
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