Open Source with Christopher Lydon
217 episodes - English - Latest episode: 14 days ago - ★★★★★ - 1K ratingsChristopher Lydon in conversation on arts, ideas and politics
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Episodes
Lessons from Hannah Arendt
April 11, 2024 22:15 - 47 minutes - 65.6 MBWe’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 ...
Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets
March 28, 2024 19:47 - 50 minutes - 35 MBWe’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 ...
Of Melville and Marriage
March 14, 2024 19:35 - 36 minutes - 33.7 MBWe 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 ...
Against Despair
March 01, 2024 00:00 - 56 minutes - 77.9 MBThe 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 ...
The Rebel’s Clinic
February 15, 2024 21:05 - 44 minutes - 60.6 MBFrantz 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 ...
Algorithmic Anxiety
February 01, 2024 23:55 - 42 minutes - 58.6 MBThe 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.” ...
The Humbling of Harvard
January 18, 2024 23:54 - 39 minutes - 36.6 MBOldest 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 ...
The Most Secret Memory of Men
January 05, 2024 00:55 - 48 minutes - 33.2 MBThe 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 ...
The Revolutionary
December 20, 2023 22:46 - 33 minutes - 46.3 MBOn 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 ...
Israel and Palestine Across History
December 08, 2023 00:33 - 44 minutes - 61.6 MBWith 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 ...
Time’s Echo
November 22, 2023 15:08 - 51 minutes - 35.2 MBThe 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 ...
Chas Freeman on a Kaleidoscopic Turn
November 09, 2023 23:43 - 42 minutes - 58.7 MBJust 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 ...
Upended Assumptions
November 03, 2023 01:01 - 37 minutes - 52.2 MBIn 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 ...
War and Dread
October 19, 2023 23:42 - 56 minutes - 77.6 MBWe 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 ...
George Eliot’s Marriage Story
October 05, 2023 22:24 - 41 minutes - 56.4 MBThe 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 ...
Zadie Smith on The Fraud
September 21, 2023 23:03 - 31 minutes - 43 MBZadie 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 ...
Henry at Work
September 07, 2023 22:19 - 36 minutes - 25.1 MBIt’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 ...
The Cosmic Scholar
August 24, 2023 22:23 - 38 minutes - 51 MBHarry 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 ...
Noam Chomsky: American Socrates
August 10, 2023 21:38 - 5 MBIt 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: ...
The Country of the Blind
July 27, 2023 19:48 - 41 minutes - 28.7 MBIn 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 ...
Animal Spirits
July 14, 2023 00:39 - 34 minutes - 47.4 MBThis 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. ...
Happy Birthday to Us
June 29, 2023 17:18 - 41 minutes - 56.6 MBWe’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 ...
Blyth Returns
June 16, 2023 03:39 - 39 minutes - 53.8 MBWe’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 ...
It Ain’t Over
June 01, 2023 19:46 - 42 minutes - 58.6 MBThis 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 ...
A Working Life with Eileen Myles
May 16, 2023 17:51 - 32 minutes - 44.6 MBThe 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 ...
Failing Intelligence
May 04, 2023 22:06 - 53 minutes - 36.5 MBWe’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 ...
Frozen Moments with Ed Koren
April 19, 2023 23:13 - 33 minutes - 46 MBHere’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 ...
How William James Can Save Your Life
April 06, 2023 21:43 - 38 minutes - 53.4 MBWilliam 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 ...
Sonny Rollins: Saxophone Colossus
March 23, 2023 21:26 - 39 minutes - 55.1 MBThere’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 ...
This Other Eden
March 09, 2023 23:41 - 35 minutes - 48.3 MBOut 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 ...
Norman Mailer Turns 100
February 23, 2023 19:53 - 37 minutes - 51.6 MB“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 ...
A Radical American Life
February 09, 2023 23:54 - 35 minutes - 32.1 MBLydia 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 ...
Thank You, Patrick Lydon
January 26, 2023 17:06 - 31 minutes - 43.7 MBThis 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 ...
Moonshot Economics
January 12, 2023 19:26 - 51 minutes - 58.2 MBThis 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 ...
Mann the Magician
January 05, 2023 21:08 - 50 minutes - 29.3 MBThis 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 ...
Liner Notes for the Revolution
December 29, 2022 19:20 - 51 minutes - 70.6 MBThis 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: ...
Thoroughly Modern Mozart
December 22, 2022 18:51 - 50 minutes - 67.5 MBThis show first aired on September 30, 2021. Who else could be said to make you smarter, just listening to the sound of his music? Only Mozart, that we know. For 300-and-some years now, he ...
Prudent Statecraft
December 15, 2022 22:57 - 50 minutes - 67.5 MBJohn Quincy Adams was the model president in the early republic who declared that the United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” But “go abroad” we did, as the republic became ...
The Maelstrom of Geopolitics
December 09, 2022 00:08 - 50 minutes - 30.2 MBA briefing session this hour from our strategic special branch, which is to say: the mind of Chas Freeman in the maelstrom of geopolitics. If President Obama had been given his first choice to sketch ...
Silent Spring, 60 Years Later
December 01, 2022 22:21 - 50 minutes - 27.4 MBHow’s to rescue the Earth from us people? Rachel Carson’s way – 60 years ago – was to write a book, and call it Silent Spring. She’d been a shy but defiant biologist in government ...
Origin Stories
November 24, 2022 18:00 - 50 minutes - 30.2 MBThis 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 ...
Multipolarity
November 17, 2022 22:32 - 50 minutes - 68.8 MBOur 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 New Right
November 11, 2022 01:03 - 50 minutes - 30.5 MBThe 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 ...
Polycrisis
November 04, 2022 01:00 - 50 minutes - 29.2 MBFinally, 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 ...
A Just Cause
October 27, 2022 23:50 - 50 minutes - 69.6 MBTalking 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 ...
Taiwan, the World-Class Puzzle
October 21, 2022 00:52 - 50 minutes - 29.3 MBNext 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 ...
Humane Wartime
October 13, 2022 23:01 - 50 minutes - 116 MBTry 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 Historians’ Diagnosis
October 06, 2022 23:47 - 50 minutes - 27.8 MBThe 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 ...
Cruel Britannia
September 29, 2022 23:00 - 50 minutes - 69 MBThis 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 ...
Lovecraft Country
September 22, 2022 23:05 - 50 minutes - 27.1 MBThis 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 ...