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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

The post John Updike’s Vocation appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.