Open Source Radio Podcasts

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For an hour every day, we�re using the Internet to talk about the world. Bloggers in Kenya, podcasters in the US Army on the Iraqi border, legions of wikipedia editors: we�re putting their voices on the air with the thinkers and writers who can help us make great conversation (and sense of the world). As we book our show, you�re tracking our progress at www.radioopensource.org, telling us who to call next. With host Christopher Lydon. Primary Format : Public Radio Language : English Also Listed as: City : Cambrige State/Province : MA Country : USA Region : NA User Tags: User Votes: RSS Feed Website People found this Podcast Searching for: View this Podcast on a Google Map. Podcast iTunes Link Text Only listing of Open Source Radio Podcasts Methings.com listings of Open Source Radio Podcasts If you like this podcast, you might also like:

Steve Pinker’s “Better Angels”: Dodging Our Own Bullet? Steven Pinker has written a game-changer on the little matter of how quickly humanity is headed for hell or redemption. The short form of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is that we're on the verge of Candide's "best of all possible worlds." Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Anatol Lieven: how to end the US dust-up with Pakistan Anatol Lieven explains the lastest clash ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ha Jin’s recovered memory of Americans in China Ha Jin's darkest fear about China is that the control-freak regime he fled 25 years ago has enough cash on hand to buy a lease on life -- in Washington and the West, at the expense of its people. The "myth" of an imperial rivalry with the US seems laughable to him... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mark Blyth (7): “We can’t all export to Mars” Mark Blyth is flying us over the embattled Eurozone -- populations aging, economies flagging, and now democracy shrinking as technocrats in bankers' gray stand in this week for the elected political chiefs in Greece and Italy... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website David Grossman: looking for an end of “the situation” David Grossman is considering my question: why the "good guy" solutions have availed so little in the Middle East, over such an ominously long time. Patriot and peacenik, critical-thinker and oppositionist, Zionist and humanist, David Grossman is a good guy, and then some... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Harold Bloom’s Melville Harold Bloom is giving us a one-man performance of a one-act play. He invited us months ago to his class at Yale on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and finally here it is and here we are. Because this is Harold Bloom on stage, himself the “living labyrinth” of literature, his jazz-like solo improvisation is endlessly allusive — to Lear (“81 years old, my age”), to Macbeth ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website My evening with Joan Didion Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Joan Didion (30 min, 15 meg) Photo by Michael A. Jones. Copyright 2005 by Sacramento Bee Joan Didion is reading from her second smashing meditation on death, Blue Nights. And I’m her interlocutor and foil again onstage in Cambridge. With a woman of the considered written word,  … Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Leslie Chang: “The Dickens of China today is doing real estate.” Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Leslie Chang (30 min, 15 meg) Leslie Chang brings a cautionary anti-romanticism and a fine reporter’s eye to the start of Brown’s Year of China. Her story is China turning itself inside out over the last 30 years — about the very hard slog of it.  … Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Jeff Sachs: the economy doctor is worried… about us Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Jeff Sachs (32 minutes, 16 mb mp3) What Jeffrey Sachs didn’t much want to talk about was the double biography I want to read someday… of the semi-science and fumbling art of economics in our times, in the lives of two powerful players born 25 days  … Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Pakistan Aslant: the two-hour version Here's the short form, as we say: nearly a month of strong conversation in Pakistan, distilled to two radio hours. Both hours are illuminating the judgment that (1) Pakistan is not about to destroy itself, much less go away and (2) that its mutually-abusive marriage with the US is not about to end, either.  ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes: a Porniad How quaint, just months ago, talking with Nicholson Baker about his inside-poetry novel, The Anthologist, to suppose his idle moments were consumed with Swinburne’s rhymes and the march time of Kipling’s four-beat lines. In truth the happy horndog inside this sportive, omnidirectional ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mark Blyth (6): Going to school on “Occupy Wall St.” Americans reverence "fairness" more than equality. We're not Sweden, and perhaps just as well, Mark Blyth allows. "But we get out of shape when we realize that the risks are being socialized and the profits are being privatized. And that's what's happening on Wall Street... " Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website David Bromwich: Obama and the measure of Lincoln Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with David Bromwich (32 minutes, 16 mb mp3) David Bromwich is my refuge from the chatter and fog of politics. Sterling Professor of English at Yale, he’s a close-reader and hard marker of Barack Obama — so hard as to flatter a struggling student’s potential. But when he measures  … Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Amitav Ghosh and his addictive empire trilogy "River of Smoke" is part two of novelist Amitav Ghosh's epic trilogy on Opium, the narcotic fuel of the British Empire in the 19th Century. Reading it, you have to wonder if he isn’t writing by loose analogy about Oil, trade and world domination in the 21st Century, too. About us, that is. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ashis Nandy: on Pakistan’s latent “potentialities” Ashis Nandy, our sparkling Sage of New Delhi, says: "Bear with Pakistan," and remember the Pashtuns that Gandhi called the finest non-violent freedom fighters of India. Don't forget the Hindus and Muslims in vast numbers who remember help from "the other side" in the cruelty of Partition. "There is that part of the story, too." Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Rashid Rana’s Pakistan: a mini-version of the globe Rashid Rana makes art that contradicts itself on a closer look. About Pakistan, too, he is saying: Look again! Pakistan is not freakish or a world apart. It may in truth be a fair sample of turmoil and transition everywhere in this 21st Century... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Shafqat Amanat Ali: local, global, classical, pop Shafqat Amanat Ali Khan is one of Pakistan's superstar singers, an embodiment of the dynamism inside South Asian music. He is singing village music that's gone global, "classical" music gone wildly popular... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Imtiaz Alam: So you want to be a journalist in Pakistan… Imtiaz Alam has the gruff manner of your classic, chain-smoking, get-to-the-point “Front Page” news editor. He seems a Chicago sort of newspaper guy, except that he works and represents the profession in Pakistan, “the deadliest place in the world to be a journalist,” as all now agree. ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Catherine Lutz: “magical thinking” and the costs of war Catherine Lutz's calm, conservative accounting of the "Costs of War" is nothing short of outrageous. It was a 5 Trillion Dollar War after all, counting the lifetime of care for disabled American troops and the interest charges on a credit-card war without pay-as-you-go taxes or even a pretense of shared sacrifice. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Kamil Khan Mumtaz: back from a modernist Hell Kamil Khan Mumtaz, an eminence in Pakistani architecture, is giving us a gentle introduction to Islamic thinking about art, design and meaning in life. He's tracking his two West-to-East journeys over the last 50-plus years: one professional and artistic, the other personal and spiritual... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Salima Hashmi: in the worst of times, the alchemy of art LAHORE – Salima Hashmi is the vital link between Pakistan’s greatest poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911 – 1984), who was her father, and a “resilience” that you’d feel in the air even if Pakistanis weren’t invoking it so urgently and so often. You’d be aware of an edgy, “on” air of pleasure in life ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mark Blyth (5): Sovereigns, Citizens and Suckers Mark Blyth is back in the pub, just in time, talking trash again and taking some credit. He’s the political economist who doesn’t mince words, even when he’s writing for fellow professionals. At Triple Crisis, for example, the other day: “The European sovereign debt crisis is little more than a huge ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Zeb and Haniya: the healing charm of “Urdu blues” Zeb and Haniya, the Pakistani song duo, could set you to wondering all over again why musicians aren't asked to run the world. In their studio in Lahore, we are puzzling how they make it look so easy to teach us new songs? to give East and West fresh tunes on stage -- as so few can do off-stage? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Nadeem ul Haque: “the country that can kill the world” Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Nadeem ul Haque (15 minutes, 8 mb mp3) Nadeem ul Haque giving a talk at TedxLahore Nadeem ul Haque introduced himself with a bit of bluster as Pakistan’s official “growth” strategist, then began blurting out his frustrations. There’s no growth to speak of in Pakistan, he said  … Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Salman Rashid: a Pakistani Travelogue, with Tears Salman Rashid, adventurer and prolific author, had offered to guide our discovery tour of Pakistan — in the spirit of Kipling’s Kim and his lama, or earlier of the Victorian genius and spy Richard Burton. ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mohsin Hamid: on a “Pakistan-like” trend in America Mohsin Hamid, of the hair-raising novel "The Reluctant Fundamentalist," is observing a trend in America toward what we like least about Pakistan: extreme inequality, elitist indifference, a flight from taxes and "shared service." Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ali Dayan Hasan: “… the rule of law is non-negotiable.” Ali Dayan Hasan polices the shaky, wavy line of free speech and civil rights in Pakistan with iron conviction, a booming parliamentary baritone, and not much else. He was the first to sound the alarm last May at the abduction of the journalist Saleem Shahzad, and then to charge the Army's dreaded ISI with Shahzad's murder... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ayesha Jalal, Part 2: What Would Manto Say? Ayesha Jalal is recalling Pakistan's greatest prose writer, Saadat Hasan Manto, whose most famous story -- in the Lahore lunatic asylum -- leaves an immortal judgment on the Partition of India in 1947. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ayesha Jalal: Pakistan’s Revenge of the 40s, then the 80s Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Ayesha Jalal (40 minutes, 20 mb mp3) It takes a historian of Ayesha Jalal‘s power to crystallize an awkward truth: that the agony of Pakistan today is inseparable from the tragedy of Pakistan’s birth in 1947. Still more bluntly, that Pakistan as we know it is  … Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Adil Omar: “Paki Rambo,” dropping beats in Islamabad ISLAMABAD — Adil Omar — referring to himself here as “Paki Rambo” — is working the entertainment value of social and personal anger, as rappers do. The twist that surprised me in conversation with Islamabad’s 20-year-old hip-hop star is that he also sees himself offering ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Alia Amirali: Change Agent in a Stuck Society ISLAMABAD -- Alia Amirali is a second-generation change agent in a society that's stuck -- or maybe worse: scared, confused, depressed, afraid it might be sinking. Her project, she begins, is to "rebuild the left" in Pakistan. She is giving us just a hint of a program, and finally a sort of plea to her alienated ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Haris Gazdar: Why is the US in Pakistan — really? KARACHI — “Plausible deniability” has been the first principle of the US-Pakistan relationship, from the beginning, as Haris Gazdar explains it. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Saad Haroon: Pakistan as a bad Bollywood comedy Dying is easy, as the old comedian could have said about Karachi today. It’s making jokes about it that’s hard. This is Saad Haroon‘s calling as a Pakistani version of John Stewart, on television and in the ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Shahrukh Hasan: The Peace That Could Save Pakistan KARACHI — Shahrukh Hasan is a Pakistani media mogul who’s made peace with India his personal, professional crusade. In American terms, he’s a throwback to the days when lively newspapers were fat with readers and profits, and their editorial chieftains stuck their necks out for substantial agendas. Shahrukh Hasan’s stamp — as managing director of the Jang ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Fisherfolk of Karachi: a Parable of Pakistan KARACHI — We are taking the fishermen’s measure of Pakistan’s distress here in a fishing village that goes back to antiquity, that fights the present-day odds with spirit. The fisherfolk all around us are the sea-level “canaries” in a shrinking and severely polluted fish-farming system, centered on ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Dr. Geet: Yankee doc, speaking Sindhi, in the flood zone KARACHI — Dr. Geet Chainani is the young American dream I hadn’t counted on meeting in Pakistan this summer. She’s a Yank born in India, raised in New York City, trained as a medical doctor in the Caribbean. And for most of a year now ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mohammed Hanif: the Explosive Case of Karachi KARACHI — Mohammed Hanif, prize novelist of A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008), is piercing a cloud of calamity and crisis that hangs over his city, Karachi, as we speak. The news headline as we arrived was “Karachi Continues to Burn and Bleed.” More than 80 people have died in “target killings” ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Montebello Project: a Marker Down for Peace The "art of peace" in a time of war -- a play on Sun Tzu's classic "The Art of War" -- was the bait and theme of a three-day conversation at the end of June. The Arab Spring was part of the provocation. James Der Derian's rallying bet is that the "Long War" fashion in post-911 conflict has run its course... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website What news of the Bulgers? Howie’s Still Ahead We can’t pass up the Bulger story, after 30-plus years’ obsession with it. The Rise, Reign and Fall of the Bulger Brothers has been the biggest Boston story of our times, maybe the only really important political news in these parts since the Kennedys. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website John Tirman: “collective autism” about the costs of war John Tirman is trying to explain how the United States got in the habit of fighting wars without a scorecard. We're a country, curiously, that can focus like fiends on earned-run averages and on-base percentages. But war numbers... ? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Harold Bloom: On the Playing Field of Poetry Harold Bloom, in conversation about his famous Anxiety of Influence among poets, says it's "no different at all" from what Mickey Mantle experienced playing in Joe DiMaggio's Yankee centerfield -- a mix of love (never without ambivalence) and then robust self-investment... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Joi Ito: How to Save the Internet from its Success Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Joi Ito (29 minutes, 14 mb mp3) If the Internet dream could take human form, it might look and sound a lot like cheerful, boyish, 44-year-old Joi Ito, the new director of the fantasy factory known as the MIT Media Lab. Like the Web, he’s everywhere  … Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ecstasy on 3 x 5 Cards: Lila Azam Zanganeh’s Nabokov Lila Azam Zanganeh is lifting us from the effete to the exhilarating to the ecstatic in the beloved Vladimir Nabokov. But wait, I wonder. Wasn’t he teasing us with those tri-lingual puns? … disdaining us in the lonely leisure of himself, butterfly net in hand, in the Alps or in Arizona? …. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ecstasy on 3 x 5 Cards: Lila Azam Zanganeh’s Nabokov Lila Azam Zanganeh is lifting us from the effete to the exhilarating to the ecstatic in the beloved Vladimir Nabokov. But wait, I wonder. Wasn’t he teasing us with those tri-lingual puns? … disdaining us in the lonely leisure of himself, butterfly net in hand, in the Alps or in Arizona? …. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Edna O’Brien: Literature Against Loneliness Edna O'Brien, in the Joyce and Beckett family of Irish fiction, speaks of books and conversation as the last refuges from loneliness. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Edna O’Brien: Literature Against Loneliness Edna O'Brien, in the Joyce and Beckett family of Irish fiction, speaks of books and conversation as the last refuges from loneliness. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mark Blyth (4): Why they call it “going for broke” Mark Blyth confirms the the sneaking suspicion that the meltdown is still melting down — and that you get sharper economic news in from the noisy guy in a Glasgow pub than from the newspapers covering the IMF sex scandal. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mark Blyth (4): Why they call it “going for broke” Mark Blyth confirms the the sneaking suspicion that the meltdown is still melting down — and that you get sharper economic news in from the noisy guy in a Glasgow pub than from the newspapers covering the IMF sex scandal. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Simon Schama: this “imperial calamity” we inherited Simon Schama, the silver-tongued Anglo American historian, reflects on the "tragic irony" of imperial overreach and decline -- Britain's and now ours. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Simon Schama: this “imperial calamity” we inherited Simon Schama, the silver-tongued Anglo American historian, reflects on the "tragic irony" of imperial overreach and decline -- Britain's and now ours. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Teju Cole: A “Seething Intelligence” on a Long Journey Teju Cole and Open City, his marvel of a first novel, pull you into a peculiarly contemporary stream of consciousness — of a global mind in motion, coming home to see himself and us, as if for the first time. Born in Michigan of Nigerian parents ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Teju Cole: A “Seething Intelligence” on a Long Journey Teju Cole and Open City, his marvel of a first novel, pull you into a peculiarly contemporary stream of consciousness — of a global mind in motion, coming home to see himself and us, as if for the first time. Born in Michigan of Nigerian parents, Cole was raised in Lagos to the age of 17, then got his college ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Steven Heydemann on the “Family Business” in Syria Steven Heydemann is picking apart my metaphor of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad as Michael Corleone – the Godfather’s gentler son from Francis Ford Coppola’s classic mob film, who took a sudden turn towards violence and thuggery when confronted with the pressures of a kingdom under siege. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Steven Heydemann on the “Family Business” in Syria Steven Heydemann is picking apart my metaphor of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad as Michael Corleone – the Godfather’s gentler son from Francis Ford Coppola’s classic mob film, who took a sudden turn towards violence and thuggery when confronted with the pressures of a kingdom under siege. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Anna West: Poetry That’s “Louder than a Bomb” Click here to listen to Chris’ conversation with Anna West Anna West, poet and teacher, is letting us in on “Louder than a Bomb.” Before it was an inspirational film, it was a high-school slam poetry festival she founded a decade ago with the Young Chicago Authors — a mentoring method that  … Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Anna West: Poetry That’s “Louder than a Bomb” Click here to listen to Chris’ conversation with Anna West Anna West, poet and teacher, is letting us in on “Louder than a Bomb.” Before it was an inspirational film, it was a high-school slam poetry festival she founded a decade ago with the Young Chicago Authors — a mentoring method that  … Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Juan Cole: Through the Fog of the Arab Spring Juan Cole‘s Informed Comment on the Iraq war made him, in my view, the Thucydides of our time — and one of the marvels of the age. That a Michigan historian of the Middle East could become an inescapable, provocatively independent ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Juan Cole: Through the Fog of the Arab Spring Juan Cole‘s Informed Comment on the Iraq war made him, in my view, the Thucydides of our time — and one of the marvels of the age. That a Michigan historian of the Middle East could become an inescapable, provocatively independent daily commentator and critic of the war policy ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Whose Words… (36) Alex Charalambides: “Look at Me!” Alex Charalambides, a slam star at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival in Salem next weekend, is the child of Greek refugees from Rumania who settled in Worcester, Mass. ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Whose Words… (36) Alex Charalambides: “Look at Me!” Alex Charalambides, a slam star at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival in Salem next weekend, is the child of Greek refugees from Rumania who settled in Worcester, Mass. ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Whose Words These Are: January O’Neil’s Underlife January O'Neil's poetry in Underlife is about "everywoman" themes: parents, children, food, sex, femaleness and race. Her motto from a Mark Strand poem is "I move to keep things whole." She personifies the very broad reach of the third Massachusetts Poetry Festival ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Whose Words These Are: January O’Neil’s Underlife January O'Neil's poetry in Underlife is about "everywoman" themes: parents, children, food, sex, femaleness and race. Her motto from a Mark Strand poem is "I move to keep things whole." She personifies the very broad reach of the third Massachusetts Poetry Festival ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Martin Marty’s Saint for Moderns: Dietrich Bonhoeffer Dietrich Bonhoeffer would be a saint by now if Protestants (Lutherans, in his case) sanctified their best. The historian Martin Marty gets quickly to the essential point of Bonhoeffer's wide relevance today in a world where church life withers here and abounds elsewhere... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Martin Marty’s Saint for Moderns: Dietrich Bonhoeffer Dietrich Bonhoeffer would be a saint by now if Protestants (Lutherans, in his case) sanctified their best. The historian Martin Marty gets quickly to the essential point of Bonhoeffer's wide relevance today in a world where church life withers here and abounds elsewhere... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Maya Jasanoff on this Empire we Inherited Maya Jasanoff is letting me lay down my how-did-we-become-an-empire obsessions before a rising star among imperial historians. She teaches the Harvard course on the British Empire. William Dalrymple calls her “a bit of a genius” for her big new book Liberty’s Exiles on the English loyalists who fled the US in 1783. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Maya Jasanoff on this Empire we Inherited Maya Jasanoff is letting me lay down my how-did-we-become-an-empire obsessions before a rising star among imperial historians. She teaches the Harvard course on the British Empire. William Dalrymple calls her “a bit of a genius” for her new book on the English loyalists who fled the US ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Arnold Weinstein: The Dimensionality of Reading Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Arnold Weinstein (53 minutes, 26 mb mp3) [Scott Kingsley for the Brown Alumni Magazine] Brown University literature professor Arnold Weinstein is recalling a half-century of reading and teaching books. He’s taking a moment to trace the “Morning, Noon, and Night” — in the title of his new book — of his literary life. He begins, in this conversation, with two books that he read as a senior at Princeton: Melville’s B ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website “A Dirty Shirt at Night”: Jimmy Breslin on … Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Jimmy Breslin (24 minutes, 12 mb mp3) Jimmy Breslin is the newspaper columnist whose gruff prose has extended the whole human comedy of New York to the world, first in the pages of the New York Herald Tribune, and later the Daily News and Newsday. Breslin is telling us the story of Branch Rickey, the owner of the old Brooklyn Dodgers who integrated baseball — and changed our country — when he hired Jackie Robinson back in 1947. Rickey, ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Pratap Mehta: Pakistan’s Perpetual Identity Crisis Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Pratap Bhanu Mehta (30 minutes, 14 mb mp3) Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a political theorist and intellectual historian based in New Delhi, is leading us through another reflection on the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan. The reconsideration of partition is a critical, current existential question not only for South Asians, but also for Americans who watch the continuous outrages from Taliban and CIA sanctuaries inside Pakistan. It’s a que ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Thomas Balmès: An Education in Images Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Thomas Balmès (12 minutes, 6 mb mp3) Director Thomas Balmès on location in Mongolia filming “Babies” [Focus Features photo] Thomas Balmès, the French film documentarian, had a worldwide hit last year with Babies. The movie was all pictures, no dialog. No text, no voice-over. No argument, no “cause.” Just irresistibly patient long shots of newborns and their parents in Namibia, Mongolia, Japan and San Francisco, ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Téa Obreht’s Fable from the War Zone: The Tiger’s Wife Téa Obreht is writing in The Tiger's Wife about the landscape of permanent war and the myths we make up to dull the pain of it. Her writing is in touch with hell, just as she is surely in touch with Dostoevsky... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Melani McAlister: For a New Moral Map of the Middle East Imagine Professor Melani McAlister at home in North Carolina, breaking down this Arab spring for a grandmother who’s not entirely convinced that President Obama is not Muslim. Professor McAlister, an American studies anthropologist at George Washington University ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website André Aciman: “The rest is just prose…” André Aciman has generously, candidly admitted us into the workshop of his meticulous craft. Who else out there honors the master tradition. “No one!” What gets a writer over the threshhold? “Style,” he says. “Content is over-rated.” ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Hamid Dabashi: “A new world giving birth to itself…” Hamid Dabashi is here to calm our nerves through the dreaded American Decline. “Empires don’t last,” he smiles. “If they did, we’d be speaking Persian.” All the news looks bright to the sometimes gruff ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mark Blyth: The Black Swan of Cairo Mark Blyth, the know-it-all professor with the Sean Connery delivery, is back in the pub tonight, and not a moment to soon. When the political economy of energy is screaming red-alert, from Japan melting to Libya’s oilfield civil war, cheerful chatter from a certified political economist can sound like music ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Freedom to Write: China’s Gift to Pittsburgh Henry Reese of Sampsonia Way in Pittsburgh stole the show this Spring at the novelist Robert Coover‘s annual ritual at Brown around the altar of ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website C. D. Wright in Triumph: One With Others C. D. Wright is well known for assembling her patchwork poetry from local and vernacular fragments. Even with fame and standing, she has still the one-of-a-kind comic, passionate, choleric sound of an offbeat oracle of the Arkansas Ozarks, where she grew up... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Alan Lomax and the Salvation of American Song We're listening in awe and gratitude to the all-American sounds that Alan Lomax recorded and saved for all time. There's outlaw minstrel Huddie Ledbetter, known as Lead Belly, singing a cocaine ode "Take a Whiff on Me" in 1934. Then Woody Guthrie ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Anthony Burgess: Language as Music, and Vice Versa Paul Phillips is leading us here in a long digression — a step into yet another alternate universe of the odd genius who wrote A Clockwork Orange. Anthony Burgess thought his famous tale (and movie!) of mindless mayhem was perhaps the least of his efforts, but what he really wanted ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Andre Dubus III: How “The Fighter” Became The Writer Andre Dubus III has written a Dickensian memoir in a Mark Wahlberg sort of setting. Townie is the tale of a bullied little boy (eldest son of a Louisiana family in a broken-down Massachusetts mill town) becoming, first, a one-punch knockout street fighter, and later a National Book Award finalist for The House of Sand and Fog. ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Parag Khanna: Why Nobody Runs the World Parag Khanna — the young freelance adventurer, noticer and scorekeeper in geo-politics — broke the news in the mainstream press three years ago that the United States’ “unipolar moment” had expired ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Peter Hessler’s New China: Is this any way to live? Peter Hessler, covering the new China for The New Yorker, made himself the rising star of the John McPhee school of reporting. It’s not just that ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Philip Weiss: A Jewish Argument around the Arab Revolt Philip Weiss, exulting in the glorious news from Egypt, says: “the handwriting on the wall is Arabic.” Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Jaimy Gordon’s Racetrack Revelation in Lord of Misrule Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Jaimy Gordon. (45 minutes, 20 mb mp3) Jaimy Gordon impels us to find the other great small-press writers we’ve never heard of. She is this winter’s longshot winner of the National Book Award, for her gorgeous racetrack novel Lord of Misrule. The 40-to-1 payoff is  … Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Elliott Colla: “The Poetry of Revolt” in the New Egypt Elliott Colla is sharing the soundtrack in his head of Egyptian revolts, today and yesterday, going back to the 1880s. Poets were invariably major players — in heady, optimistic, galvanizing roles as popular risings took off. Novelists (including the great Naguib Mafouz) got the darker job ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Rana Dasgupta: This Era of Catastrophe and Euphoria Rana Dasgupta is a lyrical novelist with a philo- sophical bent and an air of prophecy about him. Twin themes seem to absorb him, about life ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website India-Pakistan: Vazira Zamindar on the raw wound of Partition Vazira Zamindar is filling in a critical back story of fury and fear in our world, The Long Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 and after. It was one of the great post-colonial wounds, and it keeps on wounding, visibly and invisibly. Partition has been the root of endless public miseries: ethnic cleansing, chronic warfare, constructed “national” and religious hatreds ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Shiva Balaghi: Egypt in the Spotlight; the US on the Spot Shiva Balaghi is relaying cellphone news from her friends in Tahrir Square in Cairo. Between calls, so to speak, she is weighing the warnings, heard in Israel and the States, that it could be Iran all over again, Egypt on a road to mullocracy. It’s the sort of suspicion, she’s saying, that could create the scenario that it fears the most. An Iranian-American, born in Nashville, grown up in Tehran ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Whose Words These Are: Christian Wiman’s “Wound of Being” Christian Wiman didn’t plan it this way but his poetry is now entwined with his grave illness and his engagement with God and faith. He grew up in West Texas, amidst the “eyesore opulence” of his poem “Five Houses Down.” He’s lived all over ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website David Rohde’s Taliban Captivity: And the moral is… Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with David Rohde and Kristen Mulvihill. (41 minutes, 20 mb mp3) What can Taliban captivity do to a man’s judgment, even to his soul? It made David Rohde root for the CIA’s drone missiles buzzing on the horizon, even when his captors assured him the drones were hunting for  … Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Howard French on Africa in a Chinese Century Fifty years almost to the day after the catastrophic assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo — a Cold War murder by Belgium with help from our CIA — the journalist Howard French is sketching an alternative path ahead for African development today. China is the big investor in 21st ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Lydia Davis: Miniatures from a Mind on Fire Lydia Davis keeps popping up in conversation as a favorite writer of our favorite writers — Rae Armantrout, the Pulitzer poet, among them, and the novelist Robert Coover. Dan Chiasson makes her Collected Stories “one of the great books in recent literature, equal parts ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mohammed Hanif’s Af-Pak: A Case of Exploding Absurdities Mohammed Hanif, the Pakistani novelist, is observing from Karachi that “even the believers” don’t believe in the war in Afghanistan anymore. No statement of purpose passes the “you’ve got to be kidding" test ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mohammed Hanif’s Af-Pak: A Case of Exploding Absurdities Mohammed Hanif, the Pakistani novelist, is observing from Karachi that “even the believers” don’t believe in the war in Afghanistan anymore. No statement of purpose passes the “you’ve got to be kidding" test ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Knowing Jesse: Among the Books of 2010, a Life Lesson Marianne Leone Cooper wrote the book that stuck to my ribs at the end of 2010: Knowing Jesse. Way off our usual path, it is a book that ambushes the heart, that confronts our numbness with numbers and the new. It’s a book that feeds our neglected hunger for a humanistic revival, for a transformation of consciousness. ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Nir Rosen: the Iraq and Af-Pak Wars, at the Receiving End Nir Rosen is the rare war correspondent who covers Iraq and Afghanistan as if there are real people in pain on the ground. He offers a fiercely "alternative" view of US wars in the region: blind brutality, he says, is our key contribution. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website David Bromwich on the “Disappointment in Obama” Click to listen David Bromwich, the Sterling Professor of English at Yale, reads Barack Obama like a book — as if he were a book, that is. With the novelist Zadie Smith, he often seems to me the only commentator worth reading on Obama, precisely because they bring literary tools and imagination to  … Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mark Blyth (2) : 2011 Will Be Worse… and Life Will Go On Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Mark Blyth (27 minutes, 13 mb mp3) Photo from Mark Blyth’s Austerity video Mark Blyth is back in the pub tonight, played by Sean Connery, as usual, and demonstrating again how far a man can go in political economy just by talking fast and infallibly with a  … Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Wikileaks: A Simulation of Net Wars to Come Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with James Der Derian and Ronald Deibert (37 minutes, 18 mb mp3) With Net thinkers James Der Derian at Brown and Ron Deibert at the Univesity of Toronto, we’re looking for a new lede on the Wikileaks story. Julian Assange, poor devil, is the least of it — even  … Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Chris Hedges: We’re Missing Our Safety Valve Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Chris Hedges (41 minutes, 20 mb mp3) Chris Hedges, among those anxious prophets to whom attention must be paid, is a sort of George Carlin without the laugh lines. Grim obituarist of our empire, democracy and culture, the ex-New York Times war reporter is gabbing with  … Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Rainer Maria Rilke for Beginners: Whose Words These Are (31) Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Damion Searls (54 minutes, 26 mb mp3) When Rilke was dying in 1926 — of a rare and particularly agonizing blood disease — he received a letter from the young Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva. “You are not the poet I love most,” she wrote to him. “‘Most’ already  … Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website C. K. Williams on Whitman’s Music: Whose Words These Are (30) Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with C. K. Williams (42 minutes, 20 mb mp3) C. K. Williams is giving us his luminous, really rapturous, account of a lifetime reading Walt Whitman. Something changed just a few years ago — then moreso when C. K. Williams, himself a lavishly decorated poet, decided to  … Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ian Morris’s East-West History of an Endangered Species: Us Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Ian Morris (53 minutes, 26 mb mp3) There are a few little things missing in Ian Morris‘ account of human history. People, for starters. Humanity. Ideas. Causes. Nations. Heroes. Monsters, too. Conscious movements of any kind. There’s no Magna Carta, and there are no messiahs, no  … Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mark Blyth on Ireland: The Circle will not be Squared Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Mark Blyth (27 minutes, 13 mb mp3) Mark Blyth, of Austerity fame and the Watson Institute, has a Scot’s vernacular gift for clarifying economics. Is the situation explosive? “You’ve got 300 million Americans and 500 million handguns. And 72 percent of Americans that live paycheck to  … Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mark Blyth on Ireland: The Circle will not be Squared Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Mark Blyth (27 minutes, 13 mb mp3) Mark Blyth, of Austerity fame and the Watson Institute, has a Scot’s vernacular gift for clarifying economics. Is the situation explosive? “You’ve got 300 million Americans and 500 million handguns. And 72 percent of Americans that live paycheck to  … Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website James Kaplan's Sinatra: "…an almost operatic version of the blues" Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with James Kaplan (52 minutes, 25 mb mp3) With biographer James Kaplan, we’re listening to Frank Sinatra sing “I’ll Be Around” and realizing that, of course, he kept his word. The Voice is still a believable foghorn in the mist of “your love life, your life life,”  … Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Dennis Lehane: Between Dorchester Ave and Sunset Boulevard Click here to listen to Chris’ conversation with Dennis Lehane (20 meg 42 min) Dennis Lehane so rules the neighborhood of Noir (“Nwaaah,” as we say in Boston) that he gets street credit for work he didn’t write, like “The Departed” and “The Town.” But does the author of “Mystic River,” “Gone Baby Gone” and  … Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Najam Sethi: A Pakistani Prescription for Af-Pak Peace Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Najam Sethi (36 minutes, 18 mb mp3) Photo: Juliana Friend Najam Sethi is the man any of us would want to know in Pakistan. He’s the man we might like — on a very brave day — to be. He’s got the voice of a reasonable Pakistani  … Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Kwame Anthony Appiah: How to Make a Moral Revolution Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Pervez Hoodbhoy (43 minutes, 21 mb mp3) Kwame Anthony Appiah in The Honor Code is inviting all of us to pick the “moral revolution” of our dreams and let him show us how to get big results fast. His exemplary case histories start with the end  … Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Vishwas Satgar: the Political Economy of FIFA Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Vishwas Satgar. (29 minutes, 13 mb mp3) Vishwas Satgar has a half-time message from South Africa for World Cup watchers. It’s a quick introduction to “the political economy of soccer” that won’t dent any grown-up’s pleasure in the athletic or human spectacle — no more than, say, the [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Steve Kinzer’s ‘Reset’ Roles for Turkey and Iran Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Stephen Kinzer. (44 minutes, 21 mb mp3) Stephen Kinzer is a journalist of a certain cheeky fearlessnes and exquisite timing. In his new book he’s ahead of the game again. The ink was barely dry on Kinzer’s Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America’s Future, when events conspired late [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website This “Year of India” (9): Patrick Heller’s Measure of Change Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Patrick Heller. (46 minutes, 21 mb mp3) Patrick Heller was 16 years old, a school boy, when his Swiss parents moved to New Delhi in the late 1970s. India became his school — his inescapable “ethnographic experience” of second-class trains; overwhelming heat and color; radical poverty and welcoming, [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The “Fragility” Crisis is Just Begun Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Nassim Taleb (45 min, 22 mb mp3) Nassim Nicholas Taleb is one of the great wiseguys or wisemen of the moment. Quite possibly both. For a world that wants better than the fatuous “perfect storm” account of the economic meltdown — or of BP’s gusher in the Gulf, [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Whose Words These Are (27): Dan Chiasson, the Natural Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Dan Chiasson. (50 minutes, 24 mb mp3) Nancy Crampton photo       Dan Chiasson has the easy charm of a natural New England oracle, in a tradition encompassing Emily Dickinson and William James, Robert Frost and Robert Lowell. When he reads the poem “Train” from his new book Where’s the [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Damion Searls: A Thoreau Journal for Writers & Moderns Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Damion Searls (48 min, 23 mb mp3) Damion Searls has found and freed the lean, shapely and modern American classic inside the very definition of a “baggy monster.” Henry David Thoreau’s 25-year Journal ran to more than 7000 manuscript pages and 2-million words, roughly double the heft of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Whose Words These Are (26): Pulitzer Poet Rae Armantrout Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Rae Armantrout. (47 minutes, 23 mb mp3) Rae Armantrout, this year’s Pulitzer Prize poet, calls her stance “quizzical.” Fellow poets and critics write of her “oppositional temperament” (Steve Burt), of an impulse “to countermand, rather than to express” (Dan Chiasson). She is speaking in our conversation of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Kai Bird: Cancel the Apocalypse Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Kai Bird (33 min, 16 mb mp3) Kai Bird, as a Pulitzer-grade biographer and historian, is drawn to the apocalyptic. He’s been “obsessed with things atomic,” as he says — with bomb scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer; with the Bundy “Brothers in Arms,” McGeorge and William; and now with [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Amartya Sen: This Open-Ended “Year of India” (8) Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Amartya Sen (47 min, 21 mb mp3) Amartya Sen at home in Cambridge, before his hero John Rawls Amartya Sen, when I ask about this “Year of India,” quips that the biggest change in the “new” India is in our non-Indian heads. Meaning: that common wisdom has finally [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Graham Robb’s Paris: 18 Arrested Explosions Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Graham Robb (49 min, 30 mb mp3) Graham Robb is making France and the French irresistible again. With an entirely unconventional gift for historically-informed tale-spinning, his Parisians delivers nearly a score of long anecdotes about famous people in real scenes beyond imagining. Here is Hitler on a [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Bill McKibben: Coming into View, Another Eaarth Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Bill McKibben (33 min, 15 mb mp3) “That picture… a beautiful blue-white marble floating through the black empty void of space… is as out of date as my high school yearbook photo. It’s kind of the reverse of my high school yearbook photo. I have more white up [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website David Remnick: The “Race” Route over Obama’s “Bridge” Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with David Remnick. (27 minutes, 16 mb mp3) David Remnick is hanging out and indulging me here, late on a book-tour evening, in a little polite rattling of the racial premise of his Obama story, The Bridge. Race is Remnick’s theme — through young Obama’s assembling of an identity; [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mustafa Barghouti: Is there Room for Gandhi in Palestine? Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Mustafa Barghouti. (53 minutes, 32 mb mp3) Ask Palestinians why there is no Gandhi in their movement, and often the answer comes: but there are several, and Mustafa Barghouti should be recognized more widely as one of them. A medical doctor, born in Jerusalem in 1954, trained both [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Anthony Shadid: Questions a Reporter Asks Himself Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Anthony Shadid. (60 minutes, 36 mb mp3) I find it almost painful to come to the States… I tell you, part of me is convinced that the legacy of this war is that Americans come away thinking we figured out how to win wars like this. [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website David Hoffman: A Running Tour of YouTube Nation Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with David Hoffman. (58 minutes, 27 mb mp3) David Hoffman produced 88 PBS documentary features and five feature-length films over a forty-year career. But that was then. And this is a guy whose life keeps starting over. Always interestingly. We’ve shared before our adventures with [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website James Kwak: The Problem is Bank-o-cracy Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with James Kwak. (42 minutes, 19 mb mp3) James Kwak extends Michael Lewis’s point and feeds my fascination with apocalyptic hysteria and helpless torpor as the twin markers of American politics these days. He makes it believable that the angry Tea Party wackitude in the far countryside and the [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Michael Lewis’ Big Short and Our Appetite for Apocalypse Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Michael Lewis. (44 minutes, 26 mb mp3) Michael Lewis is the non-fiction novelist of our apocalyptic American mindset in 2010. The heroes of The Big Short, as he puts it in conversation “were betting on the end of the world… The only characters you can really trust are [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website David Shields’ Reality Hunger: Kicking Ass and Dropping Names Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with David Shields. (59 minutes, 27 mb mp3) David Shields practices what he preaches. Aphorisms in the Nietzsche manner are the coin of the literary realm that surfaces in his manifesto, Reality Hunger. In conversation, aphorisms seem to come as naturally to David Shields as fugues came [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Colum McCann: American Literature and New York’s Redemption Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Colum McCann. (57 minutes, 34 mb mp3) Colum McCann wrote the New Yorkiest and, many feel, the best of 9.11 novels, Let the Great World Spin, and won the National Book Award for it. Vertiginous thrills and delights of every kind abound in the poetic density of the [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Arundhati Roy’s Version of Disaster in this “Year of India” (7) Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Arundhati Roy. (52 minutes, 31 mb mp3) Arundhati Roy is giving us “the other side of the story” in this “Year of India” at Brown University and elsewhere. Media consumers in the US don’t get it all in the TED talks, or in Nandan Nilekani’s success epic, much [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ted Bogosian: Confessions of a Truth Hound Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Ted Bogosian. (28 minutes, 17 mb mp3) Ted Bogosian is one of those uncommon journalists and filmmakers for whom the stark truth of the matter is all that counts. Truth at the far pole from truthiness. Emotional truth. Historical truth. Negotiable truth, which is to [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Nell Painter’s History of White People: it’s coming to an end 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. In The History of White People, she makes Emerson “the philosopher king of American white race theory.” On the contrary, I say he was [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website This “Year of India” (6): What’s Wrong with our Afghan War Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Siddharth Varadarajan. (30 minutes, 18 mb mp3) The dirty little secret of the US drone war in Afghanistan is that the civilian “kill rate” is worse in the Obama “surge” than it was in the bad old Bush war. The dirty little sequel is that our friends in [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Jared Malsin: the kid next door reports from Bethlehem Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Jared Malsin. (27 minutes, 16 mb mp3) Jared Malsin looks, sounds and writes like your bright and earnest American kid from down the street. Until two months ago, he was reporting in the Palestinian Territories for Ma’an News Agency. A dozen voices like his in our ears, telling [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Healthcare: in the post-game booth with James Morone Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with James Morone. (42 minutes, 26 mb mp3) “Show him a poltical near-death experience, and this guy rallies!” James Morone has been telling us all along that healthcare politics was peculiarly personal — this business of medicine and presidents and policy, starting with Franklin Roosevelt’s polio and Dwight Eisenhower’s heart crises [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Linda Nathan’s Public HS for Artists, Scholars and Citizens Click to listen to Chris’s field trip to Boston Arts Academy. (55 minutes, 33 mb mp3) For 20-plus years Linda Nathan has been showing me the peaks of effort, originality, achievement and humanity! that are possible in big-city public schools. And now she is sharing her hard-won mountain-top lessons in a manual for anybody who [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Whose Words These Are (25): Fabienne Casseus’ Broken Haiti Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Fabienne Casseus (16 min, 7 mb mp3) Fabienne Casseus is a 17-year-old poet of young Haiti, broken Haiti, corpse-like Haiti, where she witnesses that a strong heart is still beating. Fabienne is a senior at a pilot public high school in Boston, “Another Course to College.” She came [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Whose Words These Are (24): Eli Marienthal’s Spoken-Word Haiti Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Eli Marienthal (15 min, 7 mb mp3) Eli Marienthal’s Haiti story is about a little-boy obsession with his Haitian twin, met on the first of many trips to Haiti to visit his father. The earthquake this winter seems to have jolted loose his fixation, toward insight and action. Eli is [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Whose Words These Are (23): Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell’s Haiti Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell (24 min, xxxxx mb mp3) “Looking in” by Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell is an oil almost six feet wide, in the collection of Partners in Health. Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell is a Haitian-American artist in prose, paint and poetry. She speaks to us a poem about the January earthquake, in [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Whose Words These Are (22): Peace-Poet Fred Marchant Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Fred Marchant (17 min, 8 mb mp3) Fred Marchant approaches the unspeakable horror and loss of life in the Haiti earthquake with a gingerly air of obligation. It’s the poet’s job, he says, to find words and speak them. His instructions came from his teacher of old, [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Shahriar Mandanipour: The ‘Love’ Cure for Iran Shahriar Mandanipour’s novel from exile, Censoring an Iranian Love Story, is the back-story of the shockingly brave green-banded resistance we watched on TV till the regime cracked down on reporting… and Michael Jackson died. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Shahriar Mandanipour (68 minutes, 31 mb mp3) CNN pictures of a botched election and [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ronald Prinn and MIT’s Wheel of Fortune Ronald Prinn is talking about what was arguably the biggest little news story on earth so far this year. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Ronald Prinn (31 minutes, 14 mb mp3) Ronald Prinn: it’s a planet changer It came from MIT’s global climate project: which reported in effect that the warming of the planet is [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Juan Enriquez: The Next Boom, by Zipcode There is no rescuing this economy from our debt, denial and epic implosions like General Motors and the city of Detroit. The only hope is that our unfinished season of disaster will be inundated (and the new economy floated) by a flood of invention. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Juan Enriquez. (27 [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Alfred Gusenbauer: Euro-Socialism in America Maybe Newt Gingrich is right — that Americans are getting used to something like European Socialism in this Bush-to-Obama bankruptcy and bailout era. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Alfred Gusenbauer. (38 minutes, 17 mb mp3) Alfred Gusenbauer: desperate? serious? Alfred Gusenbauer seems to think so. Austria’s hearty 49-year-old former chancellor, who may be [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland: the Novel of the Age I make two guesses here: that Barack Obama knows almost as little about cricket as I do (which is: zero); and further (much more interesting) that the president has found in Joseph O’Neill’s cricket-in-New York novel Netherland a sort of founding text for this turnabout era, this reconciling moment we seem to have entered, this [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Thoreau’s Fire: the Spark of “Walden” Baskin’s Thoreau: nickel first-class (1967) Is it too late to celebrate Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862) with an honest, unblushing American face? Have we laid too much pavement, built too many Cheesecake Factories in too many malls, imprisoned and executed too many harmless rejects and overextended our military rule too far ever to put [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ken Robinson & John Maeda: Creativity for Breakfast Sir Ken Robinson does most of the talking, over breakfast here, on the sketchy matter of “creativity” and the teaching of it. John Maeda, in the gossamer blazer and scarf, is the work in progress. Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with John Maeda and Sir Ken Robinson. (24 minutes, 11 mb mp3) Both men are [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Calabash 2009: A View of Us in the Age of Obama Jamaican wisdom: “When a black man becomes President of the USA, pigs will fly. And then what happened? Swine flu.” In Philip Womack’s dispatch from Calabash in the London Telegraph, June 2, 2009. Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with Melvin Van Peebles, Xu Xi, Robert Pinsky and Kwame Dawes. (41 minutes, 19 mb mp3) This [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Marlon James: “You’re headless without history…” Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Marlon James. (50 minutes, 23 mb mp3) Poets and writers come to the Calabash literary festival in Jamaica from every corner of the world, and still the overpowering voice in the fiction readings belongs to a native son from down the road in Kingston. Marlon James, in his second [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Pico Iyer in Jamaica: center of word and world Calabash, the Caribbean literary festival, is an outdoor church of the written word, rocking and resonating on the south coast of Jamaica with the voices of poets and writers from Hong Kong, New York, Barbados, Nigeria, London, San Diego and Boston, among other home addresses. In this first of our conversations from Treasure Beach, Pico [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Aleksandar Hemon: through bi-focals, darkly Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Aleksandar Hemon (25 minutes, 11 mb mp3) Aleksandar Hemon: funny people, sad tales What the Bosnian-American fictionist Aleksandar Hemon loves about being compared to Vladimir Nabokov is not the part about mastering English as a new language — praise Hemon doesn’t feel he’s earned quite yet. What pleases Hemon [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Colm Toibin: the living spell of Henry James Colm Toibin at the James family graves: “hallowed ground” of novels, diaries, sacrifice. “It’s very rare.” Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with novelist Colm Toibin. (44 minutes, 22 mb mp3) After The Master, his breakthrough meditation on Henry James, there’s no detaching the Irish novelist Colm Toibin from James’ own “dramatizations of secrecy.” Toibin’s [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website George Scialabba: the untethered, untenured mind In this world of overrated pleasures and underrated treasures, as the songwriter said, I’m glad there is George Scialabba. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with George Scialabba (44 minutes, 20 mb mp3) George Scialabba: ideas as life, not a living In the din, that is, of over-caffeinated wonks and touts who pass for thinkers, I [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Reif Larsen: the Making of the “Spivet” Legend Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Reif Larsen (45 minutes, 20 mb mp3) Reif Larsen: stories, pictures and margins! Maybe there are two Reif Larsens. One is, at 29, the precocious savior of the collapsing book business — the game-changer, anyway, who in a desperately down market got $900,000 for his first novel, with foreign [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Paul Harding’s Magical‘Tinkers’ Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Paul Harding (58 minutes, 26 mb mp3) What is the rock drummer thinking? Well, if he’s the dazzling first-novelist Paul Harding of Tinkers, the guy at the drums in the band known as “Cold Water Flat” was channeling Elvin Jones, reinventing time with his own hands and feet [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Angles on Empire: Book Week at Brown Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with James Der Derian and Catherine Lutz (46 minutes, 21 mb mp3) We’re taking two fresh measures here of the United States as military colossus — in two new books from the Watson Institute this spring. Two common points here: you won’t forget these perspectives once you’ve taken in [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website David Kennedy: Requiem for Human Rights? Twenty five years ago on a human-rights mission to Uruguay, David Kennedy fashioned the legal argument that freed five tortured prisoners (mostly medical students) from prison under a military dictatorship. The odd part is that Kennedy (now Brown University’s vice president for international affairs) came away from his own adventure with doubts of all [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Amitav Ghosh & Robert Coover: Speaking of Burma Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with Amitav Ghosh and Robert Coover (17 minutes, 8 mb mp3) Amitav Ghosh & Robert Coover Our conversation draws on the novelist Robert Coover’s exercise of conscience about freedom of expression in the world. Today. Burma was the focus this week of what’s become an annual International Writers’ Project [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Carlos Fuentes: FDR to BHO: the New Deal Revisited “What a pleasure,” Carlos Fuentes was saying, “to speak praises of the United States again.” Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with Carlos Fuentes (22 minutes, 10 mb mp3) Mexico’s statuesque novelist, the handsomest, best-tailored writer in the world, sounds euphoric in spite of The Crisis — maybe because, as Brazil’s President Lula has said, “we didn’t [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website “Waltz with Bashir”: the Art Director’s Cut at War Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with David Polonsky, James Der Derian, Amy Kravitz and Keith Brown about “Waltz with Bashir” (31 minutes, 14 mb mp3) David Polonsky: “Waltz with Bashir” is the Israeli war film that broke through to everything but an Oscar. It’s the “documentary cartoon” that uses the visual language of comic [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website James Carroll: Practicing “Americanist” Catholic Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with James Carroll (56 minutes, 26 mb mp3) “Practicing” — meaning: James Carroll: radical, pastoral, sacramental …that through these disciplines, rituals, and searches, we have some prospect of getting better. This, therefore, is practice like the practice of an art or sport. That we are practicing means, above [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Obama Effect: a Rebirth of Global Politics We are hanging out here at an improvised Clubhouse of Candid Social Democratic Statesmen. Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with Ricardo Lagos and Romano Prodi (61 minutes, 28 mb mp3) The drift of the conversation is that the global crisis is a mix of comeuppance and liberation. The crisis is surely an end of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mahmood Mamdani: You (and I) got Darfur Wrong Click to listen to Chris’s conversations with Mahmood Mamdani (59 minutes, 25 mb mp3) Who can imagine that a Save Darfur coalition vocally including Al Sharpton (”we know when America comes together, we can stop anything in the world”), Mia Farrow, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Elie Wiesel (”Darfur today is the world’s capital of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website After Gaza: The road back from shame and silence Henry Siegman: a “fierce urgency” How many setbacks does it take to induce moral clarity, or to create an opportunity? This seems to be the general question at the Harvard-MIT conference on Gaza this week. In the short term, horror seems to freeze hearts and harden old positions. The hundred-to-one ratio of Palestinian [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The President of Flow… and the end of Hip Hop? What if “My President is black” is a reset button, marking the end of a cultural era? Just talking here again about the hip hop pulse of Obama Nation. Tricia Rose says the President of Flow will be (surely ought to be) the death of commercial hip hop… of the last decade’s giant [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Obama as Gorbachev: a Regime in Crisis Click to listen to Chris’s conversations on the global crisis. (37 minutes, 17 mb mp3) 1. Unless the West suddenly gets a new act together, China wins the global crisis — because it has cash, a production machine, an orderly, top-down system co-designed by Milton Friedman and Stalin, and a domestic market of customers if [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Obama & Hip Hop: The Transracial Drumbeat Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Adam Bradley. (47 minutes, 21 mb mp3) Adam Bradley is talking about the President of Flow — about how 30 years of hip-hop (”the most widely disseminated poetry in the history of the world”) laid down the rhyme-and-rhythm track for the Age of Obama. Add this to the [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Fred Kaplan on the Neo-Cons: Daytime Dreamers Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Fred Kaplan and James Der Derian. (61 minutes, 28 mb mp3) Fred Kaplan: a short history of bad ideas Fred Kaplan, the “War Stories” columnist at Slate, reminds us in his trashing of the Bush-Cheney neo-cons, Daydream Believers, not only that his barbed book title comes from T. E. Lawrence, [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Blindspot: Lepore and Kamensky in Olde Boston Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore. (45 minutes, 21 mb mp3) Kamensky & Lepore: 2 madwomen, 1 attic Blindspot is a lark, with lessons. First, about sex and slavery in 18th Century Boston, where you didn’t expect to find so much of either. And then, about the writing of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Parag Khanna: Anxious in Afghanistan Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Parag Khanna. (29 minutes, 13 mb mp3) Parag Khanna Parag Khanna reads and sounds to me like the sane, worldly-wise, long-view alternative to the mainstream bloviators about American power in this new Age of Obama. His breakthrough piece in the New York Times Magazine just a year ago was [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Jonah Lehrer: Brain Science for the Rest of Us Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Jonah Lehrer. (47 minutes, 22 mb mp3) Jonah Lehrer The joy of reading Jonah Lehrer is that he’s scientist enough to navigate oceans of brain-science lab reports. He knows the neural pathways where Blink meets Nudge. But he’s literature bug and humanist enough to remember that the proper study [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Dave McKenna: My Private Collection of the Master Click to listen to Dave McKenna playing and talking music on Chris’ piano. (87 minutes, 40 mb mp3) Dave McKenna chez Lydon: Jeff Dunn photo Dave McKenna called himself a saloon pianist, but nobody else did. The genius Art Tatum heard in Dave a sort of successor. Miles Davis’s great collaborator Bill Evans found in [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Dave McKenna: My Private Collection of the Master Click to listen to Dave McKenna playing and talking music on Chris’ piano. (87 minutes, 40 mb mp3) Dave McKenna chez Lydon: Jeff Dunn photo Dave McKenna called himself a saloon pianist, but nobody else did. The genius Art Tatum heard in Dave a sort of successor. Miles Davis’s great collaborator Bill Evans found in [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Obama’s Lincoln: The Writer and the Imperial Crisis Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Fred Kaplan. (66 minutes, 30 mb mp3) Presidential reading: Fred Kaplan’s Lincoln Fred Kaplan’s new biography of Abraham Lincoln, the writer, the “Mark Twain of our politics,” leaves no doubt that the log-cabin president who freed the slaves and saved the Union would stand in any event with the literary [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Palestinian Who Knows (or Knew) the President Rashid Khalidi’s most promising remembrance of his friend Barack Obama is only obliquely political. On a University of Chicago tennis court about a decade ago, when Khalidi’s regular game didn’t show, he asked law professor Obama if he played, and wanted to fill in. Naw, Obama said, he wasn’t a tennis player; had [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Barack Obama: What Kind of Insider? Brown Bag (V) Glenn Loury shares an intimate sort of rumination here on who Barack Hussein Obama really is — or who he will turn out to have been. What will small things, like the choice of the Sidwell Friends School for Sasha and Malia, or big things like the war in Afghanistan, end up telling us [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Chafee Chides Obama on Gaza: Brown Bag (IV) Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Lincoln Chafee at the Watson Institute, January 29, 2009. (13 minutes, 6 mb mp3) Lincoln Chafee: peace first I wouldn’t call Lincoln Chafee child-like, but he does have the penetrating eye of the innocent kid who sees through magicians’ tricks — who speaks up about what emperors are wearing, or [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Obama Channels John F. Kennedy: Brown Bag (III) Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with James Blight at the Watson Institute, January 29, 2009. (25 minutes, 12 mb mp3) James Blight: “…don’t believe them.” Revisionist Cold War historian James Blight — the scholar behind Errol Morris’ “Fog of War” documentary with Robert McNamara — drops a resonant thought I’d never considered: that every day of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Obama and the Prophetic Tradition: Brown Bag (II) Barack Obama’s connection to the “black prophetic tradition” is the open question here in conversation with Anthony Bogues, the Jamaica-born chairman of Africana Studies at Brown. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Anthony Bogues. (24 minutes, 11 mb mp3) Anthony Bogues: the lifting of a veil In breaking through the skin-color barrier in American politics, [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Age of Obama: Ten Days In: The Brown Bag (I) Ten days into the “long now” of President Barack Obama, we’re embarked on an unsystematic series of conversations about the man and what feels more like music than politics. The philosophical text in this exchange is from Frank Sinatra, as quoted by Bono the other day in “Notes from the Chairman” in the New [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website John Updike: Ted Williams of Our Prose Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with John Updike from December 4, 2000. (50 minutes, 23 mb mp3) John Updike [Nubar Alexanian for NPR] John Updike had every kind of grace about him, including for me an aura of divine blessing. I liked his religious inquiries better than the [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website New Orleans, the Recovery Model: Ned Sublette Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Ned Sublette. (35 minutes, 16 mb mp3) Ned Sublette: new conditions… new music The conversation here, on the eve of the great deliverance at noon on Tuesday, dwells on one of the signature scars of the Bush era, the wounded city of New Orleans. One last swift kick on [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website One Man’s Mix of Cuban Music: Roberto Zurbano I asked Robero Zurbano for the impossible: a short course on Cuban music. Say, a flight across the 60 years since Chano Pozo met Dizzy Gillespie… in something less than 60 minutes. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Roberto Zurbano. (33 minutes, 15 mb mp3) Roberto Zurbano: “the story of the Cuban nation” Teacher, [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website “Our Putin” and Son: the Bushes Revealed Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Russ Baker. (36 minutes, 16 mb mp3) Russ Baker: “on assignment… but not ours” A perceptual gap is at the essence of the Bush enterprise. The actuality has tended toward wars for resources and the preservation of class prerogative, all abetted by secrecy, intimidation and the dark arts of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Music as a civic “conspiracy”: George Mathew George Mathew’s extraordinary musical project unfolds anew tonight at Carnegie Hall. On the bill is the longest symphony in the standard repertoire, Mahler’s Third, with a couple of hundred star performers on stage, all for the benefit of Children of AIDS. The mission, grander even than the materials, might be titled: Music is [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Cuba’s Healthcare Revolution… for the rest of us Cuba’s revolutionary vanguard: US medical students Keasha Guerrier, Kereese Gayle and Akua Brown Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with three American medical students in Cuba. (48 minutes, 22 mb mp3) This trip to Cuba turned around on an astonishing moment of serendipity. At a bus stop in Havana my colleague Paul McCarthy heard a laugh [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Enchantment and Ruin: Mario Coyula’s Havana Alluring Wreckage: from Robert Polidori’s impressions of Centro Havana, facing the Malecon Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Architect Mario Coyula. (43 minutes, 20 mb mp3) Havana by now can be imagined as one city in two countries. The fiery splendor of Old Havana has emptied money and momentum and much of its future into [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Our Music Man in Havana: Bobby Carcasses The polite name for it was folklore, but it was the daily stuff of peoples’ lives. Dancing and music were never very far away, It didn’t mean people were happy. It meant that — not for all Cubans, but for many — dancing was the way they walked, and singing was the [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Grand Strategy: Posen on Obama Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Barry Posen (33 min, 15 MB) Barry Posen is a very smart, connected foreign-policy “realist” who runs the MIT Security Studies Program.  He was one of those prized 33 policy types who signed the New York Times ad in September, 2002, arguing that “War with Iraq is not in [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website In the Obama Moment: Robert Coover Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Robert Coover. (47 minutes, 22 mb mp3) Robert Coover: Where we’ve always been… Robert Coover — in contrast to Rick Moody — would give you the measure of what doesn’t change. Coover’s parody version of America, going back to The Origin of the Brunists in 1966, is a nutbag [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website In the Obama Moment: Rick Moody Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Rick Moody. (36 minutes, 16 mb mp3) Rick Moody: Rabbit’s kids reach middle age The novelist Rick Moody is one measure of what has changed. He has been known as a generational figure, the “wrathful” child of the fiction he grew up reading, “striking a blow,” as he puts [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Indispensable Musician: Barenboim Backstage Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Daniel Barenboim. (32 minutes, 15 mb mp3) Daniel Barenboim: every day from scratch Daniel Barenboim’s conversation starts high as a kite on the fumes of the Wagner he’s been rehearsing, then lands with both feet on the Middle East. “The situation in the Middle East has never been so bad,” [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Amitav Ghosh and his Sea of Poppies Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Amitav Ghosh. (67 minutes, 31 mb mp3) Amitav Ghosh: on addiction and amnesia The Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh brings the British Empire to life again — the other side of the story, so to speak, from the other side of the world. If we’d had his wondrous new novel, [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Our Better Angel: Chris Adrian Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Chris Adrian. (44 minutes, 20 mb mp3) Chris Adrian: Pain’s Artist, Doctor, Minister The writer Chris Adrian is a medical doctor, a pediatric oncologist, who seems to have known from the beginning that our bodies are not the problem. I think of Beatrice, an attempted suicide, “the jumping lady,” [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website This Pariah-to-Messiah Moment: John Comaroff Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with John Comaroff. (52 minutes, 24 mb mp3) The Obama Moment in America reminds the Chicago anthropologist John Comaroff of the Mandela Moment in his native South Africa in the early 1990s. The whole world has embraced the Obama Moment as its own, Comaroff says, because it marks “the [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website New Conversation, New Narrative: Stanley Fish Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Stanley Fish. (41 minutes, 19 mb mp3) Stanley Fish: Paradise Regained? Stanley Fish made the campaign’s most audacious — also the most thoughtful — attribution of a certain aspect of divinity to Barack Obama. Fish was a Milton scholar before he became a culture warrior and, more recently, the [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Hunter’s Evidence: Carlo Ginzburg Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with micro-historians Carlo Ginzburg and David Kertzer. In Carlo Ginzburg’s beautifully extended metaphor, the original public intellectual was the Stone Age hunter: Carlo Ginzburg: the historian as card shark Man has been a hunter for thousands of years. In the course of countless chases he learned to reconstruct the shapes [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Thank you, Studs Terkel! Click to listen to Studs Terkel declaiming on the gap between Walt Whitman’s America and ours. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Campaign‘08: How was it for you, Jim Fishkin? James Fishkin’s ideal democracy is ruled by “the voice of the people, when they are thinking.” Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with James Fishkin (52 minutes, 24 mb mp3) James Fishkin: a thinking democracy? A political scientist long at the University of Texas, now at Stanford, he is the Johnny Appleseed of “deliberative democracy” — [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Longer View of 2008: Historian Gordon Wood What does a real historian make of this 2008 election that we all (reflexively now) call “historic”? Gordon Wood: a lot of Lincoln in Obama This is our opportunity with Gordon Wood – ace historian of 18th Century America at Brown, the trump card that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck invoked in the famous Cambridge [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website J. S. Bach’s“Habit of Perfection”: Andrew Rangell Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Andrew Rangell (51:15 minutes, 23.5 mb mp3) Andy Rangell at his Well-Tempered Clavier The Bradley Effect is by definition unmeasurable. The recession, or depression, is unfathomable. So what can we think and talk about to break the obsession with questions that have no answers until the night of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Poster Art Then and Now: RISD’s John Maeda Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with John Maeda (20 minutes, 9 mb mp3) Call this Take 2 on the show of Soviet poster art, through the eyes of a 40-year-old Japanese American graphic artist who just happens to be the new president of the Rhode Island School of Design, John Maeda. On a gabby, [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Soviet Posters: The Art of Polarization Click here for slideshow Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Tom Gleason (21 minutes, 10 mb mp3) We’re on a digressive walk and talk here through a master collection of those Soviet posters we all half-know and half-recoil from: those cult images of Lenin in the Twenties, Stalin in the Forties and Fifties, the icons of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Andrew Bacevich: The End of Exceptionalism Andrew Bacevich: realism and remorse Andrew Bacevich incandesces with the rage of a serious professional: with a West Pointer’s scorn for political weasels and embarrassment at incompetent generalship; with a citizen’s horror at the Long Peace that became the Long War — war today as “a seemingly permanent condition.” He burns with a Nieburhian realist’s [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Bernard Lown’s Prescription for Survival Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Bernard Lown (33 minutes, 15 mb mp3) Bernard Lown: Rx for sudden nuclear death The world-renowned cardiologist Bernard Lown won the Nobel Prize for Peace, (outside his field, so to speak) for putting doctors (starting with Russians and Americans) into the fight against nuclear weapons in a global force called [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Bernard Lown’s Prescription for Survival Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Bernard Lown (33 minutes, 15 mb mp3) Bernard Lown: Rx for sudden nuclear death The world-renowned cardiologist Bernard Lown won the Nobel Prize for Peace, (outside his field, so to speak) for putting doctors (starting with Russians and Americans) into the fight against nuclear weapons in a global force called [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Virtual JFK: Vietnam (and us) if Kennedy had lived Six crisis decisions forecast the seventh Find a way to see Virtual JFK — a documentary film chasing a what-if riddle — and have your own presidential debate before choosing between John McCain and Barack Obama. The question in Virtual JFK is whether President Kennedy, had he lived, would have withdrawn from war in Vietnam in 1965. [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website What We’re Going Through: Anna Deavere Smith Anna Deavere Smith: grace notes Anna Deavere Smith works barefoot on stage — the better to walk in the words of the people she’s impersonating; perhaps also to summon Walt Whitman, who said we’d feel his spirit “under your bootsoles.” Actress and documentarian, Anna Deavere Smith is all feeling, no bootsoles. Her new show is “a [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website What We’re Going Through: Anna Deavere Smith Anna Deavere Smith: grace notes Anna Deavere Smith works barefoot on stage — the better to walk in the words of the people she’s impersonating; perhaps also to summon Walt Whitman, who said we’d feel his spirit “under your bootsoles.” Actress and documentarian, Anna Deavere Smith is all feeling, no bootsoles. Her new show is “a [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The American Exception: Pop Culture Today On the exceptional power of American culture, what first pops out of my own head is a moment about ten years ago, after narrating Aaron Copland’s A Lincoln Portrait (1942) at the JFK Library in Boston with the Indian conductor George Mathew — before George got his American green card. The piece triggered a [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Candid Capitalist: John Bogle John Bogle of Vanguard We asked the legendary investor, John C. Bogle, patriarch of the trillion-dollar Vanguard family of funds, for wisdom that would get us past the weekend in this financial rockslide. He sees an avalanche and three years of severe pain ahead, but something less than Armageddon, and no reason to realize Sarah [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Slavoj Zizek: What is the Question? The Elvis of the intelligensia, Slavoj Zizek, hot-links in our one-way conversation… …from nominating George W. Bush (for his trillion-dollar bail-out) to the Communist Party to Kung-Fu Panda, …from John McCain (”Bush with lipstick”) to Naomi Klein, …from Barack Obama’s risk of the “John Kerry syndrome” to the experience we’re all having of putting on the reality sunglasses [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Torture, Part 3: the Philip Gourevitch version In our third go at this miserable business of sanctioned American torture, Philip Gourevitch turns it around, Pogo-style. We have met the victims, he says in effect, and they are us. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Philip Gourevitch (58 minutes, 27 mb mp3) Philip Gourevitch (photo: Andrew Brucker) Even if you want to put it [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Philippe Sands’Torture Team First, the Spencer Tracy “verdict” from “Judgement at Nuremberg” (1961). Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Philippe Sands (45 minutes, 21 mb mp3) Who will pay for the illegal abuse of detainees at Guantanamo? If violations of the Geneva Conventions — and specifically of Common Article 3, against torture, cruelty and “outrages upon personal dignity” [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website An American Exception, in Danger Chuck Collins is an analyst and agitator around the grand canyon of inequality in American incomes and property. With Bill Gates Sr., the grandfather of Microsoft, so to speak, and father, till yesterday, of the richest man in the world, Chuck Collins wrote the book in favor of “death” taxes: Wealth and Our Commonwealth: [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Rory Stewart: the Post-Imperialist Poster Hero Rory Stewart at full stride across Asia One young Scotsman’s dauntless walk across Afghanistan — at peril from bandits, wolves, dysentery, snow-blindness and Taliban thugs with Kalashnikovs — makes a crackling fine and best-selling adventure. But that can’t be the only reason Rory Stewart’s account of The Places In Between is the gift book and [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website What’s So Great About Us Which words and ideas in the definition of exceptional America do you underline? Is is a bit odd for any nation to be deeply divided, witlessly vulgar, religiously orthodox, militarily aggressive, economically savage, and ungenerous to those in need, while maintaining a political stability, a standard of living, and a love of country that are the [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website As Others See Us: Godfrey Hodgson on the Democrats Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Godfrey Hodgson (39 minutes, 18 mb mp3) Godfrey Hodgson: now When you’ve had enough of the dugout chatter from Denver on the cable networks, try Godfrey Hodgson from Oxford, 5000 miles from the convention scene. I wonder if anybody sees American politics more essentially than the co-author of a [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Cass Sunstein: for the Homer Simpson in all of us Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Cass Sunstein (30 minutes, 14 mb mp3) Cass Sunstein of the gentle Nudge Cass Sunstein gives us the half-hour short course here on “the most exciting intellectual movement of the last thirty years” — behavioral economics, that is, of which we had a taste recently with George Lakoff and Dan [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Dan Ariely: Confronting Irrationality Dan Ariely shows how often we don't know what we're choosing and don't get what we want -- because we are predictably irrational creatures. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website What Novelists are For: Russell Banks A great American novelist, Russell Banks, thinks out loud about the real historical and emotional context of the United States at decision point. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Calabash �08 (Pt 3) Reggae & the Obama Moment Bob Marley and Barack Obama are the absent giants at Jamaica's Calabash festival of writers and readers -- Obama because he, too, seems a monument to imagination. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Calabash �08 (Part 2): As Others See Us Writers in Jamaica at the Calabash literary festival sound notes of lyricism, multiplicity and what feels like a second surge of post-imperial feeling. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Calabash�08: First, the fireworks� Alpha Males of the Caribbean: Derek Walcott goes to war with the only other West Indian winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, V. S. Naipaul. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Open Source Storytelling: Ben Haggarty The Scottish world-traveler Ben Haggarty tells "open source" stories -- from as far back as the Stone Age. He says it's the human content, not the cultural variations, that hold our hearts. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Glenn Loury: The Missing Voice of Jeremiah Black economist and polymath Glenn Loury says that the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's 15 minutes of fame are not over, and shouldn't be. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Bad News in High Style: Kevin Phillips Kevin Phillips foresees the collapse of the American Empire, "almost before it started," with high style and deep seriousness. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Errol Morris� �Feel-Bad� Masterpiece Oscar-winner Errol Morris says his Abu Ghraib movie is built on "a graphic representation of American foreign policy, pure and simple." Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mary Jo Salter�s �Phone Call to the Future� The neo-formalist poet Mary Jo Salter teaches and talks about the lessons of beauty, womanhood, artistic and family life Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Israel at 60: the Etgar Keret Version The Israeli fiction writer (and now filmmaker) Etgar Keret unveils forbidden states of mind in his society: confusion, doubt, fear. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The �Open Source� Composer: David Amram David Amram learned his "many musics" from Dizzy Gillespie, Jack Kerouac and Bach. His spirit is neither "multicultural" nor eclectic, but "lovingly trying to learn the fundamentals... of beautiful things that touch your heart." Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Douglas Blackmon: Neo-Slavery in Our Times Slavery in the American South ended only a generation or two ago, not with the Emancipation Proclamation -- in Douglas Blackmon's re-visioning of the race story in our country. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Deal-Maker on the Spot: Christopher Hill Christopher Hill, talking North Korea out of its nuclear program, has also to talk the Bush Administration into a deal. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Nicholson Baker�s Human Smoke Nicholson Baker, the meta-novelist, recounts his hyper-linked history, "Human Smoke," that judges World War 2 to be "the end of civilization." Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Patrick Cockburn: The New War in Iraq Patrick Cockburn's account of the Iraqi Army's flight from battle is that the US is trying to foment a civil war among the Shia majority that the Baghdad government cannot win. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Brazil�s Statesman at Large Brazil's statesman ex-president Cardoso says: think of today's crisis and opportunity as a "post-Napoleonic moment" between disaster and renewal. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Pico Iyer: the �Transcendentalist� Dalai Lama Pico Iyer draws on a 40-year friendship with the Dalai Lama in a meditation on globalism and the Tibet crisis in China's Olympic year. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website �Armed Chair�: Bill Flynn�s Seat of Empire Artist Bill Flynn talks about the drawing project -- of an old parlor chair -- that became his personal battle (500 images over 5 years) with the war in Iraq Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Moment for Oracles: Amber and Braunze The Obama Moment: The radio oracles -- "Amber" and "Braunze" -- speak the feeling and what it means. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The News about the News: Jay Rosen Jay Rosen, the media critic at PressThink, listens for the death rattle of the newspaper industry. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Real News: Ethan Zuckerman & Solana Larsen A short course in the transformation of media -- by bloggers of the world at Global Voices Online. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Cuba in Our Ears (IV): Ned Sublette Revolutions come and go, but something about Cuba's music is forever. With Ned Sublette Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Cuba on our Minds (III): David Kaiser�s JFK Who Killed JFK? In David Kaiser's authoritative history, Oswald was the killer but it was a Cuba-centered conspiracy that set the stage. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Cuba for the Long Run (II): Adrian Lopez Denis Cuba after Fidel will run, as it always has, on transnational family networks and an 'informal' economy, in the view of social historian Adrian Lopez Denis. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website What�s Coming in Cuba (I) Patrick Symmes Cuba on the edge of a Velvet Revolution? or a civil war? The Patrick Symmes version of the Castro Revolution and its aftermath now. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website London: The News about the News Does the new "news" of Web communities have a credibility problem? Is it half as bad as the diseases afflicting "old media?" Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Post-Imperial Historian: Eric Hobsbawm Eric Hobsbawm, the global historian, considers how the Iraq War has moved power in the world and changed the agenda of the 21st Century. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Iraq in the Long View: Behnam Abu Al-Souf 10,000 Years in Mesopotamia: the eminent Iraqi archeologist Behnam Abu Al-Souf reflects of the the glory and ruin of his land. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Master Class: the Global Beethoven The Global Pianist: Hung-Kuan Chen. Atop the world cultural triangle, with a US passport, European repertoire, and Shanghai teaching eminence. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website In the Neo-Liberal Ruins: Why Venezuela Matters "Shock Therapy" for us: how the "Washington consensus" of free-market investment rules triggered neo-socialism in Latin Ameirca Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website El Cambio: Latin America�s �Change,� and Ours Getting to know Evo Morales and the new Latin America: "indigenous" may be the key word, with implications profounder than politics. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website After the Empire: Must Reading from Parag Khanna The Post-American World: the Upstart Analyst Parag Khanna reviews the Emperor's new clothes -- and America's new limp in geo-strategic race with China and Europe. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Randall Kennedy: A Change is Gonna Come "Race men" then and now: Randall Kennedy reflects on Barack Obama's category shift in the roles an African American can play in national leadership. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website MLK Jr. after 40 years: a Fraternal Memoir Martin Luther King Jr. is remembered by an early colleague not so much for balancing religion and politics but for fusing Christ-centeredness with a public mission. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Backstage with Henry V: Shakespeare's "Henry V" -- in a presidential campaign season -- may be the best insight of all into the contradictions of leadership and power. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The post-imperial maestro: Sir Colin Davis The orchestral conductor Sir Colin Davis sets a post-imperial lesson: giving up power in music and life. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website George Bush in Jerusalem: Not Too Late for a Legacy Israeli blogger Bernard Avishai and the NYTimes' Steven Erlanger conjure the benefits of boldness in George Bush's late mission to Jerusalem Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Anthony Barnett on What�s Changed Anthony Barnett is a model of thinking and doing: writer, editor, reformer and entrepreneurial radical from the Labour Club at Cambridge in the Sixties and the New Left Review in the Eighties, a hold-out from Tony Blair's New Labor movement in the Nineties, and then founding editor (months before 9.11) of the compendious site opendemocracy.net Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website At Home with Harold Bloom: (2) on the Humanities Harold Bloom, the Yale literary critic, prescribes for the "ghastly condition ... sellout ... suicide" of Humanities education today. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website At Home with Harold Bloom: (1) on Walt Whitman Harold Bloom, the Yale literary critic, puts Walt Whitman on the top tier with Shakespeare -- "the two threads in the labyrinth" -- in his grand summing-up. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website At Home with Harold Bloom: (3) The Jazz Bridge Harold Bloom is a jazz buff as well as a poetry critic, for whom Walt Whitman and Louis Armstrong are the matched twin towers of American culture so far. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Helen Vendler: Reading and Riffing on W. B. Yeats Poetry critic Helen Vendler shows us how to see the shape so as to hear the sound of a poem. W. B. Yeats' "An Airman Foresees His Death" is a 4 x 4 x 4 "cube," which has everything to do with its meaning. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Philip Gura�s American Transcendentalism Historian Philip Gura's "American Transcendentalism" reminds you of -- take your pick -- the pollution or the surging vitality of the old headwaters of American thinking. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Speaking of Music: Alex Ross�s 20th Century Alex Ross's history of the 20th Century according to its music, or: How the home address of musical composition moved from Mahler's Vienna to the Hollywood of Bernard Herrmann and Tan Dun. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Juan Cole: from Bonaparte to Bush Middle East Historian Juan Cole recounts the story of Napoleon Bonaparte's 1798 invasion of Egypt, and connects it with the "bookend" fiasco of the Bush war in Iraq today. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Free Life: Ha Jin�s Immigration Story In the Americanization process that Ha Jin writes about there is no baseball, no Abraham Lincoln or FDR, no Paul Bunyan or American camp-fire songs, no Grand Canyon, no interest in our local or national politics... and no outward sentiment about a golden path toward the citizenship moment and pledge of allegiance. Is this part of what upsets us about immigration -- that these strangers are so wrapped up in old languages, and their own damned dramas? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Chavismo with some new brakes on it The near-tie vote Sunday against the Chavez's idea of constitutional "reform" for Venezula confirms the sense of Chavez as a man on the edge, in a dangerous conflict of self and ideals, a character out a Garcia Marquez novel, in a "headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams." Is this the story? I've asking square-one sorts of questions about Chavismo : about his ideas of "participatory democracy" , about "21st Century Socialism," which may be quite different from the 19th and 2 ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Pakistan for Beginners: 3, with Omer Alvie Pakistan: anguish and absurdity at the seat of the "war on terror:" a conversation with the Pakistani blogger Omer Alvie Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Pakistan for Beginners: 2 Kanishk Tharoor, "terror and democracy" editor of the weblob openDemocracy, reflects on the "asphyxiation of political space" in Pakistan during the war on terror and the rule of General Musharraf. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Pakistan 2.0 Our conversation today begins a sort of Pakistan for Beginners. Our guest Sabahat Ashraf is a technical writer in Silicon Valley. He's a prolific blogger, and perhaps a key to the global chatter and global stakes in the homeland of a universal diaspora. Please join the conversation with a comment and point us to your favorite voices of wisdom on the past and future of Pakistan, in and out of the country. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website �This was the worst war ever� : Ken Burns� WW2 PBS documentarian Ken Burns reflects on his World War 2 epic -- and the possibility that war histories extend the innate human fascination with combat. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Way to Live: Craig Smith�s Bach Project Conductor Craig Smith, world famous especially for his cycle of Bach Cantatas, leads this cheerful introspection on music as "a way to live." Smith died on November 14, 2007. This program is adapted from a WGBH television documentary from 1992. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Art, Science & Truth: Jonah Lehrer Jonah Lehrer in "Proust was a Neuroscientist" makes the case for artists (Walt Whitman, Igor Stravinsky, George Eliot, Paul Cezanne et al.) as the real pioneers in grasping and revealing how our minds actually work. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Speaking of Music Again: Oliver Sacks There�s a case to be made � and Paul Elie makes it elegantly in his Slate review of Oliver Sacks� Musicophilia � not just that Oliver Sacks is his own most interesting patient in his journal of musical symptoms, but that himself, the patient with 70-plus years of soaring, passionate musical memories, is more interesting than himself, the observant clinical neurologist. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Piano Master Class with Saleem Abboud Ashkar The aura around the Palestinian pianist Saleem Abboud Ashkar -- performing, teaching and talking at Brown this weekend -- suggests a major musical career coming into bloom, and at the same time a world-historical conversation being extended to a new generation. Young Abboud Ashkar, just 31, could be the late Edward Said's successor in the exquisitely tantalizing dialog with the Israeli pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim. In counterpoint and close harmony, they are teasing out the im ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Harold Bloom Tapes (Part 1) 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 around the Sage of Concord. Bloom had been a critical figure in the revival of interest in Emerson, the "father of the American Religion," Bloom has called him. But what also emerges here, with some gentle prodding from your humble interviewer, is that Bloom's attachment to Emerson is vitally and intimately personal ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Harold Bloom Tapes (Part 2) 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 around the Sage of Concord. Bloom had been a critical figure in the revival of interest in Emerson, the "father of the American Religion," Bloom has called him. But what also emerges here, with some gentle prodding from your humble interviewer, is that Bloom's attachment to Emerson is vitally and intimately personal ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Harold Bloom Tapes (Part 3) 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 around the Sage of Concord. Bloom had been a critical figure in the revival of interest in Emerson, the "father of the American Religion," Bloom has called him. But what also emerges here, with some gentle prodding from your humble interviewer, is that Bloom's attachment to Emerson is vitally and intimately personal ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website He Got It Wrong, Alas: Kanan Makiya My friend Kanan Makiya was the most influential Iraqi advocate in America of the war to "liberate" his country five years ago. Today he is the most articulate casualty of his own fantasy. Kanan is famous now mainly for telling President Bush, face to face two months before the US invasion, that the American troops "will be greeted with sweets and flowers in the first months..." He had the rhetorical magic in those days to get away with arguing that invading Iraq was the moral choice eve ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website They Got It Right: (6) Shibley Telhami Professor Telhami at the University of Maryland is the only scholar we've interviewed in this series who briefed Karl Rove five years ago on the fallout of war on Iraq. He speaks from a fascinating personal history. He was born into a family of peacemakers and conciliators in an Arab Christian minority in a village near Haifa in 1951, when Israel was 3 years old. In Israeli and private schools, his first degrees were in mathematics and then philosophy before he took up international rela ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website They Got It Right: (5) Peter Liberman Peter Liberman of Queens College at the City University in New York forms his own category in this sampling. Let us call him an Optimistic Realist. Meaning: he doesn�t expect the US can or will attack Iran. It�s his observation that the popular American feeling after the Iraq misadventure has turned decisively against the �collective psychosis� involved in attacking countries that had nothing to do with an attack on us. And he believes that Israel has never been in anything like nuclear dan ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website They Got It Right: (4) Steve Van Evera Steve Van Evera, in security studies at MIT, foresees a US air assault on Iran that could run to five days and 1000 sorties; and then a certainty that �Iranians will respond.� Why are we playing with this fire? Mainly, Van Evera argues, because the neo-conservative cult in the Bush-Cheney White House � �isolated� cloistered� the wrong crowd to run anything� � has not been broken. Shouldn�t we be hearing more from the brave sages who pegged the dangers � even called the outcome � of the Ir ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website They Got It Right: (3) Barry Posen Barry Posen, in security studies at MIT, sees a US military strike coming on Iran � executed and cheered on by the same people who misjudged all the consequences of our war on Iraq. I am trying to learn why this is happening, how the �party of war� insulated itself from correction, why we citizens, we media, and the chatter along the 2008 campaign trail all sound so helpless, so oblivious about the extended catastrophe. As always, Posen is ebullient, accessible, informed; but there sounds ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website They Got It Right: (2) Michael Desch Michael Desch, then at the University of Kentucky, observed just as the US invasion of Iraq began, that the Ominous Precedent and in a sense the strategic model for the Bush warriors was Israel�s war on Lebanon, led by Ariel Sharon in 1982 and ended 18 years later by Ehud Barak�s withdrawal from Southern Lebanon. As chance would have it, Michael Desch now holds a Texas A and M professorship named for the Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in the school of public policy named for the President ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website They Got It Right: (1) Robert J. Art Robert J. Art of Brandeis University calls himself �a realist with a heart.� Colleagues respect him as the textbook type of strategic analyst, often consulted by the Pentagon and the CIA and well connected in the network of academic think tanks. His most recent of many books casts a rueful, independent eye on the modern US record of Coercive Diplomacy, meaning the use of military force or threats to change behavior, from Haiti to North Korea. Shouldn�t we be hearing more from the brave sag ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Citizen in Exile: Lincoln Chafee (Part 1) Lincoln Chafee is a soft-spoken patrician with fire in his heart. His corridor chatter at the Watson Institute at Brown University (where we're both visiting fellows) is unfailingly cheerful and correct, virtually Senatorial, but often the last word has a spur in it. Chafee takes a hard line here that you haven't heard on the campaign trail or read in a newspaper editorial: that Senators who voted to authorize the Iraq war should be disqualified for the presidency. On grounds of judgme ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Citizen in Exile: Lincoln Chafee (Part 2) In the second part of our chat former Senator Lincoln Chafee makes the Iraq war vote "totally disqualifying" for higher office. It's a ban on all the Senators running except Barack Obama, an anti-war voice who hadn't reached the Senate in 2002. The premise that Saddam Hussein, contained by arms inspectors and no-fly zones, was a threat beyond his borders "was so grossly hollow," Chafee remembers from his own researches. "Even the Kuwaitis, who'd been invaded by Saddam, were telling us: d ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Speaking of Coltrane: Five Conversations (1) The New York Times' pithy, punchy jazz critic, Ben Ratliff has written not fan stuff or a biography but a catalog of ways to think about Coltrane: an athlete of improvisation who pushed forward through "an atmosphere of almost violent incomprehension." Coltrane was a main builder of the jazz tradition "of not sounding like anybody else," or like himself six months before. He had as many artistic periods as Picasso, starting with bebop, ballads and blues; but Coltrane's development fit int ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Speaking of Coltrane: Five Conversations (2) Amiri Baraka (then: Leroi Jones) chanced to live over the Five Spot in Manhattan in the summer of 1957 when Coltrane and Thelonius Monk had a five-month learning-by-doing gig on the Bowery. Willem de Kooning and Jack Kerouac were also among the listeners and drinkers at the Five Spot. Baraka says he missed barely a session of the music that culminated in the Monk-Coltrane Carnegie Hall concert in November, 1957 -- a Blue Note best-seller only after the Library of Congress unearthed the tap ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Speaking of Coltrane: Five Conversations (3) Alain Pacowski is a French-born, French-accented jazz guitarist, who grew up in Biarritz, the son of a professional horn player, hearing jazz as the sound of America. He is, as I've said before, the most flattering of distant mirrors on our culture, and an obsessive devote of John Coltrane in particular. His taste is for that broad streak of gorgeousness in Coltrane, starting with "Bye Bye Blackbird" and culminating in his solo recording of "Lush Life." How did it feel that John Coltrane ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Speaking of Coltrane: Five Conversations (4) Bill Pierce played tenor saxophone for three years in into the early 80s with Art Blakey -- before that with Stevie Wonder, and with the drummer Tony Williams into the early 90s. He has the authority of a player who's also the teaching chairman of the reeds department of the Berklee College of Music in Boston -- and co-author of the Berklee Practice Method for tenor and soprano saxophone. The hallways and practice cubicles outside Bill Pierce's Berklee offices are thick with 19- and 20-ye ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Speaking of Coltrane: Five Conversations (5) Michael S. Harper, emeritus professor at Brown University and first poet laureate of Rhode Island, wrote the most famous of the many Coltrane poems, "Dear John, Dear Coltrane," a year before Coltrane's death. In our conversation -- and in his own digressive, virtuosic, dare I say Coltranean style -- Michael Harper weaves threads of racial brutality and family memory, black church music and profoundly engrained Christian doctrines of forgiveness in the North Carolina tapestry of Coltrane's i ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website At Home and �Global� in the US: Edwidge Danticat Edwidge Danticat -- loyal child of Port au Prince and Brooklyn -- says in conversation: "I always feel like I bring some of there to here, and some of here to there." Like her friend from the Dominican east side of Hispaniola Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat is writing "global" literature in our midst, for our mainstream, documenting the "permanent floating" migration games and the fascinating creolization of identities in our time. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website To End Another War: Richard Holbrooke Let Richard Holbrooke be our conversational measure of what the Democrats are prepared to say and do in foreign affairs... to repair a "worse than Vietnam" blunder in Iraq, to undo a factional "hijacking" of American power, to recover a good name in the world. Bill Clinton's peacemaker in the Balkans in the '90s and last UN Ambassador, Holbrooke will be in the scrum again if any Democrat wins the presidency next year, and a good bet for Secretary of State if Hillary Clinton wins. In the m ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website To End Another War: Richard Holbrooke (Pt 2) In the second part Dick Holbrooke and I engage in a certain passive-aggressive head-butting about how disasters happen and who's accountable for this one. Mischievously I had wondered if the Clinton intervention in the Balkans had helped set the Iraq trap, with the "high" of zero-casualty air warfare, all the headier without United Nations approval. Holbrooke sees the Iraq war as more nearly a fluke: a "hijacking" of the U.S. government in the rage after 9.11 by "a faction of a faction" ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website At Home in Global America: Junot Diaz (Part 1) For people who feed on fiction for tastes of truth in our time, Junot Diaz is a treasure. A double-visioned outsider in two languages, two cultures and two countries, he begins to look like the anointed prince of a generation of young immigrants writing "global" fiction inside the US. Could Juno Diaz be our Joseph Conrad? The roaring liftoff of his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao may even be an omen. Are we prepared to hear upstart fictionists tell us, as Junot Diaz do ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website At Home in Global America: Juno Diaz (Part 2) The most wondrously imagined characters in Junot Diaz's new novel are its women: Oscar's goth, "tougher than adamantine" sister Lola, and their mother Belicia. Mami is a shipwreck of female beauty, cancer-ridden and foul-spirited. But once she was astonishingly attractive and lusty, "allergic to tranquilidad," and her parents were rich and connected. This, too, is history that Belicia barely grasps, that her children are never told about their dying battle-ax mom who berates them in Pert ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website At Home in Global America: Juno Diaz (Part 3) Junot Diaz is an authority on the new realities of immigration: "unstable, here-and-there... something cool for an artist to deal with: a whole community jumping back and forth, like shuttles on the loom, strengthening connections in both places." He has vented furiously before this on the stalemate in U.S. immmigration policy. Our politics wouldn't have seized on immigration he said if we weren't trying to distract ourselves from a war we can't talk about. "It's screwy, bro," he says. ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Summer Reading: William Gibson�s Spook Country William Gibson, Mr. Cyberspace, dropped into the house yesterday morning for coffee and an hour's gab. He seems light-hearted and handsome for a hard-core geek-intellectual; friendly and digressive for a cult celebrity on a book tour. Spook Country is William Gibson's first comic novel, an acidly satirical broadside against the "war on terror." Set in the political present (2006, in fact; Tower Records is still in business), it's a thriller about a geo-strategic "prank," to disrupt or at ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website William Gibson�s �Spook Country� (Part 2) William Gibson spoke about the incisive, expatriate politics behind Spook Country: "During the Blitz in London, at the back of every British Post Office there were enormous scarlet posters, with the Crown at the top and below it the legend: Keep Calm and Carry On. That was their response to some of the most massive bombing any European city had ever experienced. That is the much more appropriate response to any form of terrorism. The non-state actor has very very limited resources and de ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website William Gibson�s �Spook Country� (Part 3) We spoke about "ubiquitous media" and Bill Gibson's own "mediated" evolution from hippie genius and oft-transparent blogger in the direction of, shall we say "commodified" author. Will we, each and all of us, ever shake the manipulations of media? "You know, we were once a society that made cars and shoes and things like that. I think now we're mainly a society that markets things and creates celebrity. There's no way to be seen as an artist without that commodification coming into play ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The History of Utopia Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) The Utopian rictus [Quasimime / Flickr]We spent a good chunk of our story meeting yesterday morning talking about Children of Men, which about half of us have seen. (If you haven't seen it, go now. It's relentless, brutal, and visually astounding -- one of the most harrowing movies I've ever seen.) But beyond this particular imagining of the near future, we were more interested in the long history of Utopias (and dystopias, their evil twins) -- and ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Major Jackson: Where He�s From Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) I often wonder how those who walk with decency internalize and respond to acts of violence, injustice, and how does that enter into their work.Major Jackson Poet Major Jackson. [Thomas Sayers Ellis]Where are you from? For each one of us the answer to that deceptively simple question is actually an intersection of community, family memory, cultural history, artistic legacy, and literal geography. The award winning poet Major Jackson somehow manages t ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Future of the All-Volunteer Military Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Training instructors at Lackland Air Force Base saluted with a ceremonial fly-over. [Linda H. Rasch / Flickr]The U.S. military has 1.4 million troops on active duty and another 1. 26 million in the Reserves, including 456,000 in the National Guard. We have 47,000 American troops stationed in Japan, 37,500 in South Korea, and 116,400 on bases all across Europe. These numbers confront us with a stunning paradox: America has the second largest standi ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Tale of New Cities Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) The architect must be a prophet...a prophet in the true sense of the term ... if he can't see at least ten years ahead, don't call him an architect.Frank Lloyd Wright A Postmillennial Paradise? [Alexander Somma / Flickr] Ten years? What about being able to see a hundred years into the future? That's what the History Channel asked leading architecture firms to do in a contest to design postmillennial versions of the nation's three largest cities: Ne ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Requiem for Darfur Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) As great as any of his 28 operas, Giuseppe Verdi's one Requiem is beyond category among the masterpieces of human affirmation in the depths of suffering and horror. Verdi wrote it in his 60's to mourn and remember his artistic heroes, the composer Rossini and the poet-novelist Manzoni. The Requiem lives in the choral and orchestral canon as a monument to Verdi himself: his belief, doubt, compositional craft and melodic genius. The work encompasses c ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Marching Toward Obsolescence Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Get thee to Washington D.C. January 27, 2007 for the Peace March. It's a worthy and timely topic, and it would be an interesting opportunity for you to demonstrate your chops in the field. Why not bring Norman Mailer with you, have him compare and contrast the occasion with the March on the Pentagon he wrote about so beautifully in The Armies of the Night... Hurley, from Pitch a Show January 5, 2007 It takes at least a village [Schizoform / Fl ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Saudi Arabia, Mysterious Ally Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) [Kudos to our great intern Danielle Bennett for sniffing this one out.] What's the conversation behind the door? [Drew9678 / Flickr] When Dick Cheney went to Saudi Arabia last month, King Abdullah apparently warned him that if the US pulls out of Iraq, the Saudis might be forced to back the Sunnis in the Iraqi civil war. The idea being that someone will have to keep Iran in check. Just a few days later, Nawaf Obaid, a foreign policy advisor to the ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Next Stop: Iran? Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Changing the calculus in the Gulf [Tolka Rover / Flickr]When we saw President Bush's surge speech last week, we heard his acknowledgement that the situation had worsened in 2006. And that he was taking responsibility. And that, as had been leaked for the last week or more, an increase of 21,000 troops, mainly in Baghdad, was the only way to make the bloody situation better. But when a number of veteran Middle East policy heads saw the same speech, t ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Economics Reimagined Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)This show will record at 5 pm Eastern to accommodate a guest from the UK.Recovering from another show that fell through for tonight, Mary found the following in The New York Times this morning:But economists have been acting a lot like intellectual imperialists in the last decade or so. They have been using their tools � mainly the analysis of enormous piles of data to tease out cause and effect � to examine everything from politics to French wine vint ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website How Do You Leave a Country? Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)And what happens when you do?On Wednesday the President will reveal the details of his already much-publicized plan to increase troop levels in Iraq. It's one option, one supported by Senator John McCain and parts of the Pentagon. Another option, however, carries the weight of half of America: leaving Iraq.Fifty-two percent of the respondents to [a] Times/Bloomberg poll -- including nearly 1 in 3 Republicans -- said they prefer a "fixed timetable" fo ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Micromanaging vs. Oversight Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)We read about this exchange between Sen. Joseph Biden and Tim Russert on Talking Points Memo today:MR. RUSSERT: You said the other day that this is President Bush�s war, and there�s...SEN. BIDEN: It is.MR. RUSSERT: ...there�s really little Democrats can do. Why not cut off funding for the war?SEN. BIDEN: I�ve been there, Tim. You can�t do it.MR. RUSSERT: Why?SEN. BIDEN: You can�t do it. It�s�what�because it made sense in the Constitution when ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website What the Active-Duty Military Wants Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) The American military � once a staunch supporter of President Bush and the Iraq war � has grown increasingly pessimistic about chances for victory. For the first time, more troops disapprove of the president�s handling of the war than approve of it. Barely one-third of service members approve of the way the president is handling the war, according to the 2006 Military Times Poll.Robert Hadierne, Poll: More troops unhappy with Bush�s course in Iraq, ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Thucydides: Ur-Historian of the Ur-War Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)Our West Point-educated wisemen on the matter of Iraq have been beating the drum: Read Thucydides! Col. Peter Mansoor tipped me over the edge with a post-game remark about the daily brutalities in Baghdad. "Read Thucydides on the revolt at Corcyra," he said. "You can practically see the drill bits in the head." So we've plunged.Thucydides[Courtesy of Altes Museum, Berlin]Thucydides (c. 465 - 395 BC) wrote -- "for all time," as he prophesied -- of t ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Edge.org: Optimism Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)With the new year comes new resolutions, and new questions, including the new Edge.org question. The science super-hero club house that brought you dangerous ideas in 2006 wants to bring you optimism in 2007.As an activity, as a state of mind, science is fundamentally optimistic. Science figures out how things work and thus can make them work better. Much of the news is either good news or news that can be made good, thanks to ever deepening knowledge ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Changing the World Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)Imagine changing this [johnlemon / Flickr]We're ringing in the New Year on a note of optimism with help from the eco-friendly encyclopedia Worldchanging: A User's Guide For the 21st Century -- a companion to the eponymous website.What the Sears, Roebuck Catalogue was to the 20th-century consumer, this volume is to the 21st-century citizen. From sustainable agriculture to microscopic supercomputers, green architecture to Grameen microfinance, this wo ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Bach�s Chaconne Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)Despite what the "recorded" date says above, this show was recorded at 12:30 pm on December 1st, 2006, and was first broadcast on January 1st, 2007.Bach's original Chaconne score [Scan courtesy of Ball State University]I was excited to see last month that Arnold Steinhardt has a new book out. His first, Indivisible by Four, was a memoir of his life as the first violinist of the Guarneri string quartet, one of the most celebrated ensembles of the last f ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Franz Wright, Re-Fed Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)In July we had the poet Franz Wright in the studio. His work, wrote Chris at the time, reads...like one man�s chronicle of spirit � as told by the spirit more than the man. He has said they they often seem nearly to write themselves, in a sort of rapture. Both prayerful and witty, they tell stories of recovery to the point of something like ecstasy.We're offering the hour again as we take time off between Christmas and New Year's. May your bellies be ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Joan Didion, Re-Fed Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)In October 2005 Chris spoke with the author Joan Didion at the First Parish Church in Cambridge, MA.Shortly thereafter she won the National Book Award for The Year of Magical Thinking; we collected a series of emails from other authors and literary bloggers you can read at the post for the original show.We're offering this conversation this week as we take time off; by now we should be deep into leftovers, thinking about what we haven't yet planned for ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Edna O�Brien, Re-Fed Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)In October we spent an hour with the Irish author Edna O'Brien. As Chris wrote at the time,We mean to talk with Edna O�Brien not only about mothers and daughters, about exile and The Light of Evening, but about Ireland then and now, and about the United States that Dilly, in the novel, sampled in the 1920�s and rejected. The Irish through the centuries have honed their backstage wits on the observation of Britain�s imperious weight in the world. What ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Philip Roth, Re-Fed Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)In May Chelsea, David and Chris visited Philip Roth at his home in Connecticut. The result, our hour with Philip Roth, features the author in conversation, talking about his native Newark and how writers don't wait for inspiration, but just get up and go to work.We're offering it again this week as the staff takes time off to eat cookies and visit family. God bless us, every one. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Baseball: Big in Japan�AND America Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)This show will record at 4pm EST.The ever helpful Emmett O'Connell thought he had written the perfect pitch: a dash of baseball, a touch of cultural intermingling, a news peg, some good guest suggestions... and the Red Sox. He thought it would be irresistable to the Open Source machine. And of course it was:It is high time that ROS did a baseball show. And, the one I think you guys should do is a Japan/US baseball show.The Red Sox (#$&%*!� groan) ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Word of the Year Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)The Oxford University Press made public its word of the year in November: it's "carbon neutral."The rise of carbon neutral reflects the growing importance of the green movement in the United States. In a CBS News/New York Times Poll in May 2006, 66% of respondents agreed that global warming is a problem that�s causing a serious impact now. 2006 also saw the launch of a new (and naturally, carbon neutral) magazine about eco-living, Plenty; the actor Leo ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Quantification of War Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)Arlington West Memorial, Santa Monica, CA [juliedermansky / Flickr]As its fourth year approaches, the war in Iraq is amassing some noteworthy numbers: dollars spent, US soldiers killed, and Iraqi casualties. The last figure is a source of recent controversy. In October The Lancet published a report that estimates that 655,000 Iraqis have died from the war, 601,000 of them from violence. (Most wartime civilian deaths are usually symptomatic of a br ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Iraq�s Oil Future(s) Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)An oil spill in Iraq. According to the photographer, "this spill was left for months before it finally soaked into the ground." [Dave Chung / Flickr]To accomodate our UK guests, this show will record at 4pm EST.Among the figures quoted in the Iraq Study Group Report -- about things like troop levels and civilian casualties -- one number nearly jumps off the page. According to the report, 150,000 to 200,000 -- and perhaps as many as 500,000 -- barrels o ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Russia, 15 Years After the Revolution A rally in Moscow last month. What do you think they were talking about? [Antonis SHEN / Flickr] Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Fifteen years ago this month, Boris Yeltsin consigned the Soviet Union to the history books in what longtime Russia watcher Stephen Cohen calls "the most consequential event of the second half of the twentieth century." Tonight we're asking: What can a decade and a half of hindsight tell us about that moment? What can we see more clearly now about what ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Classroom Lessons of Iraq Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) In twenty years the Iraq war -- like the Napoleonic and Peloponnesian Wars before it -- will be taught in classrooms at West Point and Annapolis. It will offer lessons on tactics, strategy, leadership and politics. What will a future generation of brand-new officers learn from this war when the war itself has become old? This afternoon a young former Marine Captain told us he'd teach Machiavelli in twenty years, that The Prince tells us to treat ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Iraq: A Military Inquest Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Looking back at Iraq [Jdraiders / Flickr]After the Iraq Study Group's recommendations (and Rumsfeld was ousted and President Bush "agreed that the timing is right for new leadership at the Pentagon"), before the Pentagon and NSC finalize their own reports, and on the day when President Bush is set to convene his own panel of commanders in Iraq, we're wondering what former and current members of the officer corps have to say about how we got here. Thi ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Global Warming Goes to the Supreme Court Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) [Thanks to Ben for nudging us to think hard about this case.] Will SCOTUS alert the fire department? [rscottjones / Flickr] Well, sort of. Massachusetts v. EPA, which was argued last Wednesday, is the first case involving global warming to reach the Supreme Court. It centers on the EPA's decision not to regulate CO2 emissions from automobiles (which comprise roughly 20 percent of the U.S.'s greenhouse gases). The petitioners include twelve states, ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Music on the Brain Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)Daniel Levitin has had the kind of career of which a certain brand of nerdy music lover can only dream. He was a session musician, a sound engineer (for, among others Carlos Santana and The Grateful Dead), a record producer (Blue �yster Cult, Chris Isaak, Stevie Wonder, Steely Dan), an A&R man for a record label... and then he went back to school for the obvious next job: a psychologist who studies what music does to our brains and what our brains ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Iraq�s Third Act Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)Everyone is waiting with bated breath for the release of the Baker-Hamilton Commission report this Wednesday, even though much of the content has been leaked to the press for weeks now. War weary America hopes that the report will propose some path to the beginning of the end of a war and occupation long gone sour.But the notion of a quick and painless resolution is most likely wishful thinking, as Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Moby-Dick, Cheney, et al. Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)USS Pequod[jpaul / Flickr]In times of catastrophe and chaos we often turn to poetry and prose to make sense of the madness. Melville's monumental masterwork, Moby-Dick is no exception. Captain Ahab, the monomaniac with a mission, has long been the metaphor for vengeance and obsession. Over the years people have been drawing comparisons to Hitler and Stalin and most recently George Bush -- some even offer Osama Bin Laden as Ahab's avatar.On the Pequ ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Barney Frank�s Grand Bargain Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)A latter-day Lyndon? [dpanarelli / Flickr]Barney Frank wants to make a deal. He'll chair the Financial Services Committee in the House when the 110th Congress launches in January; like Charlie Rangel with his draft, Frank is using the news vacuum of a lame-duck Congress to make his intentions clear.He's been floating the idea of a Congressionally-mediated "Grand Bargain" between economic populists and free traders. The populists get federal subsidies ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Curtains for Cursive? Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)Cursive, foiled for good? [michgm / Flickr]A recent article in the Washington Post forecast the end of cursive. What was once essential to commerce, diplomacy, and personal intercourse, the Post suggested, now seems as quaint as a rotary telephone.The article sparked debate throughout the blogosphere. Many bloggers bemoan the demise of personal penmanship as the end of a more dignified era. Others say "good riddance" to handwriting and welcome the t ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Out of Iraq Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)The hundreds of thousands of Iraqis fleeing carnage and chaos in their homeland each month aren't arguing about whether to call that situation a civil war. They're just leaving. According to reporter Nir Rosen, back in the U.S. after three months in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, the Iraqi refugee crisis is now among the worst refugee crises in the world:[These Iraqis] don't have the rights and privileges normally associated with refugees. They're stateles ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website This I Believe Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Duck and Cover [Endless Lazlo / Flickr] We hardly need to be reminded that we are living in an age of confusion -- a lot of us have traded in our beliefs for bitterness and cynicism or for a heavy package of despair, or even a quivering portion of hysteria. Opinions can be picked up cheap in the market place while such commodities as courage and fortitude and faith are in alarmingly short supply.Edward R. Murrow, This I Believe, April, 4, 1951In the ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Gandhi and Gandhigiri Chic Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)DevanJedi suggested we take a look at how India, spurred by a Bollywood fictional period flick,* has re-embraced Gandhi:Until August, when a comedy with Gandhi as a central figure was released all over India, most of the people who spoke about Gandhi and his values were alive when he was shot in 1948. Now, all generations have re-embraced the father, or "Bapu," of the nation.In the movie, titled "Lage Raho Munna Bhai," gangster Munna Bhai meets Gandhi ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Daniel Barenboim: Sound, Thought&Activism Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)Daniel Barenboim, the pianist and conductor, is by now a sort of meta-musician.Like Yo-Yo Ma of the Silk Road Project, or Dizzy Gillespie with his United Nations Orchestra, or Leonard Bernstein leaping Cold War boundaries and the musical divides between Broadway, Hollywood and the New York Philharmonic, Barenboim -- born in Buenos Aires of Russian Jewish parents, and an Israeli since his early teens -- has made himself an icon of musical implications f ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Bigotry 101:�A Night in November� Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)This show records at 2:00 pm on Tuesday, November 21st to give us a day off before Thanksgiving; you can hear it via podcast immediately, or on the radio on Wednesday, November 22nd.Before sectarian hatred came to seem universal, Belfast and Northern Ireland showed off the pure model: white Christian Europeans looking and sounding (to us) exactly alike, despising each other as "Pape" and "Prod," bombing, torturing and killing eachother with gusto and a ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Syrian Linchpin Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)Everyone's talking about Syria. And talking about talking to Syria. They're echoing a refrain started this summer, that the road to peace in Jerusalem and Beirut goes through Damascus. Now the Iraq Study Group is saying the road to peace in Baghdad may go that way too, and Syria's own President Bashar al-Asad has been emphasizing his country's importance for Middle East stability:This summer�s war in Lebanon has lent urgency to President Bashar al-Asa ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ethical Realism Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)After neo-conservatism, after muscular wilsonianism -- after Iraq -- the left-leaning Anatol Lieven and right-leaning John Hulsman are suggesting a new American approach:Ethical realism points toward an international strategy based on prudence; a concentration on possible results rather than good intentions; a close study on the nature, views, and interests of other states, and a willingness to accommodate them when possible; and a mixture of profound ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Pain of Borat Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)Sacha Baron Cohen (right) as Borat, at the Toronto Film Festival [bloombloom / Flickr]Jon wants us to take a look at the movie Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. None of us has seen Borat, but we know him as a character from Da Ali G Show, and we know this: he makes us squirm. He's hard to watch. He interviews very real people and gets them to say -- quite casually -- very ugly things.We explained th ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Masters of the House Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)Pulling the House to the left [Augusta R. Toppins]After assembling a reading list for the new Democratic majority, we're talking to House members themselves.Massachusetts Represenative Barney Frank, who will soon chair the Financial Services Committee, will be on. As will Congressman Tom Lantos of California, who will head the International Relations Committee. No definitive word back from the offices of Charles Rangel, John Conyers, or Henry Waxman, b ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Global Warming: Coal � It�s Cheap and Dirty Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) 40% of our CO2 emissions...and counting [detritus / Flickr] If you're worried about global warming, coal is almost paralyzingly scary. The statistics, lifted from Jeff Goodell and Erik Reece, tell it all. Coal is responsible for nearly 40% of America's CO2 emissions. (Here it's interesting to remember that the U.S. emits 25% of the world's greenhouse gases). That's because over 50% of our electricity comes from coal. Over half! And because -- jou ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A New Israeli - Palestinian Mandate? Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) When Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert visits Washington next week, he'll find a radically different political climate: There's a new Democratic majority in Congress. President Bush is thinking about his legacy and last two years in office. Members of Bush 41's administration like James Baker and Brent Scowcroft are back in positions of influence if not outright power. It seems the realists have edged out the neo-cons. And Washington is talking abou ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Democrats� New Reading List Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) [Grim Reaper With A Lawnmower / Flickr]Spent a couple of hours this morning knocking around ideas on how to cover the new majority in the House and -- George Allen is about to concede has officially conceded -- now the Senate. Then, in a comment thread, we see from Sutter a complete show in a box: Recommended topic: �The 2006 Election Reading List.� Shortly after winning power in 2004 1994, Speaker-elect Newt Gingrich publicly exhorted the incomi ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website It�s Wednesday Morning. Was it Good for You? Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) The party: over? [Johnsyweb / Flickr]The most likely outcome after Tuesday's midterm elections is a new majority in the House and a couple of squeakers that lead to an evenly divided Senate. But regardless of who wins, there will be plenty that's new in Congress, plenty of new plans on Wednesday morning, plenty of old enemies to pay back, plenty of aggressive awareness that it's only two more years until we choose the next President. But that's Con ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Micro-Targeted Democracy Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)Hitting the target. [Bretarnett / Flickr]We've seen a lot of talk recently about the GOP's "Voter Vault" system, a huge database of, apparently, every registered voter in the U.S. It's been collated with consumer records, public information, and basically any shred of personal data that can be mined, bought, borrowed, rented, or tracked. (The Dems, playing catch-up and perhaps wanting to shed their soft image, christened their response -- or, rather, o ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Homosexuality and the American Church Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)This show records at 5:00 pm Eastern.Maybe you were surprised by the news and maybe you weren't. Ted Haggard, pastor of the 14,000 member New Life Baptist Church in Colorado Springs, President of the National Association of Evangelicals, and a trusted advisor to President Bush, is accused of regularly having sex and doing meth with a male prostitute for over three years now. It's hard not to be distracted as each new salacious detail is leaked or piece ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Experiments in Democracy Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) The participatory budget of Icapui, Brazil. The left column reads, "where the money comes from." The one on the right reads, "what the money is spent for." Below it says,"When the administration is transparent, everything works smoothly." [Paolo Massa / Flickr]Back in September we introduced the idea of doing a show about race, class and voting with Harvard Law professor and voting rights activist Lani Guinier. While prepping for that show, I had a ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Elections �06: Montana Senate Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Is this for real, or was it photoshopped? [Patchoulli / Flickr] "Purple mountain majesties," if it sounded less, well, purple, could be the new bumper sticker for Montana. As the fourth-largest state with fewer than a million residents, its vast uncrowded reaches are nothing if not majestic. Its mountains -- both big and small -- are the stuff of postcards. And politically, though you might not expect it, it's right there in the purple spectrum. Th ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Somalia: Next Front Line for �Holy War�? Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) In 1993, there was still some grass [Sgt. G.D. Robinson / Defense Visual Information Center] A grateful hat tip to blogger Ethan Zuckerman, who once again is inspiring us to focus on Africa, this time on Somalia. Somalia may be one of the most fragile and potentially explosive countries in the world. Its environment is shattered. Its population is soaring. Disastrous famine lurks. AK-47s and other guns have multiplied since the 1990s. And there's ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Elections �06: Pennsylvania Senate Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between.James Carville, quoted in A Democrat for Main Street, The Washington Post, August 16, 2006 For Whom Will the Liberty Bell Toll? [Tim Wilson / Flickr]The Alabama part of James Carville's Pennsylvania is traditionally the Republican stronghold, but this year it appears to be going with the Democrats for the first time in decades. And the suburbs, which are usually up for grabs, are ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Iraq, October 2006 Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) In every state Iraq is an issue -- sometimes the issue -- in the 2006 midterms. Do we run the danger, standing before the possibility of the overturn of both houses of Congress, of treating Iraq as just that, an issue? Iraq is not what it was this summer, even. October was the deadliest month for US troops in Iraq since November 2004. Baghdad, said journalist Patrick Cockburn on the phone this afternoon, isn't really a city any more, it's more tha ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Georgia (and Russia) Off Our Minds Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) On our show two weeks ago about the death of Anna Politkovskaya we ended up learning not just about the life and work of a brave Russian journalist but about some of the recent stories she was covering. The most urgent one, as outlined by Masha Gessen, was the worsening (and fascinating) relationship between Russia and Georgia. Some of the threads here, in no particular order: the round-ups, arrests, and deportations of ethnic Georgians in Moscow; t ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Elections �06: Missouri Senate Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Rockets' red glare. Gateway to the West and all that. [creativity+ / Flickr]If following all the national midterm hype seems too overwhelming this season, if you worry that you can't follow the scripted snark in all 40 toss-up races, then tune out the background noise. Missouri has your race to watch. Missouri, who's picked the winner in every presidential election this century, save one every presidential election save one since 1904.* Missouri, ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Elections �06: Identities Politics Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Due to studio availability, this show will record at 5:00 pm ET For the last month we've been focusing one show each week on an individual house district or a full state-wide senate race as a way to create, in aggregate, a sort of pointillist political portrait of the country. We'll be continuing this series on Tuesday when we focus on the Missouri senate race, but first we're hoping to spend an hour talking about the future of ethnic, racial, and i ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Talking Turkishness Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Two Fridays ago, Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's best known and most controversial author, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Pamuk is the most famous of about 60 writers and publishers who have been prosecuted under Article 301, a part of the Turkish penal code that makes it a crime to "insult Turkishness," for speaking out about the mass killing of 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey during World War I. Only a few days after Pamuk was awarded the Nobel ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Edna O�Brien Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Such is the wrath of the mothers, such is the cry of the mothers, such is the lamentation of the mothers, on and on until the last day, the last bluish tinge, the pismires, the gloaming, and the dying dust.Edna O'Brien, The Light of Evening Edna O'Brien [Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin]Edna O'Brien's new novel The Light of Evening incorporates real letters that her own driving, contentious mother wrote to her from the Irish village where O'Brien's scan ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Elections �06: Tennessee Senate Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Here�s an irony for you. I�ve only seen one candidate in my lifetime of covering politics who had the skill, the instincts and the energy of Harold Ford Jr. His name was George Corley Wallace.Conservative libertarian Frank Cagle, Metro Pulse, October 10, 2006. Harold Ford, Jr. [govmarkwarner / Flickr]Tennessee voters haven't elected a Democratic Senator in 16 years and they haven't elected a black Senator since Reconstruction. Harold Ford, Jr. is ou ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Evolution of Football Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Football 2.0 [Petromyzon / Flickr]The "Small Ball Theory," George Plimpton's notion that the quality of writing about a particular sport is inversely proportional to the size of that sport's ball, has always been given a generous hearing in our office. This is a baseball kind of place, basically, with a sideline in golf. Any ball that's larger than a fist -- or oddly shaped -- doesn't get much attention in the confabs before our story meetings... or ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Photography 2.0 Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) One of the millions of photos on flickr. [Oblivion Ratula /Flickr]A group of teenagers sits in a loose cluster on the floor of an airport lounge photographing each other with cell phones and giggling over the results. A man takes a picture of everything he's eaten that day and posts the results online. In Bangalore and Portugal, in Boston and Maputo, Mozambique, "amateur" photographers are recording, documenting, and preserving the minutia of daily ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website What Should College Teach? Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Too many choices [kodama / Flickr] Last week, Harvard University published a new plan to revamp its "core" general education requirements. Harvard's long been looked to as a kind of leader in defining what colleges should be teaching -- and so it made us wonder: What should students be learning today, in 2006? What do they need to know these days in order to function as happy, engaged adults? As the Harvard report puts it, today's college students ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Death of Anna Politkovskaya Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) A memorial service for Politkovskaya in Finland [uninen / Flickr]What did she know about Putin's Russia that we don't? Politkovskaya was murdered in Moscow this week, shot on the street. A journalist, she spent the last seven years as a columnist for Novaya Gazeta, covering Chechnya and the oligarchs and the list of official sins that continues to grow in Putin's Russia. She titled collections of her columns Putin's Russia, A Dirty War and A Small ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Elections �06: Ohio�s 15th Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Hello Capitol [dospaz / Flickr] Ohio's 15th congressional district presents one of the top opportunities for Democrats this year. The Columbus-area electorate is thinking about sending its long-term and influential Representative to the sidelines, and filling her position with a relative rookie. With a month to go, polls show first-term county commissioner Mary Jo Kilroy in an even heat with seven-term incumbent Deborah Pryce. If Pryce gets the bo ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Dutch Canary in the Multicultural Coalmine? Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)One paragraph stands out among many insightful passages in Ian Buruma's new Murder in Amsterdam, a meditation on the causes and meanings of the filmmaker Theo Van Gogh's 2004 murder:By the middle of the twentieth century... the Netherlands had pretty much caught up with the world, and since then things often happened earlier than elsewhere: tolerance of recreational drugs and pornography; acceptance of gay rights, multiculturalism, euthanasia, and so o ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The End of Free Will? Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)Nature or Nurture? [BB / Flickr]The corporate lock-up of restaurants began decades ago when the lower echelon eateries - the hotdog stands, automats, cafeterias, carts, etc. - were squashed or subsumed by chain behemoths. There are scattered holdouts, but they're fading. Again, McDonald's, KFC, etc. don't aim to be mere options; their mandate is to fill all space at this price point.Jim Leff, The Evil That is Panera or Why Adam Smith's Invisible Hand R ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Predatory Politics Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)"Maf54 -- you in your boxers, too?" [Usonian / Flickr]Is Mark Foley suddenly political dynamite for the family values party or a case of a liberal, cynical media exploiting America's obsession with sex and its fear and dread and embarrassment of it too?It's a perfect blogstorm -- or at least a category 3 hurricane -- says former Clinton enabler George Stephanopoulos.But is it just Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Elections �06: The Arizona 8th Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) The border between Arizona and Mexico [Ryan Bavetta / Flickr] Arizona's 8th Congressional District stretches north from the border to a bit of the southern Tucson suburbs, but a Democrat up in Tucson doesn't necessarily want the same things as a Democrat down south. Tucson Democrats, explained Michael Marizco, author of Border Reporter, are more likely to volunteer to come south to supply water stations for border crossers; along the border, Democr ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Open Source in the Boardroom Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) That's open source, the general ethos, not Open Source, the public radio show. Because it's not just about techies in their pajamas anymore, creating Linux for the glory of it. It's also about gold-mine prospecting, and international coding competitions, and even soda marketing. It's one of the ways -- one of the few ways -- that smart companies can get ahead of the rest of the pack, says business writer William Taylor in his new manifesto Mavericks ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Green Chemistry Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) The new industrial revolution [spike55151 / Flickr] John Warner's an interesting and innovative chemist, but of all the things he said in a pre-interview, this was the most striking: there's not a single regular chemistry Ph.D. program in this country that requires a course in toxicology. Think about that for a minute. You're taught how to use and create lots of dangerous chemicals, but you don't have to know how to deal with their toxicity. Or even ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Elections �06: Rhode Island Senate Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Planet Providence, Rhode Island [woneffe/Cotuit / Flickr] This fall we'll go state by state, examining some of the most contested Congressional and gubernatorial races in the country. Tuesday we start with the Rhode Island Senate race between Republican incumbent Lincoln Chafee and his Democratic challenger, former state Attorney General Sheldon Whitehouse. Chafee is sometimes seen as a maverick - he was the only Republican Senator to vote agains ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website I.F. Stone Remembered Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) I.F. Stone, Washington, 1988 [keithwj / Flickr]I. F. Stone was the only genius I ever observed in the genius-proof genre of deadline journalism. He was also, as is often celebrated nowadays, a proto-blogger: he wrote with an absolutely one-off independent spirit and lived without a boss or a staff (but for his dreamy, gorgeous, and adoring wife Esther) on the $5-a-year subscriptions to his four-page newsletter, I. F. Stone's Weekly. He was a model ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Niall Ferguson�s �War of the World� Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Niall Ferguson, charming Scot [Brendan Greeley]China is out-manufacturing us. Islam is outbreeding us -- even as Muslim sects tear each other apart. The price of all-the-world's energy, oil, is going nuts. The Anglo-American end of the Atlantic alliance seems to have spiraled down in embarrassment in Iraq. These are the fresh elements in the Scots historian Niall Ferguson's recurrent War of the World nightmare. And they extend the theme in his s ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mea Culpa Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Crimson contrition[Horrortaxi/Flickr] Erich Segal's oft-quoted catch phrase, "Love means not ever having to say you're sorry," set the tone for the 60s and nearly the next 30 years. What was true for love soon became true for war, and for political scandals and for manmade disasters. In the 60s the apology, like so much else, went underground. But it seems that the apology is enjoying a revival as a necessary and effective tool in diplomacy and ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Moderate Muslims Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) British novelist Martin Amis wrote a 12,000 word piece in the Guardian to coincide with the 5th anniversary of September 11th. In it he rails against Islamism, and describes how he abandoned short story dealing with a would-be terrorist. The piece has sparked much intense debate in the bloggosphere, especially over what he calls the "civil war within Islam." Until recently it was being said that what we are confronted with, here, is a 'civil war' ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Handicapping the Midterms Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Let the race begin! [mescobosa / Flickr]Let the handicapping begin! On the eve of the last big round of primaries, and in the wake of the rest, we're looking forward to the midterms. There's been talk of a reversal not seen since the '94 Republican revolution, and there's recent talk of a resurgent Bush. But what have we learned so far? What rhyme or reason do you see when Lamont beats Lieberman, Clinton trounces Tasini, and Chafee takes Laffey? Is ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Blair�s Long Goodbye Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Mr. Blair is leaving the building. [Mister Snappy/Flickr]Britain's longest serving Labour prime minister will step down within the year. Small scale revolt from within party ranks and a nasty dispute with long time political rival Gordon Brown were the straws that broke the camel's back after growing anger over the country's foreign policy. During his time in office, Blair successfully captured the country's political center, led Britain away from ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website After 9/11: The Long View Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) We seek out historians to reveal the present, not the past. We want to find a doctor who's seen our symptoms before... on the general suspicion, from Ecclesiastes, that "there is nothing new under the sun." Or as Joyce's Stephen Daedalus said, because history is "the nightmare from which we are trying to awaken." Also: because so much of the daily news -- of mad military overstretch abroad and commercial and cultural decadence at home -- feels lik ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Fear Factor Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Real or Perceived? [dday/Flickr] We watched the New Year coming in around the world, the mass hysteria of no significance that was the millennial New Year�s Eve celebration. Brilliance flaring across the time zones, and none ignited by bin Laden. Light whirling over nighttime London more spectacular than anything since the splendors of colored smoke billowed up from the Blitz. And the Eiffel Tower shooting fire, a facsimile flame-throwing weapon s ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website After the Fall: The Rise of 9/11 Literature Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)Phantom Limbs[Remko van Dokkum /Flickr] I tend to be easily unhinged. Minor mishaps-a clogged drain, running late for an appointment-send me into a sky-is-falling tizzy. It�s a trait that can leave one ill-equipped for coping with the sky when it actually falls. Before 9/11 my traumas were all more or less self-inflicted, but outrunning that toxic cloud that had moments before been the north tower of the World Trade Center left me reeling on that ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Afghanistan Five Years After 9/11 Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)The strongest growth in Afghanistan? [andrew lopez / Flickr] When we were talking about whether/how to cover the 5th anniversary of September 11th, we decided that a show on Afghanistan -- which, like the rest of the media, we've neglected -- could be interesting. It was our first front in the "war on terror," so it begs the question: how are we doing? This year Afghanistan grew a record-breaking poppy crop (92% of the world's opium supply). Not unre ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Redistricting: The Art and Science of Gerrymandering Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Illinois' 4th Congressional District. [NationalAtlas.gov]We've done three shows so far looking at various problems with America's electoral process. (Here, here, and here.) The next question on the docket: how do you kill a gerrymander? Redistricting is a necessary part of democratic upkeep: changing the boundaries of political districts to account for census-tracked population shifts every ten years. So when did redistricting go from being a neces ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Rebroadcast: Black Men in America Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Open Source is off this week, so we're re-broadcasting five shows we developed in the months after Katrina hit as part of an ongoing series on race and class. Tonight: Black Men in America: Behind the Numbers. From Chris's original billboard: The story of "black males left behind" in America is a blur of bad numbers surrounding a void of good answers. In the standard statistical measures, many vital signs point down -- about families, for exampl ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Rebroadcast: Hip Hop Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Open Source is off this week, so we're re-broadcasting five shows we developed in the months after Katrina hit as part of an ongoing series on race and class. Tonight: Race and Class: Hip Hop. From Chris's original billboard: A quarter century before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, hip-hop music had become a sort of advance soundtrack of the storm. In that sense, Katrina and its revelations about race and class realities in America fit into a ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Rebroadcast: Race and Class Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)Open Source is off this week, so we're re-broadcasting five shows we developed last year the month after Katrina hit as part of an ongoing series on race and class. Tonight the first in the series, Rethinking Race and Class.From Chris's original billboard:The evangelist Bishop T. D. Jakes, with President and Mrs. Bush at the National Cathedral last week, said we�re a country �that overlooks the poor and the suffering and continues past the ghetto on o ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Houston After Katrina Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) In the immediate aftermath of Katrina the story in Houston was the instantaneous and effective combination of public participation, private philanthropy, and civic coordination. In a city that was never known for its social capital, Houstonians opened their veins, their pocketbooks, their houses. 85% gave something. The largest homeless shelter in the history of the country was put together in a matter of days. The Dallas Morning News, the paper of t ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Munich, Yalta or Cambodia: What Year is It? Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) What's your vintage? [John Federico / Flickr] If war in the Middle East is a battle for the control of images, right now in the US it's a battle for control of the analogy. (OK, it's all a battle for the control of oil, but stay with us here.) Ross Douthat, in an op-ed last week in The Wall Street Journal, took on the unenviable task of wading through yards of commentary -- on Lebanon, on Iraq, on the UN, on Iran -- to discover not what pundits th ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Europe, Lebanon and the Details of Peacekeeping Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) European hesitation over committing troops to the peacekeeping force is to some extent rooted in bitter memories of the Continent�s experiences in Bosnia, where foreign troops were not only unable to prevent large-scale ethnic killing but were themselves held hostage at times by the warring parties. Some of the peacekeepers� ineffectiveness was attributed to unclear rules of engagement and to conflicting chains of command between national defense mini ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ellington, Newport and the American Century Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) On July 7, 1956, Duke Ellington played the Newport Jazz Festival. Paul Gonsalves soloed for six minutes on "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue," the crowd exploded, an album was cut and our century -- the American century, the Jazz century -- found its high point. Or, from our own site: I may be force fitting a connection where there isn�t one � but I wonder if The Rise and Fall of America has anything to do with The Rise and Fall of SWING?Shaman, i ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Value of a Life Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) There is no value in life except what you choose to place on it...Henry David Thoreau Price Tag on Life [GwENvision / Flickr] When we were putting together our show, The Good Death, we spent a lot of time discussing the most cost effective way to die. These conversations often had us talking about the other side of the equation: what is the value of life. For nearly three years this question became the center of Kenneth Feinberg�s existence. A ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Chomsky: My Dinner with Hassan Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Just a short post until Chris can give it the full treatment. Last May Noam Chomsky, groundbreaking linguist and veteran lefty, had dinner with Hassan Nasrallah. That's right, Hassan Nasrallah. Now, we know that Chomsky and Nasrallah are likely to set off some alarm bells, but regardless of how you feel about the two, wouldn't you like to be a fly on the wall for that conversation? We'll have Chomsky on for the hour tomorrow. Noam Chomsky Prof ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Meaning of Connecticut Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Upon the revelation yesterday of a large-scale bombing plot in London, coming as it did two days after Ned Lamont's defeat of Joe Lieberman in Connecticut's Democratic primary, Lieberman connected the dots from Baghdad to London: If we just pick up like Ned Lamont wants us to do, get out by a date certain, it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England.Senator Joseph Lie ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Foiled London Plot Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) We'd planned a Duke Ellington at Newport fifty years later show for tonight, but twenty-one suspected would-be terrorists (along with the London police) changed the subject. Now we're wondering: is the foiled London plot a victory for warring on terror? Or policing it? What does today's news tell us about how far we've come -- or haven't -- in the nearly five years since September 11, 2001? And, shampoo aside, who was actually surprised by today's ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Birthday Party Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Happy Birthday[Rob Lee / Flickr] 2006 has been a big year for big birthdays. We started the season with Mozart's 250th and Beckett's 100th -- now it's time to honor the young'uns. This year Queen Elizabeth II, Hugh Hefner and Fidel Castro turn 80 -- as do Alan Greenspan, Jerry Lewis and Cloris Leachman. But there is something remarkable about the Windsor-Hefner-Castro triumvirate. Each one of them came to power nearly 50 years ago and they e ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The War for Iran: Juan Cole�s �Thought Experiment� Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) The relentless war stalker Juan Cole stopped dead in his tracks over the weekend. The war in Lebanon has no rational explanation, he decided. Tearing up a democracy with a young government that President Bush had embraced at the White House just months ago? Erasing vast tracts of a recovering capital city? Killing many hundreds of civilians in the name of ransoming two Israeli soldiers? It makes no sense at all, Professor Cole concluded. Unless ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website China: Watching from the Sidelines Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) China�s economic rise has led it to seek out natural resources and trade ties around the developing world, from Central Asia to South America to Africa. Some are warning of a new �Great Game� of resource competition, and others are afraid that China�s willingness to partner with authoritarian regimes might lead to the emergence of a �Beijing Consensus� to challenge the �Washington Consensus� that favors open, liberal democracy.mc_masterchef, in a com ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Israel and Lebanon: Refuge in Fiction Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Keret and el-Youssef [ontheface / Flickr]We first read about Etgar Keret and Samir El-Youssef in Lisa Goldman's blog two weeks ago. They're both writers -- of novels, screenplays, short stories, essays, and comics. Keret is an Israeli, El-Youssef a Palestinian who grew up in a refugee camp in Lebanon and now lives in London. And they're friends. In the culmination of another shattering week of news, and of Open Source shows about Israeli approaches ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Generational Divide in the Middle East Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Friday Prayer [bethcanphoto / Flickr]More than half of the 250 million Muslims in the Arab world today are younger than 25. The conventional wisdom is that the generation now in its 20s and 30s is more religious, less US-focused or -friendly, and more radicalized than the generation currently in its 50s and 60s. We're sketching out generational shifts in the Middle East and the larger Muslim world in the last twenty years or so. It's a huge topic, ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Optics of This War Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) The Lebanon crisis could never be contained - even if the war does not physically spread to Iran or Syria, the images of the war have already done their work throughout the Arab and Islamic world. Just as Iraq served al-Qaeda's strategy by supplying an endless stream of images of "heroic mujahideen" fighting against "brutal Americans" - and became less useful as images of dead Iraqi civilians began to complicate the picture - the Lebanon war offer ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Israel at War Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Thinking back, trying to recreate my conversations with worried friends about this war with Lebanon, about the Iranian missiles, the Syrian machinations and the assumption that Hezbollah�s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, has the ability to strike any place in the country, even Tel Aviv, I realize that there was a small gleam in almost everyone�s eyes, a kind of unconscious breath of relief. And no, it�s not that we Israelis long for war or death or ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website On David and Goliath Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Sifting through the details of a bloody six days in yesterday's story meeting, from Haifa to Nasrallah, Katyushas to Syria, we eventually drifted far afield and found ourselves talking about bar fights (via Global Voices) and biblical stories and, specifically, the lasting power of David and Goliath. Which is not to say that we're not interested in the details of the current situation. We have been, and will continue to be. But this seems like as go ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Lebanon: What Happened to the Cedar Revolution? Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Celebrating Syria's withdrawal, 2005 [FlickrJunkie / Flickr] Protesting the bombings, 2006 [captain nomes / Flickr] It seems like just yesterday the US was cheering on the Cedar Revolution as proof that democracy was spreading through the Middle East. Now the memory of last year's elections and the withdrawal of Syrian troops has been overshadowed by the power and popularity of Hezbollah. And this second, tragic destruction of Beirut has left us ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A New Map of the Middle East Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Bang. [soldeace / Flickr]The US invasion of Iraq can be seen as a bang of the fist on the chess board, a gamble that when the pieces fell back to the table we'd be looking at a better game. We've been covering this aspect of the war in Iraq for a while, discussing the likelihood or even presence of civil war in Iraq and Iran's improving hand. But with Saddam gone, suddenly a lot of countries -- not just the United States -- had one less enemy, and ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Poetry of Franz Wright and Fanny Howe Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) In the last six years I got very very interested in being around people in different forms of affliction... I use the term affliction in the sense of genuinely broken people who may not make it back. I like to be around people who are struggling with addiction and struggling with mental illness. I volunteered for a number of years in a place called the Center for Grieving Children... I'm happy among them, I like being around people who are struggl ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Lorraine Hunt Lieberson Remembered Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Lorraine Hunt Lieberson [Anne-Marie Le Ble]Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, the most celebrated operatic singer of her generation, died last week at the age of 52. Famously, Hunt Lieberson's professional singing career started late. A freelance violist who never stopped taking singing lessons, she didn't begin singing full time until the age of 26. Critics were quick to point out that even if she stopped playing the viola, she never forgot its dusky-voiced l ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Transcendental Women Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) I was amazed--it sounds so innocent and silly--to find that most of American Literature was written in three houses over a period of five years. Susan Cheever At Sleepy Hollow Cemetary [redjar / Flickr]The handsomest author and the most adoring wife in the annals of American literature are together again. You may have heard the news that the remains of Sophia Peabody Hawthorne (whose diamond-etched love lyrics are still readable in the window p ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Of Hand Counts and Voting Machines Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) At this point, we cannot design a [fully verifiable electronic election system], nor can anyone else. Computer systems are so complicated, that there is no single person that understands everything about how they work. David Dill After taking a look at the 2004 election in Ohio and America's history of dirty elections, we're thinking of a couple more shows about elections in America. Up first: the way we mark and count our ballots. Are digital ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Korea: The Politics of the Peninsula Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) For Kim Jong-Il, to think that we can just give him carrots and be generous and he will change is a bit like trying to cure pneumonia with cough drops and vitamins. The intention might be earnest, but the application is misplaced. Nuclear weapons are the key to his long-term survival, and for his children as well. David Kang Looking north across the DMZ [buck82 / Flickr]A casual American observer would have noticed something interesting in the cac ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Good Death Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Resting in Peace[Jacob Krejci / Flickr] In our suggest a show thread Scarequotes offered an idea that we are in the process of turning into an hour of radio What should the leading cause of death be? We�re all going to die. Someday. (Barring some incredible advances in medicine that confer virtual immortality on everyone.) How should that happen? We frequently hear about how such-and-such � heart disease, cancer, obesity, accidents, AIDS � is t ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Google Print Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) This, Google-able? [Justin Braithwaite / Flickr]Fair use is hard to explain. I know this because Jack Bernard, the attorney in charge of the Google project at the University of Michigan, walked me through it this afternoon. It took him forty-five minutes, and he started with a look at Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Terrorism Index Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) 84% [of the 100 polled] said we're losing the war, 86% said the world is becoming more dangerous for the United States. ...Foreign policy experts have never been in so much agreement about an administration's performance abroad. Joseph Cirincione In the wake of the Supreme Court's Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision and a descent into further chaos in Israel, we're turning to Foreign Policy's recent special, The Terrorism Index. They asked a simple quest ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website We Say Potato Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) It's the entire spectrum of cooking, of eating, of life itself can be represented by the potato.Jim Leff Steamin' Spud[Roboppy / Flickr] The last time our good friend Jim Leff, the chowhound, was on Open Source you had only the first course. Leff served up the second course, when we were off the air, and he started talking potatoes. We are bringing him back so you can be in on this great conversation. Leff is a guy who was cooking potato ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Democrats: a Message Problem? Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) But can they forgive Kerry? [kenyee / Flickr]Everything in this office comes with a Red Sox analogy, and today we're looking at the Democrats the way Red Sox nation looks at the All-Star break. Boston may be in first place. They may be five games up in first place. They may look great, they may be hitting well and there may be five good Yankees on injured reserve and yet we still can't shake the feeling -- the conviction borne of experience -- that ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Limits of Crowds Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) I really don't like anonymity in a wiki format. It's an immature thrill, it's like being a [graffiti] tagger instead of a real artist, where you get to go do something that affects collective experience but you don't really have to take responsibility. We have to make sure digital culture encourages responsible mature individuals as well as collective market judgments. I think blogs do, Wikipedias don't. Jaron Lanier The reason why Wikipedia w ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Encyclopedia of American Conservatism Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Today the New York Times published this article about the new Encyclopedia of American Conservatism. The weighty 997 page tome has been 16 years in the making, but hits books shelves at a time when American conservatism is at a cross roads. This new book stakes out some territorial claims - detailing the intellectual roots of the movement while side stepping prominent contemporary conservatives like Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, even George H.W. Bush. ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website America�s Dirty Elections Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) [djwudi / Flickr]Last night we dissected the 2004 Ohio presidential election (what went wrong and why), and tonight we'll use that same Ohio election as a kind of launching point both forwards and backward in time. Backwards to learn whether it and Florida in 2000 were particularly egregious failures -- or whether they were basically business-as-usual in a two-party system that's not eager for voting reform. And forwards to try to understand whether ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Steal This Election Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) A two-hour wait to vote in Columbus. [Bryce Glass / Flickr] Consensus seems to be that the 2004 presidential election, especially in the key swing state Ohio, was rife with problems and "irregularities" - endless polling lines in select areas, wildly inaccurate exit polls, shifty processing of voter registration cards etc. But do irregularities add up to fraud? Do problems in our piecemeal, locally-based presidential voting system add up to a stole ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website After Zarqawi: �The Enemy� in Iraq Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) 45:20 We are in the beginning of 1983 and Iraq is our Afghanistan and we are the Soviets... We're bogged down with over 100,000 troops, in an Asian land war which we cannot win, it is draining us of blood and treasure, it's obviously sapping our morale, we have an enormous budget deficit, we're the victims of imperial over-stretch, there is no end in sight, we have inadvertently helped to put up the price of petroleum which is also hurting our and ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Blogsday 2006 Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Blogsday was a great show from June 2005. Any interest in doing this again for 2006?Jon, from a comment to Open Source May 16, 2006 Oh yes there is. Jon is referring to a show from a year ago -- listen here -- an idea of Chelsea's that still one of our favorites. Taking as our model Bloomsday, Dublin's very real June 16, 1904 in which James Joyce's set his very fictional Ulysses, we took a look at one day of the blogosphere, in our case Tuesday, J ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Truth, Balance and the News Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) In our email this morning we found this: ...if my e-mail box is any indication, more and more listeners are finding NPR's traditional approach to reporting both sides of an issue to be increasingly unsatisfactory and frustrating. I sense a rising anxiety and impatience among large numbers of NPR listeners who urge that the network take a more activist -- or at least a more openly skeptical -- role in the media landscape of the United States.NPR Omb ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Blogosphere: Dems vs. the G.O.P. Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) The YearlyKos bloggers' convention just finished up in Las Vegas yesterday, drawing left-leaning bloggers from all over the country. Also in attendance were many national political figures from the Democratic party, hoping to catch the bloggers' ears. About the conference the New York Times opined: The blogosphere has become for the left what talk radio has been for the right: a way of organizing and communicating to supporters. Blogging is nowhere ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website John Updike and his Terrorist Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) John Updike [Nubar Alexanian, for This I Believe] It is made to sound like big news that John Updike has written a thriller -- with a page-turning spiritual crisis behind the wheel of a truck full of explosives in the Lincoln Tunnel entering Manhattan. It is made to sound presumptuous (maybe preposterous) for a white-haired novelist on the North Shore of Boston to be putting his imagination into the head of an 18-year-old half-Egyptian boy from ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Explaining the World Cup Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Four summers ago, the city of New York opened back up at two every morning to watch soccer games in cities four time zones away. I made a bet with the busboy where I ate breakfast and won; I made bets with a friend in Germany and lost. He called after the game, the German, proud like a favorite uncle, to explain how team USA had played better than anyone had a right to expect. Almost, he said, respectably well. I pretended to be flattered, but as ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website New Orleans: Dead and Gone? Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Lower 9th Ward, 8 months post-Katrina. [Eric Harvey Brown/ Flickr] There's been a lot of news from New Orleans this week - about the dismal state of the levees, about the fact that New Orleans is sinking at a rate of almost an inch a year - and despite the promises and the optimism, not to mention the fanfare of Nagin's inauguration, this many months after Katrina it seems like New Orleans is still a really hard place to live. Huge patches of the ci ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The War Tapes: Cinema Guerrit� Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) A Soldier's eye view [Scranton/Lacy Films] War has long been a subject of legendary filmmaking. Films such as Glory, Battleship Potemkin, Catch- 22, and Platoon capture both the physical and psychological despair of combat--even the Cold War has its films: The Macnchurian Candidate and Dr. Strangelove. But these films are the products of seasoned directors, not of the combatants. For the first time, soldiers have made a film about war while waging ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Condi�s Turn, To Diplomacy Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Condi in Vienna this week talking about Iran [Josie Duckett / State Department] Dick Cheney's fantasy war with Iran ("Real men want to go to Tehran," was the line three years ago) has been postponed, maybe shelved. Condi Rice has taken charge with her readiness to engage Iran with European cover on the matter of nuclear development. A change in the Washington weather is palpable. Reality-based thinking, Congress and foreign allies are all being ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Globalization of Hip-Hop Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Our first hip-hop show will look at the culture/phenominom domestically. This, our second hip-hop show, will answer a challenge posed by listener leonplays on our blog. A French b-boy breakdances in downtown Paris [Hugo L'Eglise /Flickr]I was interested in the idea of hip-hop music as a kind of cross-cultural glue for the marginalized immigrant experience...Europe, Brazil, Asia�hip hop music has been taken in by everyone, with many different interp ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Immigration and Development, with Amartya Sen Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) With the Nobel economist Amartya Sen, we pick up the question hanging at the end of our conversation on remittances and the flood of migrant workers. Amartya Sen [Jon Chase, Harvard News]To wit: isn't the immigration crisis the flip side of a development riddle? What would it take to make the lives of Mexican farmers sustainable in Mexico? How does it come to be that there are more African-trained nurses and doctors working in Europe than in Afri ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Philip Roth Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Philip Roth [David Miller] This Memorial Day weekend we�re talking with Philip Roth about everything. It�s a free-range conversation that gets us beyond the books and into the mind, heart and soul of the Tolstoy of our times. In his latest work, Everyman, the hero bids farewell to vigor, lust and life but Roth himself remains as vital and persistent a writer as ever. With nearly 30 books under his belt, Roth�s approach to writing hasn�t changed I ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Iraqi Police Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Police Academy[Chad Sandoe / Flickr] A strong Iraqi police force is one of the stated "pillars" of the Bush Administration's Iraq strategy. It's essential to the country's stability -- and therefore to any plans for U.S. troop withdrawal (about which rumors are heating up again). So how is it that three years after the fall of Baghdad the police force is exhausted and ineffective -- and seems in fact to be at the very root of the country's simme ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website David Remnick on Boxing Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) David Remnick, on tour for his latest, Reporting: Writings from the New Yorker, will be in our studio tomorrow night. When we told him we wanted him to talk about boxing, he wrote in an email Of course we can talk about anything that suits your fancy but I suspect that all women and nearly all men no longer care about boxing or understand why I might; it's like caring about epic poetry, but low, low, low---a forgotten thing. Wouldn't there be more ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Great American Novel Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Graphomania[chacal la chaise / Flickr]If you've been wondering what the greatest work of American fiction has been in the last 25 years, wonder no more. The New York Times Book Review has surveyed a wide swath of the literary field. Tony Morrison's Beloved topped the charts with 15 votes and Philip Roth emerged the patriarch of the Great American Novel, having spawned 6, of the 22 finalists. The results do not surprise but they do leave you p ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Price of Fantasy Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Magic numbers. [Jeff Muceus/Flickr]56, .406, 755 -- baseball's record hit streak, batting average, and home run total: numbers at the intersection of history, myth, memory and, now, at the heart of a lawsuit between ball players and their fantasy fans. Because from these numbers has grown a side business: fantasy baseball now makes an estimated $1 billion a year. Fantasy baseball is the logical middle-aged move from armchair quarterback to armchair ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Harnessing Remittances [Scheduled forAired on Thursday May 18, 2006]Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)Filipinas belly up to the remittance bar in Hong Kong [Stuart Hargreaves / Flickr]Migrant workers will remit more than $232 billion to their families this year. The money migrant workers earn -- harvesting produce in California, cleaning houses in Singapore, and tending children in Kuwait-- is meager by the standards of the developed world, but it means everything for their families back home. $232 billion i ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Hidden Histories of Slavery Click to Listen to the Show (24MB MP3)A memorial in the former slave market of Zanzibar, Tanzania, where over a million slaves were traded between 1811 and 1873. [Patrick/Flickr][Scheduled for Wednesday May 17, 2006]Ghanaian poet and scholar Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang calls slavery "the living wound under the patchwork of scars." Alternately spotlighted and ignored on both sides of the Atlantic, slavery is still the bedrock of modern race relations in the U.S., and the starting point for every c ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Living Poetry, Living Poets [Booked for Tuesday May 16, 2006]Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)A key question in the first fantasies of Open Source three years ago was whether we could build a radio conversation in which techies would tune in to poets, and poets would tune in on techies.So here we go -- first time but not the last -- with younger poets reading live in our studio from their own work and taking us inside this paradoxically burgeoning but often isolated world of contemporary poetry, on-line and in b ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The White House Lawyers Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)Here's Stephen J. Hadley, assistant to the president for national security affairs, this weekend on CBS's "Face the Nation":The president has been very clear that we are to pursue our intelligence programs within the law.Stephen J. Hadley, quoted in Bush Aide Defends Acts by N.S.A., The New York Times, May 14, 2006He's referring to the NSA's newly disclosed practice of collecting data about all of our phone calls, but he could be talking about any numb ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The NSA�s New New Phone Database Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)Woke up this morning to the following headline, emailed from Open Source's fifth Beatle, John Barth:The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary A ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Children of the Corn Subsidies Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)Up close [Pipistrula / Flickr][Booked for Wednesday, May 10]In our recent immigration show, our guests noted that thousands of illegal Mexican immigrants are crossing into the U.S. because following the NAFTA agreement cheap -- read subsidized -- American corn has flooded the Mexican market. These one-time farmers just can't compete against U.S. corn on their soil, so they often end up picking fruit on ours.It's one of many unintended consequences that ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website China: The Biggest Migration Ever [Scheduled for Tuesday 9 May 2006]Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)From here... [NgKKh / Flickr]...to here [erutan / Flickr]China now boasts the biggest migration in human history: some 120 million people so far. It began in the early 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping's "Reform and Opening" (experimentation with free markets and foreign trade) started a tidal wave of migrant workers and entrepreneurs flowing from rural farms to factories in eastern boomtowns -- initially focussed on "overnigh ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Nir Rosen on Iraq [Scheduled for Monday May 8, 2006]Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)Posters, and supporters, of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. [Nir Rosen]Nir Rosen stays out of the Green Zone. Instead, he lives and reports from what he calls the "Red Zone," i.e., the rest of the country.In the three years he's spent there since the start of the war, he has been much closer to the heart of the conflict than just about any other foreign reporter. He looks Middle Eastern and speaks Iraqi Arabic, so he ca ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Net Neutrality Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)For everyone? [io_burn / Flickr]Sometimes what the geeks care about is important. Right now the geeks are talking about "net neutrality," the idea that every packet of information -- a piece of an email, a piece of an mp3 of a radio broadcast -- carries equal importanc