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
Mrs. Dalloway at 100
9/25/2025
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 ...
The post Mrs. Dalloway at 100 appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
Duration:00:47:15
Where Are the Intellectuals?
9/11/2025
We’re with the cultural historian Robin D.G. Kelly 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 ...
The post Where Are the Intellectuals? appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
Duration:00:42:24
Russia and Ukraine in 2025
8/28/2025
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 ...
The post Russia and Ukraine in 2025 appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
Duration:00:48:37
America, América
8/14/2025
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 ...
The post America, América appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
Duration:00:42:09
The Hard Work of Organizing
7/24/2025
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 ...
The post The Hard Work of Organizing appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
Duration:00:47:56
Occupied America
7/10/2025
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 ...
The post Occupied America appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
Duration:00:40:03
Trump at War
6/26/2025
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 ...
Duration:00:46:55
Divided, Defensive Democracy
6/19/2025
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 ...
Duration:00:46:28
The Last Supper
6/5/2025
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 ...
Duration:00:41:24
Capitalism and Its Critics
5/15/2025
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 ...
Duration:00:43:56
Trade, Trumped
5/8/2025
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 ...
Duration:00:38:18
Gatsby at 100: Fitzgerald’s Warning about Trumpism
5/1/2025
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 ...
Duration:00:47:32
Miracles and Wonder
4/17/2025
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. ...
Duration:00:44:31
Trump vs. Harvard
4/10/2025
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 ...
Duration:00:48:56
From Social to Spiritual Media
3/27/2025
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 ...
Duration:00:43:18
A New World
3/13/2025
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 ...
Duration:00:24:14
Angus King’s Civics Lesson
2/27/2025
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, ...
Duration:00:32:14
Muskology
2/13/2025
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 ...
Duration:00:47:28
Trump Part II
1/30/2025
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. ...
Duration:00:35:58
Aflame
1/23/2025
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 ...
Duration:00:37:56