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Open Source Radio

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Language: English
Category: Variety / Public Radio
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For an hour every day, we�re using the Internet to talk about the world. Bloggers in Kenya, podcasters in the US Army on the Iraqi border, legions of wikipedia editors: we�re putting their voices on the air with the thinkers and writers who can help us make great conversation (and sense of the world). As we book our show, you�re tracking our progress at www.radioopensource.org, telling us who to call next. With host Christopher Lydon.

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What would Roger Williams say… and do?

What would Roger Say? Williams, that is... the founder of the Rhode Island colony is one old measure of religious freedom and the menace of theocratic meddling in America....

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[ Thu, 03 Jul 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Tony Schwartz — for the Next Generation

Tony Schwartz -- who made "the Daisy Spot," the most famous TV commercial in American politics -- built a career on the supremacy of sound, and the ear, in selling....

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[ Fri, 27 Jun 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Obama-McCain: the World’s Main Event

How Barack Obama became the world's candidate for president of the US: by tuning the meaning of "American exceptionalism."...

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[ Wed, 18 Jun 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Dan Ariely: Confronting Irrationality

Dan Ariely shows how often we don't know what we're choosing and don't get what we want -- because we are predictably irrational creatures....

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[ Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

What Novelists are For: Russell Banks

A great American novelist, Russell Banks, thinks out loud about the real historical and emotional context of the United States at decision point....

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[ Thu, 05 Jun 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Calabash ‘08 (Pt 3) Reggae & the Obama Moment

Bob Marley and Barack Obama are the absent giants at Jamaica's Calabash festival of writers and readers -- Obama because he, too, seems a monument to imagination....

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[ Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Calabash ‘08 (Part 2): As Others See Us

Writers in Jamaica at the Calabash literary festival sound notes of lyricism, multiplicity and what feels like a second surge of post-imperial feeling....

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[ Fri, 30 May 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Calabash‘08: First, the fireworks…

Alpha Males of the Caribbean: Derek Walcott goes to war with the only other West Indian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, V. S. Naipaul....

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[ Wed, 28 May 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Open Source Storytelling: Ben Haggarty

The Scottish world-traveler Ben Haggarty tells "open source" stories -- from as far back as the Stone Age. He says it's the human content, not the cultural variations, that hold our hearts....

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[ Wed, 21 May 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Open Source Storytelling: Ben Haggarty

The Scottish world-traveler Ben Haggarty tells "open source" stories -- from as far back as the Stone Age. He says it's the human content, not the cultural variations, that hold our hearts....

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[ Wed, 21 May 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Glenn Loury: The Missing Voice of Jeremiah

Black economist and polymath Glenn Loury says that the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's 15 minutes of fame are not over, and shouldn't be....

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[ Mon, 19 May 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Bad News in High Style: Kevin Phillips

Kevin Phillips foresees the collapse of the American Empire, "almost before it started," with high style and deep seriousness....

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[ Wed, 14 May 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Errol Morris’ “Feel-Bad” Masterpiece

Oscar-winner Errol Morris says his Abu Ghraib movie is built on "a graphic representation of American foreign policy, pure and simple."...

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[ Fri, 09 May 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Mary Jo Salter’s “Phone Call to the Future”

The neo-formalist poet Mary Jo Salter teaches and talks about the lessons of beauty, womanhood, artistic and family life...

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[ Wed, 07 May 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Israel at 60: the Etgar Keret Version

The Israeli fiction writer (and now filmmaker) Etgar Keret unveils forbidden states of mind in his society: confusion, doubt, fear....

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[ Mon, 05 May 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

The “Open Source” Composer: David Amram

David Amram learned his "many musics" from Dizzy Gillespie, Jack Kerouac and Bach. His spirit is neither "multicultural" nor eclectic, but "lovingly trying to learn the fundamentals... of beautiful things that touch your heart."...

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[ Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Douglas Blackmon: Neo-Slavery in Our Times

Slavery in the American South ended only a generation or two ago, not with the Emancipation Proclamation -- in Douglas Blackmon's re-visioning of the race story in our country....

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[ Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Deal-Maker on the Spot: Christopher Hill

Christopher Hill, talking North Korea out of its nuclear program, has also to talk the Bush Administration into a deal....

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[ Fri, 25 Apr 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke

Nicholson Baker, the meta-novelist, recounts his hyper-linked history, "Human Smoke," that judges World War 2 to be "the end of civilization."...

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[ Wed, 23 Apr 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Patrick Cockburn: The New War in Iraq

Patrick Cockburn's account of the Iraqi Army's flight from battle is that the US is trying to foment a civil war among the Shia majority that the Baghdad government cannot win....

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[ Fri, 18 Apr 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Brazil’s Statesman at Large

Brazil's statesman ex-president Cardoso says: think of today's crisis and opportunity as a "post-Napoleonic moment" between disaster and renewal....

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[ Mon, 14 Apr 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Pico Iyer: the “Transcendentalist” Dalai Lama

Pico Iyer draws on a 40-year friendship with the Dalai Lama in a meditation on globalism and the Tibet crisis in China's Olympic year....

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[ Fri, 11 Apr 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Pico Iyer: the “Transcendentalist” Dalai Lama

Pico Iyer draws on a 40-year friendship with the Dalai Lama in a meditation on globalism and the Tibet crisis in China's Olympic year....

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[ Fri, 11 Apr 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

“Armed Chair”: Bill Flynn’s Seat of Empire

Artist Bill Flynn talks about the drawing project -- of an old parlor chair -- that became his personal battle (500 images over 5 years) with the war in Iraq...

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[ Tue, 08 Apr 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

A Moment for Oracles: Amber and Braunze

The Obama Moment: The radio oracles -- "Amber" and "Braunze" -- speak the feeling and what it means....

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The News about the News: Jay Rosen

Jay Rosen, the media critic at PressThink, listens for the death rattle of the newspaper industry....

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[ Fri, 28 Mar 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Real News: Ethan Zuckerman & Solana Larsen

A short course in the transformation of media -- by bloggers of the world at Global Voices Online....

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[ Mon, 24 Mar 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Cuba in Our Ears (IV): Ned Sublette

Revolutions come and go, but something about Cuba's music is forever. With Ned Sublette...

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[ Thu, 20 Mar 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Cuba on our Minds (III): David Kaiser’s JFK

Who Killed JFK? In David Kaiser's authoritative history, Oswald was the killer but it was a Cuba-centered conspiracy that set the stage....

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[ Mon, 17 Mar 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Cuba for the Long Run (II): Adrian Lopez Denis

Cuba after Fidel will run, as it always has, on transnational family networks and an 'informal' economy, in the view of social historian Adrian Lopez Denis....

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[ Thu, 13 Mar 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

What’s Coming in Cuba (I) Patrick Symmes

Cuba on the edge of a Velvet Revolution? or a civil war? The Patrick Symmes version of the Castro Revolution and its aftermath now....

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[ Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

London: The News about the News

Does the new "news" of Web communities have a credibility problem? Is it half as bad as the diseases afflicting "old media?"...

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[ Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

The Post-Imperial Historian: Eric Hobsbawm

Eric Hobsbawm, the global historian, considers how the Iraq War has moved power in the world and changed the agenda of the 21st Century....

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[ Tue, 04 Mar 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Iraq in the Long View: Behnam Abu Al-Souf

10,000 Years in Mesopotamia: the eminent Iraqi archeologist Behnam Abu Al-Souf reflects of the the glory and ruin of his land....

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[ Fri, 22 Feb 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Master Class: the Global Beethoven

The Global Pianist: Hung-Kuan Chen. Atop the world cultural triangle, with a US passport, European repertoire, and Shanghai teaching eminence....

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[ Wed, 20 Feb 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

In the Neo-Liberal Ruins: Why Venezuela Matters

"Shock Therapy" for us: how the "Washington consensus" of free-market investment rules triggered neo-socialism in Latin Ameirca...

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[ Thu, 14 Feb 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

El Cambio: Latin America’s “Change,” and Ours

Getting to know Evo Morales and the new Latin America: "indigenous" may be the key word, with implications profounder than politics....

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[ Wed, 13 Feb 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

After the Empire: Must Reading from Parag Khanna

The Post-American World: the Upstart Analyst Parag Khanna reviews the Emperor's new clothes -- and America's new limp in geo-strategic race with China and Europe....

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[ Mon, 11 Feb 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Randall Kennedy: A Change is Gonna Come

"Race men" then and now: Randall Kennedy reflects on Barack Obama's category shift in the roles an African American can play in national leadership....

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[ Thu, 31 Jan 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

MLK Jr. after 40 years: a Fraternal Memoir

Martin Luther King Jr. is remembered by an early colleague not so much for balancing religion and politics but for fusing Christ-centeredness with a public mission....

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[ Fri, 25 Jan 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Backstage with Henry V:

Shakespeare's "Henry V" -- in a presidential campaign season -- may be the best insight of all into the contradictions of leadership and power....

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[ Tue, 22 Jan 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

The post-imperial maestro: Sir Colin Davis

The orchestral conductor Sir Colin Davis sets a post-imperial lesson: giving up power in music and life....

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[ Mon, 21 Jan 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

George Bush in Jerusalem: Not Too Late for a Legacy

Israeli blogger Bernard Avishai and the NYTimes' Steven Erlanger conjure the benefits of boldness in George Bush's late mission to Jerusalem...

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[ Thu, 10 Jan 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Anthony Barnett on What’s Changed

Anthony Barnett is a model of thinking and doing: writer, editor, reformer and entrepreneurial radical from the Labour Club at Cambridge in the Sixties and the New Left Review in the Eighties, a hold-out from Tony Blair's New Labor movement in the Nineties, and then founding editor (months before 9.11) of the compendious site opendemocracy.net...

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[ Wed, 09 Jan 2008 19:00:00 +0500 ]

At Home with Harold Bloom: (2) on the Humanities

Harold Bloom, the Yale literary critic, prescribes for the "ghastly condition ... sellout ... suicide" of Humanities education today....

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[ Fri, 28 Dec 2007 19:00:00 +0500 ]

At Home with Harold Bloom: (1) on Walt Whitman

Harold Bloom, the Yale literary critic, puts Walt Whitman on the top tier with Shakespeare -- "the two threads in the labyrinth" -- in his grand summing-up....

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[ Tue, 25 Dec 2007 19:00:00 +0500 ]

At Home with Harold Bloom: (3) The Jazz Bridge

Harold Bloom is a jazz buff as well as a poetry critic, for whom Walt Whitman and Louis Armstrong are the matched twin towers of American culture so far....

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[ Fri, 21 Dec 2007 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Helen Vendler: Reading and Riffing on W. B. Yeats

Poetry critic Helen Vendler shows us how to see the shape so as to hear the sound of a poem. W. B. Yeats' "An Airman Foresees His Death" is a 4 x 4 x 4 "cube," which has everything to do with its meaning....

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[ Thu, 20 Dec 2007 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Philip Gura’s American Transcendentalism

Historian Philip Gura's "American Transcendentalism" reminds you of -- take your pick -- the pollution or the surging vitality of the old headwaters of American thinking....

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[ Tue, 18 Dec 2007 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Speaking of Music: Alex Ross’s 20th Century

Alex Ross's history of the 20th Century according to its music, or: How the home address of musical composition moved from Mahler's Vienna to the Hollywood of Bernard Herrmann and Tan Dun....

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[ Sat, 15 Dec 2007 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Juan Cole: from Bonaparte to Bush

Middle East Historian Juan Cole recounts the story of Napoleon Bonaparte's 1798 invasion of Egypt, and connects it with the "bookend" fiasco of the Bush war in Iraq today....

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[ Fri, 14 Dec 2007 19:00:00 +0500 ]

A Free Life: Ha Jin’s Immigration Story

In the Americanization process that Ha Jin writes about there is no baseball, no Abraham Lincoln or FDR, no Paul Bunyan or American camp-fire songs, no Grand Canyon, no interest in our local or national politics... and no outward sentiment about a golden path toward the citizenship moment and pledge of allegiance. Is this part of what upsets us about immigration -- that these strangers are so wrapped up in old languages, and their own damned dramas?...

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[ Fri, 07 Dec 2007 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Chavismo with some new brakes on it

The near-tie vote Sunday against the Chavez's idea of constitutional "reform" for Venezula confirms the sense of Chavez as a man on the edge, in a dangerous conflict of self and ideals, a character out a Garcia Marquez novel, in a "headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams." Is this the story? I've asking square-one sorts of questions about Chavismo : about his ideas of "participatory democracy" , about "21st Century Socialism," which may be quite different from the 19th and 20th C...

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[ Tue, 04 Dec 2007 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Pakistan for Beginners: 3, with Omer Alvie

Pakistan: anguish and absurdity at the seat of the "war on terror:" a conversation with the Pakistani blogger Omer Alvie...

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[ Thu, 29 Nov 2007 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Pakistan for Beginners: 2

Kanishk Tharoor, "terror and democracy" editor of the weblob openDemocracy, reflects on the "asphyxiation of political space" in Pakistan during the war on terror and the rule of General Musharraf....

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[ Tue, 27 Nov 2007 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Pakistan 2.0

Our conversation today begins a sort of Pakistan for Beginners. Our guest Sabahat Ashraf is a technical writer in Silicon Valley. He's a prolific blogger, and perhaps a key to the global chatter and global stakes in the homeland of a universal diaspora. Please join the conversation with a comment and point us to your favorite voices of wisdom on the past and future of Pakistan, in and out of the country....

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[ Mon, 26 Nov 2007 19:00:00 +0500 ]

“This was the worst war ever” : Ken Burns’ WW2

PBS documentarian Ken Burns reflects on his World War 2 epic -- and the possibility that war histories extend the innate human fascination with combat....

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[ Wed, 21 Nov 2007 19:00:00 +0500 ]

A Way to Live: Craig Smith’s Bach Project

Conductor Craig Smith, world famous especially for his cycle of Bach Cantatas, leads this cheerful introspection on music as "a way to live." Smith died on November 14, 2007. This program is adapted from a WGBH television documentary from 1992....

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[ Tue, 20 Nov 2007 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Art, Science & Truth: Jonah Lehrer

Jonah Lehrer in "Proust was a Neuroscientist" makes the case for artists (Walt Whitman, Igor Stravinsky, George Eliot, Paul Cezanne et al.) as the real pioneers in grasping and revealing how our minds actually work....

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[ Tue, 20 Nov 2007 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Speaking of Music Again: Oliver Sacks

There’s a case to be made — and Paul Elie makes it elegantly in his Slate review of Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia — not just that Oliver Sacks is his own most interesting patient in his journal of musical symptoms, but that himself, the patient with 70-plus years of soaring, passionate musical memories, is more interesting than himself, the observant clinical neurologist....

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[ Fri, 16 Nov 2007 19:00:00 +0500 ]

A Piano Master Class with Saleem Abboud Ashkar

The aura around the Palestinian pianist Saleem Abboud Ashkar -- performing, teaching and talking at Brown this weekend -- suggests a major musical career coming into bloom, and at the same time a world-historical conversation being extended to a new generation. Young Abboud Ashkar, just 31, could be the late Edward Said's successor in the exquisitely tantalizing dialog with the Israeli pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim. In counterpoint and close harmony, they are teasing out the implica...

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[ Sun, 11 Nov 2007 19:00:00 +0500 ]

The Harold Bloom Tapes (Part 1)

In the summer of 2003, around the bicentennial of Ralph Waldo Emerson's birth, I spent an afternoon with the Sage of New Haven, Professor Harold Bloom of Yale, in conversation around the Sage of Concord. Bloom had been a critical figure in the revival of interest in Emerson, the "father of the American Religion," Bloom has called him. But what also emerges here, with some gentle prodding from your humble interviewer, is that Bloom's attachment to Emerson is vitally and intimately personal. Bl...

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The Harold Bloom Tapes (Part 2)

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The Harold Bloom Tapes (Part 3)

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He Got It Wrong, Alas: Kanan Makiya

My friend Kanan Makiya was the most influential Iraqi advocate in America of the war to "liberate" his country five years ago. Today he is the most articulate casualty of his own fantasy. Kanan is famous now mainly for telling President Bush, face to face two months before the US invasion, that the American troops "will be greeted with sweets and flowers in the first months..." He had the rhetorical magic in those days to get away with arguing that invading Iraq was the moral choice even if ...

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[ Wed, 07 Nov 2007 19:00:00 +0500 ]

They Got It Right: (6) Shibley Telhami

Professor Telhami at the University of Maryland is the only scholar we've interviewed in this series who briefed Karl Rove five years ago on the fallout of war on Iraq. He speaks from a fascinating personal history. He was born into a family of peacemakers and conciliators in an Arab Christian minority in a village near Haifa in 1951, when Israel was 3 years old. In Israeli and private schools, his first degrees were in mathematics and then philosophy before he took up international relations...

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[ Wed, 31 Oct 2007 19:00:00 +0500 ]

They Got It Right: (5) Peter Liberman

Peter Liberman of Queens College at the City University in New York forms his own category in this sampling. Let us call him an Optimistic Realist. Meaning: he doesn’t expect the US can or will attack Iran. It’s his observation that the popular American feeling after the Iraq misadventure has turned decisively against the “collective psychosis” involved in attacking countries that had nothing to do with an attack on us. And he believes that Israel has never been in anything like nuclear ...

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[ Mon, 29 Oct 2007 19:00:00 +0500 ]

They Got It Right: (4) Steve Van Evera

Steve Van Evera, in security studies at MIT, foresees a US air assault on Iran that could run to five days and 1000 sorties; and then a certainty that “Iranians will respond.” Why are we playing with this fire? Mainly, Van Evera argues, because the neo-conservative cult in the Bush-Cheney White House — “isolated… cloistered… the wrong crowd to run anything” — has not been broken. Shouldn’t we be hearing more from the brave sages who pegged the dangers — even called the outc...

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[ Fri, 26 Oct 2007 19:00:00 +0500 ]

They Got It Right: (3) Barry Posen

Barry Posen, in security studies at MIT, sees a US military strike coming on Iran — executed and cheered on by the same people who misjudged all the consequences of our war on Iraq. I am trying to learn why this is happening, how the “party of war” insulated itself from correction, why we citizens, we media, and the chatter along the 2008 campaign trail all sound so helpless, so oblivious about the extended catastrophe. As always, Posen is ebullient, accessible, informed; but there sounds...

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[ Wed, 24 Oct 2007 19:00:00 +0500 ]

They Got It Right: (2) Michael Desch

Michael Desch, then at the University of Kentucky, observed just as the US invasion of Iraq began, that the Ominous Precedent and in a sense the strategic model for the Bush warriors was Israel’s war on Lebanon, led by Ariel Sharon in 1982 and ended 18 years later by Ehud Barak’s withdrawal from Southern Lebanon. As chance would have it, Michael Desch now holds a Texas A and M professorship named for the Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in the school of public policy named for the President ...

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[ Mon, 22 Oct 2007 19:00:00 +0500 ]

They Got It Right: (1) Robert J. Art

Robert J. Art of Brandeis University calls himself “a realist with a heart.” Colleagues respect him as the textbook type of strategic analyst, often consulted by the Pentagon and the CIA and well connected in the network of academic think tanks. His most recent of many books casts a rueful, independent eye on the modern US record of Coercive Diplomacy, meaning the use of military force or threats to change behavior, from Haiti to North Korea. Shouldn’t we be hearing more from the brave sa...

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[ Fri, 19 Oct 2007 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Citizen in Exile: Lincoln Chafee (Part 1)

Lincoln Chafee is a soft-spoken patrician with fire in his heart. His corridor chatter at the Watson Institute at Brown University (where we're both visiting fellows) is unfailingly cheerful and correct, virtually Senatorial, but often the last word has a spur in it. Chafee takes a hard line here that you haven't heard on the campaign trail or read in a newspaper editorial: that Senators who voted to authorize the Iraq war should be disqualified for the presidency. On grounds of judgment, I...

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[ Fri, 12 Oct 2007 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Citizen in Exile: Lincoln Chafee (Part 2)

In the second part of our chat former Senator Lincoln Chafee makes the Iraq war vote "totally disqualifying" for higher office. It's a ban on all the Senators running except Barack Obama, an anti-war voice who hadn't reached the Senate in 2002. The premise that Saddam Hussein, contained by arms inspectors and no-fly zones, was a threat beyond his borders "was so grossly hollow," Chafee remembers from his own researches. "Even the Kuwaitis, who'd been invaded by Saddam, were telling us: don't ...

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[ Fri, 12 Oct 2007 19:00:00 +0500 ]

Speaking of Coltrane: Five Conversations (1)

The New York Times' pithy, punchy jazz critic, Ben Ratliff has written not fan stuff or a biography but a catalog of ways to think about Coltrane: an athlete of improvisation who pushed forward through "an atmosphere of almost violent incomprehension." Coltrane was a main builder of the jazz tradition "of not sounding like anybody else," or like himself six months before. He had as many artistic periods as Picasso, starting with bebop, ballads and blues; but Coltrane's development fit into jus...

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