Open Source with Christopher Lydon

<p >It’s Jackie Robinson Day, 2026, when every player in Major League Baseball wears the immortal Dodger’s number 42. Listeners, if you think you know the Jackie Robinson story, think again with us around the most...

<p >In 1854, when the escaped slave Anthony Burns was captured in Boston and returned in chains to slave-owners in Virginia, despite riotous resistance on the dock in Boston, Henry David Thoreau himself was shattered...

<p >Who remembers Bernie Goetz? Who remembers his victims? Or was Bernie Goetz the victim—the subway shooter who, back in 1984, fired at four black teenagers in a crowded subway car in Manhattan because he felt they...

<p >How should we see the Israeli-American War on Iran? How should we understand it, or maybe even escape it? The writer and historian Daniel Immerwahr is our guest, with the essential qualifications, starting with his...

<p >I must say, among all the wise people commenting on this world’s situation, I honor Jeffrey Sachs especially for being relentless on the dangers out there, going back to the Biden years. </p> <p >Jeffrey Sachs.</p>...

<p >We’re sorting puzzle pieces from the opening rounds of war with Iran. The U.S. and Israel started it. The Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic in Iran was among the first to die in it, on the first weekend of the...

<p >We’re tracking the Bernie Sanders story from a Brooklyn boyhood to the Green Mountain socialism that he implanted in Vermont, and then to his two offbeat campaigns for the Democratic presidential nomination: in...

<p >We’re going off script out here in the afterlife, in the imagination of the triple-threat novelist George Saunders. He’s eminent as a writer of stories and novels, as a critical reader, and as a teacher of modern...

<p >Pico Iyer is the global citizen and now, inadvertently, the movie star—in the winter’s hot movie, Marty Supreme. Across a hundred conversations over the years, we thought we knew everything about him, the...

<p >We’re getting our heads around the invasion of Venezuela and what feels like a rough new rule book for the so-called world order. Cue Greg Grandin, the hemispheric historian who wrote that big book America, América...

<p >We’re talking about capitalism this time, trying to reckon the power of big money to shape—even rule—the human species. Capitalism is the one-word name given to a thousand-year-old force. It’s not a science or...

<p >We’re rediscovering John Updike in the afterlife of a great writer. The Selected Letters of John Updike, just published, come to 800 pages of unguarded messages to his wives and lovers, to his mother and his...

<p >Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope is Brandon Terry’s long-awaited personal and philosophical case for struggle and optimism in the long civil rights movement in our country. It’s a map of our minds and our memories, a...

<p >What is breaking down or what’s broken when the governor of Illinois says he’s being invaded by the National Guard of Texas under President Trump’s orders, or when the president is dueling with Oregon and California...

<p >Call this Mrs. Dalloway’s podcast. We’re reading classic fiction from a century ago for light on the strangeness of the world in our day, or maybe just for relief reading a great old book. The dazzling young critic...