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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We’re staring down the several crises in our economy—and recalling the grand old joke that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. John Cassidy. John Cassidy of The ...

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We’re staring down the global trade war with Mark Blyth at Brown University. He is the People’s Economist from Scotland, who takes us home to his village pub in Dundee every once in a while ...

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We have a key, finally, to the mystery of Donald Trump and where he came from. He was born almost exactly 100 years ago in the imagination of the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. What he ...

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We’re considering the Jesus story with the historian Elaine Pagels. Her new book is a marvel, crowning a lifetime of bestselling scholarship, sifting the sources and retuning the narrative in and around the Christian Gospels. ...

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We’re tracking President Trump’s squeeze on higher education, and the argument in the Ivy League: whether or not to make a fight of it. First, Columbia surrendered under a Trump threat to cut $400 million ...

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We’re reading our way out of a ruined time with the model reader, Patricia Lockwood. She’s the poet laureate of the internet, for starters. She’s a big-league literary critic, master of social media and the ...

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We’re looking for our American place in what can feel like a new world order, with Stephen Walt, our first and favorite so-called realist in the foreign policy game—realists being the people who steer by ...

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Angus King is the anti-partisan, independent United States Senator from the cranky Yankee state of Maine. He is giving us a conversational civics lesson in the tradition of James Madison and also of Schoolhouse Rock, ...

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In the fog of Trump Two, we’re asking: what’s new? The co-presidency with Elon Musk is surely new, also the raging battle of exotic ideas among techno-optimists and libertarian anarcho-capitalists at war with the very ...

The post Muskology appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

We’re picking up the pieces of our country in the age of Trump, Part II. Is the USA still here? Is it still us? Kurt Andersen. Cue Kurt Andersen, with his finger in the wind. ...

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We’re with writer-world’s exotic traveller and truth-teller Pico Iyer. He’s been the Dalai Lama’s friend from boyhood, and our friend, too, in years now of reading and talk. In his new book, Aflame, subtitled Learning ...

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We’re here with a capsule of memory from late last year. It was a spark of generosity in Liz Walker’s story that lit up the Christmas season for lots of us, and maybe the path ...

The post From Boston to Bethlehem appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

We’re with the one-off diplomat, strategist, and historian Chas Freeman. Chas Freeman. Call this “Curious Citizen Meets the Most Knowledgeable Straight-Talker Anywhere Near the U.S. Government.” At a turn in the calendar, a transition in ...

The post A Geopolitical Check-Up appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

We’re with the celebrated Scots-accented people’s economist—celebrated above all when he’s home with the locals in his own old pub in Dundee, settling all the arguments there are around money and power, and populism on ...

The post Blyth is Back appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

We’re with the Nobel Prize novelist from Turkey, Orhan Pamuk. It’s not your standard book chat: closer to head-butting than conversation, as you’ll hear. But it’s polite enough and nobody gets hurt. Chris and Orhan ...

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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, ...

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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, ...

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