How Fares the Land? Archives - Open Source with Christopher Lydon

THIS WEEK'S SHOW: October 15, 2026

Putting people first.

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, 2013

JFK & his Papa: David Nasaw’s light on The Patriarch

David Nasaw’s smashing biography of The Patriarch: Joseph P. Kennedy smashes not least the legend of a giant gap between cranky father and radiant presidential son. JFK himself gave some...

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, 2012

Pankaj Mishra: Briefing our “Foreign Policy” Debate

“What a disaster! What an affliction! What kind of a situation is this? …England has occupied Egypt, the Sudan, and the great Indian Peninsula which are large parts of the...

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, 2012

Eric Hobsbawm, 1917 – 2012: In Memoriam

It’s a privilege at Eric Hobsbawm’s death this morning to share again the lively sound of his wondrously learned, penetrating mind. Five years ago, in his book-stuffed living-room in London,...

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, 2012

Ralph Nader: One Citizen’s View from Winsted, CT

Mary McGrath photo Ralph Nader on Main Street can still see the flatbed trucks hauling textile machinery out of his hometown in the 1950s, his high school years. The work...

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, 2012

Jackson Lears: Too Scary to Talk About

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Jackson Lears (30 min, 16 meg) Jackson Lears, the American cultural historian at Rutgers, is touching on themes somewhere below the waves of...

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, 2012

Dan Rodgers’ Age of Fracture : A Different Country Now

"We unfortunately have a lot of people, who not only don't know history but don't think they need to know."

Daniel Rodgers, the Princeton historian, and his Age of Fracture put a striking new frame around our nagging Tony Judt question: "How Fares the Land?" No, he's telling me, you're...

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, 2012

Chris Hayes: Smart Guy against the “Smart Guys”

Part of what makes the strange disorienting nature of our time is that the old institutions have been discredited but remain in power. The people who run them remain in...

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, 2012

Jacob Hacker: for 35 years of Progressive Renewal

Jacob Hacker, Yale’s bright light on American politics and co-author of Winner-Take-All Politics, is giving us a baseline on the election-year landscape: 1. The American dream has lost a 35-year...

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, 2012

David Bromwich on The Emperor’s New Language

"I've never heard so many Americans talk so acceptingly about wars, in the plural."

David Bromwich is locating our 2012 distress in our language — or lack of it. It is reunion season at Yale, 50 years after President Kennedy addressed my graduating class...

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May 25, 2012, 2012

Vanessa Williamson: How the Tea Party Could Win it All

Tea Partiers, too, are feeling the "need to act upon our intuitions of impending catastrophe."

Vanessa Williamson could persuade you that the wily elders in the Tea Party have much more to show for their anger and agitation than the passionate youth of the “Occupy”...

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, 2012

James K. Galbraith: How Our Inequality Happened

James K. Galbraith — out on the uneven playing field of American wealth and power — is pointing out the 30-year drift of tax policy and political power, all...

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, 2012

Dan Ariely on the “Irrationality” of American inequality

Dan Ariely of Predictably Irrational fame, makes the arresting point that from the standpoint of fairness and equity in the distribution of wealth and power, the vast majority of Americans...

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, 2012

Siddhartha Mukherjee: an innovator in the race?

Siddhartha Mukherjee brings authority and a certain kinship to our conversations on historian Tony Judt and his last words — Ill Fares the Land — on the malaise of our...

, 2012

Mary Fonseca’s “Letter from Lisbon” : portents of plague

A friend writes from Lisbon, … as those “Talk of the Town” pieces used to begin in the dear old New Yorker. The friend in this case is my ever-watchful...

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, 2012

Daron Acemoglu on “Extractive” Politics and Us

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Daron Acemoglu (42 min, 19 meg) Daron Acemoglu pops up in his office at MIT with the big bold energy of the book...