In a forlorn Fourth of July week, in the pit of an unpresidential, anti-presidential campaign year, 2024, we welcome back John Kaag, who writes history with a philosophical flair, never more colorful than in his ... The post American Bloods appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon .
Zionism has been the question that keeps changing. Once it was: “How to build a safe home for the Jews of the world?” Today it’s more nearly: “How to build a safe neighborhood around the ... The post The Zionism Riddle appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon .
We’re on a hometown spree along the famous Fenway in the heart of Boston. Fenway Park is where the Red Sox play, John Updike’s “lyric little bandbox of a ballpark.” Fenway Court, built around the ... The post Chasing Beauty appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon .
We’re taking a drawing lesson with Nicholson Baker—yes, the multifarious writers’ writer Nick Baker; the COVID lab leak detective; the pacifist historian of World War II in his book Human Smoke; he’s also the cherubic ... The post Nicholson Baker Finds a Likeness appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon .
We’re sampling the uproar rising from American campuses: it’s a full blown, leaderless movement by now, in an established American tradition, but still contested, still finding its way, looking for its pattern. Columbia and USC ... The post Campus Uproar appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon .
The key battle taking place in this American crisis year of 2024 is happening in our heads, according to the master historian Richard Slotkin. He’s here to tell us all that we’re in a 40-year ... The post American Disorder appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon .
We’re calling on Hannah Arendt for the twenty-first century—could she teach us how to think our way out of the authoritarian nightmare? Arendt wrote the book for all time on Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet ... The post Lessons from Hannah Arendt appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon .
We’re going to school on Taylor Swift, in the Harvard course. And all we know is, as her song says, we’re enchanted to meet her. Taylor Swift comes out of literature but she’s more than ... The post Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon .
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 ... The post Of Melville and Marriage appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon .
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 ... The post Against Despair appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon .
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 ... The post The Rebel’s Clinic appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon .
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.” ... The post Algorithmic Anxiety appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon .
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 ... The post The Humbling of Harvard appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon .
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 ... The post The Most Secret Memory of Men appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon .
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 ... The post The Revolutionary appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon .
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 ... The post Israel and Palestine Across History appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon .
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 ... The post Time’s Echo appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon .
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 ... The post Chas Freeman on a Kaleidoscopic Turn appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon .
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 ... The post Upended Assumptions appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon .
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 ... The post War and Dread appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon .
