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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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, 2011
Ha Jin’s recovered memory of Americans in China

Ha Jin‘s darkest fear about China is that the control-freak regime he fled 25 years ago has enough cash on hand to buy a lease on life — in Washington...
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, 2011
Mark Blyth (7): “We can’t all export to Mars”

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Mark Blyth (20 minutes, 8 mb mp3) Mark Blyth is flying us over the embattled Eurozone — populations aging, economies flagging, and now...
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, 2011
Leslie Chang’s “Factory Girls”

"The Dickens of China today is doing real estate."

Leslie Chang brings a cautionary anti-romanticism and a fine reporter’s eye to the start of Brown’s Year of China. Her story is China turning itself inside out over the last...
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, 2011
Mark Blyth (6): Going to school on “Occupy Wall St.”

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Mark Blyth (20 minutes, 8 mb mp3) I arrived in the States twenty years ago, to the month. When I look at the...
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, 2011
Catherine Lutz: “magical thinking” and the costs of war

"There's no good evidence that any significant part of the Iraq investment panned out."

Catherine Lutz delivers her conservative Costs of War accounting in a calm teacherly tone, but her reckoning is nothing short of outrageous: it was a 5 Trillion Dollar War after...
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, 2011
Mark Blyth (5): Sovereigns, Citizens and Suckers

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Mark Blyth (28 minutes, 14 mb mp3) Mark Blyth is back in the pub, just in time, talking trash again and taking some...
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, 2011
The Montebello Project: a Marker Down for Peace

"The visions we’ve had in the past have been bankrupted."

The “art of peace” in a time of war — a play on Sun Tzu’s classic The Art of War — was the bait and theme of three days of...
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, 2011
Mark Blyth (4): Why they call it “going for broke”

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Mark Blyth (20 minutes, 10 mb mp3) Photo from Mark Blyth’s Austerity video Mark Blyth confirms the the sneaking suspicion that the meltdown...
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, 2011
Steven Heydemann on the “Family Business” in Syria

Steven Heydemann is picking apart my metaphor of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad as Michael Corleone – the Godfather’s gentler son from Francis Ford Coppola’s classic mob film, who took a sudden...
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, 2011
Arnold Weinstein: The Dimensionality of Reading

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Arnold Weinstein (53 minutes, 26 mb mp3) [Scott Kingsley for the Brown Alumni Magazine] Brown University literature professor Arnold Weinstein is recalling a...
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, 2011
Pratap Mehta: Pakistan’s Perpetual Identity Crisis

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Pratap Bhanu Mehta (30 minutes, 14 mb mp3) Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a political theorist and intellectual historian based in New Delhi, is leading...
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, 2011
Thomas Balmès: An Education in Images

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Thomas Balmès (12 minutes, 6 mb mp3) Director Thomas Balmès on location in Mongolia filming “Babies” [Focus Features photo] Thomas Balmès, the French...
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, 2011
Mark Blyth (3): The Black Swan of Cairo

Mark Blyth, the know-it-all professor with the Sean Connery delivery, is back in the pub tonight, and not a moment to soon. When the political economy of energy is screaming...
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, 2011
Freedom to Write:
China’s Gift to Pittsburgh

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Henry Reese. (14 minutes, 7 mb mp3) [Lake Fong/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette] Henry Reese of Sampsonia Way in Pittsburgh stole the show this Spring at...
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, 2011
C. D. Wright in Triumph: One With Others

[newyorker.com image] C. D. Wright is well known for assembling her patchwork poetry from local and vernacular fragments. Even with fame and standing, she has still the one-of-a-kind comic, passionate,...