Open Source with Christopher Lydon
Christopher Lydon in conversation on arts, ideas and politics
Bernie’s Journey
19 Feb 2026
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
George Saunders on Life and the Afterlife
5 Feb 2026
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
Pico Supreme
22 Jan 2026
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
Age of Hemispheric Empires
8 Jan 2026
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
A Thousand Years of Capitalism
26 Nov 2025
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.
John Updike’s Vocation
15 Nov 2025
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
Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope
28 Oct 2025
We’re with Brandon Terry and his tragic vision of the civil rights movement: Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope is the title of his new book. It’s a map of our minds and our memories, a catalog ...
Stress-Testing the Rule of Law
9 Oct 2025
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
The Last Supper
5 Jun 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
Capitalism and Its Critics
15 May 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
Trade, Trumped
8 May 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 ...
Gatsby at 100: Fitzgerald’s Warning about Trumpism
1 May 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 ... The post
Miracles and Wonder
17 Apr 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
Trump vs. Harvard
10 Apr 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
From Social to Spiritual Media
27 Mar 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
A New World
13 Mar 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
Angus King’s Civics Lesson
27 Feb 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
Muskology
14 Feb 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
Trump Part II
31 Jan 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. ... The post Trump
Aflame
23 Jan 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,
From Boston to Bethlehem
10 Jan 2025
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
A Geopolitical Check-Up
27 Dec 2024
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.
Blyth is Back
12 Dec 2024
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
Not Your Standard Book Chat
6 Dec 2024
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
The Roy Haynes Century
26 Nov 2024
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,
Joshua Cohen’s Camp
15 Nov 2024
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
United States of Fear
7 Nov 2024
Fintan O’Toole has made a brilliant career watching Ireland (his home country) transform itself—its Catholic culture, its vanishing population, its frail economy—into something very modern and
Amber’s America: Love and Outrage
2 Nov 2024
In the long weekend of solemn suspense before our presidential election in 2024, our guest is Amber. I met Amber on a call-in radio show almost 30 years ago, and we’ve been talking ever since. ...
Playground
24 Oct 2024
Richard Powers may just be the bravest big novelist out there. His new book is titled Playground, in which AI plays with the natural world. The question is whether and how the digital transformation
A Jerusalem Tragedy
10 Oct 2024
For our shattering Age of October 7, Nathan Thrall has written a double masterpiece, in my reading. Already a Pulitzer Prize-winner for non-fiction, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is a searching
The Climate Story’s Breaking Point
26 Sep 2024
We’re in Climate Week 2024, with the indispensable, independent activist and authority Bill McKibben. We catch him packing, in Vermont, for what’s far from his first climate rodeo in New York.
Bear-Baiting Debating
12 Sep 2024
We’re in our very own post-debate spin room, taking the measure of Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and of ourselves, as the voters they were pitching. Did we get what we expected? Did we get what ...
The Harris Machine
29 Aug 2024
There’s a puzzle in this podcast, and it comes with our prize sociologist, Tressie McMillan Cottom. It’s roughly this: How does Kamala Harris, after the Democratic convention in Chicago and for
In It to the Finish
15 Aug 2024
Cornel West is our guest, the preacher-teacher in a tradition of black prophetic fire, as he puts it, the line of holy anger in American history, and this time on the presidential ballot in a ...
American Believer
1 Aug 2024
The novelist Marilynne Robinson has a nearly constitutional role in our heads, our culture by now. She’s the artist we trust to observe the damaged heart of America, and to tell us what we’re
Political Football
18 Jul 2024
In the strangeness of mid-summer 2024, the cosmopolitan novelist Joseph O’Neill is our bridge between the Republican convention in Milwaukee and the Summer Olympics in Paris. He knows both sides of
American Bloods
4 Jul 2024
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
The Zionism Riddle
20 Jun 2024
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 ...
Chasing Beauty
6 Jun 2024
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
Nicholson Baker Finds a Likeness
23 May 2024
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
Campus Uproar
9 May 2024
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
American Disorder
25 Apr 2024
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 ...
Lessons from Hannah Arendt
11 Apr 2024
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
Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets
28 Mar 2024
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 ...
Of Melville and Marriage
14 Mar 2024
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
Against Despair
1 Mar 2024
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 Rebel’s Clinic
15 Feb 2024
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
Algorithmic Anxiety
1 Feb 2024
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
The Humbling of Harvard
18 Jan 2024
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 Most Secret Memory of Men
5 Jan 2024
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
