Open Source with Christopher Lydon

Latest Episodes
Trade, Trumped
Were staring down the global trade war with Mark Blyth at Brown University. He is the Peoples Economist from Scotland, who takes us home to his village pub in Dundee every once in a while ...
Gatsby at 100: Fitzgerald’s Warning about Trumpism
We have a key, finally, to the mystery of Donald Trump and where he came from. He was born almost exactly 100 years ago in the imagination of the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. What he ...
Miracles and Wonder
Were considering the Jesus story with the historian Elaine Pagels. Her new book is a marvel, crowning a lifetime of bestselling scholarship, sifting the sources and retuning the narrative in and arou
Trump vs. Harvard
Were tracking President Trumps squeeze on higher education, and the argument in the Ivy League: whether or not to make a fight of it. First, Columbia surrendered under a Trump threat to cut $400 mil
From Social to Spiritual Media
Were reading our way out of a ruined time with the model reader, Patricia Lockwood. Shes the poet laureate of the internet, for starters. Shes a big-league literary critic, master of social media a
A New World
Were looking for our American place in what can feel like a new world order, with Stephen Walt, our first and favorite so-called realist in the foreign policy gamerealists being the people who steer
Angus King’s Civics Lesson
Angus King is the anti-partisan, independent United States Senator from the cranky Yankee state of Maine. He is giving us a conversational civics lesson in the tradition of James Madison and also of S
Muskology
In the fog of Trump Two, were asking: whats new? The co-presidency with Elon Musk is surely new, also the raging battle of exotic ideas among techno-optimists and libertarian anarcho-capitalists at
Trump Part II
Were picking up the pieces of our country in the age of Trump, Part II. Is the USA still here? Is it still us? Kurt Andersen. Cue Kurt Andersen, with his finger in the wind. ...
Aflame
Were with writer-worlds exotic traveller and truth-teller Pico Iyer. Hes been the Dalai Lamas friend from boyhood, and our friend, too, in years now of reading and talk. In his new book, Aflame, s