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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."

, 2014
In Memoriam: Richard Eder, The Exemplary Reader

To Richard Eder (1932 - 2014), with love and thanks

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....
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, 2014
“Rite of Spring” Revival

On the way to our show with Benjamin Zander on Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 9 this Thursday, we're revisiting a show we did with him nearly fifteen years ago about...
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, 2014
Cold Wars, and How to Survive Them

Ahead of our show with Elaine Scarry this week, we're reminding ourselves of how we got into the nuclear standoff called the Cold War, and how Ronald Reagan dreamed we...
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, 2014
Speaking of Music Again: Oliver Sacks

We've been contemplating the mysteries of music over the past few weeks, since our conversations with Gunther Schuller and Richard Powers. Perhaps the essential question here is what neuroscience is...
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, 2014
Edna O’Brien: Literature Against Loneliness

In celebration of Saint Patrick's Day: Edna O'Brien is my fair embodiment of a writer's gifts and the pleasures of reading. Her prose, as Philip Roth once remarked, is "like...
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, 2014
Vijay Iyer’s Life in Music: "Striving is the Back Story"

Vijay Iyer brings rare stuff to jazz piano, starting with a Brahmin Indian name and heritage, and a Yale degree in physics. Gujarati stick dances and Bhajan devotional songs from...
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, 2014
Steve Pinker’s “Better Angels”: Dodging Our Own Bullet?

Steven Pinker has written a game-changer on the little matter of how quickly humanity is headed for hell or redemption.Better Angels is a tour de force in 700 pages of...
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, 2014
Isabel Wilkerson’s Leaderless March that Remade America

Isabel Wilkerson is the epic tale teller of the Great Migration of Southern black people that remade America — sound, substance and spirit — in the 20th Century. The proof...
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, 2014
Yehudi Wyner’s Life in Music: a Composer with Piano Hands

Yehudi Wyner is an approachable guy in a forbidding field: contemporary “serious” music. He gives us an opening here to ask where new sounds come from. In his case new...
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, 2014
Cuba’s Healthcare Revolution

Cuba’s revolutionary vanguard: US medical students Keasha Guerrier, Kereese Gayle and Akua Brown Three winters ago our Open Source trip to Cuba turned around on an astonishing moment of serendipity. At...
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, 2014
Dennis Lehane – Between Dorchester Ave and Sunset Boulevard

Dennis Lehane so rules the neighborhood of Noir (“Nwaaah,” as we say in Boston) that he gets street credit for work he didn’t write, like “The Departed” and “The Town.”...
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, 2014
John Lanchester on London in the Age of Inequality

Economic inequality is still on our minds after last week’s show with MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and Rolling Stone editor Matt Taibbi. Here’s an interview we recorded with John Lanchester...
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, 2007
Speaking of Music: Alex Ross’s 20th Century

However we listen to the twentieth century, the links as well as the tensions and the often grisly politics are endlessly absorbing. And Alex Ross, the New Yorker's music critic...
, 2007
The Newest Nixon

In 1962, after losing the governor’s race to Pat Brown, Richard M. Nixon pronounced: “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” Unfortunately, Nixon’s admonition was more like an exercise...
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, 2007
The Issue is Empire

Question: from essayist Cullen Murphy: Are We Rome? — as in “the glory that was…,” and, of course, “decline and fall…” Answer: from political economist Alice Amsden, in Escape from...