel an uncanny resonance between Frantz Fanon’s time in the 1950s and the cruel news of the 2020s: at the U.S. border with Mexico, to take one of many examples, and of course the killing field of Gaza, between Israelis and Palestinians.
The question is how digital tech picks and chooses the content that comes to your phones and your brain, or, as Kyle Chayka puts it in a brave new book Filterworld: “how algorithms flattened culture.” What is the chance that devices that know your likes and dislikes better than you do are ever going to surprise you or teach you? What’s the tilt, over time, of an information system that’s tuned to the smiley face?
Kyle Chayka with Chris.
The joke version is that the algorithm walks into the bar and the bartender asks, “What would you like?” And of course, the algorithm answers, without thinking, “I’ll have what everyone else is having.” Kyle Chayka seems to have answered the question why TikTok voices and Instagram faces are so uniform, why AirBnB is showing what looks like the same room for rent all over the planet, why pop music is down to one super-singer who can fill stadiums all over the earth, for an Eras tour that could go on forever. We’re talking about algorithmic culture in a brave new world.
Oldest and far the richest among American universities, Harvard is the apex, in some sense, of American intellectualism, and it will be a long time figuring out just how it lost a big game it didn’t seem to know it was playing: a high-stakes free for all, it turned out to be, with poisonous words like plagiarism and anti-Semitism threaded through the media coverage and then in airborne ad banners and other blunt instruments.
Diana Eck and Randall Kennedy.
Suddenly, the president of Harvard—a black woman, as chance would have it—resigned her job under pressure, as if to confirm that something serious had indeed happened. But what in the world was the Harvard fight about? And was this the beginning or the end of a great battle?
The only way into this podcast is a long leap headfirst into postcolonial French fiction, of all things, and a novel titled The Most Secret Memory of Men. Our guest is the toast of literary Paris, the first novelist from sub-Saharan Africa to win France’s highest book prize, the Goncourt: Mohamed Mbougar Sarr.
The first thing we feel in this magical book is Sarr himself: the doctor’s son from Dakar in Senegal, eldest of seven sons—military school, advanced education in France, and now, of course, the Goncourt. At the start of Sarr’s book, we’re at play in a Parisian nest of artists and writers, hustlers and searchers, men and women out of France’s one time colonies—Senegal, Mali, Ivory Coast. They’re watching the World Cup, they’re smoking weed, they’re making love, but they’re thinking about literature. “This is our life,” one writer says, “but we also talk about it, because talking about it keeps it alive. And as long as it’s alive, our lives, even if they’re pointless, even if they’re tragically comical and insignificant, won’t be completely wasted. We have to behave as if literature were the most important thing on earth.”
On the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, we’re face to face, almost, with an American political type that’s gone missing in our third century. Check this resume: he’s principled, he’s prepared, a two-fisted aristocrat networked with farmers and workers; a thinker and writer at risk, without fear, talking ideas and enacting them, getting results; a man with no interest in money, no envy of riches or rank. He’s got a Harvard education, but no profession, no real career. He’s a republican, he’ll tell you, who takes self-government seriously—and the personal virtues that sustain it. The hero in this podcast is Samuel Adams of Boston, revived after two and a half centuries by the magical biographer Stacy Schiff.
Stacy Schiff (credit: Elena Seibert).
Thomas Jefferson of Virginia saw Sam Adams as the man who lifted a tax protest up to the launch of a new nation—a bigger figure even than his second cousin, John Adams, main author of the U.S. Constitution.
With the historian John Judis we are looking for a longer timeline in the crisis of Gaza, Israel, Palestine. It has been, in fact, a century of layered conflict between Arabs and Jews, two peoples in stop-and-go warfare over a small plot of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
John Judis.
What if (as in James Joyce’s most famous line) that hundred years of history is itself the nightmare from which we are all trying to awake? Can we break the nightmare war cycle by relearning the history, by taking it again, by doing it over?
The question that resurfaces in a time of horror may be what remains when memory is wiped out, when the unspeakable is left unspoken, in someone’s hope, perhaps, that it’ll be forgotten? Where does history live? Jeremy Eichler’s answer is that music becomes the code of our darkest secrets.
Jeremy Eichler.
Babi Yar is the ravine in Kyiv where Nazi invaders killed and dumped the bodies of more than 33,000 Jews in the last couple days of September 1941. It became an officially unmentionable disgrace to the Germans who executed the atrocity and to the Ukrainians and Russians who didn’t stop it. Almost 20 years later, and ever since then, Babi Yar got its standing as the biggest mass murder in the Nazi war on the Soviet Union, but only because Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote a famous poem about it called “Babi Yar,” and Dmitri Shostakovich, in turn, defied Stalin to compose a Babi Yar memorial at the head of his thirteenth symphony.
There in one grim anecdote is how history lives inside music, music as a last refuge of history that we confront no other way. Jeremy Eichler’s irresistible new book from the ruins of the twentieth century is called Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance. It’s very particularly about four giants in twentieth-century music: Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten.
Just a month into the ferociously brutal and reckless war in Israel-Palestine, on what feels like a hinge of history—outcomes wildly uncertain—our refuge is Chas Freeman, the American diplomat, strategist, and historian. We call Chas our “chief of intelligence” in the realm of world order and disorder. Chas Freeman calls himself sick at heart at the war crimes abounding in this war, some aided and abetted by the United States, he says.
Chas Freeman.
We’re at a turning point, he’s telling us—not far, perhaps, from nervous breakdown.
In this podcast, two old friends in and out of journalism talk about the Middle East war, which comes to feel more like a contest in war crimes. Steven Erlanger joins us—he’s the New York Times‘ chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe.
Steven Erlanger.
We start with the terms Steve recently put forth in the Times: the assumptions—or some of the many, many assumptions—that have been upended by this war. The thought, for example, even in Bibi Netanyahu, that Hamas could manage Gaza as an open-air prison, or that Israel is invulnerable to attack.
We are listening in the dark, after a catastrophe yet to be contained: more than 1,000 Israeli civilians killed in a terrorist invasion from Gaza two weeks ago, thousands more Palestinians dead in a first round of punishment from Israel. “Only the beginning” says Prime Minister Netanyahu, while President Biden, in support, warns him against “all-consuming rage.” In all-consuming anxiety, more than a million Palestinians, under Israeli orders, have fled their homes in Gaza, without a clue where safety will be found.
David Shulman and Hussein Ibish.
What we went to find in conversation was the sound of deep experience in the war zone of the Middle East, and also, in a time of dread, some measure of confidence in restraint.
The question is marriage. The answer in this podcast is Clare Carlisle’s sparkling book, The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life. George Eliot, born Marian Evans, was the towering novelist of Middlemarch, Silas Marner, and more. She put a man’s name on her author’s page. She built very nearly a religion on her foundational ideas about marriage, yet she never married the man she loved and for 24 years called her husband.
Clare Carlisle.
It was an astonishing feat that George Eliot pulled off in Victorian England. It’s another considerable feat of Clare Carlisle’s to fill out for modern readers the question that she and George Lewes were exploring together.
Zadie Smith is a writer who matters, twenty years now after White Teeth, her breakthrough novel when she was just out of college. Her new one is titled The Fraud: fiction that pops in and out of two centuries. It can feel very Victorian and it can feel very 2023. Frauds, trials, disbelief abounding.
Think of Zadie Smith as the current title-holder in the glorious old lineage of English and American fiction, looking both forward and backward, and sideways, in this new novel about her professional family over the generations: literary ancestors and cousins in the game today. It can feel confessional at one moment, comical the next, stone serious before you’re done. Founders of the Victorian novel turn up in The Fraud. At the same time, she’s addressing the extended family of readers and writers today.
It’s Labor Day week, 2023, and Henry David Thoreau is the heart of our conversation. It’s not with him, but it’s driven by his example: American thinking at its best on the matter of how to make a living.
John Kaag.
Have no doubt that the gabby man-about-Concord in the 1850s was a worker: expert surveyor, gardener, as many trades as fingers, he said, not to mention the writer of Walden and Civil Disobedience, of course, and a life journal that came to two million words. We read Henry Thoreau anew for his insight into our work, not his: the often fruitless, driven, underpaid labor of the 2020s, and, oddly enough, our midnight anxiety that ChatGPT could take it all away. This is a conversation in the Harvard Bookstore with our friend the philosopher John Kaag, who co-wrote the pungent and personal handbook titled Henry at Work.
Harry Smith was the oddest duck you never heard of in the art underground: an unsightly, often obnoxious genius. Only the artists knew him, but it was a multitude: Bob Dylan, who sang the roots ...
It is said about Noam Chomsky that he has been to the study of language what Isaac Newton was to the study of gravity after the apple hit his head. Chomsky had the “aha!” insight: ...
In The Country of the Blind, where the writer Andrew Leland is guiding our tour, they do things differently. They have their own identity riddles, their network of heroes and not-so-heroes. They have their own ...
This is the vitalism episode, with the passionate polymath Jackson Lears. His new book is beyond category, and gripping, too: it’s titled Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street. ...
We’re marking the 20th birthday of podcasting in conversation with Erica Heilman, a prize practitioner. Here we are with Erica in Peacham, Vermont, settled in 1776 in the Northeast Kingdom, up toward Canada. We seek ...
We’re back in the pub a year later with Mark Blyth, the outspoken political economist at Brown University—which means he works and talks and thinks at the intersection of big money and big power. In ...
This week: a show from our archive from The Connection days. “It ain’t over till it’s over.” That’s Yogi Berra’s ageless line, in the title now of a summer hit movie just to prove Yogi ...
The line is intoned now as a sort of chapter heading in our literary-artistic history: Eileen Myles grew up in Boston/Cambridge and moved to New York in 1974 to become a poet.
Chris with Eileen Myles.
And they did. 20 volumes later—their latest book of poetry is A “Working Life”— they’re very nearly the New York poet, with a branch office in Marfa, Texas, and still a strong Boston accent that is part of the poems. Recently, back in Boston, Eileen Myles sat down to talk about a life in poetry and in conversation with the world.
We’re humbled—we’re also scared—by the power of chatbots like GPT-4 to do pretty much everything that word people have ever done, but faster and maybe more to the point. The twist in this conversation is that our guests are professional humanists, guardians, and teachers of the hard-earned old wisdom of books, not machines. And the double twist that they want to argue is that the enemy here is not evil AI: it’s us, who have enfeebled the old culture to a vanishing point in the practice of our politics, our media, our most expensive elite universities.
Robert Pogue Harrison and Ana Ilievska.
Robert Pogue Harrison is our Dante scholar at Stanford, our professional humanist, and a West Coast friend in smart podcasting. We asked ChatGPT about his voice, and we got the instant answer that his voice “has a certain mellowness and introspection” that go with his “keen ear for language and a precise, articulate way of expressing his ideas.” He’s joined by Ana Ilievska, initials A.I. She is Robert’s colleague from Europe in humanistic studies at Stanford. Recently, in the podcast Entitled Opinions, they both defended AI as a wake-up call, maybe in the nick of time, to rescue humanity, human stewardship, human culture from its corrupted condition. They both said they expect their students to use AI and to learn from it.
Here’s a last burst of wind in our sails, a last gentle guffaw, from a listener we came to adore: the cartoonist Ed Koren. You knew Ed Koren, too, for those furry, quizzical characters he drew and captioned—portraits of our general bemusement—through a 60-year run in The New Yorker magazine. His studio, it turned out, was in rural Vermont, where he’d gotten hooked on our public radio shows. Finally, just a few years ago, we met the sheer joy of that man, face to face.
Chris Lydon with Ed Koren in Vermont, November 2021.
Ed Koren knew that “the laws of entropy,” as he put it in conversation, were not in his favor. But he did not believe in dying, and in his case, I don’t either. Most of a year ago, in the late stages of treatment for inoperable lung cancer, he told me he’d withdrawn from hospice care because hospice framed its mission around death, and his passion, as he said, was life and living. What I heard was not the sound of denial, or evasion of anything. I felt him embracing a truth that I’d felt from the start of a precious friendship: Ed Koren stood for the elusive strands of humanity that do not die. The wonder of our connection has been discovering, oddly enough, that we could talk about such things. And so we did, producer Mary McGrath and I, visiting Ed and his wife Curtis, late in March, up in Mary’s ski country. As we entered his studio this time he was absorbed in reading a New Yorker profile of the godfather of modern graphic design, Milton Glaser.
Ed Koren’s hairy creatures.
Scenes from Ed Koren’s studio last month. In the center: Ed with Mary McGrath.
William James, thinker and writer, was known widely in the nineteenth century as the adorable genius who invented American pragmatism. He was a brain scientist, student of war and religion, a philosopher who can feel like a very lively presence in the shadows of our condition, whatever we call it.
John Kaag.
In the 2020s, the philosopher John Kaag is our guest to enlist William James in a sort of quest for insight and healing in a divided nation. His books on William James include Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life.
There’s nobody quite like Sonny Rollins in the All-American sound and story of jazz. He was a teenager in Harlem in the 1940s when major players caught on to a rising star. Steadily over the decades, he built one of the genius careers on the tenor saxophone, alongside his rival and friend John Coltrane. More than that, Sonny Rollins was making his music a way of life, a mission of self-study and self-improvement, a moral and philosophical course of inquiry and reinvention—of gentleness and peace—all at the same time.
Biographer Aidan Levy. Credit: Jahsie Ault.
In his 93rd year of life, Sonny Rollins now has the affirmation of a 700-page biography, meticulous and monumental—modeled on Robin Kelley’s life of Sonny’s friend Thelonious Monk. It lets all of us see Sonny Rollins up with Walt Whitman and a few others on the Olympus of American art and storytelling.
Out of the blue a decade ago, Paul Harding won a huge popular following, first, and then the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for his modern Maine sort of folk tale called Tinkers. His new one is deeper, darker, more ambitious philosophically, more poetic, more beautiful in long stretches—more ironical, too, starting with the title.
Paul Harding.
This Other Eden takes off from sketchy reality—a real colony of free poor people—Europeans, Africans, indigenous Penobscots, fishermen, farmers, all of them on a tiny island off the coast of Maine about a century ago, until they got swept up by the state and banished to confinement, some of them in the Maine School for the Feeble Minded. In the novel, it’s Paul Harding’s invented characters and imagination that compose a tale of family love encompassing the damages of incest and murder and official state cruelty.
“Don’t forget” is a mantra in our shop: “don’t forget” specially the characters, the moments that made us. Norman Mailer is the spirit-seeker and sometimes reckless truth-teller we are un-forgetting in this podcast. We are summoning Norman Mailer in his hundredth-birthday season, what could be his revival time, to tell us what happened to his country and ours. Mailer lived and wrote it all: 40 books of eagle-eyed fact and fiction. First as a soldier in the Philippines, in the 1940s; then: epic poet of the Sixties in America; eventually as a celebrity and popular artist of Duke Ellington or Frank Sinatra proportions.
J. Michael Lennon, Chris Lydon, and John Buffalo Mailer.
Sinatra taught us love songs, Mailer read the maelstrom of our American dream life to us. The premise in our conversation is that Norman Mailer, 15 years after his death, is still speaking to his country. Certainly to John Buffalo Mailer, youngest of seven sons and daughters, co-editor with J. Michael Lennon of a Mailer distillation for 2023, titled A Mysterious Country: The Grace and Fragility of American Democracy.
Lydia Moland is reminding us that when present company in American public life comes up short, the ancestors of American democracy and spirit are lurking out there, in abundance and power to reset our judgment of who we are and what is possible, for a society, for each of us.
Lydia Moland.
Lydia Moland, our sometime radio colleague, is now a philosophy professor at Colby College in Maine. For her the shock of recognition came at the chance sight of a nineteenth-century letter from a battling idealist, Lydia Maria Child, whom she’d never heard of. (It reminds me of the Pulitzer Prize biographer Stacy Schiff feeling much the same rapture at the same moment in 2016, rediscovering the sturdy giant of the American Revolution, Samuel Adams.) Lydia Moland’s big book became a story not just of a central figure in the abolition of slavery, but of her own passion as a contemporary scholar finding a model of moral courage for our own times. We spoke together at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge on the publication of Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life.
This is family talk in rural Ireland toward the end of an extraordinary life. My brother Patrick was the youngest of six, the saint among us and always the brightest company. Two winters ago he’d struck an odd note in our regular catching-up by phone, from his community farm in County Kilkenny to my base in Boston. He said, “Chris, I’ve aged more in the last 10 weeks than in the last 10 years.” To walk 50 yards had become an ordeal. The villain turned up in a Dublin exam: it was ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease of the “motor neurons,” which spares the victim’s thinking and speech even as it cripples the body. There was nothing to be done about this – except, I ventured, to record a gabby memoir in the time we had, over Zoom, and then face-to-face on the porch of Patrick’s little farmhouse in the town of Callan. We are tracking the glow of a soul. What had made such a life even possible?
Patrick and Chris in Lisbon in 2018.Patrick and Gladys at their farm.Patrick was the brother who never had a salary, or a personal savings account. His famous high school, Phillips Exeter, gave him its highest award, for a life “non sibi,” not for self. He’d found his match in Gladys Kinghorn, from Aberdeen in Scotland, visionary and inexhaustible, like himself. What they did together over 50 years across the southeast of Ireland was build a network of farms and school communities to support people with Down syndrome, autism, epilepsy. In Patrick’s Camphill communities, inspired by the Austrian guru Rudolf Steiner, support was founded on love and attention. Music became central in Camphill therapy. So was gardening, both vegetables and flowers. There may be more to see and say about Patrick, but I’m just as hungry for other accounts around the self-disciplined blossoming of beautiful lives.
Patrick Lydon in 1970.Patrick in 1973.Special thanks to the Irish filmmaker Eamon Little, who recorded the sound of this podcast. With Curious Dog Films, he is making a feature documentary on Patrick Lydon, titled Born That Way.
This show first aired on September 16, 2021.
It’s hard not to notice that we’re flunking tests, right and left, and running out of strategies against global-size troubles. COVID, we said, was our test for the age of viruses. At summer’s end the variants are gaining and most of the world is unvaccinated. Afghanistan became a 20-year test of the notion that a public-private force of money, drones, a few troops, and contractors on the ground could win an asymmetrical war against the Taliban, and terror. We didn’t. And now comes Mariana Mazzucato, the brassy Italian-English-American who says: it’s our thinking that’s got to change, and find its way back to the idealism and scale of JFK’s space program.
The Apollo 11 lunar module.We’ve got COVID, climate, chaos in the rush from Afghanistan, plus cruelties of capitalism and a cultural rift in the heart of the country. Who are we by now? Who remembers a certain cool competence in the self-image of Americans? And who can imagine recovering it? Mariana Mazzucato wants to tell you: she can! Born in Italy, raised in the US, holding forth now from University College London, she’s got an audience on both sides of the Atlantic. Her message is: we’ll change our luck only by transforming ourselves with ideas and dreams at the grand scale of the emergencies in energy, jobs, health, and justice. When she speaks of a Moonshot Mission to change capitalism, she’s evoking John F. Kennedy’s promise to put a man on the moon in the ’60s. On the 2021 agenda, I’m asking her to grade our wins and losses in the struggle with COVID so far, and the prospects in our struggle to save the climate.
This show originally aired on September 23, 2021.
Thomas Mann was one of those cultural giants the world doesn’t seem to make anymore—artists with authority, almost as big as their countries, at the level of Mark Twain, say, Voltaire, or Emerson! In his heyday a century ago Thomas Mann was called “the life of the mind in Germany”: the darkly philosophical novelist of obsession and illness in TheMagic Mountain, the tale-spinner of Death in Venice, about a master writer, like himself, who falls quite madly in love with the sheer beauty of a 14-year-old boy on the beach. But Thomas Mann had a secret: he had been that love-stricken man on the beach. He was a happy husband, the father of six, and all his long life scanning for love that was not allowed. The trick today is to reimagine a whole Thomas Mann, and the novelist Colm Tóibín has pulled it off.
With Colm Tóibín at the James family gravesite in Cambridge. Photo credit: Benjamen Walker.The Irish and transnational novelist Colm Tóibín is inviting us into a rare feast for alert readers this hour. The Magician is his new title: it’s a biography in the form of a novel about the twentieth-century German master Thomas Mann, both statesman and artist. The rare part is that Colm Tóibín is also giving us a sort of anatomy lesson in the processes that make high art and artists: the family politics, the erotic engines seen and unseen, the historical memory in a country and culture that were coming apart. Toss in what Thomas Mann felt was the spiritual energy that reached him through art and music especially. The Magician is a marvel, and so is Colm Tóibín.
Our unipolar moment may be remembered as the United States’ turn as “king of the hill,” two decades or so between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rocket rise of China’s economy. What ...
The hatching of a New Right Republican party, under fire, is the substance of this radio hour. It was simpler in Gilbert and Sullivan when the song said: every boy and every gal that’s born ...
Finally, there’s a word for it: the polycrisis, to describe the multiple messes we’re in. Our guest the historian Adam Tooze says it’s a polycrisis when old crises like war, weather, and disease are breeding ...
Talking time around the war in Ukraine may be approaching. This radio hour may be a moment in that trend: reaching out for strong views we hadn’t heard, in head-on disagreement about the morality and ...
Next on the global agenda comes Taiwan, the island off China once known as Formosa, meaning shapely, beautiful. Today it’s a puzzle with moving parts: a not-quite nation of 24 million people that has two ...
Try a simple riddle, about the time and climate we Americans are living in, today: Do we call it (a) wartime or (b) peacetime? Tense time, for sure, and there’s war in the headlines. But ...
The conversation about a world in disarray feels urgent, elusive, etherized. Who will name this crisis and the roots of it: war, tribalism, maldistributed money, and pain, exceptionalism for rich people, maybe, for a rich ...
This show first aired on May 19, 2022. George Orwell said, “It’s so easy to be witty about the British Empire.” As in the throwaway line that English people had conquered the world in a ...
This show was first broadcast on October 31, 2019. H. P. Lovecraft’s frightful horror fiction—dated between Edgar Allan Poe’s and Stephen King’s—is the weirdest of the weird. Lovecraft found ravenous, man-eating rats in the walls ...
This show was first broadcast on April 1, 2021. You must remember this, the song says. In fact, it’s hard to forget at Oscar time every April, that Casablanca, the Best Picture of 1942, was ...
This show first aired on May 31, 2018. The Studs Terkel edge on the radio was, first of all, picking guests who would sound more interesting 50, 60 years later: Mahalia Jackson, Bucky Fuller, Toni ...
This show is a rerun. This week sees the opening of The End of the Tour, an updated My Dinner with Andre about David Foster Wallace’s book tour in 1996 for his immeasurable novel, Infinite Jest. ...
This show originally aired on August 9, 2018. The Shostakovich story — man and music in the apocalypse of world war and Cold War — seems to get more frightfully irresistible with every remembrance, every ...
This show first aired on November 11, 2021. George Orwell rests now with the immortal English writers. But why? For impact and influence, you could argue that Orwell in his novels and essays matched Shakespeare, ...
This show first aired on December 2, 2021. Giant questions this hour, and a slew of fresh answers: Where do we humans come from? Who are we, after all? Where are we going? Was our ...
This show originally aired on December 20, 2018. A tribute to Leonard Bernstein with Nigel Simeone, Jamie Bernstein, and Augusta Read Thomas. Leonard Bernstein, the multi-musician, did it all in his lifetime. At his 100th ...
This show first aired on March 29, 2018. In the annals of rock music albums, Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks is one of a kind. In an earthy medium, it’s a masterpiece of abstraction. Indecipherable. Irresistible. ...
This show originally aired on July 6, 2017. Henry David Thoreau, our specimen of American genius in nature, wrote famously short, and long. “Simplify,” in a one-word sentence of good advice. But then 2-million words ...
This episode was first broadcast on February 18, 2021. The invitation this hour, or maybe the dream, is to learn how to write short stories with the poignancy and power of the old Russian Masters, ...
This show first aired on December 17, 2020. Erroll Garner, the jazz pianist, is undergoing an upward revaluation of the sort that artists dream of: a reputational transition forty-some years after he died. In his ...
Mark Blyth, the people’s economist, to the rescue. We’ve got tribulations of money and power to be decoded, in what can feel like wartime. Sanctions or penalties for the warfare make economic waves, too. Inflation ...
Four months into the war in Ukraine, 20 weeks of radio talk about it, feels like time for a deep breath: an hour to look hard at a painful stalemate, a poisonous war that bodes ...
Between the US and China, you can feel that the chill is on among the chieftains, spoiling for a fight over Taiwan or trade or just top billing. But what about the people? Two peoples ...
The United States and China are both working on something like a separation agreement. It’s the end of something like a marriage over the last 50 years—it produced vast wealth, but something less than democracy ...
A moral philosopher and a walking trove of literature’s wisdom walk into a radio conversation together. The question for one hour is the bleak time we’re all living in, this sea of troubles we don’t ...
Memorial Day can feel different every year, bittersweet at its best. It’s been the last Monday in May since 1868, first as Decoration Day, for marking the graves of our Civil War dead—lest Americans forget, ...
On the famous clock-face of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the time now is 100 seconds before midnight. Meaning: humankind is closer to nuclear doomsday than it’s ever been. But it’s worse than that: those ...
It’s Iran, again, at the center of a tricky, dangerous puzzle. Four years after Donald Trump broke out of the nuclear ban agreement, Iran is just days or weeks away from having enough enriched uranium ...
Try this, to get a fresh grip on the war in Ukraine, and its effects still to come: we’ve got a food war in the breadbasket of the world, on the vast Eurasian prairie that’s ...
We are encouraged to believe, we Americans, that if anything good for the world comes out of the war in Ukraine, it will be that “the US is back,” not shooting but supporting, maybe midwifing ...
Twenty questions this hour on the war in Ukraine. For starters: will the war end in April? May? Maybe June? Who gets to announce the good news? An essay question: Can a war look more ...
We’re engulfed by war, rumors of war, videos of war, crimes of war—are we looking at ‘end times’ approaching? Or just the dead end of the forever wars? Our conversation this hour is about the ...
The war questions are back, you notice—in everyday America: the talk of risk, the chance of ruin, the push and pull of righteousness, restraint; and all that history in our heads. Who gets it right ...
When Bill McKibben looks at the war in Ukraine, what he sees is a chapter, maybe the very last one, in the chronicle of a planet that we humans are burning unto our own extinction. ...
Big lessons out of the war in Ukraine about “how the world really works” are showing up on the ground, not in theory class. They’re what you can learn just by watching. Example: it’s almost ...
Sobering questions: how could this unmerciful war in Ukraine go nuclear? If Russia’s barbaric smashing of cities and civilians finally pushes the US and NATO (past just sympathy) to “doing something”—with their own troops or ...
It’s banks against tanks in the Ukraine war that’s now about everything: about the courage of Kyiv, about hope holding on in a horror show, kids in the roaring hell of it. Columns of refugees ...
Make what you can of the news from Ukraine: nobody’s calling it a Seinfeld crisis anymore, meaning a crisis about nothing, with a painless remedy at hand. Just what is this crisis, though, and how ...
This hour: the back-story of In Search of Monsters, our collaboration with the counter-punching think tank, the Quincy Institute. It’s the back-story of two men – two centuries apart – inside that Quincy idea. First ...
It was the meeting, just 50 years ago this month, that changed more lives at more levels than any other political handshake in our lifetimes. The Trickster and the Monster, as the principals had been ...
This show was originally broadcast on July 15, 2021. We know their songs, not so much what they were going through, those Black women artists who wrote and sang so many anthems of American life: ...
The missing piece in the Ukraine crisis, you begin to notice, is that vast grain field and the 45-million people who live on it. The real players in the crisis are NATO, just west, and ...
This show first aired on August 12, 2021. This mood we’re in: stuck, anxious, alone, desperate for an exit ramp, even to another bad stop on the same old highway. COVID, climate, chaos—or is it ...
Vladimir Putin’s threat to invade Ukraine is the first headline crisis of the new year. The headlines and the ‘crisis’ word come almost automatically when the story is Russia and its wily autocrat. We see ...
This show first aired on May 20, 2021. The opioid epidemic, still rampant, still deadly, turns out to be a family story at its root. Empire of Pain is Patrick Radden Keefe’s account of the ...
This show first aired on November 18, 2021. The grand master of bug biology E.O. Wilson has always had a way of seeing the big picture in his microscopic science. Looking at a wall-size projection ...
There’s a friendly hour’s conversation here about racial matters and moods. It’s been going on in a bookstore for about 35 years. What’s new this time, late in the portentous year of 2021, is first, ...
Mark Blyth is the butcher’s son from Dundee, now the American professor of political economics, still with the Sean Connery burr in his voice. Sounds like a working stiff; seems to think like one. Not ...
This show was originally broadcast on December 5, 2019. Origin stories can be educated guesses, or leaps of collective imagination as to who we are, how we got to this point. The Big Bang is ...
Glasgow on the Clyde is not the end of the story, but you can see the end from Glasgow: it’ll be more “blah, blah, blah,” says Greta Thunberg, the merciless teenage critic the world has ...
Boston politics has taken a turn. The Last Hurrah was 65 years ago – the classic obituary novel about those noisy Irish rascals who ran City Hall for much of the twentieth century. That era ...
This show was originally broadcast on March 11, 2021. The CRISPR challenge is back—first to grasp, then how to apply the biggest scientific breakthrough of our century so far. You remember CRISPR: nature’s own repair ...
Prison time can be the strangest interval in a long life: it is experienced, year by year, as a slow-burning hell on earth, often revalued later as productive, enlightening, redemptive turn-around time. Chris Hedges has ...