Parachute Radio Archives - Open Source with Christopher Lydon

THIS WEEK'S SHOW: October 15, 2026

Putting people first.

, 2014

I’m going to China next month, and I’m looking for your encouragement and leads. It’s my first trip to the mainland after exactly 50 years of vivid dreaming about it....

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, 2013

Coffee Hour on Cairo: A Collective Work of Art

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Barbara Massaad (32 min, 15 meg) Revolutions are not born of chance but of necessity. A revolution is a return from the fictitious...

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, 2013

Gregory Buchakjian in Beirut: A Course of Catastrophe

Gregory Buchakjian looks at the Arab uprisings of the last two years and sees not an exception but an extension — at best a pause, not a change, along a...

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, 2013

Guy Talk in Tahrir Square

"What broke the culture of fear in Tahrir Square was a miracle, in some sense."

So three Egyptian guys walked into a coffee shop in Cairo… and this is what we talked about. (1) The culture of fear in a “securitized state.” (2) The burden...

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, 2013

Khaled Hafez: Art and Revolution in Egypt

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Khaled Hafez (12 min, 5.6 meg) CAIRO — Khaled Hafez — charismatic painter and multi-media artist, in his regular Friday salon or master...

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, 2012

Nael El Toukhy: a post-modern novelist’s eye on Egypt

Nael El Toukhy is a bright light among Egypt’s millennial writers at a breakpoint in Arab culture as well as politics. On a rooftop in Cairo we’re talking about the...

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, 2012

Khaled Abol Naga: Egypt’s Best of Times, Worst of Times

Khaled Abol Naga — movie star and now film producer, too — found his political voice in what was supposed to be a documentary film. “Microphone” (trailers: here and below)...

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, 2012

Alaa Al Aswany: Egypt’s Number One Novelist on… Us

"Novelists and doctors are both interested in understanding human pain."

CAIRO — Alaa Al Aswany, the best-selling novelist in the Arab world, sticks to his day job in dentistry. We meet in his modern clinical suite where he starts writing...

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, 2012

Heba Morayef’s Rights Watch in Egypt

Where do the torturers and thugs come from a long-suffering, world-weary population?

CAIRO — Heba Morayef of Human Rights Watch serves effectively as a home-grown guardian angel of human decency amidst the endless contradictions of Egypt’s stumbling revolution. She is taking me...

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, 2012

Tuesday in Tahrir: Field Notes, with Novelists

CAIRO — On the way into the tumult in Tahrir Square today, we’re in conversation with the novelist Mona Prince of So You May See and My Name is...

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, 2012

Egypt’s Revolution Continues: the Talk of Tahrir

Click to listen to three middle-class “revoltionaries” with Chris Lydon renewed protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square (26 min, 11.8 meg) CAIRO — We’ve been in Tahrir Square all day till...

, 2012

A Note on Gaza, November 20, 2012

CAIRO — The slaughter in the Gaza Strip is five hours away by car, plus a few hours’ waiting time at the border checkpoints. Yet Gaza’s suffering is several surreal...

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, 2012

Elias Khoury: an upheaval in “souls, bodies, imaginations…”

Click to listen to novelist Elias Khoury in conversation with Chris Lydon on the Arab unpheaval. (27 min, 12 meg) This revolution is mainly a cultural event, not a political...

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, 2012

Khaled Fahmy: a baseline “biography” of the revolution in Egypt

CAIRO — Khaled Fahmy came home to Egypt just months before the uprising in Tahrir Square. He was leaving a big university career in Oxford and New York, drawn by...

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, 2012

Coffee Hour: on A Week in Tunisia

Click to listen to Chris and Mark in a wrap-up exchange on the less-than-revolution in Tunisia (30 min, 12 meg) We’re lifting a ritual from the Cairo novels of the...