Prison time can be the strangest interval in a long life: it is experienced, year by year, as a slow-burning hell on earth, often revalued later as productive, enlightening, redemptive turn-around time. Chris Hedges has ...

Open Source with Christopher Lydon

Prison Playwrights

Jonathan Franzen might just be the last of the fine-grained, big-book portraitists of “the way Middle America lives”—specially the intimate deceptions that family relations are made of. Franzen is a realist with an edgy American ...

Franzen Comes Alive

Who else could be said to make you smarter, just listening to the sound of his music? Only Mozart, that we know. For 300-and-some years now, he has set the standard for whatever lies beyond ...

Thoroughly Modern Mozart

Thomas Mann was one of those cultural giants the world doesn’t seem to make anymore—artists with authority, almost as big as their countries, at the level of Mark Twain, say, Voltaire, or Emerson! In his ...

Mann the Magician

It’s hard not to notice that we’re flunking tests, right and left, and running out of strategies against global-size troubles. COVID, we said, was our test for the age of viruses. At summer’s end the ...

Moonshot Economics

Those twin towers of the World Trade Center wrote two epic stories into the skyline of Manhattan: rise and fall. Most of us saw the hellscape of fire and smoke in the fall of the ...

Tragic Architecture

This show first aired on December 17, 2020. Erroll Garner, the jazz pianist, is undergoing an upward revaluation of the sort that artists dream of: a reputational transition forty-some years after he died. In his ...

The Joy and Genius of Erroll Garner

The war for Afghanistan is over: the Taliban won in a walk. We’re shocked, more than surprised, but then what? Is this our American empire at sundown we’re seeing? And how would we feel about that? ...

The End of the War

This show first aired on August 8, 2019. Spoiler alert! (Really.) The big movie to reckon with this summer may be as much about the mood of 2019 as about the Helter-Skelter 1960s. It’s Once ...

Tarantino’s 9th

This mood we’re in: stuck, anxious, alone, desperate for an exit ramp, even to another bad stop on the same old highway. COVID, climate, chaos—or is it capitalism that’s trapped us? We meet broken institutions ...

Into the Feel Tank

This show was first broadcast on October 22, 2020. A bold new life of JFK cues Emerson’s line: “there is no history, only biography,” particularly when the life of a man and the American Century ...

JFK in the American Century

That blood-red full moon of July looked for sure to be on fire, but only because we saw it through smoke that had drifted thousands of miles east across North America. We’re sorting through glimpses ...

A Tale of Two Deltas

You can’t help noticing the badge of success in American business has changed. Robber barons a century ago built monopolies, then palaces. In our second gilded age today, winners at the Bezos, Branson, and Elon ...

Five Stones for Goliath

We know their songs, not so much what they were going through, those Black women artists who wrote and sang so many anthems of American life: Bessie Smith’s “Gimme a Pigfoot” and Mamie Smith’s “Crazy ...

Liner Notes for the Revolution

This show first aired on May 28, 2020. John Maynard Keynes was a philosophical giant in twentieth-century England. In his day job, he was a public economist; in America he was a political football for ...

Moral Economics

Christopher Lydon in conversation on arts, ideas and politics

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Open Source with Christopher Lydon

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