Open Source with Christopher Lydon

We’re at sea this time on our own Odyssey, a voyage between the ancient epic that refuses to die and Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster movie version for us in this summer of 2026. It’s the story of course we all half-know about the wily old Greek warrior-king coming home ten years late from a horrible war against Troy, in maybe 1200 BC.

Daniel Mendelsohn...

We’re high as a kite on World Cup football. The final test, coming Sunday, is down to Spain and Argentina. My question is whether this frenzied global contest might actually be rescuing our species from itself?

Our guests are soccer coach Michael LaVigne and the sports broadcaster Seamus Malin. We’re looking to confirm my intuition that this beautiful game, as B...

We’re still in the Fourth of July spirit around the 250th birthday of our nation, hooked in particular by one grand American historian’s question to it: is the United States on the road to a new civil war?

David Blight.

David Blight, Sterling Professor of History at Yale, has been our guest before—on his Pulitzer-winning biography of

We’re in a sort of watch party for a season when World Cup soccer, championship basketball, sports of every kind, all seem to run deeper, more believable, much better played than the rest of our lives, more memorable than our politics, surely more honest and closer to our ideals as human beings, not just Americans.

Richard Johnson.

We’re sampling the ...

We’re unearthing a model writer for an anxious America. Dwight Macdonald was his own eccentric voice through the Cold War politics and culture of the 1950s and 60s. He was a peacenik at heart, otherwise unpredictable, a New York intellectual of his own school. So in this podcast, we’re just reading Dwight Macdonald aloud with John Summers, who has edited a collection he calls...