Open Source with Christopher Lydon

Open Source with Christopher Lydon

Christopher Lydon in conversation on arts, ideas and politics

Episodes

Political Football

July 18, 2024 • 50 mins
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 ...
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American Bloods

July 4, 2024 • 35 mins
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 ...
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Transcript

The Zionism Riddle

June 20, 2024
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 ...
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Chasing Beauty

June 6, 2024
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 ...
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Nicholson Baker Finds a Likeness

May 23, 2024 • 46 mins
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 ...
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Campus Uproar

May 9, 2024 • 55 mins
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 ...
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American Disorder

April 25, 2024 • 42 mins
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 ...
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Lessons from Hannah Arendt

April 11, 2024 • 47 mins
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 ...
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Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets

March 28, 2024 • 50 mins
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 ...
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Of Melville and Marriage

March 14, 2024 • 36 mins
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 ...
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Against Despair

March 1, 2024 • 56 mins
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 ...
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The Rebel’s Clinic

February 15, 2024 • 44 mins
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 ...
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Algorithmic Anxiety

February 1, 2024 • 42 mins
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.” ...
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The Humbling of Harvard

January 18, 2024 • 39 mins
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 ...
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The Most Secret Memory of Men

January 5, 2024 • 48 mins
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 ...
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The Revolutionary

December 20, 2023 • 33 mins
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 ...
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Israel and Palestine Across History

December 8, 2023 • 44 mins
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 ...
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Time’s Echo

November 22, 2023 • 51 mins
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 ...
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Chas Freeman on a Kaleidoscopic Turn

November 9, 2023 • 42 mins
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 ...
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Upended Assumptions

November 3, 2023 • 37 mins
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 ...
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