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
Time’s Echo
11/22/2023
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 ...
Duration:00:51:09
Chas Freeman on a Kaleidoscopic Turn
11/9/2023
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 ...
Duration:00:42:41
Upended Assumptions
11/2/2023
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 ...
Duration:00:37:58
War and Dread
10/19/2023
We are listening in the dark, after a catastrophe yet to be contained: more than 1,000 Israeli civilians killed in a terrorist invasion from Gaza two weeks ago, thousands more Palestinians dead in a first ...
Duration:00:56:26
George Eliot’s Marriage Story
10/5/2023
The question is marriage. The answer in this podcast is Clare Carlisle’s sparkling book, The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life. George Eliot, born Marian Evans, was the towering novelist of Middlemarch, Silas Marner, and ...
Duration:00:41:00
Zadie Smith on The Fraud
9/21/2023
Zadie Smith is a writer who matters, twenty years now after White Teeth, her breakthrough novel when she was just out of college. Her new one is titled The Fraud: fiction that pops in and ...
Duration:00:31:15
Henry at Work
9/7/2023
It’s Labor Day week, 2023, and Henry David Thoreau is the heart of our conversation. It’s not with him, but it’s driven by his example: American thinking at its best on the matter of how ...
Duration:00:36:29
The Cosmic Scholar
8/24/2023
Harry Smith was the oddest duck you never heard of in the art underground: an unsightly, often obnoxious genius. Only the artists knew him, but it was a multitude: Bob Dylan, who sang the roots ...
Duration:00:38:56
Noam Chomsky: American Socrates
8/10/2023
It is said about Noam Chomsky that he has been to the study of language what Isaac Newton was to the study of gravity after the apple hit his head. Chomsky had the “aha!” insight: ...
Duration:00:50:53
The Country of the Blind
7/27/2023
In The Country of the Blind, where the writer Andrew Leland is guiding our tour, they do things differently. They have their own identity riddles, their network of heroes and not-so-heroes. They have their own ...
Duration:00:41:44
Animal Spirits
7/13/2023
This is the vitalism episode, with the passionate polymath Jackson Lears. His new book is beyond category, and gripping, too: it’s titled Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street. ...
Duration:00:34:28
Happy Birthday to Us
6/29/2023
We’re marking the 20th birthday of podcasting in conversation with Erica Heilman, a prize practitioner. Here we are with Erica in Peacham, Vermont, settled in 1776 in the Northeast Kingdom, up toward Canada. We seek ...
Duration:00:41:12
Blyth Returns
6/15/2023
We’re back in the pub a year later with Mark Blyth, the outspoken political economist at Brown University—which means he works and talks and thinks at the intersection of big money and big power. In ...
Duration:00:39:08
It Ain’t Over
6/1/2023
This week: a show from our archive from The Connection days. “It ain’t over till it’s over.” That’s Yogi Berra’s ageless line, in the title now of a summer hit movie just to prove Yogi ...
Duration:00:42:36
A Working Life with Eileen Myles
5/16/2023
The line is intoned now as a sort of chapter heading in our literary-artistic history: Eileen Myles grew up in Boston/Cambridge and moved to New York in 1974 to become a poet. Chris with Eileen ...
Duration:00:32:24
Failing Intelligence
5/4/2023
We’re humbled—we’re also scared—by the power of chatbots like GPT-4 to do pretty much everything that word people have ever done, but faster and maybe more to the point. The twist in this conversation is ...
Duration:00:53:05
Frozen Moments with Ed Koren
4/19/2023
Here’s a last burst of wind in our sails, a last gentle guffaw, from a listener we came to adore: the cartoonist Ed Koren. You knew Ed Koren, too, for those furry, quizzical characters he ...
Duration:00:33:25
How William James Can Save Your Life
4/6/2023
William James, thinker and writer, was known widely in the nineteenth century as the adorable genius who invented American pragmatism. He was a brain scientist, student of war and religion, a philosopher who can feel ...
Duration:00:38:49
Sonny Rollins: Saxophone Colossus
3/23/2023
There’s nobody quite like Sonny Rollins in the All-American sound and story of jazz. He was a teenager in Harlem in the 1940s when major players caught on to a rising star. Steadily over the ...
Duration:00:39:22
This Other Eden
3/9/2023
Out of the blue a decade ago, Paul Harding won a huge popular following, first, and then the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for his modern Maine sort of folk tale called Tinkers. His new one ...
Duration:00:35:07