Open Source with Christopher Lydon

02/02/2025

This week, hear a conversation with Pico Iyer about silence and monastic life.

Find it at our site or wherever you go for podcasts:

We’re with writer-world’s exotic traveller and truth-teller Pico Iyer. He’s been the Dalai Lama’s friend from boyhood, and our friend, too, in years now of reading and talk. In his new book, Aflame, subtitled Learning from Silence, we catch him at a turn in his thinking. His fresh question, ...

01/12/2024

We're thankful for Roy Haynes, the jazz drummer who energized scores of jazz stars: Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan, + many more.

Roy Haynes died recently, 4 months before his 100th birthday. We remember him on this week's show with Robin Kelley:

radioopensource.org/the-roy-hayn...

We’re saluting one man’s century in American music. Roy Haynes was the jazz drummer from Boston who shaped the bebop sound in Harlem 80 years ago. He got nicknamed Snap Crackle for his own crisp, lyrical, almost melodic touch. Over the decades, he accompanied and energized scores of jazz stars: ...

19/11/2024

This week's show: Pulitzer-winner Joshua Cohen on Trump, Netanyahu, and the state of the world.

Find it at our site or wherever you go for podcasts!

radioopensource.org/joshua-cohen...

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.

01/10/2024

Race to the Finish -

03/02/2024

This week: Kyle Chayka explains how algorithms—such as those at work within this very social media platform—have sustained flat, bland, troublingly untroubled culture.

Find the show at our site or wherever you go for podcasts:

The question is how digital tech picks and chooses the content that comes to your phones and your brain, or, as Kyle Chayka puts it in a brave new book Filterworld: “how algorithms flattened culture.” What is the chance that devices that know your likes and dislikes better than you do are ever g...

05/01/2024

Everybody should read THE MOST SECRET MEMORY OF MEN, the Prix Goncourt-winning novel by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr.

It's a novel overbrimming with literary conversations, which emanate in this week's show into our conversation with Sarr himself:

The only way into this podcast is a long leap headfirst into postcolonial French fiction, of all things, and a novel titled The Most Secret Memory of Men. Our guest is the toast of literary Paris, the first novelist from sub-Saharan Africa to win France’s highest book prize, the Goncourt: Mohamed ...

05/01/2024

Wherever you go for podcasts, find our new show with Stacy Schiff about Samuel Adams.

If you've ever wondered why a beer is named after this particular historical figure, we've made the show for you:

On the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, we’re face to face, almost, with an American political type that’s gone missing in our third century. Check this resume: he’s principled, he’s prepared, a two-fisted aristocrat networked with farmers and workers; a thinker and writer at risk,...