Open Source with Christopher Lydon

We’re with a master historian, Gary Gerstle, and we’re looking at the all-time thriller in midterm elections. There seem to be momentous turns in the American story, with surprise stars like Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan, who will be the first Muslim in the United States Senate, or Keisha Bottoms, the first woman in the Georgia governor’s office. Democrats will run Texas again, after 30 years in internal exile.

Gary Gerstle.

Elon Musk spent half a billion dollars to buy Congress and got nothing. Donald Trump lost almost everything and still cannot spell humility. But Ga...

We’re in the wild west of cyberspace. It is a man-made ecosystem, this cyberspace, where man-made AI lives and flourishes, but we’re coming to know that it’s a dangerous place, crawling with bullies and predators, infinitely rich, rife with disruption, misinformation, bad advice, and prurient distractions as well.

Francine Berman.

And furthermore, we’re coming to know that super brainy AI could be quite capable of killing off our soulful old human species, extinguishing our humanity if we let it. So who is protecting us, you ask? What is the public interest? What’s t...

We’re staring down the life-and-death hazard of artificial intelligence. That phrase “AI apocalypse” sounds a little panicky, but when the masters of the craft started arguing this summer about how soon, in the next 10 years, their science might wipe out human life forever, we had to say attention must be paid.

Ben Hurlbut.

We’re joined by Ben Hurlbut, professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. He’s been a wary eye on science in general, the teacher and guide we reach for on issues that we simply don’t know how to...

We’re between breakdown and breakup, or maybe between the AI monster and human extinction. Those are the rough choices that the all-purpose American writer Kurt Andersen is offering us in his vast portrait of a broken country as a sort of bad marriage. He’s written a novel called The Breakup. Is the USA beyond repair? he’s asking us. Could a national divorce be better than the country we’ve got, on its 250th birthday, no less?

Kurt Andersen.

We’re taking up his book, a novel about a married couple in trouble inside a n...

We’re savoring a glorious story we thought we knew in the long ordeal of racial justice in America. It was the singer Marian Anderson’s moment in 1939, after the Daughters of the American Revolution barred the black contralto from their Constitution Hall in Washington. With President and Eleanor Roosevelt’s encouragement, Marian Anderson decided instead to sing in front of the Abraham Lincoln Memorial. 

Anthony Tommasini.

75,000 people came to listen outdoors and Marian Anderson opened the concert with that anthem of liberty, “My Country Tis of Thee.” It’s the crowning moment in our guest Anthony...

We’re at sea this time on our own Odyssey, a voyage between the ancient epic that refuses to die and Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster movie version for us in this summer of 2026. It’s the story of course we all half-know about the wily old Greek warrior-king coming home ten years late from a horrible war against Troy, in maybe 1200 BC.

Daniel Mendelsohn.

Nobody knows the grip of it all better than our guest Daniel Mendelsohn, who sailed the route Odysseus took with his 81-year-old father and made an intimate mission of family discovery in it...

We’re high as a kite on World Cup football. The final test, coming Sunday, is down to Spain and Argentina. My question is whether this frenzied global contest might actually be rescuing our species from itself?

Our guests are soccer coach Michael LaVigne and the sports broadcaster Seamus Malin. We’re looking to confirm my intuition that this beautiful game, as Brazilians were first to call it, is humankind at its best—and maybe even a new model of civilization.

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We’re still in the Fourth of July spirit around the 250th birthday of our nation, hooked in particular by one grand American historian’s question to it: is the United States on the road to a new civil war?

David Blight.

David Blight, Sterling Professor of History at Yale, has been our guest before—on his Pulitzer-winning biography of Frederick Douglass: The Prophet of Freedom. And now he’s our biographer of the American experiment, looking ahead by looking back. The experiment, he says, is in deep, maybe critical trouble.

And here’s more fro...

We’re in a sort of watch party for a season when World Cup soccer, championship basketball, sports of every kind, all seem to run deeper, more believable, much better played than the rest of our lives, more memorable than our politics, surely more honest and closer to our ideals as human beings, not just Americans.

Richard Johnson.

We’re sampling the global sports mania on its home ground in Boston with the encyclopedic Richard Johnson, founder and longtime curator of the New England Sports Museum, which is spread out on the walls inside the seco...

We’re unearthing a model writer for an anxious America. Dwight Macdonald was his own eccentric voice through the Cold War politics and culture of the 1950s and 60s. He was a peacenik at heart, otherwise unpredictable, a New York intellectual of his own school. So in this podcast, we’re just reading Dwight Macdonald aloud with John Summers, who has edited a collection he calls Atrocities of the Mind: Essays on Violence and Politics in the American Century.

John Summers.

The premise in our conversation is that a certain urgent music in Dwight Macdonald’s pros...

We’re entranced in Molly Crabapple’s reanimation of the Jewish Labour Bund in Europe and Russia, of a century ago. Yiddish Socialism was a nickname. You could plausibly describe that old Bund as forgotten but not gone in the wider world today. The question may be whether the Bund’s humane ideals will have another chance against the lawlessness and cruelty of the 2020s.

Molly Crabapple.

We know Molly Crabapple as a one-off writer and artist, pens and paintbrushes at the ready, a sort of global muckraker in the rough places of the world. Last t...

We’re talking about the new magic of money, or Musk-ism, as our guests call it. Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff are historians of different sorts—historians of the future. Oddly enough, their hair-raising new book is not really about the man Elon Musk or his famous money. It’s about the sci-fi system that he is creating to trap the rest of us inside it, as Jill Lepore puts it.

Chris, Ben Tarnoff, and Quinn Slobodian.

Techno sovereignty is the buzzword that rules the walled gardens of Musk World, private empires of far reaching wealth...

We’re tuning in on the Pope and the President in what can sound like a historic showdown. Are we in the first rounds of an epic struggle between church and empire? Are we perhaps looking more nearly at two schoolboys sizing each other up? Will we get a moral test here finally around modern warfare without end?

Paul Elie.

Paul Elie writes wonderfully in The New Yorker about this very odd confrontation. “The first American pope is also a wartime pope,” he writes. His predecessor, Pope Francis, had observed a third world war in pieces...

It’s Jackie Robinson Day, 2026, when every player in Major League Baseball wears the immortal Dodger’s number 42. Listeners, if you think you know the Jackie Robinson story, think again with us around the most affecting sports book I can remember reading. It’s titled Kings and Pawns, about two all-time star black athletes, both of them race pioneers, heroes of conscience.

Howard Bryant.

First, Jack Roosevelt Robinson, who integrated big league baseball in 1947, and then the all-American college football star and singer supreme Paul Robeson, whose earth-shaking bass baritone voice made history on opera stages...

In 1854, when the escaped slave Anthony Burns was captured in Boston and returned in chains to slave-owners in Virginia, despite riotous resistance on the dock in Boston, Henry David Thoreau himself was shattered.

Lewis Hyde. Credit: The Radcliffe Institute.

“At last it occurred to me,” he wrote, “that what I had lost was a country.” The question becomes: what would Thoreau say today if he learned that hard workers and taxpayers of long standing in this country and his state were being locked up and deported for want of immigration papers? Our guest Lewis Hyde says Tho...

Who remembers Bernie Goetz? Who remembers his victims? Or was Bernie Goetz the victim—the subway shooter who, back in 1984, fired at four black teenagers in a crowded subway car in Manhattan because he felt they were threatening other riders and himself.

Heather Ann Thompson.

40 years later, our guest Heather Ann Thompson is digging up doubts—not so much about the case as about all of us who followed it and fixed it on our timeline of social history, of crime, fear, race, and poverty, the city of New York itself and its self-esteem. The book...

How should we see the Israeli-American War on Iran? How should we understand it, or maybe even escape it? The writer and historian Daniel Immerwahr is our guest, with the essential qualifications, starting with his own grip on history, and a taste also for irony, tragedy, absurdity—in his own freewheeling and unpredictable style.

Daniel Immerwahr.

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I must say, among all the wise people commenting on this world’s situation, I honor Jeffrey Sachs especially for being relentless on the dangers out there, going back to the Biden years.

Jeffrey Sachs.

He has worn his dread on his face. And in his voice, no matter that people get tired of it. And he’s very specific about the risks: of nuclear escalation for one; about grave economic damage in the rise of the BRICS alternatives to the trading nations, the old imperial remnant; but also about sleepwalking into World War III.

We’re sorting puzzle pieces from the opening rounds of war with Iran. The U.S. and Israel started it. The Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic in Iran was among the first to die in it, on the first weekend of the war, which President Trump says could go on for weeks. But to what end? On whose say-so? At what risk?

Huss Banai.

Hussein Banai, known as Huss, is our guest—the guide we turn to partly because he was born and schooled in Iran. He is informed but not official, a professor of i...

We’re tracking the Bernie Sanders story from a Brooklyn boyhood to the Green Mountain socialism that he implanted in Vermont, and then to his two offbeat campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination: in 2016, and again in 2020. Our guest, Dan Chiasson, is the poet who braided the several stories here of a man—and his city, and his state, and his nation—into a big book called Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician.

Dan Chiasson with Chris.

It’s a masterpiece, full of surprises—the best I’ve read on the power game in...

We’re going off script out here in the afterlife, in the imagination of the triple-threat novelist George Saunders. He’s eminent as a writer of stories and novels, as a critical reader, and as a teacher of modern fiction, and how to write it in the great Chekhov short story tradition. He’s also a man and an artist in a moment of ecstasy that he’s recently written about in his newsletter, describing a moment of overwhelming joy and sense of connection that reminded me of Emerson finding himself suddenly, he wrote, “glad to the brink of fear.”

Pico Iyer is the global citizen and now, inadvertently, the movie star—in the winter’s hot movie, Marty Supreme. Across a hundred conversations over the years, we thought we knew everything about him, the transcendentalist Buddhist who grew up with the Dalai Lama as a sort of third parent in and out of his father’s house.

He’s been the personal friend, almost, of our transcendentalists in this neighborhood, Emerson and Thoreau. He wrote a book about having the great novelist Graham Greene in his head. So who is this guy with the cameo ro...

We’re getting our heads around the invasion of Venezuela and what feels like a rough new rule book for the so-called world order. Cue Greg Grandin, the hemispheric historian who wrote that big book America, América just in time last summer.

Greg Grandin.

The big theme in Grandin’s book is the very dicey business of sovereignty historically between North and South America. And Donald Trump has been teasing at that instability of borders and labels ever since he renamed the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf Of America.” He’s teasing us again this week w...

We’re talking about capitalism this time, trying to reckon the power of big money to shape—even rule—the human species. Capitalism is the one-word name given to a thousand-year-old force. It’s not a science or doctrine or mere politics. It’s a thoroughly human and ever-changing arrangement of affairs that can produce rapid and vast expansion of wealth in private hands.

Sven Beckert.

And Capitalism is the title of our guest Sven Beckert’s new thousand-page history of the whole thing. A thousand pages covering a thousand years. The opening line in his book is...

We’re rediscovering John Updike in the afterlife of a great writer. The Selected Letters of John Updike, just published, come to 800 pages of unguarded messages to his wives and lovers, to his mother and his editors. We’re turning to his kids for a fresh measure of the artist who cracked open the sexual revolution of the 1960s and lived it his own way.

Miranda Updike, Michael Updike, Elizabeth Updike Cobblah, and David Updike. Photograph by Jameson Sempey, Reading Eagle, courtesy of A.A. Knopf.

Couples was his breakthrough novel and bestseller in 1968. His...

Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope is Brandon Terry’s long-awaited personal and philosophical case for struggle and optimism in the long civil rights movement in our country. It’s a map of our minds and our memories, a catalog of our judgments and feelings around an epic era in American history that isn’t over. I take it as a brave and deeply thoughtful response to the charge leveled by the great W.E.B. Du Bois that the real plot of the civil rights story got lost or suppressed long ago.

Brandon Terry.

The po...

What is breaking down or what’s broken when the governor of Illinois says he’s being invaded by the National Guard of Texas under President Trump’s orders, or when the president is dueling with Oregon and California over policing a public safety crisis that mostly disappeared five years ago in Portland, Oregon? What does it tell us that a senior federal judge in Boston declared in a formal opinion last week that the Trump team is bent on crushing free speech by wayward prosecutions, if only for their power to chill and intimidate?

Nancy Gertner.

Call this Mrs. Dalloway’s podcast. We’re reading classic fiction from a century ago for light on the strangeness of the world in our day, or maybe just for relief reading a great old book. The dazzling young critic Merve Emre is our guest and our guide to Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece, Mrs.Dalloway, from 1925. The novel is a day in the life, or a slideshow in the mind, of a rich, ruling class lady in London, volubly in love with life, out shopping for flowers on Bond Street on a morning in June for a party she’ll...

We’re with the cultural historian Robin D.G. Kelley at UCLA, who has the nerve to ask: where have our thinkers gone in Trump time? Not the experts or the influencers, but the grander minds who might tell us where our country went.

James Baldwin and Noam Chomsky (by Susan Coyne).

Robin hooked us with his piece in the Boston Review on “The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Fascism and Genocide.” Whose job is it to tell us the truth in what can feel like a sort of waking nightmare or a revo...

We’re in the fourth summer of hot warfare between Russia and Ukraine. It’s a cruel and deadly war that doesn’t know how to stop.

Anatol Lieven.

Our guest to offer a helping hand is the journalist and analyst that I’ve leaned on heavily, Anatol Lievin, an esteemed correspondent for the Financial Times in London, now at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington, with his eyes on Eurasia in general.

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We’re grappling with the prize historian Greg Grandin’s take on the making of the modern world. There’s a 600-page version in hard covers, but also a two-word version in his title, America, América, code for his main point: that the story of global USA today has Latin America woven all through it.

Greg Grandin.

It’s a history of brutal conquest, some discovered ideals and values through five centuries, and maybe an exceptional all-American hybrid, after all, into today. In the roots, of course, were two colonial empires, Spanish and British, rivals an...

We’re retracing our steps out of the last bad-dream era in American life. Michael Ansara was in the thick of that struggle too, around war and justice. The Hard Work of Hope is his memoir of many losses and his own big mistakes that come back, 50 years later, as lessons and blight.

Michael Ansara.

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We’re in Saratoga, New York, with the soulful American believer Marilynne Robinson, prize novelist and teacher of novelists. She’s known over the decades as the storyteller we trust to observe the troubled heart of our country—our own troubled hearts. She’s been a voice of encouragement—somebody said: a voice that has been overheard by more readers than any other living American writer.

Marilynne Robinson with Chris.

This summer, she crossed a line, relabelling the American condition in Trump time. Our politics and our culture, she writes, are “under occupation” by a faction of our...

We’re in the Orwellian aftermath of what President Trump has called his 12-day war in the Middle East. It’s over, he proclaimed on Monday. “Congratulations world,” he said on his Truth Social site, “it’s time for peace.”

Huss Banai.

Our guest to watch a mystery unfolding is the Iranian-American scholar at Indiana University in Bloomington, Hussein Banai, known as Huss. He’s been my refuge and resource for 20 years and some on not just venomous politics, but high-tech warfare and now tentative, sudden peace, it appears, between two governments.

The post Trump at Wa...

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 feels to me shaken, defensive, divided, embarrassed—as I don’t remember ever before—around questions that go to our character as a country, questions about democracies morphing, sometimes disappearing, even dying.

Danielle Allen.

In all the talk we’re hearing, what’s different about Danielle Allen is her timeline. Her eye goes back to ancient days in Athens and Rome, es...

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 marker for what Paul Elie calls crypto-religion. Let’s call it the artistic underground where unlabeled church themes took root in our lifetimes. It’s where religious mystery went, but not to die—almost the opposite. Crypto-zone is where pop culture stars found a space for moods and visions they had known growing up.

Paul Elie and Chris.

Think Leonard Cohen and hi...

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 New Yorker magazine has written a sprightly catalog of capitalism’s critics over the centuries: who got it right, for example, about today’s inequality crisis, or the climate damage, or the threat to democracy, or the alternatives to capitalism that might still work better, or even rescue it.

The post Capitalism and Its Critics appeared f...

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 to tell all of us what the powers that be are up to.

Penguins on an uninhabited island that’s been hit with a 10% tariff.

We’ve been bracing for a universal trade war, not just China, but Canada, France, Mexico, you name it—uninhabited islands (where only penguins and seals live) will be touched. President Trump’s ultimate wea...

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 stands for by now is a sort of MAGA question: can Donald Trump make America Gatsby’s again? As in: The Great Gatsby, published in 1925.

Sarah Churchwell.

The book makes every list of great American novels, but it’s more than that. It’s a high-style satire and prophetic tragedy about a dreamer who invented not just a fake self, but a whol...

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. The title is Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus.

Elaine Pagels.

By the way, we’re in history class, not Sunday school, but she’s tackling the big questions about just what happened to this restless young rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, who got crucified for his ambition in his battle with the chief priests of the temple and th...