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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 | 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 the oligarchs and the list of official sins that continues to grow in Putin's Russia. She titled collections of her columns Putin's Russia, A Dirty War and A Small ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | A Dutch Canary in the Multicultural Coalmine? Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) One paragraph stands out among many insightful passages in Ian Buruma's new Murder in Amsterdam, a meditation on the causes and meanings of the filmmaker Theo Van Gogh's 2004 murder: By the middle of the twentieth century... the Netherlands had pretty much caught up with the world, and since then things often happened earlier than elsewhere: tolerance of recreational drugs and pornography; acceptance of gay rights, multiculturalism, euthanasia, an ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The End of Free Will? Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Nature or Nurture? [BB / Flickr] The corporate lock-up of restaurants began decades ago when the lower echelon eateries - the hotdog stands, automats, cafeterias, carts, etc. - were squashed or subsumed by chain behemoths. There are scattered holdouts, but they're fading. Again, McDonald's, KFC, etc. don't aim to be mere options; their mandate is to fill all space at this price point.Jim Leff, The Evil That is Panera or Why Adam Smith's Invisible Ha ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Elections �06: The Arizona 8th Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) The border between Arizona and Mexico [Ryan Bavetta / Flickr] Arizona's 8th Congressional District stretches north from the border to a bit of the southern Tucson suburbs, but a Democrat up in Tucson doesn't necessarily want the same things as a Democrat down south. Tucson Democrats, explained Michael Marizco, author of Border Reporter, are more likely to volunteer to come south to supply water stations for border crossers; along the border, Democr ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Open Source in the Boardroom Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) That's open source, the general ethos, not Open Source, the public radio show. Because it's not just about techies in their pajamas anymore, creating Linux for the glory of it. It's also about gold-mine prospecting, and international coding competitions, and even soda marketing. It's one of the ways -- one of the few ways -- that smart companies can get ahead of the rest of the pack, says business writer William Taylor in his new manifesto Mavericks ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Green Chemistry Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) The new industrial revolution [spike55151 / Flickr] John Warner's an interesting and innovative chemist, but of all the things he said in a pre-interview, this was the most striking: there's not a single regular chemistry Ph.D. program in this country that requires a course in toxicology. Think about that for a minute. You're taught how to use and create lots of dangerous chemicals, but you don't have to know how to deal with their toxicity. Or even ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Elections �06: Rhode Island Senate Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Planet Providence, Rhode Island [woneffe/Cotuit / Flickr] This fall we'll go state by state, examining some of the most contested Congressional and gubernatorial races in the country. Tuesday we start with the Rhode Island Senate race between Republican incumbent Lincoln Chafee and his Democratic challenger, former state Attorney General Sheldon Whitehouse. Chafee is sometimes seen as a maverick - he was the only Republican Senator to vote agains ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | I.F. Stone Remembered Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) I.F. Stone, Washington, 1988 [keithwj / Flickr]I. F. Stone was the only genius I ever observed in the genius-proof genre of deadline journalism. He was also, as is often celebrated nowadays, a proto-blogger: he wrote with an absolutely one-off independent spirit and lived without a boss or a staff (but for his dreamy, gorgeous, and adoring wife Esther) on the $5-a-year subscriptions to his four-page newsletter, I. F. Stone's Weekly. He was a model ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Niall Ferguson�s �War of the World� Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Niall Ferguson, charming Scot [Brendan Greeley]China is out-manufacturing us. Islam is outbreeding us -- even as Muslim sects tear each other apart. The price of all-the-world's energy, oil, is going nuts. The Anglo-American end of the Atlantic alliance seems to have spiraled down in embarrassment in Iraq. These are the fresh elements in the Scots historian Niall Ferguson's recurrent War of the World nightmare. And they extend the theme in his s ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Mea Culpa Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Crimson contrition[Horrortaxi/Flickr] Erich Segal's oft-quoted catch phrase, "Love means not ever having to say you're sorry," set the tone for the 60s and nearly the next 30 years. What was true for love soon became true for war, and for political scandals and for manmade disasters. In the 60s the apology, like so much else, went underground. But it seems that the apology is enjoying a revival as a necessary and effective tool in diplomacy and ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Moderate Muslims Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) British novelist Martin Amis wrote a 12,000 word piece in the Guardian to coincide with the 5th anniversary of September 11th. In it he rails against Islamism, and describes how he abandoned short story dealing with a would-be terrorist. The piece has sparked much intense debate in the bloggosphere, especially over what he calls the "civil war within Islam." Until recently it was being said that what we are confronted with, here, is a �civil war� ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Blair�s Long Goodbye Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Mr. Blair is leaving the building. [Mister Snappy/Flickr]Britain's longest serving Labour prime minister will step down within the year. Small scale revolt from within party ranks and a nasty dispute with long time political rival Gordon Brown were the straws that broke the camel's back after growing anger over the country's foreign policy. During his time in office, Blair successfully captured the country's political center, led Britain away from ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | After 9/11: The Long View Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) We seek out historians to reveal the present, not the past. We want to find a doctor who's seen our symptoms before... on the general suspicion, from Ecclesiastes, that "there is nothing new under the sun." Or as Joyce's Stephen Daedalus said, because history is "the nightmare from which we are trying to awaken." Also: because so much of the daily news -- of mad military overstretch abroad and commercial and cultural decadence at home -- feels lik ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Fear Factor Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Real or Perceived?[dday/Flickr] We watched the New Year coming in around the world, the mass hysteria of no significance that was the millennial New Year�s Eve celebration. Brilliance flaring across the time zones, and none ignited by bin Laden. Light whirling over nighttime London more spectacular than anything since the splendors of colored smoke billowed up from the Blitz. And the Eiffel Tower shooting fire, a facsimile flame-throwing weapon su ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Afghanistan Five Years After 9/11 Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)The strongest growth in Afghanistan? [andrew lopez / Flickr] When we were talking about whether/how to cover the 5th anniversary of September 11th, we decided that a show on Afghanistan -- which, like the rest of the media, we've neglected -- could be interesting. It was our first front in the "war on terror," so it begs the question: how are we doing? This year Afghanistan grew a record-breaking poppy crop (92% of the world's opium supply). Not unre ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Rebroadcast: Black Men in America Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Open Source is off this week, so we're re-broadcasting five shows we developed in the months after Katrina hit as part of an ongoing series on race and class. Tonight: Black Men in America: Behind the Numbers. From Chris's original billboard: The story of "black males left behind" in America is a blur of bad numbers surrounding a void of good answers. In the standard statistical measures, many vital signs point down -- about families, for exampl ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Houston After Katrina Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) In the immediate aftermath of Katrina the story in Houston was the instantaneous and effective combination of public participation, private philanthropy, and civic coordination. In a city that was never known for its social capital, Houstonians opened their veins, their pocketbooks, their houses. 85% gave something. The largest homeless shelter in the history of the country was put together in a matter of days. The Dallas Morning News, the paper of t ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Munich, Yalta or Cambodia: What Year is It? Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) What's your vintage? [John Federico / Flickr] If war in the Middle East is a battle for the control of images, right now in the US it's a battle for control of the analogy. (OK, it's all a battle for the control of oil, but stay with us here.) Ross Douthat, in an op-ed last week in The Wall Street Journal, took on the unenviable task of wading through yards of commentary -- on Lebanon, on Iraq, on the UN, on Iran -- to discover not what pundits th ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Europe, Lebanon and the Details of Peacekeeping Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) European hesitation over committing troops to the peacekeeping force is to some extent rooted in bitter memories of the Continent�s experiences in Bosnia, where foreign troops were not only unable to prevent large-scale ethnic killing but were themselves held hostage at times by the warring parties. Some of the peacekeepers� ineffectiveness was attributed to unclear rules of engagement and to conflicting chains of command between national defense mini ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Houston After Katrina In the immediate aftermath of Katrina the story in Houston was the instantaneous and effective combination of public participation, private philanthropy, and civic coordination. In a city that was never known for its social capital, Houstonians opened their veins, their pocketbooks, their houses. 85% gave something. The largest homeless shelter in the history of the country was put together in a matter of days. The Dallas Morning News, the paper of the northern rival, names Houston as its " ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Chomsky: My Dinner with Hassan Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Just a short post until Chris can give it the full treatment. Last May Noam Chomsky, groundbreaking linguist and veteran lefty, had dinner with Hassan Nasrallah. That's right, Hassan Nasrallah. Now, we know that Chomsky and Nasrallah are likely to set off some alarm bells, but regardless of how you feel about the two, wouldn't you like to be a fly on the wall for that conversation? We'll have Chomsky on for the hour tomorrow. Noam Chomsky Prof ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The Meaning of Connecticut Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Upon the revelation yesterday of a large-scale bombing plot in London, coming as it did two days after Ned Lamont's defeat of Joe Lieberman in Connecticut's Democratic primary, Lieberman connected the dots from Baghdad to London: If we just pick up like Ned Lamont wants us to do, get out by a date certain, it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England.Senator Joseph Lie ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The Foiled London Plot Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) We'd planned a Duke Ellington at Newport fifty years later show for tonight, but twenty-one suspected would-be terrorists (along with the London police) changed the subject. Now we're wondering: is the foiled London plot a victory for warring on terror? Or policing it? What does today's news tell us about how far we've come -- or haven't -- in the nearly five years since September 11, 2001? And, shampoo aside, who was actually surprised by today's ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The War for Iran: Juan Cole�s �Thought Experiment� Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) The relentless war stalker Juan Cole stopped dead in his tracks over the weekend. The war in Lebanon has no rational explanation, he decided. Tearing up a democracy with a young government that President Bush had embraced at the White House just months ago? Erasing vast tracts of a recovering capital city? Killing many hundreds of civilians in the name of ransoming two Israeli soldiers? It makes no sense at all, Professor Cole concluded. Unless ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | China: Watching from the Sidelines Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) China�s economic rise has led it to seek out natural resources and trade ties around the developing world, from Central Asia to South America to Africa. Some are warning of a new �Great Game� of resource competition, and others are afraid that China�s willingness to partner with authoritarian regimes might lead to the emergence of a �Beijing Consensus� to challenge the �Washington Consensus� that favors open, liberal democracy.mc_masterchef, in a com ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Israel and Lebanon: Refuge in Fiction Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Keret and el-Youssef [ontheface / Flickr]We first read about Etgar Keret and Samir El-Youssef in Lisa Goldman's blog two weeks ago. They're both writers -- of novels, screenplays, short stories, essays, and comics. Keret is an Israeli, El-Youssef a Palestinian who grew up in a refugee camp in Lebanon and now lives in London. And they're friends. In the culmination of another shattering week of news, and of Open Source shows about Israeli approaches ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Generational Divide in the Middle East Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Friday Prayer [bethcanphoto / Flickr]More than half of the 250 million Muslims in the Arab world today are younger than 25. The conventional wisdom is that the generation now in its 20s and 30s is more religious, less US-focused or -friendly, and more radicalized than the generation currently in its 50s and 60s. We're sketching out generational shifts in the Middle East and the larger Muslim world in the last twenty years or so. It's a huge topic, ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The Optics of This War Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) The Lebanon crisis could never be contained - even if the war does not physically spread to Iran or Syria, the images of the war have already done their work throughout the Arab and Islamic world. Just as Iraq served al-Qaeda's strategy by supplying an endless stream of images of "heroic mujahideen" fighting against "brutal Americans" - and became less useful as images of dead Iraqi civilians began to complicate the picture - the Lebanon war offer ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Israel at War Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Thinking back, trying to recreate my conversations with worried friends about this war with Lebanon, about the Iranian missiles, the Syrian machinations and the assumption that Hezbollah�s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, has the ability to strike any place in the country, even Tel Aviv, I realize that there was a small gleam in almost everyone�s eyes, a kind of unconscious breath of relief. And no, it�s not that we Israelis long for war or death or ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | On David and Goliath Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Sifting through the details of a bloody six days in yesterday's story meeting, from Haifa to Nasrallah, Katyushas to Syria, we eventually drifted far afield and found ourselves talking about bar fights (via Global Voices) and biblical stories and, specifically, the lasting power of David and Goliath. Which is not to say that we're not interested in the details of the current situation. We have been, and will continue to be. But this seems like as go ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Lebanon: What Happened to the Cedar Revolution? Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Celebrating Syria's withdrawal, 2005 [FlickrJunkie / Flickr] Protesting the bombings, 2006 [captain nomes / Flickr] It seems like just yesterday the US was cheering on the Cedar Revolution as proof that democracy was spreading through the Middle East. Now the memory of last year's elections and the withdrawal of Syrian troops has been overshadowed by the power and popularity of Hezbollah. And this second, tragic destruction of Beirut has left us ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | A New Map of the Middle East Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Let me first tell you what I am not worried about. I am not worried about a regional confrontation beyond the borders of Lebanon... simply because neither regional nor international actors have an interest in moving the current confrontation beyond the Lebanese borders. I am worried, long-term, about the extreme separation in the Arab world between the two camps. Amr Hamzawy Bang. [soldeace / Flickr]The US invasion of Iraq can be seen as a bang o ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The Poetry of Franz Wright and Fanny Howe Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) In the last six years I got very very interested in being around people in different forms of affliction... I use the term affliction in the sense of genuinely broken people who may not make it back. I like to be around people who are struggling with addiction and struggling with mental illness. I volunteered for a number of years in a place called the Center for Grieving Children... I'm happy among them, I like being around people who are struggl ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Lorraine Hunt Lieberson Remembered Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Lorraine Hunt Lieberson [Anne-Marie Le Ble]Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, the most celebrated operatic singer of her generation, died last week at the age of 52. Famously, Hunt Lieberson's professional singing career started late. A freelance violist who never stopped taking singing lessons, she didn't begin singing full time until the age of 26. Critics were quick to point out that even if she stopped playing the viola, she never forgot its dusky-voiced l ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Transcendental Women Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) I was amazed--it sounds so innocent and silly--to find that most of American Literature was written in three houses over a period of five years. Susan Cheever At Sleepy Hollow Cemetary [redjar / Flickr]The handsomest author and the most adoring wife in the annals of American literature are together again. You may have heard the news that the remains of Sophia Peabody Hawthorne (whose diamond-etched love lyrics are still readable in the window p ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Of Hand Counts and Voting Machines Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) At this point, we cannot design a [fully verifiable electronic election system], nor can anyone else. Computer systems are so complicated, that there is no single person that understands everything about how they work. David Dill After taking a look at the 2004 election in Ohio and America's history of dirty elections, we're thinking of a couple more shows about elections in America. Up first: the way we mark and count our ballots. Are digital ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Korea: The Politics of the Peninsula Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) For Kim Jong-Il, to think that we can just give him carrots and be generous and he will change is a bit like trying to cure pneumonia with cough drops and vitamins. The intention might be earnest, but the application is misplaced. Nuclear weapons are the key to his long-term survival, and for his children as well. David Kang Looking north across the DMZ [buck82 / Flickr]A casual American observer would have noticed something interesting in the cac ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Emerson Redux Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Nothing says the 4th of July like Ralph Waldo Emerson, that's what we maintain at Open Source. So while you enjoy your barbecues and fireworks -- or watch Confederate re-enactors get ready for the Civil War (Civil War?), as I found myself doing in the Adirondacks yesterday -- you can also listen to our special hour about the Sage of Concord. We're back live, with Death, tomorrow. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The Terrorism Index Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) 84% [of the 100 polled] said we're losing the war, 86% said the world is becoming more dangerous for the United States. ...Foreign policy experts have never been in so much agreement about an administration's performance abroad. Joseph Cirincione In the wake of the Supreme Court's Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision and a descent into further chaos in Israel, we're turning to Foreign Policy's recent special, The Terrorism Index. They asked a simple quest ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | We Say Potato Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) The entire spectrum of cooking, of eating, of life itself can be represented by the potato. Jim Leff Steamin' Spud[Roboppy / Flickr] The last time our good friend Jim Leff, the chowhound, was on Open Source you had only the first course. Leff served up the second course, when we were off the air, and he started talking potatoes. We are bringing him back so you can be in on this great conversation. Leff is a guy who was cooking potato ch ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Democrats: a Message Problem? Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) But can they forgive Kerry? [kenyee / Flickr]Everything in this office comes with a Red Sox analogy, and today we're looking at the Democrats the way Red Sox nation looks at the All-Star break. Boston may be in first place. They may be five games up in first place. They may look great, they may be hitting well and there may be five good Yankees on injured reserve and yet we still can't shake the feeling -- the conviction borne of experience -- that ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The Limits of Crowds Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) I really don't like anonymity in a wiki format. It's an immature thrill, it's like being a [graffiti] tagger instead of a real artist, where you get to go do something that affects collective experience but you don't really have to take responsibility. We have to make sure digital culture encourages responsible mature individuals as well as collective market judgments. I think blogs do, Wikipedias don't. Jaron Lanier The reason why Wikipedia w ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The Encyclopedia of American Conservatism Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Today the New York Times published this article about the new Encyclopedia of American Conservatism. The weighty 997 page tome has been 16 years in the making, but hits books shelves at a time when American conservatism is at a cross roads. This new book stakes out some territorial claims - detailing the intellectual roots of the movement while side stepping prominent contemporary conservatives like Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, even George H.W. Bush. ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | America�s Dirty Elections Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) [djwudi / Flickr]Last night we dissected the 2004 Ohio presidential election (what went wrong and why), and tonight we'll use that same Ohio election as a kind of launching point both forwards and backward in time. Backwards to learn whether it and Florida in 2000 were particularly egregious failures -- or whether they were basically business-as-usual in a two-party system that's not eager for voting reform. And forwards to try to understand whether ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Steal This Election Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) A two-hour wait to vote in Columbus. [Bryce Glass / Flickr] Consensus seems to be that the 2004 presidential election, especially in the key swing state Ohio, was rife with problems and "irregularities" - endless polling lines in select areas, wildly inaccurate exit polls, shifty processing of voter registration cards etc. But do irregularities add up to fraud? Do problems in our piecemeal, locally-based presidential voting system add up to a stole ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | After Zarqawi: �The Enemy� in Iraq Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) 45:20 We are in the beginning of 1983 and Iraq is our Afghanistan and we are the Soviets... We're bogged down with over 100,000 troops, in an Asian land war which we cannot win, it is draining us of blood and treasure, it's obviously sapping our morale, we have an enormous budget deficit, we're the victims of imperial over-stretch, there is no end in sight, we have inadvertently helped to put up the price of petroleum which is also hurting our and ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Blogsday 2006 Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Blogsday was a great show from June 2005. Any interest in doing this again for 2006?Jon, from a comment to Open Source May 16, 2006 Oh yes there is. Jon is referring to a show from a year ago -- listen here -- an idea of Chelsea's that still one of our favorites. Taking as our model Bloomsday, Dublin's very real June 16, 1904 in which James Joyce's set his very fictional Ulysses, we took a look at one day of the blogosphere, in our case Tuesday, J ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Truth, Balance and the News Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) In our email this morning we found this: ...if my e-mail box is any indication, more and more listeners are finding NPR's traditional approach to reporting both sides of an issue to be increasingly unsatisfactory and frustrating. I sense a rising anxiety and impatience among large numbers of NPR listeners who urge that the network take a more activist -- or at least a more openly skeptical -- role in the media landscape of the United States.NPR Omb ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Blogosphere: Dems vs. the G.O.P. Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) The YearlyKos bloggers' convention just finished up in Las Vegas yesterday, drawing left-leaning bloggers from all over the country. Also in attendance were many national political figures from the Democratic party, hoping to catch the bloggers' ears. About the conference the New York Times opined: The blogosphere has become for the left what talk radio has been for the right: a way of organizing and communicating to supporters. Blogging is nowhere ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | John Updike and his Terrorist Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) John Updike [Nubar Alexanian, for This I Believe] 48:15 Jack Levy, even to the mismatching suit and trousers, is sort of a version of my father, who was also a patient plodder and involved in school teaching...So this book has a kind of Rabbit in it in the form of Ahmad, a kind of a reckless guy on the move operating out of gut instinct that God loves him. Then you have the centaur kind of figure, the plodding, horse-like, patient, dogged civil ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Explaining the World Cup Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)Four summers ago, the city of New York opened back up at two every morning to watch soccer games in cities four time zones away. I made a bet with the busboy where I ate breakfast and won; I made bets with a friend in Germany and lost.He called after the game, the German, proud like a favorite uncle, to explain how team USA had played better than anyone had a right to expect. Almost, he said, respectably well. I pretended to be flattered, but as an ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | New Orleans: Dead and Gone? Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Lower 9th Ward, 8 months post-Katrina. [Eric Harvey Brown/ Flickr] There's been a lot of news from New Orleans this week - about the dismal state of the levees, about the fact that New Orleans is sinking at a rate of almost an inch a year - and despite the promises and the optimism, not to mention the fanfare of Nagin's inauguration, this many months after Katrina it seems like New Orleans is still a really hard place to live. Huge patches of the ci ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The War Tapes: Cinema Guerrit� Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) A Soldier's eye view [Scranton/Lacy Films] War has long been a subject of legendary filmmaking. Films such as Glory, Battleship Potemkin, Catch- 22, and Platoon capture both the physical and psychological despair of combat--even the Cold War has its films: The Macnchurian Candidate and Dr. Strangelove. But these films are the products of seasoned directors, not of the combatants. For the first time, soldiers have made a film about war while waging ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Condi�s Turn, To Diplomacy Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Condi in Vienna this week talking about Iran [Josie Duckett / State Department] Dick Cheney's fantasy war with Iran ("Real men want to go to Tehran," was the line three years ago) has been postponed, maybe shelved. Condi Rice has taken charge with her readiness to engage Iran with European cover on the matter of nuclear development. A change in the Washington weather is palpable. Reality-based thinking, Congress and foreign allies are all being ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Immigration and Development, with Amartya Sen Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) With the Nobel economist Amartya Sen, we pick up the question hanging at the end of our conversation on remittances and the flood of migrant workers. Amartya Sen [Jon Chase, Harvard News]To wit: isn't the immigration crisis the flip side of a development riddle? What would it take to make the lives of Mexican farmers sustainable in Mexico? How does it come to be that there are more African-trained nurses and doctors working in Europe than in Afri ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Philip Roth Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Philip Roth [David Miller] This Memorial Day weekend we�re talking with Philip Roth about everything. It�s a free-range conversation that gets us beyond the books and into the mind, heart and soul of the Tolstoy of our times. In his latest work, Everyman, the hero bids farewell to vigor, lust and life but Roth himself remains as vital and persistent a writer as ever. With nearly 30 books under his belt, Roth�s approach to writing hasn�t changed I ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The Iraqi Police Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Police Academy[Chad Sandoe / Flickr] A strong Iraqi police force is one of the stated "pillars" of the Bush Administration's Iraq strategy. It's essential to the country's stability -- and therefore to any plans for U.S. troop withdrawal (about which rumors are heating up again). So how is it that three years after the fall of Baghdad the police force is exhausted and ineffective -- and seems in fact to be at the very root of the country's simme ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | David Remnick on Boxing Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) David Remnick, on tour for his latest, Reporting: Writings from the New Yorker, will be in our studio tomorrow night. When we told him we wanted him to talk about boxing, he wrote in an email Of course we can talk about anything that suits your fancy but I suspect that all women and nearly all men no longer care about boxing or understand why I might; it's like caring about epic poetry, but low, low, low---a forgotten thing. Wouldn't there be more ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The Great American Novel Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Graphomania[chacal la chaise / Flickr]If you've been wondering what the greatest work of American fiction has been in the last 25 years, wonder no more. The New York Times Book Review has surveyed a wide swath of the literary field. Tony Morrison's Beloved topped the charts with 15 votes and Philip Roth emerged the patriarch of the Great American Novel, having spawned 6, of the 22 finalists. The results do not surprise but they do leave you p ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The Price of Fantasy Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Magic numbers. [Jeff Muceus/Flickr]56, .406, 755 -- baseball's record hit streak, batting average, and home run total: numbers at the intersection of history, myth, memory and, now, at the heart of a lawsuit between ball players and their fantasy fans. Because from these numbers has grown a side business: fantasy baseball now makes an estimated $1 billion a year. Fantasy baseball is the logical middle-aged move from armchair quarterback to armchair ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Harnessing Remittances [Scheduled forAired on Thursday May 18, 2006] Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Filipinas belly up to the remittance bar in Hong Kong [Stuart Hargreaves / Flickr]Migrant workers will remit more than $232 billion to their families this year. The money migrant workers earn -- harvesting produce in California, cleaning houses in Singapore, and tending children in Kuwait-- is meager by the standards of the developed world, but it means everything for their families back home. $232 billi ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The Hidden Histories of Slavery Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) A memorial in the former slave market of Zanzibar, Tanzania, where over a million slaves were traded between 1811 and 1873. [Patrick/Flickr][Scheduled for Wednesday May 17, 2006] Ghanaian poet and scholar Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang calls slavery "the living wound under the patchwork of scars." Alternately spotlighted and ignored on both sides of the Atlantic, slavery is still the bedrock of modern race relations in the U.S., and the starting point for ev ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Living Poetry, Living Poets [Booked for Tuesday May 16, 2006]Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)A key question in the first fantasies of Open Source three years ago was whether we could build a radio conversation in which techies would tune in to poets, and poets would tune in on techies.So here we go -- first time but not the last -- with younger poets reading live in our studio from their own work and taking us inside this paradoxically burgeoning but often isolated world of contemporary poetry, on-line and in b ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The White House Lawyers Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)Here's Stephen J. Hadley, assistant to the president for national security affairs, this weekend on CBS's "Face the Nation":The president has been very clear that we are to pursue our intelligence programs within the law.Stephen J. Hadley, quoted in Bush Aide Defends Acts by N.S.A., The New York Times, May 14, 2006He's referring to the NSA's newly disclosed practice of collecting data about all of our phone calls, but he could be talking about any numb ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The NSA�s New New Phone Database Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)Woke up this morning to the following headline, emailed from Open Source's fifth Beatle, John Barth:The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary A ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | China: The Biggest Migration Ever [Scheduled for Tuesday 9 May 2006] Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) From here... [NgKKh / Flickr] ...to here [erutan / Flickr] China now boasts the biggest migration in human history: some 120 million people so far. It began in the early 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping's "Reform and Opening" (experimentation with free markets and foreign trade) started a tidal wave of migrant workers and entrepreneurs flowing from rural farms to factories in eastern boomtowns -- initially focussed on ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Nir Rosen on Iraq [Scheduled for Monday May 8, 2006] Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Posters, and supporters, of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. [Nir Rosen]Nir Rosen stays out of the Green Zone. Instead, he lives and reports from what he calls the "Red Zone," i.e., the rest of the country. In the three years he's spent there since the start of the war, he has been much closer to the heart of the conflict than just about any other foreign reporter. He looks Middle Eastern and speaks Iraqi Arabic, s ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Net Neutrality Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) For everyone? [io_burn / Flickr]Sometimes what the geeks care about is important. Right now the geeks are talking about "net neutrality," the idea that every packet of information -- a piece of an email, a piece of an mp3 of a radio broadcast -- carries equal importance. That is, a message from me moves no faster or slower over the Internet than a message from the Queen. Or from CNN. Net neutrality isn't protected by any law, it isn't vouchsafed ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Presidential Signing Statements Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Reagan did it. [Ronald Reagan Presidential Library]Our Presidential Power show never materialized, despite a lot of exhortations from our loyal readership, but the issue has never gone away. Far from it. The latest outcry about a possible chink in the checks and balances system focuses on the practice of presidential "signing statements," official addenda in which the president explains his interpretation of the bill he's signing into law -- or just ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Stephen Colbert, Court Jester [Aired May 02, 2006] Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) The White House Correspondents' Association invited Stephen Colbert to speak last Saturday. It's a yearly ritual: the press corps, the administration and five b-list Hollywood celebrities get a little drunk together, the President makes fun of himself and then a comedian makes fun of the President. Then Michael Bloomberg pays for the open bar. Katrina vanden Heuvel looks good in her gown; Karl Rove looks awkward in his tux. ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The Day After Prison [Scheduled for Monday May 1, 2006]Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)At the end of our show about race, class and prisons, Princeton sociologist Bruce Western ran through a quick list of things you could do to help prisoners successfully re-enter society.There are a whole bunch of things we can do at very low cost right at discharge. We can make sure people are enrolled in Medicaid. Do they have five points of ID, so they can get a driver's license? Do they know about things like the Ea ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Race, Class and Racism [Booked for Aired Monday, April 24] Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Eracism[Allie Holler / Flickr] In response to Martin Luther King's assassination, schoolteacher Jane Elliott devised a simple yet revealing exercise that helped her students understand the pathology of racism and prejudice-- �The Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes" experiment. This experiment was featured in the 1985 Frontline Documentary, A Class Divided . On April 5, 1968, the day after King was shot Elliott divided her a ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | China vs. India � The Next 100 Years [Booked for Aired on Wednesday, April 19] Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Mumbai [reidmix / Flickr]President Hu Jintao of China is visiting the U.S. this week. It's not an official state visit -- not like Manmohan Singh was granted last year -- but more of a "working visit." And this is more than political pageantry. It means, for example, that President Hu will be having dinner with Bill Gates... but not George Bush. And it means that the Sino-Indo-American geo-political chess ma ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Chowhounds I want to be a culinary chameleon and just enjoy every end of every spectrum possible. I've drunk really expensive Bordeaux and I've also drunk the best banana milkshake in Brooklyn, and I feel whole for experiencing that spectrum.Jim Leff on Open Source [Booked forAired on Wednesday, March 29] Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Jim Leff [snapshotartifact.org] "I eat to live. I live to eat. I eat to eat more." Those are the words of a true chowhound. If your desk drawers are bu ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Don Quixote at 400 [Booked for Aired Thursday December 15]Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)[Toni To / Flickr] Whether it is the greatest of literary masterpieces or the most mis-categorized and over-sold, Don Quixote (on its 400th birthday) is my prime example of the open-source novel. The tale -- itself a patchwork of picaresque and pastoral narratives -- has been infinitely cannibalized and copied, retold in the forms of painting (Picasso) and film, the symphonic score (Richard Strauss) and the Broad ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Google Print Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) This, Google-able? [Justin Braithwaite / Flickr]Fair use is hard to explain. I know this because Jack Bernard, the attorney in charge of the Google project at the University of Michigan, walked me through it this afternoon. It took him forty-five minutes, and he started with a look at Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Gary Hart: God and Caesar in America We take up again on Monday the church-and-state question -- the Jeffersonian legacy and our Theocracy in America anxieties -- with Gary Hart, the former Senator and presidential contender from Colorado. Before he got into law or politics, Gary Hart earned a divinity degree at Yale. He was raised in the Church of the Nazarene and graduated from Bethany Nazarene College. He has just published a thoughtful brief about a religious revival underway in America and the risky implications in pol ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Torture, Still, Again Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) [pulpolux / Flickr]If you google the phrase "black sites" now, at 4:05 this afternoon, you get hits that are mostly websites about African Americans. Soon enough, however, a search of "black sites," like "waterboarding" and "stress position," will reveal a list of pages that, alleged or proven, irrevocably connect the United States to the practice of torture. And we learned this morning in an article in the Washington Post that we're doing it where ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | The Muscular Wilsonians: What do They Believe? Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) [James Bunton/ Flickr]I keep thinking, listening to how Republicans support the use of force in the service of freedom, about the Dayton Agreement, the conference in 1995 that determined the shape and security of what used to be Yugoslavia. Clearly the Democrats don't shy away from the use of force, and they don't shy away from nation-building (wasn't that an issue during the 2000 election?), yet now the GOP has grabbed the idea of championing freedo ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Rethinking Race and Class: John McWhorter [Booked for aired Monday, September 26]Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)John McWhorter [The Teaching Company]Here's the question: In four decades of unrelenting news and politics centered on "race," what has worked, and what hasn't, to challenge and ease the authority of the color line? And what accounts for the sense after Katrina that much of the drama was just sound and fury?If we're starting again -- as, in a sense we are -- what have we learned from, for example: voting rights an ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache |