April 27, 2016

Eileen Myles’s Moment

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...| More
March 24, 2016

Weimar America?

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...| More
January 21, 2016

Black Mountain College: “The Grass-Roots of Democracy”

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...| More
January 7, 2016

Our Postmodern Myth: “Star Wars” is Back

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...| More
January 3, 2016

An American Classic: “Fat City”

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...| More
November 25, 2015

Colm Tóibín’s Working on his Sentences

This is provincial Ireland, a place of long winters but not freezing winters. There’s drizzle as much as there’s rain. You’re trying to find a...| More
October 28, 2015

Our First Dance with the Devil

As John Winthrop, Massachusetts’ first governor, first came to our shores, he gave the famous address, “A Modell of Christian Charity.” When Winthrop declared, “we shall...| More
October 12, 2015

Paul Theroux in Zimbabwe, USA

There was something there once. It was a plantation, and then factories set up. The agriculture is now mechanized. The factories are closed. So what...| More
September 28, 2015

Thomas Mallon’s Real Reagan

“He’s still winking at us,” Thomas Mallon says of our 40th president. Ronald Reagan’s essential quality (as official biographer Edmund Morris discovered with some embarrassment)...| More
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