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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 Also Listed as: Culture Current events Live talk Public Radio City : Cambrige State/Province : MA Country : USA Country : NA User Tags: healthy and unhealthy foods User Votes: RSS Feed Website People found this Podcast Searching for: Car talk | lydon | Talk | View this Podcast on a Google Map. Add to iTunes Text Only listing of Open Source Radio Podcasts Trumix.com listings available of Open Source Radio Podcasts Click Here to Update the directory of this podcasts programs.

Trumix.com listings available of Open Source Radio Podcasts Build your own playlists with this podcast. 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 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 nuc ... 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 ... 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 s ... 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 Presi ... 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 bra ... 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 We Interrupt This Program... Goodbye for now from Open Source. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website On Endings The End. From Bob Newhart's post-modern dream to Casablanca's classic farewell, great endings live on after the last page or the final frame. So how's a film, or a novel, or even a radio show, to craft an ending that satisfies -- and lasts? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The New Community The New Community. How's to translate the brilliant success of eBay or Craigslist in reconfiguring the process of buying and selling -- through networks on the web -- into the realm of political and cultural gab? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Issue is Empire Empire or Republic? Political economist Alice Amsden believes that the American empire lifted all boats until 1980; and since then has lifted only the yachts. Are we in danger, as Benjamin Franklin warned, of being unable to hang on to our republic? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Doping: Better Sporting Through Chemistry? Better living through chemistry, but sports? When ambivalent fans still throng to watch a steroid-tainted Barry Bonds and a perennially disgraced Tour de France, is it time to rethink fandom in an age of pharmaceutical enhancement? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ralph Nader: Super Hero or ?ber Spoiler? The real Ralph Nader, or Ralph as he sees himself: the local boy from small-city Winsted, Connecticut, the small-d Jeffersonian democrat, one of four star kids of purposeful immigrant parents who told him that "character" was "destiny." Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Passion: Bees The Plight of the Bumblebee: Bees are disappearing from hives, and no one knows why. But more than honey is at stake: who else is going to pollinate one third of our country's crops? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ralph Nader: Super Hero or ?ber Spoiler? The real Ralph Nader, or Ralph as he sees himself: the local boy from small-city Winsted, Connecticut, the small-d Jeffersonian democrat, one of four star kids of purposeful immigrant parents who told him that "character" was "destiny." Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Passion: Bees The Plight of the Bumblebee: Bees are disappearing from hives, and no one knows why. But more than honey is at stake: who else is going to pollinate one third of our country's crops? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Collapse of the Senate Immigration Bill Starting with the anxiety that beat the alliance represented by Ted Kennedy, George Bush and John McCain; who's up, in a campaign season, for a new quest for common ground? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Pharma: The New Drug Lord? When Dr. Marcia Angell wrote "The Truth About Drug Companies" in 2004, book and author were compared with Upton Sinclair and "The Jungle." Three years later doctors are still on the take, miracule cures are foundering and drug prices are soaring. Who's got a cure for Big Pharma? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Blogsday 2007 Our yearly trip around the blogosphere, post by post: A dentist's life. A detective's wife. The first day of pre-school. The first day of chemo. It's a pointillist portrait of the world from the best writers you've never heard of. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Taking the Food Stamp Challenge Lawmakers, activists, and bloggers are trying the $21-a-week diet to see what it's like for the hungry poor -- and they're finding that even if you can eat for one dollar a meal, it's virtually impossible to eat well. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website No Artist Left Behind What if marching bands and glee clubs, painting and poetry magazines are in fact the best way to engage hearts and minds in the modern city high school? Will we wonder some day how the expressive arts became almost unheard-of luxuries in our public schools? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Hillary Clinton's War Vote The return of the war vote: what does Hillary Clinton's 2002 vote authorizing the Iraq War say about her 2008 campaign, the future of the war, and the politcal calculus of never saying: I'm sorry. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Norman Mailer's'Long View' Norman Mailer at home, between Hitler novels, venting on his lifetime interest in the three kingdoms: God, Satan and Us. Plus, Proust, his grandchildren, existentialism and the real significance of TV commercials. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Deploying. Again. The fourth deployment. What combination of patriotism and fatigue, eagerness and fear, arrives when Uncle Sam FedExes marching orders for your fourth tour in Iraq or Afghanistan? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Plague: Camus's Fable in Our Time Camus's classic novel has served as an allegory for World War II, facism, and AIDS. In a post-9-11world his tale still vibrates with the questions about war, resistance, faith, and personal responsibility in the pestilences of our time. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website South Africa in Context: The Story of Mac Maharaj Mac Maharaj, lifer and survivor in South Africa's freedom movement. He smuggled Nelson Mandela's autiobiography out of prison and has the whole context of the African National Congress's epic struggle. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Notes From New Orleans "New Yorker" writer Dan Baum has spent nearly a year and a half in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina: in the Lower Ninth Ward, blogging an outsider's insights into the idiosyncracies of a city still struggling to survive. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Baseball: The Dominican Pastime One out of eight major league baseball players comes from the island nation of the Dominican Republic. It's the classic dream that epic talent can pull you out of staggering poverty -- but both the talent and the poverty are growing by the day. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website William James: Son, Brother, Hero The ageless American wisdom of William James: his ideas about religious belief, the process of thinking, and very public issues like war and imperialism still frame our discourse and mark the gold-standard of argumentative style. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Notes From New Orleans "New Yorker" writer Dan Baum has spent nearly a year and a half in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina: in the Lower Ninth Ward, blogging an outsider's insights into the idiosyncracies of a city still struggling to survive. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website William James: Son, Brother, Hero The ageless American wisdom of William James: his ideas about religious belief, the process of thinking, and very public issues like war and imperialism still frame our discourse and mark the gold-standard of argumentative style. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website South Africa in Context: The Story of Mac Maharaj Mac Maharaj, lifer and survivor in South Africa's freedom movement. He smuggled Nelson Mandela's autiobiography out of prison and has the whole context of the African National Congress's epic struggle. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Baseball: The Dominican Pastime One out of eight major league baseball players comes from the island nation of the Dominican Republic. It's the classic dream that epic talent can pull you out of staggering poverty -- but both the talent and the poverty are growing by the day. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Comey's Dissent at Justice A made-for-TV domestic spying drama. The inside story is out: about resignation threats at the Justice Department and a siren-blaring dash to John Ashcroft's hospital bed. Does it punch another hole in the Bush-Cheney case for a unitary executive? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mortgage Meltdown With a million homeowners going into foreclosure this year and dozens of unregulated lenders going belly-up, what is the "subprime" mortage crunch doing to the American dream? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Equity: More Private, Less Public? Equity: More Private, Less Public? Cerberus's purchase of Chrysler is the latest in a slew of recent private-equity deals worth billions of dollars. Does this buyout frenzy signal a broad shift in the public-private equity balance? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Spread of HIV in Africa Regrouping against HIV in Africa. In the so-called "ABC" anti-AIDS campaign, conservatives pushed for A, abstinence, and liberals for C, condoms. But as infections skyrocket what about the African voices pushing for B: "be faithful"? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Passion: Libraries When it's easier to google a fact than head to the stacks, what does the future hold for the library? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Varieties of Faith and Reason, Take Two Faith and Reason, Take Two: In this moment of religious fervor and anti-religious fear, is it possible to talk calmly about the varieties of religious meaning, ritual, and experience? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Hitchens v. God Polemicist Christopher Hitchens joins the neo-atheist movement, which begins to look like a literary crusade. His fighting flags say: God is Not Great. And: Religion, in our time especially, poisons everything. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ishmael Beah: Boy Soldier Ishmael Beah was 12 when the civil war erupted in Sierra Leone. At 13 he was orphaned, high on drugs, wielding an AK-47 for the army. Now 26, he's written the story of losing his humanity and finding a new life after war. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Re-Broadcast: Japanese Baseball Japanese Baseball in America: with Dice-K pitching for Boston, Ichiro dreaming of .400 and Hideki Matsui's all-around excellence, can we imagine a new MLB work ethic? With post-game "self-reflection conferences," or post-season FALL training? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Gold Rush for Financial Information The gold rush for financial information that surfaced in Rupert Murdoch's bid for the Wall Street Journal. CNBC, Bloomberg News and now Reuters are in on it, too. It's not "let's do the numbers." It's "let's OWN the numbers." Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The New Age of Old Age The doctor who writes, Atul Gawande, the Chekhov of our American times, on the science and sociology of aging. Medicine has added decades of quantity to our lives, but who's thinking about their quality? 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