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Christopher Lydon in conversation on arts, ideas and politics
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A series of podcast conversations recorded in Shanghai and Beijing by Christopher Lydon in 2014.
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Recorded in Karachi and Lahore in the summer of 2011, Another Pakistan offers a unique view of a complicated country. Host Christopher Lydon interviews singers, story-tellers and artists to paint a picture rarely seen in mainstream media.
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Two hundred years after the fall of the Terran Empire, humans find themselves the subject race, Stagnating on their own world unable to evolve either technologically or otherwise. It is into this oppressive world, that the most unlikely of men are thrust into the roles of heros. An audio theater dramatization of the novel by Christopher Patrick Lydon. DarkerProjects.com - Audio Theater in a Darker Shade
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The podcast that listens to people around the world.
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Zadie Smith is a writer who matters, twenty years now after White Teeth, her breakthrough novel when she was just out of college. Her new one is titled The Fraud: fiction that pops in and out of two centuries. It can feel very Victorian and it can feel very 2023. Frauds, trials, disbelief abounding. Think of Zadie Smith as the current title-holder …
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It’s Labor Day week, 2023, and Henry David Thoreau is the heart of our conversation. It’s not with him, but it’s driven by his example: American thinking at its best on the matter of how to make a living. John Kaag. Have no doubt that the gabby man-about-Concord in the 1850s was a worker: expert surveyor, gardener, as many trades as fingers, he sai…
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Harry Smith was the oddest duck you never heard of in the art underground: an unsightly, often obnoxious genius. Only the artists knew him, but it was a multitude: Bob Dylan, who sang the roots music that Harry Smith collected; Thelonious Monk, who talked him through the bop era; Patti Smith, the songster—no relation; the poet Allen Ginsberg, who l…
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It is said about Noam Chomsky that he has been to the study of language what Isaac Newton was to the study of gravity after the apple hit his head. Chomsky had the “aha!” insight: that the power of language is born in our biology—it’s not acquired. Chomskyan linguistics came to explain how the human species alone got that gift of language. But it’s…
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In The Country of the Blind, where the writer Andrew Leland is guiding our tour, they do things differently. They have their own identity riddles, their network of heroes and not-so-heroes. They have their own senses of beauty and of sexual interest. They have their own sore spots when sighted people speak of their disability. They have their own F…
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This is the vitalism episode, with the passionate polymath Jackson Lears. His new book is beyond category, and gripping, too: it’s titled Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street. Jackson Lears. The historian Jackson Lears is reintroducing us to the energy, enchantment, courage, spontaneity, and longing that…
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We’re marking the 20th birthday of podcasting in conversation with Erica Heilman, a prize practitioner. Here we are with Erica in Peacham, Vermont, settled in 1776 in the Northeast Kingdom, up toward Canada. We seek out Erica because she’s the great artist emerging in this young medium. With Erica Heilman in Vermont. People speak of podcasting as r…
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We’re back in the pub a year later with Mark Blyth, the outspoken political economist at Brown University—which means he works and talks and thinks at the intersection of big money and big power. In this pub, the forbidden word is “bankruptcy.” When Mark Blyth moved to the United States, the national debt was about a quarter of the gross national p…
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This week: a show from our archive from The Connection days. “It ain’t over till it’s over.” That’s Yogi Berra’s ageless line, in the title now of a summer hit movie just to prove Yogi was right about pretty much everything. He was a most valuable player in his New York Yankees uniform and a most beloved, most creative, most quotable source of Amer…
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The line is intoned now as a sort of chapter heading in our literary-artistic history: Eileen Myles grew up in Boston/Cambridge and moved to New York in 1974 to become a poet. Chris with Eileen Myles. And they did. 20 volumes later—their latest book of poetry is A “Working Life”— they’re very nearly the New York poet, with a branch office in Marfa,…
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We’re humbled—we’re also scared—by the power of chatbots like GPT-4 to do pretty much everything that word people have ever done, but faster and maybe more to the point. The twist in this conversation is that our guests are professional humanists, guardians, and teachers of the hard-earned old wisdom of books, not machines. And the double twist tha…
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Here’s a last burst of wind in our sails, a last gentle guffaw, from a listener we came to adore: the cartoonist Ed Koren. You knew Ed Koren, too, for those furry, quizzical characters he drew and captioned—portraits of our general bemusement—through a 60-year run in The New Yorker magazine. His studio, it turned out, was in rural Vermont, where he…
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Janelle Ward: The Shifting Sands of Social Media
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Mark Fonseca Rendeiro Janelle Ward Janelle Ward and I were once eager grad students at the University of Amsterdam where we dove head first into the world of personal publishing before most of the world had any idea what this was or why it would matter. 20+ years later, we are communications professionals, somehow still sitting in the Netherlands, …
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William James, thinker and writer, was known widely in the nineteenth century as the adorable genius who invented American pragmatism. He was a brain scientist, student of war and religion, a philosopher who can feel like a very lively presence in the shadows of our condition, whatever we call it. John Kaag. In the 2020s, the philosopher John Kaag …
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There’s nobody quite like Sonny Rollins in the All-American sound and story of jazz. He was a teenager in Harlem in the 1940s when major players caught on to a rising star. Steadily over the decades, he built one of the genius careers on the tenor saxophone, alongside his rival and friend John Coltrane. More than that, Sonny Rollins was making his …
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Out of the blue a decade ago, Paul Harding won a huge popular following, first, and then the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for his modern Maine sort of folk tale called Tinkers. His new one is deeper, darker, more ambitious philosophically, more poetic, more beautiful in long stretches—more ironical, too, starting with the title. Paul Harding. This O…
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“Don’t forget” is a mantra in our shop: “don’t forget” specially the characters, the moments that made us. Norman Mailer is the spirit-seeker and sometimes reckless truth-teller we are un-forgetting in this podcast. We are summoning Norman Mailer in his hundredth-birthday season, what could be his revival time, to tell us what happened to his count…
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Lydia Moland is reminding us that when present company in American public life comes up short, the ancestors of American democracy and spirit are lurking out there, in abundance and power to reset our judgment of who we are and what is possible, for a society, for each of us. Lydia Moland. Lydia Moland, our sometime radio colleague, is now a philos…
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