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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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’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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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, ...

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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.” ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...