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Open Source with Christopher Lydon

Podcasts

Christopher Lydon in conversation on arts, ideas and politics

Location:

Cambridge, MA

Description:

Christopher Lydon in conversation on arts, ideas and politics

Language:

English

Contact:

(617) 353-0692


Episodes
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The Roy Haynes Century

11/26/2024
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, ...

Duration:00:38:17

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Joshua Cohen’s Camp

11/15/2024
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, ...

Duration:00:37:22

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United States of Fear

11/7/2024
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 ...

Duration:00:24:51

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Amber’s America: Love and Outrage

11/2/2024
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. ...

Duration:00:31:05

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Playground

10/24/2024
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 ...

Duration:00:42:56

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A Jerusalem Tragedy

10/10/2024
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 ...

Duration:00:50:56

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The Climate Story’s Breaking Point

9/26/2024
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.

Duration:00:41:03

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Bear-Baiting Debating

9/12/2024
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 ...

Duration:00:42:00

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The Harris Machine

8/29/2024
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 ...

Duration:00:35:11

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In It to the Finish

8/15/2024
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 ...

Duration:00:39:31

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American Believer

8/1/2024
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 ...

Duration:00:38:04

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Political Football

7/18/2024
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 ...

Duration:00:50:24

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American Bloods

7/3/2024
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 ...

Duration:00:35:47

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The Zionism Riddle

6/20/2024
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 ...

Duration:00:53:53

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Chasing Beauty

6/6/2024
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 ...

Duration:00:44:51

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Nicholson Baker Finds a Likeness

5/23/2024
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 ...

Duration:00:46:10

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Campus Uproar

5/9/2024
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 ...

Duration:00:55:19

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American Disorder

4/25/2024
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 ...

Duration:00:42:44

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Lessons from Hannah Arendt

4/11/2024
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 ...

Duration:00:47:44

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Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets

3/28/2024
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 ...

Duration:00:50:57