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THIS WEEK'S SHOW: October 1, 2026
AI Apocalypse?

"A juvenility of moral imagination that is at the core of this."

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April 16, 9 PM, 2020
The Many Faces of Ferrante

On Ferrante's epic.

This is a rerun, prompted by the HBO series My Brilliant Friend, based on the  “Neapolitan Novels” of Elena Ferrante. Ferrante’s identity remains beguilingly unknown, but she has put so...
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May 23, 9 PM, 2019
At Home in Japan with Pico Iyer

Stillness and contemplation in Japan.

Pico Iyer once described himself as “a global village on two legs.” He’s the writing champion of cosmopolitan consciousness who lived awhile inside the Los Angeles airport just to feel...
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, 2017
Karl Ove Knausgaard on Art and Loneliness

"That's the point, to be in a place where you are not aware of yourself."

Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote a 6-volume selfie that a lot of us can’t stop reading. My Struggle he called it, looking inward and talking to himself for thousands of pages....
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, 2017
Claire Messud: Best Friends…For Now

"You never know the story."

Claire Messud is a novelist of social nuance, especially concerning the crushable inner lives of girls. You could say her new book The Burning Girl, is a suburban Boston version of...
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, 2017
Amiri Baraka: Ennobled by Coltrane

Amiri Baraka‘s death prompts me to repost a conversation we had about the music of John Coltrane, which inspired Baraka and ennobled the ambitions of his Black Arts movement. “Trane...
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, 2017
Ian Johnson and the Souls of China

"It's not all sitting, quietly meditating and saying, 'Om.'"

Ian Johnson won a Pulitzer Prize covering China for the Wall Street Journal–mostly economics–but then discovered what felt like a bigger story: a full-blown spiritual crisis inside a frenzied money...
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, 2017
George Saunders in the Afterlife

"If death is in the room, it's pretty interesting"

The story master George Saunders is widely revered as the nicest guy in the writing game, but it’s sweeter and deeper than that. I met him in the Boston Public Library the...
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, 2017
Stephen Kinzer: America’s Empire State of Mind

Why are we everywhere in the world, so often with guns drawn? The provocative reporter Stephen Kinzer has covered a number of our “regime-change” interventions in the world, from Guatemala...
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July 16, 2015, 2016
Claudia Rankine’s Citizen

"What does it mean that black men are being shot in the back?"

In the time of Ferguson, Baltimore, and Charleston, the poet Claudia Rankine has been the lyric teller of our deepest hurt. Her new book, Citizen: An American Lyric, was a best-seller and something...
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, 2016
The Tragedy of Tony Blair

"Someone someday should do a series of Shakespearean plays about the Labour Party."

The scathing Chilcot verdict on Tony Blair’s contribution to the war on Iraq brings to mind a more awful tragedy: that more politicians – notably of the American variety –...
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, 2015
Colm Tóibín’s Working on his Sentences

"You’re attempting a sort of insistent rhythm which might make its way into the reader’s nervous system."

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...
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October 29, 2015, 2015
Our First Dance with the Devil

You can still see the shadow of the Salem witch trials on Massachusetts — and all America.

As John Winthrop, Massachusetts’ first governor, first came to our shores, he gave the famous address, “A Modell of Christian Charity.” When Winthrop declared, “we shall be as a city upon...
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September 24, 2015, 2015
The New New Deal

Millions of working people need economic help. What would work?

To close out our series on work, produced in partnership with The Nation, we’re looking ahead to the big proposals and spiritual realignments that might spell a major change for...
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, 2015
New Ireland Says “Yes”

In Dublin, young people greet marriage equality — and a new national mood.

In today’s Ireland, yes means no. A democratic yes to same-sex marriage signaled no! to patriarchal priests and cane-wielding nuns; no to the bankers who led the country into a devastating crash;...