THIS WEEK'S SHOW: October 15, 2026
Putting people first.
, 2019
Remembering Michael Haynes
If Open Source had ever had a chaplain, it would have been Reverend Michael Haynes, who went to glory on Thursday this week at the age of 92. Chris Lydon...
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:03 — 28.4MB)
, 2018
"To be alive is to be made of memory."
Our long, gabby afternoon with Philip Roth in 2006, at his farmhouse in Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut, was a sort of pay-off. I’d helped him find just the right Boston location...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:55 — 41.1MB)
, 2018
"How can we capture what it feels like to be human and alive?"
This is an unlocked, bonus segment of Open Source. You can hear weekly conversations and extended interviews like this one by subscribing and supporting our work on Patreon. The writer...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:56 — 45.7MB)
December 8, 2016
What was The Bard saying, really?
Bob Dylan, the poet, has been singing more than 50 years, but have you ever really stopped to listen to the words? Now that Dylan is a Nobel giant of literature, we...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:16 — 59.9MB)
July 16, 2015, 2016
"What does it mean that black men are being shot in the back?"
In the time of Ferguson, Baltimore, and Charleston, the poet Claudia Rankine has been the lyric teller of our deepest hurt. Her new book, Citizen: An American Lyric, was a best-seller and something...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:00 — 62.6MB)
July 13, 2016, 2016
"I was fascinated with the idea of songs that seem to have been written by no one."
Our country turned 240 last week—and yet it seems as if we’ve got so much growing up to do. In the 1960s—maybe the last moment in our history that felt so fraught with tension,...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:57 — 30.2MB)
June 16, 2016, 2016
"Identity becomes treacherous... when it’s used as a substitute for self-awareness."
We’re really feeling the fault lines of human identity in 2016: the vexed questions of who we are, who we aren’t, and who we’d like to be. The “angry white...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:56 — 29.4MB)
May 12, 2016, 2016
What would the great sage say if we teleported him to the 21st century?
In an panicked moment, maybe what we need most is a new set of eyes—or a very old one. Whatever you may find to be the problem—capitalist excess or teens “keeping...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:55 — 29.3MB)
, 2016
"All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born."
It has been 100 years since Ireland’s Easter Rising, a fascinating, tragic episode that blended literature and liberation, defeat and victory, national reverence and remorse, and, in William Butler Yeats‘s...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:41 — 29.5MB)
April 28, 2016, 2016
"I remember writing a poem that went, 'O life, when do you staht?' 'S-t-a-h-h-t.'"
This week, we’re tuning into the writer Eileen Myles. Born outside Boston in 1949, Myles is just now having an all-American moment. Myles has spent the last forty years as a queer and feminist...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:55 — 22.9MB)
March 24, 2016, 2016
What do we have to learn from the lost world of Germany between the wars?
Pundits from Glenn Beck to Roger Cohen and Chris Hedges have one other discouraged democracy on their minds this election year. They’re thinking of the German government that rose as a fresh democracy in 1919 but failed — amid...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:03 — 29.9MB)
January 21, 2016, 2016
What would we learn as students among the minds of Black Mountain College?
In 1933, a group of freethinking American educators and academics took a look at their fresh, interwar world — and set about trying to remake it. They set up a campus in idyllic countryside outside Asheville,...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:01 — 29.3MB)
January 7, 2016, 2016
Why does "Star Wars" still mean so much to so many people?
There’s a big old *spoiler alert* hanging over this whole radio show. You’ve been warned! We’re beginning 2016 by confronting what is already its biggest cultural phenomenon. The Force Awakens, the latest...
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:20 — 32.0MB)
December 22, 2015, 2016
"I thought, I got something here. I can do a good book. I just have to keep going."
An Open Source experiment here: Chris Lydon kindly handed off the hosting reins to me for a day, for an interview with Leonard Gardner, author of the classic novel Fat...