Open Source with Christopher Lydon

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.

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.

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.

We’re with Brandon Terry and his tragic vision of the civil rights movement: Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope is the title of his new book. It’s a map of our minds and our memories, a catalog of our judgments and feelings around an epic era in American history. And it’s not quite over. I take it as a response finally to the charge leveled by the great W.E.B. Du Bois that the real plot of the civil rights story got lost or suppressed long ago. Brandon Terry. The post Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

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 President Trump’s orders, or when the president is dueling with Oregon and California over policing a public safety crisis that mostly disappeared five years ago in Portland, Oregon? What does it tell us that a senior federal judge in Boston declared in a formal opinion last week that the Trump team is bent on crushing free speech by wayward prosecutions, if only for their power to chill and intimidate? Nancy Gertner. The questions keep coming. Nancy Gertner is our guest to consider them. She’s overqualified by a celebrated career as a trial lawyer, then as a federal judge, and now retired from the court as a private practitioner again, independent and outspoken about a world that she knows intimately. The post Stress-Testing the Rule of Law appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

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, or maybe just for relief reading a great old book. The dazzling young critic Merve Emre is our guest and our guide to Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece, Mrs.Dalloway, from 1925. The novel is a day in the life, or a slideshow in the mind, of a rich, ruling class lady in London, volubly in love with life, out shopping for flowers on Bond Street on a morning in June for a party she’ll be giving at home that evening. Merve Emre. But Mrs. Dalloway is also a novel of ruin alongside rapture. A second major character, Septimus Smith, is a veteran of World War I. Broken by combat and shell shock, considering suicide because, in his madness, he supposes that only killing himself would allow him to honor life as it should be lived. The post Mrs. Dalloway at 100 appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

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 experts or the influencers, but the grander minds who might tell us where our country went. James Baldwin and Noam Chomsky (by Susan Coyne). Robin hooked us with his piece in the Boston Review on “The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Fascism and Genocide.” Whose job is it to tell us the truth in what can feel like a sort of waking nightmare or a revolution going backward? Will we ever see Benjamin Franklin’s common-sense republic again? Or put it another way: where’s Noam Chomsky, or James Baldwin for that matter? Will we ever again meet an unflinching truth-teller about our real condition in this autumn of 2025? The post Where Are the Intellectuals? appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

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. Anatol Lieven. Our guest to offer a helping hand is the journalist and analyst that I’ve leaned on heavily, Anatol Lievin, an esteemed correspondent for the Financial Times in London, now at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington, with his eyes on Eurasia in general. The post Russia and Ukraine in 2025 appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

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 covers, but also a two-word version in his title, America, América, code for his main point: that the story of global USA today has Latin America woven all through it. Greg Grandin. It’s a history of brutal conquest, some discovered ideals and values through five centuries, and maybe an exceptional all-American hybrid, after all, into today. In the roots, of course, were two colonial empires, Spanish and British, rivals and partners, reenacting over the decades their past far into the future. The post America, América appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

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 justice. The Hard Work of Hope is his memoir of many losses and his own big mistakes that come back, 50 years later, as lessons and blight. Michael Ansara. The post The Hard Work of Organizing appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

We’re in Saratoga, New York, with the soulful American believer Marilynne Robinson, prize novelist and teacher of novelists. She’s known over the decades as the storyteller we trust to observe the troubled heart of our country—our own troubled hearts. She’s been a voice of encouragement—somebody said: a voice that has been overheard by more readers than any other living American writer. Marilynne Robinson with Chris. This summer, she crossed a line, relabelling the American condition in Trump time. Our politics and our culture, she writes, are “under occupation” by a faction of our fellow citizens. And it’s quite unlike your normal, ordinary right-to-left or left-to right political shift. It is not what people mean by polarization. It’s something quite different. The post Occupied America appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

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. “Congratulations world,” he said on his Truth Social site, “it’s time for peace.” Huss Banai. Our guest to watch a mystery unfolding is the Iranian-American scholar at Indiana University in Bloomington, Hussein Banai, known as Huss. He’s been my refuge and resource for 20 years and some on not just venomous politics, but high-tech warfare and now tentative, sudden peace, it appears, between two governments.

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 Danielle Allen is our guest examiner of the cranky American condition. It feels to me shaken, defensive, divided, embarrassed—as I don’t remember ever before—around questions that go to our character as a country, questions about democracies morphing, sometimes disappearing, even dying. Danielle Allen. In all the talk we’re hearing, what’s different about Danielle Allen is her timeline. Her eye goes back to ancient days in Athens and Rome, especially to her friend Aristotle, who wrote the book on democracy and its corruptions—in oligarchy and other ways.

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 her number one hit “Like a Prayer.” The song is a marker for what Paul Elie calls crypto-religion. Let’s call it the artistic underground where unlabeled church themes took root in our lifetimes. It’s where religious mystery went, but not to die—almost the opposite. Crypto-zone is where pop culture stars found a space for moods and visions they had known growing up. Paul Elie and Chris. Think Leonard Cohen and his all-time hit with “Hallelujah.” Think Prince singing “I Would Die For You.” Think Bob Dylan and his gospel period with “Gotta Serve Somebody.” And it’s not just songs. Crypto-religion is the zone where the filmmaker, Martin Scorsese, imagined The Last Temptation of Christ. It’s where the pop artist Andy Warhol, himself a Catholic, made endless versions of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece of Jesus at the Last Supper with his disciples.

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 than the end of capitalism. John Cassidy. John Cassidy of The New Yorker magazine has written a sprightly catalog of capitalism’s critics over the centuries: who got it right, for example, about today’s inequality crisis, or the climate damage, or the threat to democracy, or the alternatives to capitalism that might still work better, or even rescue it.

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 to his village pub in Dundee every once in a while to tell all of us what the powers that be are up to. Penguins on an uninhabited island that’s been hit with a 10% tariff. We’ve been bracing for a universal trade war, not just China, but Canada, France, Mexico, you name it—uninhabited islands (where only penguins and seals live) will be touched. President Trump’s ultimate weapon of choice in such a war is a 125% tariff, on most of what comes from China, raising prices, of course, but the Trump line also says the flood of new tariff income could pay for what he calls his big, beautiful tax cut.

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 novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. What he stands for by now is a sort of MAGA question: can Donald Trump make America Gatsby’s again? As in: The Great Gatsby, published in 1925. Sarah Churchwell. The book makes every list of great American novels, but it’s more than that. It’s a high-style satire and prophetic tragedy about a dreamer who invented not just a fake self, but a whole cast of rich, mostly repellent characters and wannabes all around him—those famously careless people who smash things up for as long as they can and then let other people clean up their messes. Our guest, Sarah Churchwell, is not the first to make the Gatsby-Trump connection, but nobody has mapped it as broadly as she has.

We’re considering the Jesus story with the historian Elaine Pagels. Her new book is a marvel, crowning a lifetime of bestselling scholarship, sifting the sources and retuning the narrative in and around the Christian Gospels. The title is Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus. Elaine Pagels. By the way, we’re in history class, not Sunday school, but she’s tackling the big questions about just what happened to this restless young rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, who got crucified for his ambition in his battle with the chief priests of the temple and the Romans who ruled Jerusalem at the time.

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. First, Columbia surrendered under a Trump threat to cut $400 million in federal funding. Then Princeton said, “No way, we’ll fight your flimsy charges to the end.” And then Harvard, with $9 billion at stake, tried gentle engagement with the Trump inquiry, until 800 of its professors and staff said, “No way, when free expression and democracy are at risk.” Ryan Enos. What’s required, they said, is open, coordinated resistance, which gives the rest of us time to learn what this fight is all about. Ryan Enos is a young professor in Harvard’s government department, among the first of the 800 signers of that petition

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. She’s a big-league literary critic, master of social media and the Twitter joke, but also of the mysticism of St. Teresa. She’s on a field-trip to Harvard this week from her home base in Savannah, Georgia, and we’re meeting for the first time, in Cambridge. Patricia Lockwood and Chris Lydon. In this almost archaic culture of books, her mindset is very 2025. This side of Harold Bloom, I’ve never met a wider scope in a reader.