Open Source with Christopher Lydon
By Christopher Lydon
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Description
Open Source is the world’s longest-running podcast. Christopher Lydon circles the big ideas in culture, the arts and politics with the smartest people in the world. It’s the kind of curious, critical, high-energy conversation we’re all missing nowadays. Be part of the action: leave a voice message to be played on the air; get in touch over Facebook or Twitter; or email us – info@radioopensource.org with show ideas, advice, requests and high-quality criticism.
| Name | Description | Released | Price | ||
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1 |
Is Capitalism Working? | Casey Stengel raised the question about baseball’s miserable Mets long ago: anybody here know how to play this game? It’s the question more and more of us ask about economists and some of them ask about one another. | 10/16/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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2 |
Big Data: Who Are We On The Web? | On a corporatized Web, we’re often the sum of our all data — packaged and sold to data brokers for pennies. But the dream of the Internet was that we would be the producers, not the product: participants in a conversation outside of the force of gravi | 10/8/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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3 |
Give Peace a Chance | Peace is really hard. It's kind of miserable, in a way. There's a kind of unsatisfied portion of the human spirit that wants to have a clean victory. But if you're a student of war in the Middle East, the conclusion you have to draw is that one war ... | 10/5/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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4 |
Hacking Climate Change | Can we hack our way toward solutions for climate change? While governments dither, Congress negates and the world warms, how about deploying private finance, atmospheric chemistry and every kind of ingenuity to tackle the problem that’s too big to solve | 9/30/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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5 |
America’s War of Ideas | In the run up to another war in the Middle East, after stalemate in Afghanistan and Iraq, what is it in the American DNA that makes us think it it will be different the next time? What is the story we continually tell ourselves about our indispensable ... | 9/25/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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6 |
Inside the Islamic State | We're looking inside the Islamic State: as a phenomenon and as America's latest enemy in the endless war on terror. Do we know who they are, or how we plan to defeat them? President Obama says they aren't Islamic and aren't a state. | 9/18/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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7 |
Rick Perlstein’s Second Draft of History | Rick Perlstein is the hyperkinetic close reader of politics just yesterday. The Invisible Bridge is his third big brick of a book — an 800-page magnifying glass on just three abysmal years between Richard Nixon’s second inauguration in 1973, | 9/7/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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8 |
What’s Left of Liberal Zionism? | We're looking at liberal Zionism, enduring a crisis after a brutal summer in Gaza. It's prompted handwringing for American Jews and Israelis who are still looking for a way to peace, and still worried about the clash of democratic and Jewish ideals in ... | 9/7/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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9 |
Hacking Democracy | Do we dare look under the hood of American democracy? Or do we have the suspicion that Supreme Court decisions and political battles conceal a drift into corruption? This week we're asking our panel of estimable guests where the problems lie with our g... | 8/31/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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10 |
WWI: Remaking Music | In the last show in our series on the Great War, we're listening to the sounds that emerged from its ashes. In Vienna concert halls and New York jazz clubs, from Maurice Ravel’s piano elegies to Igor Stravinsky’s explosive symphonies, | 8/25/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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11 |
WWI: Adam Tooze Reviews “The Deluge” | In 1916, two years into the war, Americans reelected the president who’d kept us out of the battle. But by the summer of 1917, the same Woodrow Wilson had committed the US to fighting alongside Britain and France against Germany. | 8/17/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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12 |
WWI: The Shock of the New | Out of the wreckage of World War 1 come the incandescent modernists -- none burning brighter than James Joyce and his Ulysses. And don't forget Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound and Pablo Picasso, too. It’s a rebel alliance of high-art anarchists. | 8/13/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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13 |
WWI: The War of the Century | This week we’re talking about the guns of August, fired one hundred years ago this month. And we’re wondering what kind of century we inherited from the First World War. Alongside power politics and industrial killing, there was a revolution in art, | 8/11/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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14 |
At Peking University: the Rising Generation | What I went least prepared for was the openness of Chinese people in what we call a closed society. So the last audio postcard from this trip is a 10-minute distillation of a conversation that sprang up like music to my ears in a dormitory room with fi... | 8/8/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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15 |
Andrew Bacevich: America’s War for the Greater Middle East | How do you end an endless war? Thirty years ago Jimmy Carter declared the Persian Gulf a "vital" focus of American foreign policy. Since then, U.S. forces have invaded, occupied, garrisoned, bombed or raided 18 nations, | 8/7/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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16 |
Ai Weiwei, China’s Artist/Enemy #1 | Not perhaps since Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet Gulag has there been a dissenting artist who got to be as famous as the government that hounds him. But Ai Weiwei’s situation is one-of-a-kind.He’s a scathing oppositionist who argues with me that | 8/4/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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17 |
The End of Work | The jobless economy: a fully automated, engineered, robotic system that doesn’t need YOU, or me either. Anything we can do, machines can do better - surgery, warfare, farming, finance. What’s to do: shall we smash the machines, or go to the beach, | 7/31/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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18 |
Earth 2.0 | With hundreds of Earth-like planets discovered over the past few years, it’s fair to say we’re on the verge of finding alien life. Two new programs at NASA hope to find and analyze thousands more of these exoplanets, as they’re called. | 7/20/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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19 |
Lines In The Sand | The borders that divide up our modern world hinge, sometimes, on decisions that have stopped making sense. The Middle East is still suffering from unhealed wounds resulting from the boundaries established a hundred years ago in secret by two men, | 7/17/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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20 |
Yu Hua: China’s Revolution Addiction | Everybody loves Yu Hua, a giant of the literary life in China today. He’s a free spirit with a critical eye, and a popular touch, a tragic vision, an easy laugh. It is a main theme in much of Yu Hua’s work and our conversation that China is hooked fo | 7/10/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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21 |
One Nation Under Surveillance | It’s the artists — from Orwell of Nineteen Eighty-Four, to Philip Dick and Margaret Atwood, to Trevor Paglen and Banksy — who raise the big questions: about voyeurism, about safety and risk, and the essence of our public and private selves. | 7/10/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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22 |
Ruby Braff’s Tribute to Louis Armstrong | Louis Armstrong came out of the Colored Waifs’ Home in New Orleans and the honky-tonks of the red-light Storyville district. Then and ever after Louis Armstrong’s time and phrasing, his tone and spirit made him the most influential voice in 20th centu | 7/8/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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23 |
Wynton Marsalis on Louis Armstrong | “What we play,” Louis Armstrong said, “is life.” We’re learning that Louis Armstrong was not just the world’s greatest trumpet player, not just the most original and influential voice in jazz, not just the founding father of an American music | 7/7/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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24 |
The John Updike Radio Files | We've discovered some old gems in our radio archives and sprinkled them through a conversation with John Updike's biographer, Adam Begley, for our show this week. Begley talks about Updike's Pennsylvania boyhood, his wives and lovers north of Boston, | 7/2/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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25 |
Stokely Carmichael and Black Power | This week marks the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act. At the end of June, 1964, Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King Jr., and hundreds of civil rights activists marched across Mississippi to register African-American voters in ... | 6/29/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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26 |
Revisiting David Foster Wallace’s Boston | The novelist David Foster Wallace has resurfaced on film and in our radio archive, so we’re revisiting one of our favorite shows of the year this week: “Infinite Boston,” a tribute to Wallace's magnum opus "Infinite Jest" and its roots in Cambridge | 6/26/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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27 |
David Foster Wallace on The Connection with Chris Lydon, February 1996 | In February 1996, David Foster Wallace came to Boston. He was the not-quite recognized writer of the massive book, Infinite Jest, which was just beginning to capture the attention of reviewers, readers and a generation of writers. | 6/25/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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28 |
Vijay Iyer: Jazz in the 21st Century | Where is jazz headed in a new century? With the pianist Vijay Iyer as guide, newly tenured as a professor at Harvard, it tends toward the experimental, with drummers, young musicians and slam poets. If it doesn’t always swing, | 6/19/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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29 |
Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue | In advance of our show with the jazz pianist Vijay Iyer this Thursday, we dug through our old Connection archives and found this wonderful conversation about Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue” recorded in 2000. From a humble birth in 1959 as forty-five min | 6/18/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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30 |
Robin Kelley’s Transcendental Thelonious Monk | Robin Kelley's superb biography brings the Thelonious Monk story back from the ragged edge to the creative center of American music. And it brings my reading year to a blessedly loving, gorgeously swinging, dissonant, modernist, | 6/17/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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31 |
China Rising | China is in its own gilded age, says The New Yorker writer Evan Osnos, into a second generation of ultra-modern tech, a still-developing country bristling with billionaires. On the eve of Chris' trip to China, | 6/13/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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32 |
Evan Osnos on China’s “Age of Ambition” | On the verge of my own first plunge into China, I’m in conversation with Evan Osnos of The New Yorker. He’s been eight years in the new China, reenacting the role of the foreign correspondent on the grand scale: covering an impossibly big story of po | 6/12/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
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33 |
How Would Burke Makeover the GOP? | Next time on Open Source, the conservative hero Edmund Burke, the 18th-century British statesman who befriended the American Revolution, hated the French version, loved liberty and hated violence, and believed that empires like his and ours must answer... | 6/5/14 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 33 Items |
Customer Reviews
the ultimate dinner table conversation
Chris Lydon is the consummate intellectual, able to uncover fascinating Connections from a variety of guests about a range of topics. This is no mundane "talk show." In contrast to most "talk" shows, this is not about getting people to argue their cases but about finding common ground. For example, a discussion of Muslim-Christian relationships (very timely) is based on an examination of 10th century Al-Andalus Spain. The guests included an author, a classical music composer, and an examination of how peaceful coexistence flourished 1000 years ago. He must have the best Rolodex in the business. The website format is the most interactive, with audience able to suggest topics and comment through very thoughtful blogging. With all of the conflict on radio shows (even the current version of NPR’s The Connection, which he founded before he was forced out!) this is an intellectual oasis for those of us who are fascinated by the world and wish we could have just stayed in our college classes a few more years.
Smart and eclectic
"Open Source" is one of the very best of the discussion/call-in shows. Guests are tops in their field; host Christopher Lydon knows how to ask the right questions, and he plays fair. Topics are relevant and always fascinating -- a nice mix of politics, the arts and pop culture. I've appreciated the post-Katrina series on race relations, in particular.
Emersonian
Socrates said: "Knowledge begins in wonder." Radio Open Source is full of wonder - wonder-ful.
