Open Source with Christopher Lydon

Joshua Cohen’s Camp

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 his imagination we need, ...

United States of Fear

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 profoundly different. And he’s covered our country so well ...

Amber’s America: Love and Outrage

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

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 might ...

A Jerusalem Tragedy

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 work ...

The Climate Story’s Breaking Point

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

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

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 the rest of this ...