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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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | “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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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, she trained as a Middle East historian at the University of Michigan. She’s now a post-d ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 us here [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | 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 | 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 write a [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | 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 St. Paul [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | 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 paycheck. Do [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | 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 | 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,” as Bono [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | 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 | 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 patriot, [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | 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 of dueling [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Pakistan 3.0: The “CIA Jihad” and the Whirlwind Today Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Pervez Hoodbhoy (34 minutes, 17 mb mp3) It is well known that the term ‘Pakistan’, an acronym, was originally thought up in England by a group of Muslim intellectuals. P for the Punjabis, A for the Afghans, K for the Kashmiris, S for Sind and the ‘tan’, they [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Reading Obama’s Mind: Pragmatism and Its Perils Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with James Kloppenberg (38 minutes, 19 mb mp3) If there is a problem with Barack Obama’s thinking, his “intellectual biographer” James Kloppenberg is saying on the morning after Obama’s mid-term “humbling,” it’s not what he thinks, deep in the Democratic mainstream. Neither is Obama over-thinking his confoundingly broad assignment. [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Daniyal Mueenuddin on Pakistan: At the Bedside of a Friend Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Daniyal Mueenuddin (45 minutes, 22 mb mp3) Daniyal Mueenuddin is the leading light of Pakistan’s literary boom in the English-speaking world. Just in time, he’s a hit in America for an enthralling collection of linked stories, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, set in the feudal farming estates of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Noam Chomsky: the Bright Side of the American Socrates Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Noam Chomsky (52 minutes, 25 mb mp3) Chantal Berman photo Noam Chomsky, after all these years, retains the power to shock — in the bright title of his new collection, Hopes and Prospects, and with what sounds like good news in this conversation. It’s Professor Chomsky’s cheerful conviction, [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Whose Words These Are (29): the Haunting of Peter Balakian Click to listen to Peter Balakian’s reading and conversation with Chris (21 minutes, 10 mb mp3) Peter Balakian has made “the aftermath of catastrophe” his poetic terrain. He is doubtless best known for his prose memoir of the Armenian genocide of 1915. Inspired by his grandmother’s strange shards of stories and nightmare visions, Balakian’s celebrated [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | V. S. Naipaul’s “Gloomy Clarity” about Africa and Himself Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with V. S. Naipaul (23 minutes, 11 mb mp3) V. S. Naipaul at his unveiling in London’s National Portrait Gallery V. S. Naipaul, in the winter of his long writing life, doesn’t disguise his melancholy or his frailty. Still, his inquisitorial eye and his magic with a prose sentence [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Kevin Kelly on Tech: the Unabomber was Right; the Amish, too. Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Kevin Kelly (44 minutes, 21 mb mp3) Kevin Kelly, most engaging of technophiles, has never been a techie. He was a low-consumption hippie growing up, then dropped out of college to photograph the simple life in Asia and Africa. In the 1970s, his twenties, he edited The Whole [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Jill Lepore: Tea Party Time… and the Death of Compassion Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Robert Reich (52 minutes, 25 mb mp3) There’s more religion than politics in the 2010 Tea Party, Jill Lepore is saying. There’s less of 1776 about it than of 1976 — that dyspeptic post-Vietnam, post-Watergate bicentennial moment remembered for Gerald Ford and school busing fights in Boston elsewhere. [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Isabel Wilkerson’s Leaderless March that Remade America Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Isabel Wilkerson. (48 minutes, 23 mb mp3) Isabel Wilkerson is the epic tale teller of the Great Migration of Southern black people that remade America — sound, substance and spirit — in the 20th Century. The proof is in the soundtrack — musical highlights of a comprehensive revolution. [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Whose Words These Are (28): Helen Vendler’s Emily Dickinson Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Helen Vendler (64 minutes, 30 mb mp3) Helen Vendler, our tutor in W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens, is showing us here how to swim the chilly depths of Emily Dickinson. The poem that taught Vendler how to read Dickinson is “Ashes denote that fire was…” The bleak [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | John Mearsheimer: Why does a smart country act so stupid? Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with John Mearsheimer (48 minutes, 22 mb mp3) When Barack Obama delivered his defining “dumb war” denunciation of war against Iraq in October, 2002, he was a state senator standing in at Chicago’s first big anti-war rally for the invited keynoter, John Mearsheimer, who’d been booked elsewhere. It was [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Robert Reich: Soak the rich for their own good Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Robert Reich (43 minutes, 21 mb mp3) Robert Reich is the point man in economics of the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” as Howard Dean used to say. That is, he’s been the burr under the saddle of the Wall Street wing that chased Reich, as Secretary [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Daniel Kehlmann’s Fame: The Self in the Cyber Century Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Daniel Kehlmann (40 minutes, 19 mb mp3) Daniel Kehlmann is a very funny, very philosophical young fictionist from Germany who will make you want more like him — and more playfully engaging books like his Fame, a novel in nine linked short stories, or “episodes.” A number of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Andrew Bacevich: how war without end became the rule Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Andrew Bacevich (43 minutes, 20 mb mp3) Andrew Bacevich is the soldier turned writer who’s still unlearning and puncturing the Washington Rules of national security. The rules have turned into doctrines, he’s telling us, of global war forever. He is talking about the scales that have fallen from [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Arianna Huffington: who will change the conversation? Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Arianna Huffington (23 minutes, 11 mb mp3) Arianna Huffington is the fair, smart, brassy embodiment of a new conversation trying to happen. At a sold-out book party at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, I am interrupting her pitch for Third World America to ask her, as queen of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Real India: Ashis Nandy’s post-colonial “intimate enemies” Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Ashis Nandy (32 minutes, 15 mb mp3) NEW DELHI — Ashis Nandy has a big idea about “loss and recovery” in the history of colonialism. The bumpersticker version is that the conquerors and colonists lose in the end; the vanquished victims win. He is talking, of course, about [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Real India: Namita Gokhale: the revolution will be written! Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Namita Gokhale (34 minutes, 17 mb mp3) NEW DELHI – Namita Gokhale — novelist, publisher, sparkplug of the annual Jaipur Literature Festival — says the essential (maybe the only) revolution in India today is literary. She’s envisioning something like a galactic explosion outward from a Sanskritic big bang [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Real India: On the Couch with Sudhir Kakar Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Sudhir Kakar (17 minutes, 8 mb mp3) NEW DELHI — Sudhir Kakar has built a Freudian bridge to the alternate universe that is India. The India he writes and talks about is different not only from our world but also from its own branding. “Indians,” he writes, for [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Real India: Tarun Tejpal’s heart-ache for “the idea of India” Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Tarun Tejpal (66 minutes, 32 mb mp3) NEW DELHI — Tarun Tejpal — muckraker, editor and novelist — is speaking with professional zeal and a certain generational remorse about his remarkable ten-year-old magazine Tehelka. In the slick commercial media of New Delhi, Tehelka is the strong-minded reformist alternative. [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Real India: The BBC’s Mark Tully on Poverty and “Tinderwood” Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Mark Tully (40 minutes, 19 mb mp3) NEW DELHI — Mark Tully is something like the Edward R. Murrow of India. He has been the beloved voice of the BBC in New Delhi since 1964 — knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1991 even after he quit the Beeb [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Real India: Shashi Tharoor, the ‘NRI’ who came home Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Shashi Tharoor (41 minutes, 20 mb mp3) NEW DELHI — Shashi Tharoor is the global Indian who came home — who scored a thundering victory in his first run for office, and has been paying the price ever since. Bounced in April from P. M. Manmohan Singh’s Cabinet [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Real India: M. A. Baby and “Kerala Communism” Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with M. A. Baby (29 minutes, 14 mb mp3) TRIVANDRUM, Kerala — M. A. Baby is giving us an introductory dose of Indian leftism in power. A Communist and a Catholic, too, he is the Minister of Education and Culture in a coalition government that runs the state of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Real India: “I’m the Village Guy” Click to listen in on Chris’s conversation with Barathi Raja Reddy in Tamil Nadu. (17 minutes, 8 mb mp3) Barathi Raja Reddy is the Indian entrepreneur we didn’t expect to meet. He’s a young man of the Old India happy to be dropping out of the New.  He is a soft-spoken Hindu nationalist who’s devoted [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Real India: Novelist Paul Zacharia Shares His “Confusion” Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Paul Zacharia. (33 minutes, 15 mb mp3) Paul Zacharia is a novelist and story writer eminent in the Malayalam language and in Trivandrum, the southernmost big city in India and the capital of the famously progressive state of Kerala. In our conversations, Paul Zacharia stands for the many [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Real India: Walking the Slum Side of Bangalore Click to listen in on Chris’s slum tour with Brindge Adige. (54 minutes, 26 mb mp3) BANGALORE — Brinda Adige, a self-starting social activist, in yellow sari, is our guide to the slum side of Bangalore and the virtual canyon between the public squalor and private affluence that are both hallmarks of the New India. [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Real India: At Koshy’s Cafe, The Talk of Bangalore Click to listen in on the conversation at Koshys Cafe. (35 minutes, 16 mb mp3) “… And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. Especially in the field of technology. And these entrepreneurs — [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Real India: Confidence-building in the new “Women’s Work” Click to listen in on Chris’s visit to the Ubuntu workshop in Ramanagar. (22 minutes, 11 mb mp3) RAMANAGAR — We drove out about 50 kilometers south and west of Bangalore to see a busted “silk city” and a social “silver bullet” in action. Ubuntu-at-Work, an NGO with roots in the US and other branches [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Real India: A historian’s cautions on “the Indian Century” Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with the Ramachandra Guha. (58 minutes, 28 mb mp3) BANGALORE — Ramchandra Guha, the provocative, critical historian of India After Gandhi, has vitality and charisma to match his country’s. Writing and talking with fire-hose force, he’s come to mirror India’s sense of it’s 63-year-old self. For all of the [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Real India: a land soon without tigers, and maybe orchids Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with the Suprabha Seshan. (27 minutes, 13 mb mp3) Suprabha Seshan — a gardener and guardian of the land, living for the last 17 years in the wild rain forest of Kerala, near the southwest tip of India — is taking a fierce run here at the glad gab in [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The New India: Social Entrepreneurship as a Family Affair Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with the Chhiber-Mathew family. (46 minutes, 22 mb mp3) BANGALORE — Neelam Chhiber met her husband Jacob Mathew in graduate school, the National Academy of Design in Ahmedabad. Today, with their 19-year-old son Nishant, they are giving me one family’s story of the improvisational networking and social entrepreneurship that [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Nicholas Carr: our brains, drowning in the Shallows Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Nicholas Carr. (27 minutes, 13 mb mp3) Photo: William Taylor for wired.com Nicholas Carr is famous for fretting that Google is making us stupid — that the Internet is driving our brains into The Shallows. But he knows that he’s not the first to worry about the effects of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Duke Ellington’s America: musical genius and then some… Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Harvey G. Cohen. (44 minutes, 20 mb mp3) Harvey Cohen’s jam-packed Duke Ellington’s America makes it a great long season of jazz biographies — after Robin Kelley’s Thelonious Monk and Terry Teachout’s Pops. Harvey Cohen is a cultural historian who’s been to the bottom of the Smithsonian’s oceanic archive on [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | William Dalrymple: the Af-Pak Fiasco “on its last legs” Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with William Dalrymple. (49 minutes, 22 mb mp3) William Dalrymple is drawing on a deep well of personal and imperial history in his stark clarification of our American comeuppance in Afghanistan. “The war has lost all semblance of shape or form,” he observes, at a moment when our [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Vijay Iyer’s Life in Music: “Striving is the Back Story…” Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Vijay Iyer. (68 minutes, 33 mb mp3) Vijay Iyer brings rare stuff to jazz piano, starting with a Brahmin Indian name and heritage, and a Yale degree in physics. Gujarati stick dances and Bhajan devotional songs from Northern India are in his blood, well mixed by now with [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Bromwich Channels Edmund Burke: “America is out of itself” Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with David Bromwich. (43 minutes, 20 mb mp3) David Bromwich is channeling the lost conservative voice of Edmund Burke, the missing wisdom on our mad Afghanistan misadventure. This is what Yale’s Sterling Professors of Literature are for, now and then: to recalibrate commentary to the cadences of immortality In my [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Paul Bloom: A Walking Tour of Cognitive Science Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Paul Bloom. (48 minutes, 23 mb mp3) Paul Bloom lures you to the frontier in human psychology with ancient moral questions and the evidence of full-bodied human behavior. In the next-door labs of neuroscience, his colleagues may be well on their way to mapping every link in the [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | Amartya Sen: This Open-Ended “Year of India” 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | Anthony Shadid: Questions a Reporter Asks Himself Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with James Kwak. (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 | 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. We’re in James Der Derian’s class on global media [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 painting almost six feet wide, from the collection of Partners in Health in Boston. Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell is a Haitian-American artist in prose, paint and poetry. She speaks to us a poem about the [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | 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 | Whose Words These Are (21): Afaa Michael Weaver on Haiti Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Afaa Michael Weaver (20 min, 9 mb mp3) Afaa Michael Weaver leads off a week of poets’ reflections on the catastrophe in Haiti. His poem “Port-au-Prince” is not “news analysis;” it’s a stab at fitting disaster news, now two months old, into a context between heart and history. [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | This “Year of India” (5): … and the chronic crisis of Pakistan Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Farzana Shaikh (38 min, 17 mb mp3) Salman Rushdie, no less, finished his packed public talk at Brown three weeks ago with the observation that Pakistan is the globe’s true nightmare nation — that if Pakistan doesn’t rescue itself from political collapse into extremism, “we’re all fucked.” In this [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Thomas Y. Levin: “surveillent narcissism” and other digital doubts Click to listen to Chris’s classroom conversation with Thomas Y. Levin (32 min, 19 mb mp3) Advertising confirms Thomas Levin’s observation that, strange to tell, we have come to embrace Orwell’s worst nightmare in 1984, universal electronic surveillance. A Kenneth Cole billboard in Manhattan makes the unembarrassed point that “On an average day you will [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | This “Year of India” (4): The NY Times’ Man in Bombay Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Anand Giridharadas (45 min, 27 mb mp3) We’re getting a personal take on the New India that we haven’t heard before from New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas. When he went “home” after college, from Cleveland to the land of his ancestors, the feeling he confronted was, in effect, [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Tom Gleason’s Liberal Education: Memoir with Music Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Tom Gleason (43 min, 26 mb mp3) Call this a musical-conversational extension on the memoir of a beloved teacher, the historian of Russia at Brown University, Abbott Gleason, known as Tom. We’re connecting dots from Tolstoy to Orwell to Louis Armstrong in a big roomful of friends at [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Yehudi Wyner’s life in music: a composer with piano hands Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Yehudi Wyner (55 min, 33 mb mp3) Yehudi Wyner is an approachable guy in a forbidding field: contemporary “serious” music. He gives us an opening here to ask where new sounds come from. In his case new music comes out of a sort of compost of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Ghana Speaks (V): The Radio Voices of Cape Coast Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Mike Serwornoo (15 min, 9 mb mp3) An underlying question through this experimental week in Ghana is: what more would it take to podcast conversations as direct as these from India, or Israel, or the West Bank? Or China, or Congo, for that matter? Mike Serwornoo, in our [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Ghana Speaks (IV): … and Koo Nimo plays guitar and sings Click to listen to Chris’s visit with Dr. Kofi Sam to the village of Aburanza (60 minutes, 36 meg mp3) It is 7:30 a.m. on the last Saturday in January, a warm winter morning in Ghana, and we are privileged to be hanging out for an hour of music and a few well-chosen words with a [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Ghana Speaking: Kofi Sam’s Model of African Self-Sufficiency Click to listen to Chris’s visit with Dr. Kofi Sam to the village of Aburanza (28 minutes, 17 meg mp3) We are making the full village rounds here in Aburanza, near Cape Coast, with a strong-minded, strong-willed modern chief. From furniture works to dress-making class to palm-nut oil pots, Dr. Kofi Sam is barking out [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Ghana Speaking: Village Living in Kwabeng Click to listen to Chris’s visit to Kwabeng with Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang (31 minutes, 19 meg mp3) I’m going “home” here with my friend Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang to “where my belly button is buried,” to the seat of his fondest memories and his first great love, his grandmother. And I’m concluding presumptuously, on a day’s visit, that [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Ghana Speaking: The “living wound” at Cape Coast Castle Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang (30 minutes, 18 meg mp3) I’m in Ghana for a week — starting from Cape Coast, toward the western end of Ghana’s Atlantic shore. Cape Coast is a university town and a major fishing center in West Africa. It’s the spot where First Lady Michelle [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | McChesney and Nichols: $30-billion to save journalism Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Robert McChesney and John Nichols (56 minutes, 26 meg mp3) Robert McChesney and John Nichols are grappling with the question: what would Thomas Jefferson do about the death of the American newspaper? Better, Jefferson said, to have newspapers without a government than to have government without newspapers. [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Harold Evans and his “rag and bone men of the opinion trade” Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Harold Evans (41 minutes, 19 meg mp3) Harold Evans, doubtless the finest English newspaper editor of his time, could make you weep in his memoir of formative days in Manchester and glory years (1965 – 1981) with the Sunday Times of London. Weep, that is, not so much [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Rebecca Goldstein’s Ontological Urge: the 36 Arguments Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Rebecca Goldstein (36 minutes, 22 meg mp3) Who knew that the God question is burning bright in our university neighborhood of brain scientists, mathematicians, computer geniuses, game theorists, physicists and literary folk, too? — that is, in the postmodern precincts around Boston that I call “the frontal lobe of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Erica Hirshler’s Biography of a Masterpiece Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Erica Hirshler (26 minutes, 12 meg mp3) Click here for a high resolution JPEG of the painting. Erica Hirshler and I are standing in many shades of awe in this conversation, in front of Boston’s favorite painting by Boston’s favorite painter. Hirshler’s compact little book, Sargent’s Daughters: The Biography [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Terry Teachout’s Pops: Culture-Changing Genius Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Terry Teachout (57 minutes, 26 meg mp3) Terry Teachout’s fine reconsideration of the man called “Pops” solidifies Louis Armstrong’s standing as not just the greatest horn player since the angel Gabriel, but an all-transforming artist at the level of James Joyce or even Shakespeare, and a black American freedom [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Whose Words These Are (20): Rick Benjamin Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Rick Benjamin. (38 minutes, 18 meg mp3) Rick Benjamin says the threshold instruction of most good poems is: slow down, be alert, wake up. The reason to write poetry is to be of use, he says. The reason to read poetry is that it might change your [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Robin Kelley’s Transcendental Thelonious Monk Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Robin Kelley (51 minutes, 24 meg mp3) Robin Kelley’s superb biography brings the Thelonious Monk story back from the ragged edge to the creative center of American music. And it brings my reading year to a blessedly loving, gorgeously swinging, dissonant, modernist, and utterly one-off climactic note. [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Robin Kelley’s Transcendental Thelonious Monk Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Robin Kelley (51 min, 24 meg mp3)Robin Kelley’s superb biography brings the Thelonious Monk story back from the ragged edge to the creative center of American music. And it brings my reading year to a blessedly loving, gorgeously swinging, dissonant, modernist, and utterly one-off climactic note. [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Gordon Wood: Empire and Liberty, then and now Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Gordon Wood (27 minutes, mp3) Gordon Wood, the wonderfully plain-spoken Pulitzer and Bancroft prize historian at Brown, thinks that Thomas Jefferson would find Barack Obama obnoxiously, over-reachingly Hamiltonian… and that Alexander Hamilton would likewise dismiss Obama as a Jefferson dreamer. Empire of Liberty is the title of Gordon Wood’s magisterial [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Whose Words These Are (19): Andrew Motion Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Andrew Motion. (23 minutes, 11 meg mp3) Sir Andrew Motion succeeded Dryden, Wordsworth, Tennyson and, immediately, Ted Hughes as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. He can sound like the elegist of rural old imperial England, but he can sting in the present tense too, on matters from Princess [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Orhan Pamuk and his Museum: This is your brain on novels… Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Orhan Pamuk. (28 minutes, 13 mb mp3) Orhan Pamuk in his six Norton Lectures at Harvard this fall filled the air with ideas about fiction. “The novel is not about the characters but about their world,” for example, part of the reason that Pamuk has never titled a [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Whose Words These Are (18): Keith Waldrop Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Keith Waldrop. (23 minutes, 11 meg mp3) Keith Waldrop, who just won the National Book Award in poetry for his Transcendental Studies, is a quilter in phrases. He eschews any intention or meaning that you could point to in his work. He makes statements here and there, but [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | This “Year of India” (3): Suketu Mehta, Bombay’s Biographer Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Suketu Mehta. (37 minutes, 17 mb mp3) Suketu Mehta, the master storyteller of modern Bombay, learned by listening — to the runaway poet from Bihar, for example, who wanted him to write a book titled “Untold Stories” or “Untellable Stories,” like his own. He was a boy of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | This “Year of India” (2): Rana Dasgupta Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Rana Dasgupta. (45 minutes, 21 mb mp3) Rana Dasgupta’s India is a land of grueling poverty still, in a culture transfixed by glittering wealth. The dominant mood is “frenzied accumulation” in a society “consumed both by euphoria and dread.” Mahatma Gandhi’s India of fond memory — triumphant non-violence [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Whose Words These Are (17): Henri Cole Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Henri Cole. (42 minutes, 19 mb mp3) The poet Henri Cole got his French first name from his Armenian mother. From his father, a military man, he got his Southern speech and, in what sounds like sadness and irony, “a knack for solitude.” Poetry was the place [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Whose Words These Are (16): Nick Baker’s Chowder Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Nicholson Baker. (49 minutes, 23 mb mp3) Nicholson Baker bursts into our poetry series with a passion for form, a longing for four-beat rhythms a la Kipling and rhymes of the kind that Ira Gershwin and Dr. Seuss learned from Swinburne. For a couple of months now we’ve [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Mary Karr on Girls and their Dragons Mary Karr, the poet and ever the “scrappy little beast,” gives me three more reasons to marvel, and cherish her, in her third memoir. Lit, after The Liars’ Club and Cherry, is the story of drinking her way to Catholicism, sobriety and more writing. Her title refers, she says, to the things that [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Thomas Balmes on Documentary Democracy Thomas Balmes is a global filmmaker from France who commits anthropology with his camera. He is coaching us here in how to make expressive use of the new video democracy on YouTube — how to adapt our own anthropological eyes to see and perhaps reveal what’s lurking in plain sight all around us. [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The Voice of Gandhi in this “Year of India” It’s the audacity of Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violence, and the radical priority he gave to social justice, that Gandhi’s grandson stresses in a sort of keynote conversation at the start of Brown University’s “Year of India.” Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Rajmohan Gandhi (35 minutes, 16 mb mp3). Rajmohan Gandhi in Bapu’s lap, Delhi, 1936 Short [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Whose Words These Are (15): Bloom’s Hart Crane We’re in the “living labyrinth” of Harold Bloom’s astonishing memory here. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Harold Bloom (32 minutes, 15 mb mp3). The great sage of New Haven is walking us through the dark, dense maze of his first and favorite poet, Hart Crane (1899 – 1932). Take this as a [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | David Bromwich on Obama: Looking at Words Closely Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with David Bromwich (41 minutes, 19 mb mp3). It’s a measure of the change in the discourse that David Bromwich, Yale’s Sterling Professor of English who used to write op-ed in the New York Times, now keeps a sort of Times Watch in the Huffington Post, the New York Review [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | “The Wire” Rewired “The Wire” was the genius series on HBO that “revealed” Baltimore today (”Bodymore, Murderland”) the way Dickens’ Bleak House and Oliver Twist revealed 19th Century London. It was “reality television,” finally, about no-go America: not just terror-stricken drugged-out public housing but the complexity of human responses inside it. It was the new-media [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Ralph Nader’s Flight of Fantasy Ralph Nader has charted a utopian fictional flight out of the dystopia he sees all around him on the ground. In conversation I’m trying to figure whether Ralph has written a happy ending to his career, or a scream of despair. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Ralph Nader. (39 minutes, 18 [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | How God Came Back: Gordon, Cox and West Click to listen to the “Matters of Faith” conversation with Harvey Cox, Mary Gordon, Cornel West and Chris Lydon. (43 minutes, 20 mb mp3)This is a book-fair exchange that caught fire around a current version of the old graffiti duel: “God is dead,” signed Nietzsche. Then, “Nietzsche is dead,” signed God. How’s [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Mark Danner: Scoring Assymetrical Warfare If, as guesstimated, Osama Bin Laden spent half a million dollars to recruit, feed and train the perpetrators of 911, and if the US has spent or committed something like $2-trillion on our 8-year response, the asymmetry of costs in this global war on terror is something like 4-million to 1. And that’s just [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Ted Sizer: Performance was the only test Ted Sizer was a master teacher when he first kicked me into shape in the 1950s. He was just out of Yale and the United States Army. I was a driven, impoverished sophomore at the “Marine Corps of the Mind,” as we thought of our venerable, ancient Roxbury Latin School in Boston. [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Whose Words These Are (14): C.D. Wright Prompted by last weekend’s Massachusetts Poetry Festival, the question has been: where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going?C.D. Wright speaks of her output as “a few reams of freedom.” Father was an Arkansas judge and a nearsighted bookworm, like herself. Mother was a court reporter. “Of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Chris Hedges: Requiem for the Republic Chris Hedges is “Mr. Bad News” in our time, the obituary writer for our economy, our culture, our democracy, our media. When I got to the New York Times (some years before Chris Hedges) in the late Sixties, Alden Whitman had the bad news moniker, writing obits of great figures for the paper of [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Whose Words These Are (13): Michael Ansara In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, which pops into full bloom tomorrow (Saturday) in the city of Lowell, the question has been: where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Michael Ansara stands for the poet lurking in every one of us, and in this conversation he instructs us [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Whose Words These Are (12): Teresa Cader In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Teresa Cader used to think of herself as a child of Europe. Walt Whitman made her a poet and an American. Her father was an immigrant from Poland. Her mother’s side is [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Whose Words These Are (11): Lloyd Schwartz In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, the question has been: where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? You can hear it in Lloyd Schwartz’s reading of “Six Words” that he thought of being an actor. “Speech is his muse,” says his friend Robert Pinsky, noting the [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Donald Pease: Obama’s “Transnational” Presidency Herman Melville, C. L. R. James & Donald Pease: deep dreams of America as the utopian world-nation Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Donald Pease. (49 minutes, 23 mb mp3) Re-read Moby-Dick and be cured of these absurd Nobel blues. The Nobel Peace Prize for Barack Obama underlines the world’s idea of our “transnational” President, our [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Whose Words These Are (10): Stephen Burt In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, the question has been: where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Stephen Burt makes you think of Samuel Johnson and also “The Simpsons.” If Harold Bloom were a precocious thirty-something again, if he loved science fiction and underground rock ‘n’ roll, [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Whose Words These Are (9): Sarah Kay In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, the question has been: where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Before she could write, spoken word poet Sarah Kay began dictating poems to her mother. Today, at 21, Sarah has become a successful, artful practitioner of spoken word. Sarah’s [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Whose Words These Are (8): Rosanna Warren In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Rosanna Warren says it’s a tremendous relief to meet people who know her work and don’t know that she’s the daughter of the triple-threat poet, critic and novelist Robert Penn Warren (1905 – 1989). [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Whose Words These Are (7): Vendler’s Stevens What is it about Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955), that such a variety of our contemporaries speak of an attachment that does not hang on “meaning”? Ask who or what drew them to poetry and, over and over, the answer is: Wallace Stevens. Typically it was long before they quite knew what he [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Whose Words These Are (6): Ron Slate In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Ron Slate is the poet who flies business class. He’s also the corporate strategist of darting eye and allusive readings with nothing of the boardroom or the brochure about himself or his language. [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Tracy Kidder: “…faith that looks through death” Tracy Kidder actually finds a needle in the haystack — a kernel of inspiration in a continent of bad news — in his virtually irresistible new saga (with a Wordsworth title) Strength in What Remains. The bad news is the ongoing massacres and underlying misery in East Central Africa – in the neighborhood of Rwanda, [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Whose Words These Are (5): Jericho Brown In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Jericho Brown was born and raised in Shreveport, but did his growing-up in New Orleans. Library daycare introduced him to Shelley’s love poetry; the black church introduced him to call-and-response testimony and poetic performance. Fresh [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Whose Words These Are (4): Joan Houlihan In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Joan Houlihan has rebuilt a poetry nest in Concord, Massachusetts — home of the “American Renaissance” of Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott & Co. in the 1850s, the town where, in Susan Cheever’s line, “most of American [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | James Morone: What healthcare politics lays bare From FDR to Barack Obama, James Morone’s revelatory history of presidents and healthcare policy lays out some basic rules — the conditions, in short, that Lyndon Johnson met to pass Medicare in 1965, but that asked too much of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton in the losing campaigns of 1977 and 1994 for universal insurance. [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Whose Words These Are (3): Franz Wright In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Franz Wright grew up as an estranged son of a famous American poet. At 18, he’d read everything, found an addictive pleasure writing poetry (”like a first shot of heroin”), and learned “there was [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Whose Words These Are: Regie Gibson In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Chicagoan poet Regie Gibson places himself “somewhere between page and stage,” writing and speaking about life, art and philosophy. He won the 1998 National Slam Competition and founded the Church of The Funky [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Whose Words These Are: Jill McDonough In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Jill McDonough. (26 minutes, 12 mb mp3) Jill McDonough is reverent about traditional form, raucously funny and often dark about much else. Her first book, Habeas Corpus, gives [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Rory Stewart: “nonsense” policy in Afghanistan Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Rory Stewart. (17 minutes, 8 mb mp3) Rory Stewart in professorial mode The Kipling-esque adventurer and writer Rory Stewart – the man who walked alone across Afghanistan and made a best-seller of The Places In Between — was quoted by Nicholas Kristoff in the Times the other day dismissing [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Isaac Newton drops in at MIT Alexander Pope’s couplet about Isaac Newton gives me goosebumps: Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said: Let Newton be! and all was light. Epitaph… Intended for Sir Isaac Newton, in Westminster Abbey   Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Tom Levenson. (29 minutes, 14 mb mp3) Sir Isaac: an “angel of the Lord” for science If the [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Patrick Keefe’s Snakehead: to the US, through Hell In Patrick Keefe’s saga of The Snakehead, it’s the migrants and refugees scoffing at our immigration rules, and breaking them at risk of their lives, who pose the moral challenge to those of us who got here the easy way – that is, were born here. How many of us would take the route [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Jackson Lears: on Obama’s Sorrows of Empire Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Jackson Lears (49 minutes, 23 mb mp3) Jackson Lears‘ cultural history, Rebirth of a Nation, from the Civil War to World War One, is the flip side of Louis Menand’s dazzling take on the same period, The Metaphysical Club (2001). Jackson Lears: “our historian of yearning” Menand wrote about [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | New Music at Tanglewood: Beauty’s Turn Check my ears here: I hear a turning toward humanity among the rising star composers at the Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood this week. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with composers Augusta Read Thomas, Aaron Travers, Cynthia Lee Wong and Jacob Bancks at Tanglewood (31 minutes, 14 mb mp3) Augusta Read Thomas Michael [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Jeff Klein’s Excellent Adventure in Gaza Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Jeff Klein (50 minutes, 25 mb mp3) Jeff Klein’s excellent adventure this summer was a mission to Gaza, the Palestinian beachhead between Egypt and Israel, to witness resilience, as he says, amidst horrific destruction. From Jones Hill in Dorchester, Massachusetts, Jeff Klein is a retired machinist and union [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | “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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | “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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | J. S. Bach�s �Habit of Perfection�: Andrew Rangell Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Andrew Rangell (50 minutes, 23 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 [...] Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | Hanging Out at Tanglewood Tanglewood beats working... for anybody who gets to listen, and perhaps specially for the young performers who are pouring their talented hearts into the opportunity of a lifetime. Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Doug Fitch, Christin-Marie Hill and Erik Nielsen here (27 minutes, 12 MB MP3) Erik Nielsen, conductor; Christin-Marie Hill, mezzo; and Doug Fitch, stage director at the Tanglewood Music Center.In the theater shed on the western edge of the Tanglewood lawn I am sitt ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The American Exception, Again Barack Obama at the Victory Column in Berlin just now marks another stage of "rejoining the world" and "rebranding" the American voice out there on the globe. It's an astonishingly rapid transition in these dog days of July, 2008. Obama on tour is becoming "the cause of all mankind," as Thomas Paine once said of our country. What would it mean, or require, for Americans to see ourselves this way again? This is the puzzle Ted Widmer sets himself in Ark of the Liberties, whose title comes ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | And now for something completely different� John Maeda, the new president of the Rhode Island School of Design, has said his wants his job to be "something delivered live as a kind of open conversation with the RISD community and the world." At our own joint site lydonmaeda.com, we are embarking on our own digressive ramble around whatever topics pop up -- a few of them referenced in the visuals here. You are cordially invited to join the conversation with a comment, or with suggestions as to where we go from here. Click to listen ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | George Lakoff: Obama in a Bind A "metaphorical body" helped build Barack Obama's triumph so far, in George Lakoff's scientific reading. That tall, supple, smiling Obama figure, standing tall, fires up good feelings through the "mirror neurons" in our brains. "Up and forward" is the effect we feel, as Lakoff puts it in conversation. So what is the effect on our political minds of what feels now like an uncertain Obama shuffle to the center or the right? "Bad things" are transmitted by the same mirror neurons to our embo ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | What would Roger Williams say� and do? Roger WilliamsIn celebration of the Fourth of July, despite everything... Martha Nussbaum revives a dreamy vision of religious freedom. Jeff Sharlet paints the real bathos of our adapted political piety. I join them both in the pleasure of rediscovering Roger Williams (1603 - 1683) as a neglected American model of real religion, real freedom, real tolerance. As Martha Nussbaum reminds us, Roger Williams was English-born, a friend and contemporary of John Milton. He came to America -- a ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Tony Schwartz � for the Next Generation Tony Schwartz in the Shrine of SoundTony Schwartz made his famous TV and radio commercials (like the "Daisy spot" for Lyndon Johnson, and Coca Cola's "It's the Real Thing" campaign) in what felt like a chapel in his apartment in the old "Hell's Kitchen" neighborhood of West Side Manhattan. Hunched over his turntables, wrapped in earphones and cables in a room lined on every wall with Tony's 40 years of sound recordings, he'd remind you of the Wizard of Oz with his bumbling air of magic, b ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Obama-McCain: the World�s Main Event Here's a first conversational stab at the point that Obama vs. McCain -- while it's not the world's election -- is a world event like no US presidential campaign before it. This is partly the Web effect, which puts millions, maybe billions, of people in the churn of daily information about the campaign. And it's even moreso the resonance of Barack Obama, who's been dubbed "Germany's favorite politician at the moment" (in Germany) and "definitively... the candidate of Europe" (in Portugal) ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Dan Ariely: Confronting Irrationality Dan Ariely's genius in Predictably Irrational is for simple social experiments that become giant public parables. Here's how playing with the taste of beer, for example, takes him to the Israeli-Palestinian impasse: in the student pub at MIT, where Ariely taught, drinkers much preferred the "MIT Brew" to straight Budweiser -- unless they were told in advance that "MIT brew" was Budweiser doctored with a few drops of balsamic vinegar. If they knew beforehand what they were drinking, a sour ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | What Novelists are For: Russell Banks Russell Banks: We're DreamingRussell Banks reminds you what the great novelists (think Tolstoy, Dickens, Hugo, Joyce, Mailer) are for: to dream up stories that illuminate the social and emotional reality of their times and nations -- "...to forge in the smithy of my soul," in the line Joyce gave to Stephen Daedalus, "the uncreated conscience of my race." Russell Banks is one of those writers, in the Dos Passos tradition, whose imaginative forge is solidly founded on history and social cont ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Calabash �08 (Pt 3) Reggae & the Obama Moment Bob Marley and Barack Obama are the absent heroes of the 8th annual Calabash literary festival in Jamaica: Marley, because his music and poetry incarnate the living "reggae aesthetic" (with the pan-African, Judaeo-Christian, sexual, political and celebratory overtones which the poet and Calabash co-founder Kwame Dawes expounds in conversation here). And Obama, because he seems to stand for a possibility that is artistic as well as political -- for the idea that imagination can lead the wa ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Calabash �08 (Part 2): As Others See Us Calabash: the reggae aesthetic, in wordsThe Caribbean literary festival known as Calabash breathes the wondrous tropical salt air of Bob Marley, Derek Walcott and C. L. R. James -- an air of lyricism, multiplicity and resistance. It's the air of a once neglected precinct of empire that has produced by now a powerfully diasporic people and consciousness. Chris Abani, the exiled Nigerian poet now teaching in Los Angeles, observed at the start of his remarks to Calabash '08 that "there woul ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Calabash �08: First, the fireworks� "It's going to be nasty," Derek Walcott said, prefacing his war on V. S. Naipaul with a warning. "The Mongoose" was the last of Walcott's new poems at the Calabash Literary Festival in Jamaica last weekend. He'd wondered whether he ought to read it, Walcott said, "and then I figured if I don't do it, I'll say: what the hell, you should have done it... I think you'll recognize Mr. Naipaul." Click to listen to Derek Walcott's "Chatterbox" conversation and reading at Calabash 08 (42 minu ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Open Source Storytelling: Ben Haggarty Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Ben Haggarty & Company (33 minutes, 15 mb mp3) Ben Haggerty, open sorcererBen Haggarty picks up on the question "where do stories come from?" at roughly the point where David Amram left off on the mystery of where music comes from. David Amram said his music comes from what touched his heart in train whistles and the sounds of his father's farm, later from the cadences of Jack Kerouac and flights of Dizzy Gillespie. Ben Haggarty's folk ta ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Glenn Loury: The Missing Voice of Jeremiah Are we supposed to be hoping that the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's hair-raising 15 minutes of fame are over? Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Glenn Loury (37 minutes, 17 mb mp3) Glenn Loury               [Mark Ostow photo]The black polymath Glenn Loury and I are puzzling in conversation here about all that the YouTube and network frenzy left out -- the blessed insight and fellowship of black church life in America, but also ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Bad News in High Style: Kevin Phillips Kevin Phillips: how bad is it really?People I know count on Paul Krugman in The Times to give us all the bad news we can believe in. But Kevin Phillips (a Nixon-brain turned populist grand historian) not only trumps Krugman in the Cassandra Stakes, he also explains why Krugman and media in general have gone soft and squishy ("now that the financial clouds have lifted a bit") on the global apocalypse coming in the convergence of our housing collapse, the explosion of public and private debt ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Errol Morris� �Feel-Bad� Masterpiece Lynndie England with "Gus" at Abu GhraibErrol Morris's Standard Operating Procedure is a shocking, depressing work of art that might tell you almost nothing you didn't know in your bones: that the torture chambers at Abu Ghraib were a perfect kernel of the war on Iraq. See the movie anyway, for confirmation or as penance. It is a blood sample of a gross policy of humiliation, emasculation, sophisticated mental cruelty and pitiless domination in the Arab Middle East. Errol Morris makes n ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Mary Jo Salter�s �Phone Call to the Future� Mary Jo SalterUp with poets. Send us your favorites, please. We begin a new series of poetry conversations with the well-known American formalist, Mary Jo Salter, who teaches at Mount Holyoke and Johns Hopkins and co-edits The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Mary Jo Salter (34 minutes, 16 mb mp3) In the poem below, we are standing in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The poet is spinning out a tribute to Nicolael Maes, a student of Rembrandt ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Israel at 60: the Etgar Keret Version The writer Etgar Keret was our Open Source witness in Israel two years ago to a general (local, global, existential) disbelief and alienation from the war on Lebanon. And now we have the pleasure of meeting him in the flesh on a campus visit to Brown. Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Etgar keret here (24 minutes, 11 MB MP3) Etgar Keret: "a Jew in a diaspora of Israel"Edgar Keret's bizarre, violent, popular short stories (in a collection The Girl on the Fridge) are cited a ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The �Open Source� Composer: David Amram David Amram at Brown's grand pianoWe are hanging out at the piano here with the composer and Renaissance man David Amram, who has hung with the best -- starting with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Jack Kerouac in the 1950's. Each of those associates, as David observes in this conversation, was an encyclopedia of music in himself. From them he absorbed an ideal he is still practicing: not multi-cultural balancing or eclectic blending but "lovingly trying to learn some of the fundamen ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Douglas Blackmon: Neo-Slavery in Our Times Douglas Blackmon of the Wall Street Journal has written a newsman's history book with staggering implications about racial reality in America today. Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Douglas Blackmon here (53 minutes, 24 MB MP3) Douglas Blackmon: truth about Jim CrowThe heart of the story is that slavery in the American South ended not with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and the end of the Civil War, but at the onset of World War 2. That is: state-sanctioned brutal ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Deal-Maker on the Spot: Christopher Hill Today's visiting fireman at the Watson Institute is under more pressure than most. Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Christopher Hill (16 minutes, 7 mb mp3) Christopher Hill, between East and WestOur man in East Asia, Christopher R. Hill, negotiating North Korea's nuclear disarmament, is evidently having a tougher time with the Bush principals in Washington than with the Pyongyang end of the wobbly old "axis of evil." David Sanger in the New York Times yesterday wrote that ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Nicholson Baker�s Human Smoke Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Nicholson Baker (53 minutes, 25 mb mp3) Nicholson Baker: history by hyperlinkA wing commander in the [British] Royal Air Force [in Iraq], J. A. Chamier, published his views on how best to deal with tribal rebellions. The commanding officer must choose the most inaccessible village of the most prominent tribe, said Chamier, and attack it with all available aircraft. "The attack with bombs and machine guns must be relentless and unremitting a ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Patrick Cockburn: The New War in Iraq We are asking the bravest reportorial hand on the ground in Iraq, Patrick Cockburn of The Independent from London, to make a coherent picture of the news of the war -- starting with the flight of under-equipped and under-committed Iraqi Army units from their assigned war on Muqtada Al-Sadr's Mahdi Army... and, among other things, the assassination of Muqtada's brother-in-law in Najaf and, of course, General David Petraeus's plea in Congress for an extension of the American "surge." Cockbu ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Brazil�s Statesman at Large Fernando Henrique Cardoso of BrazilFernando Henrique Cardoso , the lively, worldly-wise ex-president of Brazil -- "a genuine philosopher-king" in the estimate of Foreign Affairs magazine --invites you to a thought exercise. Suppose the world is in a "post-Napoleonic" moment, in need of a new "world order" (or "A World Restored," as the young historian Henry Kissinger put it in his first book, in 1957). Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Fernando Henrique Cardoso (23 minutes, ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Pico Iyer: the �Transcendentalist� Dalai Lama In Tibet the Dalai Lama was an embodiment of an old culture that, cut off from the world, spoke for an ancient, even lost traditionalism; now, in exile, he is an avatar of the new, as if having traveled eight centuries in just five decades, he is increasingly, with characteristic directness, leaning in, toward tomorrow.Pico Iyer, The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, page 203. Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Pico Iyer here (43 minutes, 20 MB MP3) Pi ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | �Armed Chair�: Bill Flynn�s Seat of Empire Bill Flynn at his drawing boardBill Flynn's mother was throwing out an old parlor chair five years ago. Bill Flynn -- master draughtsman and teacher at the Boston Museum School -- grabbed it as a "set-up" to draw. Almost immediately the chair started morphing into images of the war in Iraq. By this Spring of 2008 Bill Flynn has finished more than 500 mostly charcoal versions of the chair, and has mounted two exhibitions and published a book, Armed Chair, variations on a theme that could b ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The News about the News: Jay Rosen This seems to be the moment in which the death of the American newspaper can be foretold with some authority -- by Eric Alterman in this week's New Yorker; by the new local owners of the great old papers (�The news business is something worse than horrible," says Sam Zell, in what sounds like buyer's remorse over Chicago's Tribune Company); by The New York Times itself in what has become a serial, almost daily obituary (here, for example) and by our guru and guide to the transformation of m ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Real News: Ethan Zuckerman & Solana Larsen Ethan Zuckerman is up there with Yo-Yo Ma among my heroic models of global citizenship. His brainchild, Global Voices Online, is my model of journalism transforming itself. Global Voices Online (GVO) is an edited aggregation of blogs in roughly 200 countries. It's a brilliant early stab at the notion of the world reporting on itself. I think of it as Ethan's answer to the famous prayer of the great Scot, Robert Burns (1759 - 1796): "Oh wad some power the giftie gie us / To see oursel�s a ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Speaking of Race: John Edgar Wideman�s Fanon And people think Rev. Jeremiah Wright is angry. The jolt in John Edgar Wideman's new novel, Fanon is the open rage in the modern black heart about the history of slavery and lynching, and the furious living consciousness of the color line in 21st-Century America. A surrogate "author" in the story in his Manhattan apartment receives a severed human head, plastic-wrapped and hand-delivered by UPS. In the writer's mind, the murder of Emmett Till in 1955 might have been yesterday. The Homes ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Cuba in Our Ears (IV): Ned Sublette And then -- deeper than the Revolution, coming and going -- there's the music of Cuba. Our brilliant, besotted, utterly persuasive authority Ned Sublette drives head-on into Alex Ross's theme in The Rest is Noise that the story of 20th Century was the migration of the world capital of music from Vienna and Paris in the 18th and 19th Centuries to Los Angeles in our time. Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Ned Sublette here (45 minutes, 20 mb mp3) Havana: the world capital of m ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Cuba on our Minds (III): David Kaiser�s JFK Click to listen to Chris's conversation with David Kaiser here (54 minutes, 25 MB MP3) The journalist and diplomat William Attwood is the exceptional spirit in David Kaiser's new history of the JFK assassination, The Road to Dallas . Attwood leaps off the page as a man of imagination and mettle who (on a first reading) might have saved the Kennedy brothers and redrafted hemispheric relations. Out of LOOK magazine and the Adlai Stevenson campaigns in the 1950s, Attwood came into the Ke ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Cuba for the Long Run (II): Adrian Lopez Denis Adrian Lopez Denis finds it laughable that even the best of the Anglo-American media, The Economist and The New Yorker, made iconic covers of cigar smoke (and crushed cigar butts) when Fidel Castro bowed out of office -- a man who quit smoking 40 years ago, in a country that has produced a generation of creative young survivors since the heyday of the 1959 Revolution. Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Adrian Lopez Denis here (44 minutes, 20 MB MP3) Adrian is a social historia ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | What�s Coming in Cuba (I) Patrick Symmes Is Cuba, after Fidel Castro, in for a Velvet Revolution? or a civil war? or more of the same? Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Patrick Symmes here (52 minutes, 24 mb mp3) The marvelous Patrick Symmes, who has a keen ear for Cuba's own prophets, is haunted by the miserable chants of a woman in Central Cuba who told him, "we're going to suffer... we're going to suffer!" But will the suffering come from a settling of scores when Raul Castro, too, is gone? From raw violence alo ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | London: The News about the News "Harry's War is Over" was the headline all over London on the weekend of our grand gabby openDemocracy conference on "Credibility in the New News." But, of course, that scoop about 23-year-old, third-from-the-throne Prince Harry at the front in Afghanistan had been suppressed for weeks by the embedded London papers until it finally surfaced in the Drudge Report. Is there more to be said about the near-death of British newspapering? They're all colorful tabloids now, shrunken in size, ser ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The Post-Imperial Historian: Eric Hobsbawm An historian of ever widening scope, Eric Hobsbawm has been taking the long view for a very long time. His definition of the historian's trade is: "how and why Homo sapiens got from the paleolithic to the nuclear age." Born in 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution, Hobsbawm is 90 now, but in his pungent writing and talk, the species is young, and the future is everything. Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Eric Hobsbawm here (34 minutes, 16 mb mp3) Eric Hobsbawm: on the A ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Iraq in the Long View: Behnam Abu Al-Souf Listen to the archeologist Behnam Abu Al-Souf long enough, and you'll be hearing the Iraqi uncle you never knew you had. Dr. Ben as I call him is a great bear of muscular, hands-on scholarship. For half a century he has been an eminence in the excavation and preservation of neolithic Northern Iraq. By now he is a sort of Father Time from Mesopotamia, a man with ten or fifteen thousand years of historical memory in his head, about the land for which archeology was invented. He is at Brow ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Master Class: the Global Beethoven The sublime pianist Hung-Kuan Chen is playing for keeps at what I think of as the great three-way intersection of our time. His passport says: USA. His stock in trade is the classical canon of European music from Mozart to Messaien, Beethoven to Bartok. His working base is the piano department chair at the Shanghai Conservatory in a country with 80-million young students of keyboard music. Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Hung-Kuan Chen here (35 minutes, 16 mb mp3) Hung- ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | In the Neo-Liberal Ruins: Why Venezuela Matters Jeffrey Sachs had the wit to foresee the doom in his own economic remedies for Bolivia in the mid-1980s. The crisis then was hyper-inflation. "If you're bold," he remembers telling Bolivians in power, "you could turn a poor, land-locked, hyper-inflated country into a poor, land-locked country with stable prices." The problem that free markets, free trade and foreign direct investment didn't solve over the next twenty years was majority poverty in a pigmentocracy, as Sachs put it on Open S ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | El Cambio: Latin America�s �Change,� and Ours You're focused on living standards. We're focused on well-being. That's the difference between the indigenous vision and the modern Western vision.Bolivia's Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca, in conversation with Thomas Ponniah Evo Morales, the provocative "populist" president of Bolivia, is coming to Brown at the end of February, a visit of some moment: the first US campus stop by the first Latin American leader of "indigenous" stock and identity. A two-day conference at the Watson ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | After the Empire: Must Reading from Parag Khanna Click to listen to Chris's classroom conversation with Parag Khanna here (60 minutes, 27 mb mp3) Everybody's homework assignment this week is, first, to absorb Parag Khanna's breathtaking revisioning of the United States in the world, and, second, to add your comment on the late great American Empire. Can it have come and gone so fast? Parag Khanna will join us in class with James Der Derian, the master of global security and media studies at Brown, on Thursday afternoon. Parag Khanna ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | A Moment for Oracles: Amber and Braunze In the Obama rapture after South Carolina, what we wanted wasn't experts (because there are none) or wiseguys (because Chris Matthews has them all). We wanted oracles. Then came an email from a listener in New York: "Give me Amber, or give me death...," thirsting for that fabulous firehose of crystalline commentary from talk shows past. And then Braunze himself called from Alabama -- another heroic one-off thinker and talker whose call-in handle, like Amber's, has the hue of an alloye ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Randall Kennedy: A Change is Gonna Come A conversation with law professor Randall Kennedy the other night began with his new book Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | MLK Jr. after 40 years: a Fraternal Memoir Haynes (in dark glasses) and King, March on Boston, 1965Michael Haynes is my touchstone of the abiding power and fascination and the profound earthly-heavenly mystery around Martin Luther King Jr. In 1951 Haynes and King broke in together as apprentice preachers at the historic Twelfth Baptist Church in Boston, and they stayed in close touch until King's assassination 40 years ago, come April 4. Haynes is greatly under-cited in the King biographies, it seems to me. In our conversation Ha ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Backstage with Henry V: King Henry V: Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more... ... when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger; Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage... ... The game's afoot: Follow your spirit, and upon this charge Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!' Laurence Olivier (1944)Boy, in Henry's army: Would I were in an alehouse in London, I would give all my fame for a pot of ale, and safety ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The post-imperial maestro: Sir Colin Davis Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Sir Colin Davis here (47 minutes, 22 mb mp3) Sir Colin Davis, at play Sir Colin Davis -- "the reluctant king of English music making," the FT calls him -- recounts in conversation a turning point in his life that sounds like a parable for each and all of us and maybe for great nations, too. The year must have been 1962. Davis, who's now 80, was then 35, a tempestuous young superstar conductor with the BBC and other symphony orchestras in Lond ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | George Bush in Jerusalem: Not Too Late for a Legacy Bernard AvishaiMy friend Bernard Avishai suggests on his bracing, clarifying blog from Jerusalem that everybody traveling with President Bush in the Mideast this week should stop and see a popular Israeli movie, "The Band's Visit." It's about an Egyptian policemen's marching band from Alexandria that finds itself by mistake in a forlorn Israeli desert community, and then about the bandleader and the woman who welcomes him, unpacking their humanity and their love for one another. The film, ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Anthony Barnett on What�s Changed Credit Anthony Barnett with making the link between the Barack Obama campaign and Will Smith's box-office smash, "I Am Legend." Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Anthony Barnett here (28 minutes, 13 MB MP3) openDemocracy's Anthony BarnettIn the movie it's the lean and gorgeous family-minded, brown-eyed man (the scientist Robert Neville, played by Smith) who's "the last human" in New York and maybe on earth. He's immune from the virus that has turned the rest of us into zombie ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | At Home with Harold Bloom: (2) on the Humanities By his own account, Harold Bloom has lost a step or two at age 77, after major heart surgery. His reading rate is not what it used to be, he says. In his early thirties, the basic Bloomian reading speed with a serious text was 1000 pages an hour; it might be less than half that today. Meaning that nowadays it could take an afternoon, not just the lunch hour, to consume War and Peace. Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Harold Bloom here (25 minutes, 11 MB MP3) Harold Bloom, ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | At Home with Harold Bloom: (1) on Walt Whitman What was new at Yale this Fall was that for the first time in 53 years, the great pole star of our literary-critical firmament, Harold Bloom, did not give any of his famous courses -- on Shakespeare, or on "how to read a poem." He did, however, indulge Open Source in a long conversation that confirms a major recovery of health and the steady fire of heart and mind as Bloom writes a grand revision of his masterwork on The Anxiety of Influence. Click to listen to Chris's conversation with ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | At Home with Harold Bloom: (3) The Jazz Bridge Not the least of Harold Bloom's many charms for me is that he bridges poetry and jazz, to which our conversation turns. Bloom combines ardent fan-hood and that incomparable gift for assimilating and synthesizing all he's heard as well as all he's read, and making meaning of it. Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Harold Bloom here (22 minutes, 10 MB MP3) [Sue Mingus]Bloom's theoretical work on The Anxiety of Influence was written about poets, of course, but applies in still mor ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Helen Vendler: Reading and Riffing on W. B. Yeats Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Helen Vendler here (32 minutes, 15 MB MP3) Helen Vendler: A Poem's Best Friend Helen Vendler -- the poet's best friend and the reader's too -- helps you hear a poem by showing you first how to see it. Look, for example, at Yeats's famous World War I memorial for Major Robert Gregory, "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death." The difference between reading this elegy not as a speech, but as a poem is as simple and striking as realizing that the p ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Philip Gura�s American Transcendentalism Emersonians, awake! Evening Grosbeaks & American DawnYou regulars from the comment thread know who you are: mynocturama, peggysue, bobby, allison, nother and of course, potter, among the vast and various summer circle... We're wallowing in the transcendent mystery of things with Philip Gura, the author of American Transcendentalism: A History. Gura is an eminent professor of literature and culture at the University of North Carolina, but he's also "one of us," avid in the non-dogmat ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Speaking of Music: Alex Ross�s 20th Century My subtitle for Alex Ross's addictive encyclopedia The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century would be: How the headquarters of musical composition moved from Vienna to Los Angeles: from the old home address of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms to its new home in and around Hollywood: home, that is, of the refugee modernists Stravinsky and Schoenberg and of course the movie business and the film score: name your monument from Bernard Herrmann's themes for Orson Welles ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Juan Cole: from Bonaparte to Bush ...in the name of liberty, security, democracyBehind a facade of lawmaking and reasonableness visible in Bonaparte's correspondence crouched the grim realities of corruption, power, and terror. When Bonaparte ordered General Menou to the key port city of Rosetta near Alexandria to organize that province, he wrote with unusual candor, "The Turks can only be led by the greatest severity. Every day I cut off five or six heads in the streets of Cairo. We had to manage them up to the present ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | A Free Life: Ha Jin�s Immigration Story Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Ha Jin here (25 minutes, 11 MB MP3) What if the meticulous realism of Ha Jin's first "American" novel, A Free Life, could be slipped into the fearful immigration debate we're not quite having in the US? Ha Jin: the long arc to AmericaI can imagine two reactions. First, the generous sigh of sympathy -- "give them a break!" -- on being reminded just how humbling it is to hit the American beach running, to grasp our idioms ("in the doghouse, ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Chavismo with some new brakes on it The Nobel fictionist Gabriel Garcia Marquez left a brilliant double-exposure of Hugo Chavez after they shared a plane ride not long after Chavez took power in Venezula in 1999: Hugo Chavez"While he moved off among his military escort and old friends," remembered Garcia Marquez, "I shuddered at the thrill of having gladly traveled and talked with two contrary men. One to whom inveterate luck has offered the opportunity to save his country. And the other, a conjurer who could go down in his ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Pakistan for Beginners: 3, with Omer Alvie Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Omer Alvie (17 minutes, 8 MB MP3) But suppose this were a realistic novel! Just think what else I might have to put in... How much real-life material might become compulsory! -- About, for example... the attempt to declare the sari an obscene garment; or about the extra hangings -- the first for twenty years -- that were ordered purely to legitimize the execution of Mr. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto; or about why Bhutto's hangman has vanished into thi ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Pakistan for Beginners: 2 Since my last visit to Karachi, my friend the poet had spent many months in jail, for social reasons. That is to say, he knew somebody who knew somebody who was the wife of the second cousin by marriage of the step-uncle of somebody who might or might not have shared a flat of someone who was running guns to the guerrillas in Baluchistan. You can get anywhere in Pakistan if you know people, even into jail. My friend still refuses to talk about what happened to him during those months; but o ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Pakistan 2.0 Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Sabahat Ashraf (35 minutes, 17 MB MP3) Pakistan is different, as you remember. Usually, we speak of a country having an army. In Pakistan, it is said, the army has a country. Washington's friend, the General and President Pervez Musharraf, has embodied the off-and-on tradition of army rule in Pakistan since his bloodless coup in 1999. George W. Bush, coming into his 2000 presidential campaign, was asked by a reporter to name the leader of Pa ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | �This was the worst war ever� : Ken Burns� WW2 William James: the mind of Pragmatism...modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors. Showing war's irrationality and horror is of no effect on him. The horrors make the fascination. War is the strong life; it is life in extremis; war taxes are the only ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us. [Emphasis added] History is a bath of blood. The Iliad is one long recital of how Diomedes and Ajax, Sarpedon and Hector kille ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | A Way to Live: Craig Smith�s Bach Project Craig Smith made glorious music, and wonderful conversation about it, too. For more than 30 years, Craig Smith was soul and spirit, secret hero and standard bearer -- the conscience and great affirmer of Boston's marvelous musical world. And ever a generous "natural" on radio and television with me. Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Craig Smith here (29 minutes, 14 MB MP3) Craig SmithWhen he was rehearsing a grand production of Bach's St. Matthew Passion in the late 1990s, I ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Art, Science & Truth: Jonah Lehrer Reading Jonah Lehrer's Proust Was a Neuroscientist is something like watching Jacoby Ellsbury in the Red Sox outfield. Reflexively one stammers what Emerson wrote to Walt Whitman on reading Leaves of Grass in 1855: "I greet you at the beginning of a great career..." Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Jonah Lehrer here (22 minutes, 10 MB MP3) Jonah LehrerLehrer is preposterously young (26) to be standing so confidently at the intersection of art and science. Reviews have t ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Speaking of Music Again: Oliver Sacks Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Oliver Sacks (38 min/18MB MP3) The andante had just ended on a phrase filled with a tenderness to which I had entirely surrendered. Marcel Proust: recalling a music salonThere followed, before the next movement, a short interval during which the performers laid down their instruments and the audience exchanged impressions. A duke, in order to show that he knew what he was talking about, declared: "It's a difficult thing to play well." Other ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | A Piano Master Class with Saleem Abboud Ashkar Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Saleem Abboud Ashkar (35 min / 16MB MP3) 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. Saleem Abboud Ashkar: The Master in Class Young Abboud Ashkar, just 31, could be the late Edward Said's successor in the exquisitely tantal ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | 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 | 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 | 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 Makiya: Cautionary Idealism 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 inv ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Citizen in Exile: Lincoln Chafee (Part 1) Lincoln Chafee is a soft-spoken patrician with fire in his heart. Lincoln Chafee at WatsonHis 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. "Did you see the Senate resolution to put a 'terrorist' target on Iran's Revolutionary Guards," he asked me the other day. "And did you see who voted in the majority for it?" Chafee had a rollcall lis ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | 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. Lincoln Chafee at Watson 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 Sa ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Speaking of Coltrane: Five Conversations (1) How did it feel that John Coltrane was "back," I asked the drummer Roy Haynes a dozen years ago, when Impulse reissued his classics and Whitney Balliett in The New Yorker solemnized a Coltrane revival. "I didn't know he ever left!," Roy shot back -- all we needed to know, delivered with Haynesian snap, crackle and pop. Coltrane the BookIn this 40th anniversary autumn after his death, at 40, what lives with Coltrane and his music is the idea of love's forgiveness, of redemption through ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Speaking of Coltrane: Five Conversations (2) Amiri BarakaThe poet 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 Cong ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Speaking of Coltrane: Five Conversations (3) Alain PacowskiAlain 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." Click to listen ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Speaking of Coltrane: Five Conversations (4) Bill PierceBill 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 ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | 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. It begins: Michael S. Harper a love supreme, a love supreme a love supreme, a love supreme Sex fingers toes in the marketplace near your father's church in Hamlet, North Carolina� witness to this love in this calm fallow of these minds, there is no substitute for pain: genitals g ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | 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." Edwidge DanticatLike 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. The definitions of identity are so fluid. S ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | 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. Richard Holbrooke 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 Cl ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | 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 | At Home in Global America: Junot Diaz (Part 1) They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fuku americanus, or more colloquially, fuku -- generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and Doom of the New World... No matter what it's name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | 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 | 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 | 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. William Gibson by Michael O'Shea We talk here about: First, the disappearance of the virtual, of cyberspace itself, because it's not "there" anymore, viewed from "here." It's everywhere, and we're inside it most of the time now. In 1981 there was ver ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | William Gibson�s �Spook Country� (Part 2) Second, 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 resourc ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | William Gibson�s �Spook Country� (Part 3) And Third, 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 comin ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | They Got It Right: (5) Peter Liberman On the other hand... Peter Liberman 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 danger from either Iraq or Iran ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | They Got It Right: (4) Steve Van Evera Steve Van Evera -- as prolific, engaged, unbuttoned and accessible online as his MIT colleague Barry Posen -- foresees a US air assault on Iran that could run to five days and 1000 sorties; and then a certainty that "Iranians will respond." Stephen Van Evera of MITInformed guesswork: "They can wreck our whole project in Iraq," Van Evera says, if they are willing to live with the wreckage of a failed state next door. "They have capable terrorists" in the Western hemisphere as well as the M ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | They Got It Right: (3) Barry Posen The nightmare isn't half over. Barry Posen and Steve Van Evera, colleagues in security studies at MIT, both see 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. In conversation with them 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 ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | They Got It Right: (6) Shibley Telhami Can anybody head off a new war that we know will end badly? This is Shibley Telhami's question at the end of our conversation about the Iran sequel to the misery in Iraq. His answer seems to be: No -- we're in the trap already, headed for the grinder. Shibley Telhami: on the slippery slope 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. Telhami proceeded to sign the pr ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | They Got It Right: (2) Michael Desch William Kristol -- still writing that the Iraq War and the George W. Bush presidency are bound for long-run glory -- may be the case study of neo-con imperviousness to evidence, also of invincible error as a career move that works in our media. The historian David Kaiser has posted an exhaustive Kristol file on Iraq, a five-year string of howlers. Except that almost nobody's howling. Jebediah Reed at Radar Online has done a scorecard on four commentators "getting rich by being wrong" o ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | They Got It Right: (1) Robert J. Art Shouldn't we be hearing more from the brave sages who pegged the dangers -- even called the outcome -- of the Iraq war remarkably, precisely right. This begins a series of interviews with a slate of them. Robert J. Art of Brandeis University Commentary around the Iraq war -- and the prospect of a sequel in Iran -- is full now of confessions of past error -- most of them partial and opaque confessions, well short of the full "mea maxima culpa." See, for example, from the original "war bl ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The Harold Bloom Tapes 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 | We Interrupt This Program� Click to Listen to a Special Message (MP3) This is not the news we ever dreamed of posting. After tomorrow's broadcast we are putting Open Source on a summer hiatus. We learned late last week that a brand-name media company that had asked to partner with us had changed its mind. So for now, the best hope on the near horizon of relaunching the program and refinancing it has gone aglimmering. Without a substantial new funder, we cannot keep paying our bills. Your help and support has help ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | On Endings Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) [fliegender / Flickr]The final episode of The Sopranos managed to either enrage or delight every fan and critic who has been following Tony Soprano and his brood for nearly eight years. In fiction -- and in life -- bidding farewell is never easy, particularly if the challenge is to do it in an authentic, entertaining, and emotionally gratifying way. And even though all good things come to an end, it's a remarkable achievement when anything -- good ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The New Community Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) This one's for us. All of us. We're talking about the building of networks and communities on the Web, not least because we want to keep ours alive and growing. We want to do it a lot better than we have to this point. Our guest in the studio, Larry Weber, is the town crier of the Internet transformation in the world of commerce. I call him the World Wide Weber. He was in on the "marketing" of Tim Berners-Lee's big idea when it first took root ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Lessons from Northern Ireland Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Ian and Martin, BFF? [dps / Flickr] On May 8th, Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness -- two men who were once the bitterest of enemies -- entered into a power-sharing agreement as leader and deputy leader of Northern Ireland's executive government. Paisley is head of the Democratic Unionists, Northern Ireland's largest Protestant political party, and McGuinness is former head of the IRA. These two men sitting across a table from each other would have be ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The Issue is Empire Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) The glory that was Caesar Question: from essayist Cullen Murphy: Are We Rome? -- as in "the glory that was...," and, of course, "decline and fall..." Answer: from political economist Alice Amsden, in Escape from Empire: Notice rather that there have been two American Empires since World War 2. The first was an improvisational Golden Age from 1944 to 1980 (FDR through Jimmy Carter) that worked growth wonders for pretty much everybody, including ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Blogsday 2007 Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) It's here again. No, not Groundhog Day, our annual rite of the dead of winter. It's the third-annual Blogsday, our bloggy riff on Bloomsday. In case you're new to this party, it all started two years ago when Chelsea suggested a novel way to pay homage to the existing homage to James Joyce. Brendan explained it this way last year: Taking as our model Bloomsday, Dublin�s very real June 16, 1904 in which James Joyce set his very fictional Ulysses, we ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Taking the Food Stamp Challenge Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Have we mentioned that Chelsea is living off of the 21 dollar a week food stamp diet? She�s two weeks into it and says the free samples at Whole Foods help a lot. Here�s part of her shopping list from last week: a bag of spinach ($1), 6 mangoes (.69 each), two jars of peanut butter (two for $4), two cans of tuna (three for a dollar), canola oil ($1.39 per pound), 24 bananas ($2.40), 16 oz. shredded mozzarella ($1.77) and a big splurge � 24 popsicles ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Collapse of the Senate Immigration Bill Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Last week the Senate's immigration bill -- championed by George Bush, John McCain, and Ted Kennedy -- collapsed under the pressure of a firestorm on conservative blogs and talk radio. Blogger and American Prospect writer Ezra Klein explained it to me this way: the bill had three interlocking parts that really represented three different consitutencies. The amnesty section was for many of the Democrats; the guestworker section was for business; and the ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | No Artist Left Behind Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Our next Pinchas Zuckerman? [Paul-W / Flickr] Last week Chris caught up with our neighbor, Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. Pinsky was fresh from a fundraiser for The Boston Arts Academy, which is Boston's only high school for the arts. As a hearty advocate for human expression, Pinsky told Chris that he profoundly admires the academy for sticking its neck out in an academic atmosphere where kids slog through a monotone curriculum of te ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hillary Clinton�s War Vote Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) We're making calls right now, but here's a promo to give you a head start: The return of the warvote: what does Hillary Clinton's 2002 vote authorizing the Iraq War say about her 2008 campaign, the future of the war, and the political calculus of never saying: I'm sorry? (More to follow.) Update, 6/6 2:10 pm What do you think? [mcotner / Flickr] Here's the short course: On October 11th 2002, Hillary Clinton voted to authorize Preside ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The Plague: Camus�s Fable in Our Time Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Thanks to Andrew Kinney, patsyb, and Sutter for suggesting another "literary lessons for Iraq" show. Albert Camus [late night movie / Flickr] Read The Plague this weekend, and help us milk Camus's metaphor for our own pestilential times! We will be guided on air by James A.W. Heffernan, Professor of English, Emeritus, at Dartmouth, Jim Fitzmorris, plawright and theatre historian, and by the political scientist John Mearsheimer of Chicago, ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | South Africa in Context: The Story of Mac Maharaj Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)Finally, from perhaps the least-sung of South Africa's modern heroes, Mac Maharaj has written perhaps the most searing of personal stories. Padraig O'Malley made him do it -- over a ten-year course of hundreds of hours of interviews.Their book, Shades of Difference, feels from the first page distinctly original and gripping in the annals of freedom struggles. It reads less "as told to" O'Malley, but more as a sustained, relentlessly probing and intim ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The Varieties of Faith and Reason, Take Two Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)One hundred and forty (and counting) satisfied and disastisfied listeners to last night's Christopher Hitchens show can't be all wrong. Hitchens (along with Chris and Eddie Glaude) seemingly touched everybody's nerves, and we figured we'd try another go-around tonight. This time we hope to frame the hour around varieties of religious meaning, ritual, and experience. Hitchens's portrait of religion in America -- around the world, really -- was painted ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Hitchens v. God Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) To the sometimes solemn literary cottage-industry of neo-atheism, Christopher Hitchens -- with his manifesto: God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything -- brings his famous English-school-boy wit, come to full blossom now in the great American music hall. Of the late Jerry Falwell, Hitchens told Sean Hannity this week, "If they gave him an enema he could have been buried in a matchbox." On The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, plugging the new b ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Comey�s Dissent at Justice Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) On Tuesday, former deputy Attorney General James B. Comey testified in a Senate hearing on the US Attorneys investigation. What unravelled was a made-for-TV drama, a whole new episode in the Bush-Cheney push for presidential power. (If the writers of 24 don't steal from Comey's testimony, they're crazy. Actually, they've already done critical decision making in the ICU.) Here's how the teleplay might look: Prelude In the spring of 2004, "solid Repu ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Equity: More Private, Less Public? Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Yesterday's news that DaimlerChrysler is selling the second half of its name to Cerberus, a private equity firm, didn't come as a complete surprise. Recent private equity deals have included other household names like Qantas, Clear Channel, Gillette, Hertz, Toys "R" Us, and Neiman Marcus, along with a whole slew of huge companies whose names are less familiar. More than a thousand companies were taken private last year alone, in deals worth $371 bill ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The Gold Rush for Financial Information Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Is all the personal and political coverage of the Rupert Murdoch story missing the point? To wit: financial information is the prize in Murdoch's bid for The Wall Street Journal. "Let's do the numbers" is the lead-in line on public radio's Marketplace. "Let's own the numbers" is the theme of Rupert Murdoch's ambition, which is not just to own The Journal and join the top ring of the American publishers's club, but to combine the lustre and electro ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | France: The Sarko vs. S�go Prism Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) [Thanks to Alexandre Enkerli for pitching this show. It will record at 5:00 pm Eastern to accomodate overseas guests.] The wild first round of French presidential elections is over, and the shaggy 12 candidates have been whittled down to a slim two. It's a classic battle of left and right now, with the conservative interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy going head to head against the Socialist Ségolène Royal, president of the Poitou-Charentes ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Ralph Ellison�s America Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) [This show records at 4:00pm Eastern to accommodate our guests' schedules.] America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. It's 'winner take nothing' that is the great truth of our country or of any country. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. Our fate is to become one, and yet many -- This is not prophecy, but description. Thus one of the greate ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Weinberger�s Miscellany Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)[This show will record at 11:00 am Eastern so that Chris can attend an evening meeting.]David Weinberger, one of the smartest of our many smart neighbors, has a new book about books and planets, Staples and Amazon, 20 questions and the periodic table, Carl Linnaeus and Melvil Dewey, data and metadata -- about everything, in other words: Everything is Miscellaneous. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | At Dinner with David Halberstam Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) David Halberstam's life seems to have flashed before him in a last supper at Chez Panisse in Berkleley last Saturday night, in the company of other long-form journalists of distinction: Orville Schell, dean of the Berkeley graduate program in journalism; his wife, filmmaker Liu Baifang; Mark Danner of The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books; and the radio documentarian Sandy Tolan of Berkeley and NPR. We will recapitulate the dinner conversat ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Globalization�s Double-Edged Sword Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) We have entered the age of the faceless, agile enemy. From London to Madrid to Nigeria to Russia, stateless terrorist groups have emerged to score blow after blow against us. Driven by cultural fragmentation, schooled in the most sophisticated technologies, and fueled by transnational crime, these groups are forcing corporations and individuals to develop new ways of defending themselves. The end result of this struggle will be a new, more resilient ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Re-Imaging Violence Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)We've decided to scrap tonight's planned show (about language post-Imus) in favor of a show about the visual reverberations of the Virginia Tech shooting. Our central prod came from the trusty barthjg, who wrote:I�ll pitch a show about Instant Symbols and Icons, based on the Virgina Tech killings.The image of Cho Seung-Hui brazenly holding two handguns, arms outstretched will soon reach iconic status, to be mashed up and shared in all sorts of ways--ju ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Eddie Palmieri on Latin Jazz Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) [This show will record at 5pm EDT.] Eddie Palmieri [Joris Machielse / Flickr]Pianist-bandleader Eddie Palmieri, who won his 9th Grammy in February, has been the gold standard of Latin dance music and jazz for an amazing 45 years. He is "in residence" this week with the Harvard Jazz Band, under the redoubtable Tom Everett, practicing for a big concert on Saturday. We've asked Eddie Palmieri for the Open Source one-hour course on the rules and glo ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | On the Watch List Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Thanks to barthjg for pitching this show When I tried to use the curb-side check in [at the airport], I was denied a boarding pass because I was on the Terrorist Watch list. I was instructed to go inside and talk to a clerk.... I presented my credentials from the Marine Corps to a very polite clerk for American Airlines. One of the two people to whom I talked asked a question and offered a frightening comment: 'Have you been in any peace marches? ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Detroit�s Big Three and the EPA Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) The U.S. Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the Environmental Protection Agency can regulate the carbon emissions that cause global warming. In doing so they ruled for an assortment of states and environmental groups, and against the EPA and American automakers. Add this decision to the daily litany of the Big Three's woes: falling sales, layoffs and buy-outs, and staggering health care costs, for starters. In our Global Warming Goes to the Supreme ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Israel vs. Iran Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)Our many shows about a possible showdown with Iran -- most recently with Seymour Hersh last week, but also here, here, here, and here, just to name a few -- had, in retrospect, a rather myopic focus. They all looked squarely at the U.S.Israel, it turns out, has been having its own debate, which boils down roughly to this: if sanctions don't work, and an Iraq-chastened Uncle Sam won't bomb Iran, should we? Yossi Klein Halevi and Michael Oren, writing in ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Katrina and the Insurance Tsunami Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)I suggest that you do a show on how the insurance industry is crippling growth along the Gulf Coast. The Army Corps of Engineers has admitted in its own report that the flood was caused by design and construction failures, but it is not possible to sue the Army Corps of engineers. This means that 200,000 families have to fight with insurance companies and go hat in hand to the state government begging for scraps with which to rebuild.Listener Ray Shea ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | What to Do in Space? Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)Thanks to Brian Dunbar, with assists from Jason Hoppes and Pboake.So maybe this week's most compelling space story actually has nothing to do with space. But there are plenty of interesting things going on in the final frontier that don't involve attempted murder or adult diapers.We have several billionaires building rockets and standing up companies to send tourists to space. Several others are building new launch systems for cargo. The ESA wants to d ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Plamegate: The Libby Trial Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)Vying for screentime with Anna Nicole Smith [Sheila Steele / Flickr]We've done several shows on Plamegate, and each time we have to ask, "So wait, remind me, what happened when?" If you'd like to refresh your own memory, check out Frog-Marching: Miller, Cooper, Rove or Getting Judith Miller or Rome to Yellowcake to Grand Jury: How Did We Get Here?.The current installment in this le Carré-esque mystery is Scooter Libby's perjury trial. On Thursday t ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Obama and the Boomers Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)In the back and forth between Clinton and Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and 2004, I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the baby boom generation -- a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago -- played out on the national stage. The victories that the sixties generation brought about--the admission of minorities and women into full citizenship, the strengthening of indivi ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Chalmers Johnson and his �Nemesis� Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Finally, a man and a book to challenge and change the "master narrative" of our times. In early 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, I was putting the finishing touches on my portrait [The Sorrows of Empire] of the global reach of American military bases. In it, I suggested the sorrows already invading our lives, which were likely to be our fate for years to come: perpetual war, a collapse of constitutional government, endemic official lying a ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The Ecstasy of Influence Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)We can't stop talking about Jonathan Lethem's essay in this month's Harper's. If you haven't read it, you really should. Nothing that follows in this post will be nearly as interesting. Go ahead. And this post will still be here when you return. You know you want to.Caught [Digirebelle / Flickr]Nearly every word of this essay about cultural borrowing and reworking was stolen -- er, appropriated -- from some other source and then cobbled together with a ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Elif Shafak: Voice of a New Turkey Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Turkish writer Elif Shafak. [Fatmanur / Flickr]The novelist Elif Shafak has taken her brave, vulnerable, fascinating place -- not entirely unlike Orhan Pamuk's -- among the compelling voices of the "new Turkey." Her new book, The Bastard of Istanbul, is a hugely beguiling, broad, tasty sweep of the Turkish terrain -- (yes, stuffed green peppers come through as virtual characters in the novel bursting with nuts, garlic, rice and spices). The cast em ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The End of the Foreign Correspondent? Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Going the way of these guys? [hugovk / Flickr]On January 23rd, the legendary Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski died. The next day The Boston Globe closed its last three foreign bureaus. Kapuscinski was the inspiration to a generation of foreign correspondents, Poland's only reporter outside its own borders during the Cold War who, since he couldn't cover everything, had the latitude to report at length what he found interesting. The Globe, li ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Groundhog Day (Day Two) Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) I liked this picture too much not to put it up. Plus it was tagged "groundhog." (Perhaps they're in a huge be-your-own-groundhog playland?) [casa-robertson / Flickr]It's Groundhog Day... again. (Again.) In the spirit of Groundhog Day -- or maybe it's proof of our faith in the beautiful notion of perennial, incremental betterment -- we've decided to do this whole thing one more time. Think of it as a repeat of our first annual special. In case you ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Do Americans Need to Serve? Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) [Thanks to Forton Twelve, herbert browne, and davispeter for the nudges.] That's NSman as in NationalServiceMan [superciliousness / Flickr] Last week's show on the future of the all-volunteer military raised several questions that made us wonder about the robustness of America's appetite for national service. Why, when we're at war in Iraq, is most of America at WalMart? Why are well-educated elites underrepresented in the armed forces when this ha ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 win ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | 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 timet ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | 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 Cons ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | 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 | 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 knowl ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | 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 ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | 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 bell ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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, rathe ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | 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 p ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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 t