Open Source with Christopher Lydon

An Open Source experiment here: Chris Lydon kindly handed off the hosting reins to me for a day, for an interview with Leonard Gardner, author of the classic novel Fat...

This is provincial Ireland, a place of long winters but not freezing winters. There’s drizzle as much as there’s rain. You’re trying to find a style just to bring things...

Michael Lewis is the great tale-spinner in the Second Gilded Age in America. He’s part muckraker, but part Mark Twain, too, for finding classic characters as good as the King...

The Egyptian graffiti genius known as Ganzeer is working on our turf now. I am presuming to welcome him as an artist of radical humanism. Four years ago in the...

The beloved Richard Eder had the gift he admired in John Updike and that that sparkled in his own prize-winning book reviews: he “snored” metaphors and similes the way J....

Last weekend, in one of Brooklyn’s hippest neighborhoods, DUMBO, interactive installation artist Risa Puno sold cookies at an unusual cost: your personal data. Want a homemade Pink Peppercorn Pistachio cookie? Try giving up your home address...

Composers of classical music often put performance directions or notes throughout their scores. John Luther Adams, a composer known for expansive, landscape-themed music, includes only one word on the score...

The march announced itself by force of numbers, and by its feel. No one seemed angry. This is not to say that the marchers had been bought off, or didn't...

Jackson Lears has dramatized the relationship between Theodore Roosevelt and William James, but evidence of that conversation is actually hard to find. We turned up one interesting chapter in the...

Not perhaps since Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet Gulag has there been a dissenting artist who got to be as famous as the government that hounds him. But Ai Weiwei’s...

By Max Larkin Whether or not we’re doing so out of a sense of centenary obligation, it’s a good thing that readers are revisiting The Great War in Modern Memory, by...

It’s been a little over a year since revelations from Edward Snowden’s historic NSA leak started appearing in newspapers around the world, and information about new surveillance programs is still...

Our Twitter experiment this week came from Sonia Chung’s wonderful essay, “I Heart Chekhov“, from The Millions. We wanted to design some postcards. We used what Nabokov considered to be...

In his stories Chekhov captured, with an almost photographic talent and simplicity, the look of a country at the end of the day. But he died five years before Sergei...

Welcome back to my living room. We're reading the story, "About Love," from 1898. Chekhov tells it as a conversation among three men on a hunting weekend -- a veterinarian,...