Open Source with Christopher Lydon

Christopher Lydon

Christopher Lydon in conversation on arts, ideas and politics

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August 6 · 36 min
Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey
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. He’s published his own translation of Homer’s whole poem, and now he’s reviewing this summer’s big movie for the New York Review of Books. The post Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
July 17 · 53 min
The World’s Sport
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. The post The World’s Sport appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
July 9 · 41 min
After the Fireworks
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 from David Blight on the U.S. in crisis—this is a recent talk at the American Academy in Berlin: The post After the Fireworks appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
June 19 · 34 min
The Boston Watch Party
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 second tier of the Boston Garden. We can look down to the ice that Bobby Orr skated on for the Boston Bruins and the parquet floor over that ice that Bill Russell and Larry Bird bounced basketballs on for the Celtics. We can also see those championship banners in green and white. Bill Russell won 11 of them in 13 years. It takes the breath away. The post The Boston Watch Party appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
June 11 · 49 min
America’s Orwell
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 prose still sounds clearly enough for a world that has nobody with quite like his range today. Who was Dwight MacDonald—the pedigreed populist, sometime Trotskyite, hard left, who came to call himself a conservative anarchist? The post America’s Orwell appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
May 29 · 45 min
Here Where We Live Is Our Country
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 time she was here, she was just back from civil war in Syria. This time, she’s just back from unearthing history, World War I time, through an epidemic of hellish and deadly pogroms in pre-revolutionary Russia. The Bund, created in Poland, was a tough-minded working-class alliance demanding full rights for Jews at home. It was irreconcilably embattled against the rising young Zionist movement that would establish a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Molly Crabapple took it on herself—and learned the Yiddish language as part of the job—to research and write the whole story of the Jewish Bund: the old politics in it, the modern emotions that it still stirs, starting with the restored memory of her own family. And she’s made a monumental book of it under the title Here Where We Live Is Our Country. The post Here Where We Live Is Our Country appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
May 14 · 55 min
Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed
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 and power. Musk himself models the new class of emperors. Funny part is that the last time we spoke with Ben and Quinn, Elon Musk and his chainsaw were modeling just the opposite: his own ruthless destructive power in the chaotic post-democratic age of Donald Trump. A year and a half later, Donald Trump can look like a declining force compared with Elon Musk on the rise, at the dawn of a settled down, largely secret, post-capitalist or neo-capitalist age of Elon Musk. The post Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
April 23 · 40 min
The Pope and the President
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 all around us as he, the pope, was dying. And yet now, here we are in a war with Iran, clearly a new war of choice launched by an American president, in coordination with the Israeli prime minister, and Pope Leo, still new to the job, seems driven to do something about this. He’s not talking about strategic cards in his hand. He’s speaking rather of a moral necessity to make peace. And you could wonder: isn’t it about time? The post The Pope and the President appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
April 16 · 47 min
Kings and Pawns
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 around the world. Howard Bryant has written a book of tragic ironies and overpowering interest. Maybe the deeper subject then and now is: how does a black man make it into the Hall of Fame of American heroes, well beyond baseball? And at what price? The post Kings and Pawns appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
April 3 · 40 min
Thoreau Meets ICE
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 Thoreau would blame us, citizens, for the failure of our country and our Commonwealth to keep all its residents safe and secure in their adopted communities, regardless of their immigration status. Lewis Hyde’s essay, “ICE and our Immigrants: Lessons from the Abolitionists,” is forthcoming in the summer issue of Liberties quarterly. Thoreau’s essay, “Slavery in Massachusetts,” can be found in Hyde’s edited edition of The Essays of Henry David Thoreau (Milkweed Editions). The post Thoreau Meets ICE appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
March 26 · 38 min
Fear and Fury
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 is Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage. The post Fear and Fury appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
March 20 · 35 min
Hit-and-Run Belligerence
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. The post Hit-and-Run Belligerence appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
March 11 · 37 min
Sleepwalking into World War III
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. The post Sleepwalking into World War III appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
March 6 · 31 min
War with Iran
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 international studies at Indiana University in Bloomington. The post War with Iran appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
February 19 · 51 min
Bernie’s Journey
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 our country since Theodore White’s Making of the President 1960, a long time ago. 60 years later, Chiasson has written the Bernie journey in Burlington as his own story. Dan Chiasson’s life is an outcome, he writes, of the Bernie years. But what are we going to call Bernie’s own story—a romance that failed, or arguably a tragedy? Maybe it’s a lesson that we were never encouraged to learn about the expansive promise lurking in our own American democracy The post Bernie’s Journey appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
February 5 · 31 min
George Saunders on Life and the Afterlife
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.” Vigil, the latest novel by George Saunders. He was looking into a puddle by the road and feeling an incredible thrill of insight into daily life. And George Saunders was writing about something like it about his last few days—on Stephen Colbert’s show, seeing best friends in New York, former students also in Philadelphia. The post George Saunders on Life and the Afterlife appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
January 22 · 45 min
Pico Supreme
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 role in Marty Supreme, standing athwart Timothée Chalamet’s raging drive to be the ping-pong champion of the universe? The post Pico Supreme appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
January 8 · 35 min
Age of Hemispheric Empires
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 when he says Cuba could be next, even Colombia on the list for invasion or regime change. The post Age of Hemispheric Empires appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
Nov 26, 2025 · 37 min
A Thousand Years of Capitalism
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 live in a world created by capitalism.” How did it happen? Is it still happening, for better or worse? Did it have to happen? The post A Thousand Years of Capitalism appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.
Nov 15, 2025 · 38 min
John Updike’s Vocation
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 second son, Michael, and his second daughter, Miranda, were adolescent witnesses to the story. We’re gathered in Michael’s house on the North Shore of Boston, the heart of Updike Country, to resurface the glow in John Updike’s prose and the pleasure in his company. The post John Updike’s Vocation appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

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