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 ...

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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, ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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.

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 ...

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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 ...

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 ...

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We’re with the cultural historian Robin D.G. Kelley 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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 ...

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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 ...

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