Open Source with Christopher Lydon

Recent Episodes

Prison Playwrights

Posted October 14, 2021 • 00:50:54

Prison time can be the strangest interval in a long life: it is experienced, year by year, as a slow-burning hell on earth, often revalued later as...

Franzen Comes Alive

Posted October 7, 2021 • 00:50:43

Jonathan Franzen might just be the last of the fine-grained, big-book portraitists of “the way Middle America lives”—specially the intimate deceptions...

Tragic Architecture

Posted September 9, 2021 • 00:50:08

Those twin towers of the World Trade Center wrote two epic stories into the skyline of Manhattan: rise and fall. Most of us saw the hellscape of fire...

The End of the War

Posted August 26, 2021 • 00:50:55

The war for Afghanistan is over: the Taliban won in a walk. We’re shocked, more than surprised, but then what? Is this our American empire at sundown...

COVID on the Ballot

Posted October 29, 2020 • 00:50:09

COVID, COVID, COVID, all you hear is COVID, the man tweeted, but how could it not be tagged as the COVID election in the plague year 2020? COVID has...