Open Source with Christopher Lydon

It’s Labor Day week, 2023, and Henry David Thoreau is the heart of our conversation. It’s not with him, but it’s driven by his example: American thinking at its best...| More

Harry Smith was the oddest duck you never heard of in the art underground: an unsightly, often obnoxious genius. Only the artists knew him, but it was a multitude: Bob...| More

It is said about Noam Chomsky that he has been to the study of language what Isaac Newton was to the study of gravity after the apple hit his head....| More

In The Country of the Blind, where the writer Andrew Leland is guiding our tour, they do things differently. They have their own identity riddles, their network of heroes and...| More

This is the vitalism episode, with the passionate polymath Jackson Lears. His new book is beyond category, and gripping, too: it’s titled Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from...| More

We’re marking the 20th birthday of podcasting in conversation with Erica Heilman, a prize practitioner. Here we are with Erica in Peacham, Vermont, settled in 1776 in the Northeast Kingdom,...| More

We’re back in the pub a year later with Mark Blyth, the outspoken political economist at Brown University—which means he works and talks and thinks at the intersection of big...| More

This week: a show from our archive from The Connection days. “It ain’t over till it’s over.” That’s Yogi Berra’s ageless line, in the title now of a summer hit...| More

The line is intoned now as a sort of chapter heading in our literary-artistic history: Eileen Myles grew up in Boston/Cambridge and moved to New York in 1974 to become...| More