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
Twitter:
@radioopensource
Language:
English
Contact:
(617) 353-0692
Website:
http://www.radioopensource.org/
Email:
info@radioopensource.org
Episodes
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Of Melville and Marriage
3/14/2024
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 ...
Duration:00:36:44
Against Despair
2/29/2024
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 ...
Duration:00:56:40
The Rebel’s Clinic
2/15/2024
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 ...
Duration:00:44:06
Algorithmic Anxiety
2/1/2024
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.” ...
Duration:00:42:37
The Humbling of Harvard
1/18/2024
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 ...
Duration:00:39:53
The Most Secret Memory of Men
1/4/2024
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 ...
Duration:00:48:17
The Revolutionary
12/20/2023
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 ...
Duration:00:33:39