Open Source with Christopher Lydon

Out of the blue a decade ago, Paul Harding won a huge popular following, first, and then the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for his modern Maine sort of folk tale...| More

“Don’t forget” is a mantra in our shop: “don’t forget” specially the characters, the moments that made us. Norman Mailer is the spirit-seeker and sometimes reckless truth-teller we are un-forgetting...| More

Lydia Moland is reminding us that when present company in American public life comes up short, the ancestors of American democracy and spirit are lurking out there, in abundance and...| More

This is family talk in rural Ireland toward the end of an extraordinary life. My brother Patrick was the youngest of six, the saint among us and always the brightest...| More

This show first aired on September 16, 2021. It’s hard not to notice that we’re flunking tests, right and left, and running out of strategies against global-size troubles. COVID, we...| More

This show originally aired on September 23, 2021. Thomas Mann was one of those cultural giants the world doesn’t seem to make anymore—artists with authority, almost as big as their...| More

This show was originally broadcast on July 15, 2021. We know their songs, not so much what they were going through, those Black women artists who wrote and sang so...| More

This show first aired on September 30, 2021. Who else could be said to make you smarter, just listening to the sound of his music? Only Mozart, that we know....| More

John Quincy Adams was the model president in the early republic who declared that the United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” But “go abroad” we...| More