Open Source with Christopher Lydon
Open Source with Christopher Lydon
Christopher Lydon
Christopher Lydon in conversation on arts, ideas and politics
Of Melville and Marriage
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 ...
Mar 14
36 min
Against Despair
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 ...
Feb 29
56 min
The Rebel’s Clinic
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 ...
Feb 15
44 min
Algorithmic Anxiety
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.” ...
Feb 1
42 min
The Humbling of Harvard
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 ...
Jan 18
39 min
The Most Secret Memory of Men
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 ...
Jan 4
48 min
The Revolutionary
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 ...
Dec 20, 2023
33 min
Israel and Palestine Across History
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 ...
Dec 7, 2023
44 min
Time’s Echo
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 ...
Nov 22, 2023
51 min
Chas Freeman on a Kaleidoscopic Turn
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 ...
Nov 9, 2023
42 min
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