Open Source with Christopher Lydon

Short form: Tinkers was no fluke — the little gem of a novel that caught a word-of-mouth wave and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010; it’s the snowy paperback still...

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...

I went out to the wild woods of western Maine in the late summer to inhale the biologist Bernd Heinrich‘s experience of Life Everlasting — and just to behold a...

  “Although knaves win in every political struggle, although society seems to be delivered over from the hands of one set of criminals into the hands of another set of...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Nicholas Carr. (27 minutes, 13 mb mp3) Photo: William Taylor for wired.com Nicholas Carr is famous for fretting that Google is making us...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Nell Irvin Painter. (27 minutes, 16 mb mp3) Nell Painter and I seem to have opposite takes on the great Ralph Waldo Emerson....

Mary and The Emerson Summer Gang, I apologize for the delay in getting this out. I spent the weekend writing and writing, always finding myself backtracking, realizing what I was...

In the summer of 2003, around the bicentennial of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s birth, I spent an afternoon with the Sage of New Haven, Professor Harold Bloom of Yale, in conversation...

In the summer of 2003, around the bicentennial of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s birth, I spent an afternoon with the Sage of New Haven, Professor Harold Bloom of Yale, in conversation...

In the summer of 2003, around the bicentennial of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s birth, I spent an afternoon with the Sage of New Haven, Professor Harold Bloom of Yale, in conversation...

Maybe after close reading we could stipulate: every sentence of this amazing central essay deserves to be underlined or highlighted. Emerson is unceasing, relentless… and before you leave, and it...

The Emerson Discussion group continues! Here is Potter’s schedule for the rest of the summer: Self-Reliance, July 20 Compensation, July 27 Spiritual Laws, August 3 Love, Aug. 10 Friendship, Aug...

Whether we actually complete both series or not, the point is the start, the initiative is all, what Susan Sontag called “the beginning mind.” In what follows I’ve tried to...

Nothing says the 4th of July like Ralph Waldo Emerson, that's what we maintain at Open Source. So while you enjoy your barbecues and fireworks -- or watch Confederate re-enactors...

24 MB MP3 So David has been laboring mightily for two weeks now to give us all the day off today. He did this by listening through hours of interviews...