Listen to Open Source on Kill Radio in CA

The Indispensable Musician: Barenboim Backstage

Tue, Nov 25 Listen

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Daniel Barenboim. (32 minutes, 15 mb mp3) Daniel Barenboim: every day from scratch Daniel Barenboim’s conversation starts high as a kite on the fumes of the Wagner he’s been rehearsing, then lands with both feet on the Middle East. “The situation in the Middle East has never been so bad,” [...]

Amitav Ghosh and his Sea of Poppies

Fri, Nov 21 Listen

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Amitav Ghosh. (67 minutes, 31 mb mp3) Amitav Ghosh: on addiction and amnesia The Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh brings the British Empire to life again — the other side of the story, so to speak, from the other side of the world. If we’d had his wondrous new novel, [...]

Our Better Angel: Chris Adrian

Thu, Nov 13 Listen

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Chris Adrian. (44 minutes, 20 mb mp3) Chris Adrian: Pain’s Artist, Doctor, Minister The writer Chris Adrian is a medical doctor, a pediatric oncologist, who seems to have known from the beginning that our bodies are not the problem. I think of Beatrice, an attempted suicide, “the jumping lady,” [...]

This Pariah-to-Messiah Moment: John Comaroff

Tue, Nov 11 Listen

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with John Comaroff. (52 minutes, 24 mb mp3) The Obama Moment in America reminds the Chicago anthropologist John Comaroff of the Mandela Moment in his native South Africa in the early 1990s. The whole world has embraced the Obama Moment as its own, Comaroff says, because it marks “the [...]

New Conversation, New Narrative: Stanley Fish

Wed, Nov 5 Listen

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Stanley Fish. Stanley Fish: Paradise Regained? Stanley Fish made the campaign’s most audacious — also the most thoughtful — attribution of a certain aspect of divinity to Barack Obama. Fish was a Milton scholar before he became a culture warrior and, more recently, the New York Times’ “Think Again” [...]

The Hunter’s Evidence: Carlo Ginzburg

Tue, Nov 4 Listen

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with micro-historians Carlo Ginzburg and David Kertzer. In Carlo Ginzburg’s beautifully extended metaphor, the original public intellectual was the Stone Age hunter: Carlo Ginzburg: the historian as card shark Man has been a hunter for thousands of years. In the course of countless chases he learned to reconstruct the shapes [...]

Thank you, Studs Terkel!

Mon, Nov 3 Listen

Click to listen to Studs Terkel declaiming on the gap between Walt Whitman’s America and ours.

Campaign ‘08: How was it for you, Jim Fishkin?

Fri, Oct 31 Listen

James Fishkin’s ideal democracy is ruled by “the voice of the people, when they are thinking.” Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with James Fishkin (52 minutes, 24 mb mp3) James Fishkin: a thinking democracy? A political scientist long at the University of Texas, now at Stanford, he is the Johnny Appleseed of “deliberative democracy” — [...]

A Longer View of 2008: Historian Gordon Wood

Wed, Oct 29 Listen

What does a real historian make of this 2008 election that we all (reflexively now) call “historic”? Gordon Wood: a lot of Lincoln in Obama This is our opportunity with Gordon Wood – ace historian of 18th Century America at Brown, the trump card that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck invoked in the famous Cambridge [...]

J. S. Bach’s “Habit of Perfection”: Andrew Rangell

Tue, Oct 28 Listen

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Andrew Rangell (50 minutes, 23 mb mp3) Andy Rangell at his Well-Tempered Clavier The Bradley Effect is by definition unmeasurable. The recession, or depression, is unfathomable. So what can we think and talk about to break the obsession with questions that have no answers until the night [...]

Poster Art Then and Now: RISD’s John Maeda

Mon, Oct 20 Listen

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with John Maeda (20 minutes, 9 mb mp3) Call this Take 2 on the show of Soviet poster art, through the eyes of a 40-year-old Japanese American graphic artist who just happens to be the new president of the Rhode Island School of Design, John Maeda. On a gabby, [...]

Soviet Posters: The Art of Polarization

Thu, Oct 16 Listen

Click here for slideshow Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Tom Gleason (21 minutes, 10 mb mp3) We’re on a digressive walk and talk here through a master collection of those Soviet posters we all half-know and half-recoil from: those cult images of Lenin in the Twenties, Stalin in the Forties and Fifties, the icons of [...]

Andrew Bacevich: The End of Exceptionalism

Fri, Oct 10 Listen

Andrew Bacevich: realism and remorse Andrew Bacevich incandesces with the rage of a serious professional: with a West Pointer’s scorn for political weasels and embarrassment at incompetent generalship; with a citizen’s horror at the Long Peace that became the Long War — war today as “a seemingly permanent condition.” He burns with a Nieburhian realist’s [...]

Bernard Lown’s Prescription for Survival

Wed, Oct 8 Listen

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Bernard Lown (33 minutes, 15 mb mp3) Bernard Lown: Rx for sudden nuclear death The world-renowned cardiologist Bernard Lown won the Nobel Prize for Peace, (outside his field, so to speak) for putting doctors (starting with Russians and Americans) into the fight against nuclear weapons in a global force called [...]

Virtual JFK: Vietnam (and us) if Kennedy had lived

Mon, Oct 6 Listen

Six crisis decisions forecast the seventh Find a way to see Virtual JFK — a documentary film chasing a what-if riddle — and have your own presidential debate before choosing between John McCain and Barack Obama. The question in Virtual JFK is whether President Kennedy, had he lived, would have withdrawn from war in Vietnam in 1965. [...]

What We’re Going Through: Anna Deavere Smith

Thu, Oct 2 Listen

Anna Deavere Smith: grace notes Anna Deavere Smith works barefoot on stage — the better to walk in the words of the people she’s impersonating; perhaps also to summon Walt Whitman, who said we’d feel his spirit “under your bootsoles.” Actress and documentarian, Anna Deavere Smith is all feeling, no bootsoles. Her new show is “a [...]

The American Exception: Pop Culture Today

Tue, Sep 30 Listen

On the exceptional power of American culture, what first pops out of my own head is a moment about ten years ago, after narrating Aaron Copland’s A Lincoln Portrait (1942) at the JFK Library in Boston with the Indian conductor George Mathew — before George got his American green card. The piece triggered a [...]

Candid Capitalist: John Bogle

Sat, Sep 27 Listen

John Bogle of Vanguard We asked the legendary investor, John C. Bogle, patriarch of the trillion-dollar Vanguard family of funds, for wisdom that would get us past the weekend in this financial rockslide. He sees an avalanche and three years of severe pain ahead, but something less than Armageddon, and no reason to realize Sarah [...]

Slavoj Zizek: What is the Question?

Tue, Sep 23 Listen

The Elvis of the intelligensia, Slavoj Zizek, hot-links in our one-way conversation… …from nominating George W. Bush (for his trillion-dollar bail-out) to the Communist Party to Kung-Fu Panda, …from John McCain (”Bush with lipstick”) to Naomi Klein, …from Barack Obama’s risk of the “John Kerry syndrome” to the experience we’re all having of putting on the reality sunglasses [...]

Torture, Part 3: the Philip Gourevitch version

Fri, Sep 19 Listen

In our third go at this miserable business of sanctioned American torture, Philip Gourevitch turns it around, Pogo-style. We have met the victims, he says in effect, and they are us. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Philip Gourevitch (58 minutes, 27 mb mp3) Philip Gourevitch (photo: Andrew Brucker) Even if you want to put it [...]

Philippe Sands’ Torture Team

Wed, Sep 17 Listen

First, the Spencer Tracy “verdict” from “Judgement at Nuremberg” (1961). Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Philippe Sands (45 minutes, 21 mb mp3) Who will pay for the illegal abuse of detainees at Guantanamo? If violations of the Geneva Conventions — and specifically of Common Article 3, against torture, cruelty and “outrages upon personal dignity” [...]

An American Exception, in Danger

Fri, Sep 12 Listen

Chuck Collins is an analyst and agitator around the grand canyon of inequality in American incomes and property. With Bill Gates Sr., the grandfather of Microsoft, so to speak, and father, till yesterday, of the richest man in the world, Chuck Collins wrote the book in favor of “death” taxes: Wealth and Our Commonwealth: [...]

Rory Stewart: the Post-Imperialist Poster Hero

Fri, Sep 5 Listen

Rory Stewart at full stride across Asia One young Scotsman’s dauntless walk across Afghanistan — at peril from bandits, wolves, dysentery, snow-blindness and Taliban thugs with Kalashnikovs — makes a crackling fine and best-selling adventure. But that can’t be the only reason Rory Stewart’s account of The Places In Between is the gift book and [...]

What’s So Great About Us

Thu, Sep 4 Listen

Which words and ideas in the definition of exceptional America do you underline? Is is a bit odd for any nation to be deeply divided, witlessly vulgar, religiously orthodox, militarily aggressive, economically savage, and ungenerous to those in need, while maintaining a political stability, a standard of living, and a love of country that are the [...]

As Others See Us: Godfrey Hodgson on the Democrats

Fri, Aug 29 Listen

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Godfrey Hodgson (39 minutes, 18 mb mp3) Godfrey Hodgson: now When you’ve had enough of the dugout chatter from Denver on the cable networks, try Godfrey Hodgson from Oxford, 5000 miles from the convention scene. I wonder if anybody sees American politics more essentially than the co-author of a [...]

Cass Sunstein: for the Homer Simpson in all of us

Sun, Aug 24 Listen

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Cass Sunstein (30 minutes, 14 mb mp3) Cass Sunstein of the gentle Nudge Cass Sunstein gives us the half-hour short course here on “the most exciting intellectual movement of the last thirty years” — behavioral economics, that is, of which we had a taste recently with George Lakoff and Dan [...]

Hanging Out at Tanglewood

Wed, Aug 6 Listen

The Brecht-Weill opera masterpiece from 1930 -- "The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahoganny" -- plays like a raucous contemporary tragedy at Tanglewood.

The American Exception, Again

Thu, Jul 24 Listen

The Obama world tour renews old questions about America. Historian Ted Widmer mulls the exceptional nation, and the global nation?

And now for something completely different…

Fri, Jul 18 Listen

John Maeda, the graphic artist and computer programmer who has just become president of the Rhode Island School of Design, embarks on a free-form conversational series with Chris Lydon

George Lakoff: Obama in a Bind

Fri, Jul 11 Listen

Brain scientist George Lakoff is watching Barack Obama's body language and messaging skill as he maneuvers under pressure.

Open Source (Community)