Open Source with Christopher Lydon
Episodes
The Pope and the President
23 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Kings and Pawns
16 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
It’s Jackie Robinson Day, 2026, when every player in Major League Baseball wears the immortal Dodger’s number 42. Listeners, if you think ...
Thoreau Meets ICE
03 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Fear and Fury
26 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 teen...
Hit-and-Run Belligerence
20 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Sleepwalking into World War III
11 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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...
War with Iran
06 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Bernie’s Journey
19 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 tw...
George Saunders on Life and the Afterlife
05 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 writ...
Pico Supreme
22 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Pico Iyer is the global citizen and now, inadvertently, the movie star—in the winter’s hot movie, Marty Supreme. Across a hundred conversation...
Age of Hemispheric Empires
08 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
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 Grand...
A Thousand Years of Capitalism
26 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 on...
John Updike’s Vocation
15 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 un...
Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope
28 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope is Brandon Terry’s long-awaited personal and philosophical case for struggle and optimism in the long civil righ...
Stress-Testing the Rule of Law
09 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 Presiden...
Mrs. Dalloway at 100
25 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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, ...
Where Are the Intellectuals?
11 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 expert...
Russia and Ukraine in 2025
29 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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. Ana...
America, América
14 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 c...
The Hard Work of Organizing
24 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 j...
Occupied America
10 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We’re in Saratoga, New York, with the soulful American believer Marilynne Robinson, prize novelist and teacher of novelists. She’s known o...
Trump at War
26 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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....
Divided, Defensive Democracy
19 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 Da...
The Last Supper
05 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Capitalism and Its Critics
15 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 t...
Trade, Trumped
08 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Gatsby at 100: Fitzgerald’s Warning about Trumpism
01 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 nove...
Miracles and Wonder
17 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We’re considering the Jesus story with the historian Elaine Pagels. Her new book is a marvel, crowning a lifetime of bestselling scholarship, si...
Trump vs. Harvard
10 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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. Fi...
From Social to Spiritual Media
27 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
A New World
13 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Angus King’s Civics Lesson
27 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Angus King is the anti-partisan, independent United States Senator from the cranky Yankee state of Maine. He is giving us a conversational civics less...
Muskology
14 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Trump Part II
31 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Aflame
23 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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...
From Boston to Bethlehem
10 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 seas...
A Geopolitical Check-Up
27 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We’re with the one-off diplomat, strategist, and historian Chas Freeman. Chas Freeman. Call this “Curious Citizen Meets the Most Knowledge...
Blyth is Back
12 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Not Your Standard Book Chat
06 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 y...
The Roy Haynes Century
26 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 ye...
Joshua Cohen’s Camp
15 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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, ...
United States of Fear
07 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Fintan O’Toole has made a brilliant career watching Ireland (his home country) transform itself—its Catholic culture, its vanishing population...
Amber’s America: Love and Outrage
02 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 yea...
Playground
24 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 questi...
A Jerusalem Tragedy
10 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...
The Climate Story’s Breaking Point
26 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We’re in Climate Week 2024, with the indispensable, independent activist and authority Bill McKibben. We catch him packing, in Vermont, for what...
Bear-Baiting Debating
12 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 pitchi...
The Harris Machine
29 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
There’s a puzzle in this podcast, and it comes with our prize sociologist, Tressie McMillan Cottom. It’s roughly this: How does Kamala Har...
In It to the Finish
15 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
American Believer
01 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Political Football
18 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the strangeness of mid-summer 2024, the cosmopolitan novelist Joseph O’Neill is our bridge between the Republican convention in Milwaukee and...
American Bloods
04 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 histor...
The Zionism Riddle
20 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 mor...
Chasing Beauty
06 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Nicholson Baker Finds a Likeness
23 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We’re taking a drawing lesson with Nicholson Baker—yes, the multifarious writers’ writer Nick Baker; the COVID lab leak detective; the p...
Campus Uproar
09 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We’re sampling the uproar rising from American campuses: it’s a full blown, leaderless movement by now, in an established American traditi...
American Disorder
25 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Lessons from Hannah Arendt
11 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets
28 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Of Melville and Marriage
14 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 D...
Against Despair
01 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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...