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Ghana Speaking: The “living wound” at Cape Coast Castle Updated: 2010-02-08 20:47:37 Description: Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang (30 minutes, 18 meg mp3) I’m in Ghana for a week — starting from Cape Coast, toward the western end of Ghana’s Atlantic shore. Cape Coast is a university tow...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD McChesney and Nichols: $30-billion to save journalism Updated: 2010-02-03 15:33:09 Description: Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Robert McChesney and John Nichols (56 minutes, 26 meg mp3) Robert McChesney and John Nichols are grappling with the question: what would Thomas Jefferson do about the death of the American newspaper?...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Harold Evans and his “rag and bone men of the opinion trade” Updated: 2010-01-22 19:07:54 Description: Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Harold Evans (41 minutes, 19 meg mp3) Harold Evans, doubtless the finest English newspaper editor of his time, could make you weep in his memoir of formative days in Manchester and glory years (1965...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Rebecca Goldstein’s Ontological Urge: the 36 Arguments Updated: 2010-01-20 21:40:10 Description: Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Rebecca Goldstein (36 minutes, 22 meg mp3) Who knew that the God question is burning bright in our university neighborhood of brain scientists, mathematicians, computer geniuses, game theorists, phys...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Erica Hirshler’s Biography of a Masterpiece Updated: 2010-01-14 21:33:06 Description: Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Erica Hirshler (26 minutes, 12 meg mp3) Click here for a high resolution JPEG of the painting. Erica Hirshler and I are standing in many shades of awe in this conversation, in front of Boston’...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Terry Teachout’s Pops: Culture-Changing Genius Updated: 2010-01-11 23:02:23 Description: Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Terry Teachout (57 minutes, 26 meg mp3) Terry Teachout’s fine reconsideration of the man called “Pops” solidifies Louis Armstrong’s standing as not just the greatest horn player sinc...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Whose Words These Are (20): Rick Benjamin Updated: 2009-12-30 13:59:56 Description: Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Rick Benjamin. (38 minutes, 18 meg mp3) Rick Benjamin says the threshold instruction of most good poems is: slow down, be alert, wake up. The reason to write poetry is to be of use, he says. The r...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Robin Kelley’s Transcendental Thelonious Monk Updated: 2009-12-23 14:56:17 Description: Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Robin Kelley (51 minutes, 24 meg mp3) Robin Kelley’s superb biography brings the Thelonious Monk story back from the ragged edge to the creative center of American music. And it brings my rea...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Gordon Wood: Empire and Liberty, then and now Updated: 2009-12-21 16:43:39 Description: Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Gordon Wood (27 minutes, mp3) Gordon Wood, the wonderfully plain-spoken Pulitzer and Bancroft prize historian at Brown, thinks that Thomas Jefferson would find Barack Obama obnoxiously, over-reaching...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Whose Words These Are (19): Andrew Motion Updated: 2009-12-17 20:39:16 Description: Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Andrew Motion. (23 minutes, 11 meg mp3) Sir Andrew Motion succeeded Dryden, Wordsworth, Tennyson and, immediately, Ted Hughes as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. He can sound like the elegist of...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Orhan Pamuk and his Museum: This is your brain on novels… Updated: 2009-12-14 20:46:47 Description: Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Orhan Pamuk. (28 minutes, 13 mb mp3) Orhan Pamuk in his six Norton Lectures at Harvard this fall filled the air with ideas about fiction. “The novel is not about the characters but about thei...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Whose Words These Are (18): Keith Waldrop Updated: 2009-12-12 00:12:36 Description: Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Keith Waldrop. (23 minutes, 11 meg mp3) Keith Waldrop, who just won the National Book Award in poetry for his Transcendental Studies, is a quilter in phrases. He eschews any intention or meaning th...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD This “Year of India” (3): Suketu Mehta, Bombay’s Biographer Updated: 2009-12-09 17:47:57 Description: Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Suketu Mehta. (37 minutes, 17 mb mp3) Suketu Mehta, the master storyteller of modern Bombay, learned by listening — to the runaway poet from Bihar, for example, who wanted him to write a book ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD This “Year of India” (2): Rana Dasgupta Updated: 2009-12-08 15:18:53 Description: Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Rana Dasgupta. (45 minutes, 21 mb mp3) Rana Dasgupta’s India is a land of grueling poverty still, in a culture transfixed by glittering wealth. The dominant mood is “frenzied accumulati...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Whose Words These Are (17): Henri Cole Updated: 2009-12-03 17:28:34 Description: Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Henri Cole. (42 minutes, 19 mb mp3) The poet Henri Cole got his French first name from his Armenian mother. From his father, a military man, he got his Southern speech and, in what sounds like sadn...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Whose Words These Are (16): Nick Baker’s Chowder Updated: 2009-11-24 19:18:08 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Mary Karr on Girls and their Dragons Updated: 2009-11-19 21:31:43 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Thomas Balmes on Documentary Democracy Updated: 2009-11-19 00:21:20 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Voice of Gandhi in this “Year of India” Updated: 2009-11-16 22:05:25 Description: 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....more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Whose Words These Are (15): Bloom’s Hart Crane Updated: 2009-11-13 21:56:08 Description: 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,...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD David Bromwich on Obama: Looking at Words Closely Updated: 2009-11-11 00:23:26 Description: 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 Ti...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD “The Wire” Rewired Updated: 2009-11-04 20:05:50 Description: “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,...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Ralph Nader’s Flight of Fantasy Updated: 2009-11-03 01:35:19 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD How God Came Back: Gordon, Cox and West Updated: 2009-10-27 23:50:44 Description: 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: “...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Mark Danner: Scoring Assymetrical Warfare Updated: 2009-10-26 16:30:37 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Ted Sizer: Performance was the only test Updated: 2009-10-23 20:10:27 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Whose Words These Are (14): C.D. Wright Updated: 2009-10-21 21:22:37 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Chris Hedges: Requiem for the Republic Updated: 2009-10-19 18:13:49 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Whose Words These Are (13): Michael Ansara Updated: 2009-10-16 23:51:50 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Whose Words These Are (12): Teresa Cader Updated: 2009-10-16 15:22:34 Description: 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 i...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Whose Words These Are (11): Lloyd Schwartz Updated: 2009-10-14 23:34:49 Description: 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 a...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Donald Pease: Obama’s “Transnational” Presidency Updated: 2009-10-14 02:17:50 Description: 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 blue...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Whose Words These Are (10): Stephen Burt Updated: 2009-10-09 19:45:35 Description: 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 wer...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Whose Words These Are (9): Sarah Kay Updated: 2009-10-08 02:30:21 Description: 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, S...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Whose Words These Are (8): Rosanna Warren Updated: 2009-10-07 03:04:08 Description: 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 d...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Whose Words These Are (7): Vendler’s Stevens Updated: 2009-10-06 03:03:05 Description: 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 Steve...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Whose Words These Are (6): Ron Slate Updated: 2009-10-02 16:27:35 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Tracy Kidder: “…faith that looks through death” Updated: 2009-10-01 12:25:58 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Whose Words These Are (5): Jericho Brown Updated: 2009-09-30 16:35:17 Description: 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 Shell...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Whose Words These Are (4): Joan Houlihan Updated: 2009-09-29 17:35:17 Description: 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 Eme...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD James Morone: What healthcare politics lays bare Updated: 2009-09-28 19:50:56 Description: 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 Carte...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Whose Words These Are (3): Franz Wright Updated: 2009-09-25 21:32:43 Description: 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 plea...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Whose Words These Are: Regie Gibson Updated: 2009-09-24 20:55:14 Description: 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, a...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Whose Words These Are: Jill McDonough Updated: 2009-09-21 22:16:06 Description: 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 tra...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Rory Stewart: “nonsense” policy in Afghanistan Updated: 2009-09-16 21:27:55 Description: 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-sell...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Isaac Newton drops in at MIT Updated: 2009-09-14 21:19:22 Description: 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 Chr...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Pico Iyer in Jamaica: center of word and world Updated: 2009-05-27 23:11:26 Description: 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, ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Patrick Keefe’s Snakehead: to the US, through Hell Updated: 2009-09-10 01:27:14 Description: 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 her...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Jackson Lears: on Obama’s Sorrows of Empire Updated: 2009-08-28 04:58:30 Description: 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 sa...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD New Music at Tanglewood: Beauty’s Turn Updated: 2009-08-14 19:57:43 Description: 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, Cyn...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Jeff Klein’s Excellent Adventure in Gaza Updated: 2009-08-05 18:07:18 Description: 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, ami...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Shahriar Mandanipour: The ‘Love’ Cure for Iran Updated: 2009-07-24 22:24:41 Description: 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 l...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Ronald Prinn and MIT’s Wheel of Fortune Updated: 2009-07-17 20:53:16 Description: 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 M...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Juan Enriquez: The Next Boom, by Zipcode Updated: 2009-06-25 21:18:53 Description: 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. ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Alfred Gusenbauer: Euro-Socialism in America Updated: 2009-06-23 18:57:23 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland: the Novel of the Age Updated: 2009-06-17 03:53:32 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Pico Iyer in Jamaica: center of word and world Updated: 2009-05-27 23:11:26 Description: 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,...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Marlon James: “You’re headless without history…” Updated: 2009-05-28 21:13:50 Description: 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 bel...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Calabash 2009: A View of Us in the Age of Obama Updated: 2009-06-04 15:32:11 Description: 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 conver...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Ken Robinson & John Maeda: Creativity for Breakfast Updated: 2009-06-05 16:24:33 Description: 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 conver...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Thoreau’s Fire: the Spark of “Walden” Updated: 2009-06-10 18:58:06 Description: 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, imprison...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Colm Toibin: the living spell of Henry James Updated: 2009-05-19 21:10:52 Description: 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 Mas...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Aleksandar Hemon: through bi-focals, darkly Updated: 2009-05-21 09:22:33 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD George Scialabba: the untethered, untenured mind Updated: 2009-05-15 02:28:40 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Reif Larsen: the Making of the “Spivet” Legend Updated: 2009-05-12 20:54:58 Description: 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 gam...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Paul Harding’s Magical ‘Tinkers’ Updated: 2009-05-07 21:14:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD David Kennedy: Requiem for Human Rights? Updated: 2009-04-29 20:56:58 Description: 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 Un...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Angles on Empire: Book Week at Brown Updated: 2009-04-30 20:54:22 Description: 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 thi...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Mahmood Mamdani: You (and I) got Darfur Wrong Updated: 2009-04-03 23:50:28 Description: 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 world̶...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD “Waltz with Bashir”: the Art Director’s Cut at War Updated: 2009-04-17 15:41:06 Description: 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 t...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Carlos Fuentes: FDR to BHO: the New Deal Revisited Updated: 2009-04-23 20:58:35 Description: “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 ha...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Amitav Ghosh & Robert Coover: Speaking of Burma Updated: 2009-04-24 19:38:43 Description: 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 i...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD James Carroll: Practicing “Americanist” Catholic Updated: 2009-04-11 01:13:23 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD After Gaza: The road back from shame and silence Updated: 2009-04-02 04:06:57 Description: 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 see...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Mahmood Mamdani: You (and I) got Darfur Wrong Updated: 2009-04-03 23:50:28 Description: 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 world̶...more... Click to listen to Chris's conversations with Mahmood Mamdani (59 minutes, 25 mb mp3)">LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | Click to listen to Chris's conversations with Mahmood Mamdani (59 minutes, 25 mb mp3)">DOWNLOAD The Obama Effect: a Rebirth of Global Politics Updated: 2009-04-09 03:06:20 Description: 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 cri...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The President of Flow… and the end of Hip Hop? Updated: 2009-03-26 21:20:42 Description: 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 comm...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Obama & Hip Hop: The Transracial Drumbeat Updated: 2009-03-18 14:27:02 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Obama as Gorbachev: a Regime in Crisis Updated: 2009-03-19 20:33:34 Description: 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 sy...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Fred Kaplan on the Neo-Cons: Daytime Dreamers Updated: 2009-03-06 03:41:20 Description: 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 Bu...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Parag Khanna: Anxious in Afghanistan Updated: 2009-02-25 22:15:05 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Blindspot: Lepore and Kamensky in Olde Boston Updated: 2009-03-03 04:23:28 Description: 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 d...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Jonah Lehrer: Brain Science for the Rest of Us Updated: 2009-02-25 01:29:48 Description: 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 w...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Dave McKenna: My Private Collection of the Master Updated: 2009-02-20 04:36:57 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Palestinian Who Knows (or Knew) the President Updated: 2009-02-12 02:45:35 Description: 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 i...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Obama’s Lincoln: The Writer and the Imperial Crisis Updated: 2009-02-12 22:48:13 Description: 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,” ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Barack Obama: What Kind of Insider? Brown Bag (V) Updated: 2009-02-11 02:39:25 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Obama and the Prophetic Tradition: Brown Bag (II) Updated: 2009-01-30 22:15:06 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Obama Channels John F. Kennedy: Brown Bag (III) Updated: 2009-02-03 03:44:14 Description: 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 sc...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Chafee Chides Obama on Gaza: Brown Bag (IV) Updated: 2009-02-04 02:50:11 Description: 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 t...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD John Updike: Ted Williams of Our Prose Updated: 2009-01-28 22:37:43 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Age of Obama: Ten Days In: The Brown Bag (I) Updated: 2009-01-29 23:53:26 Description: 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 Sin...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD One Man’s Mix of Cuban Music: Roberto Zurbano Updated: 2009-01-17 03:55:49 Description: 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 Z...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD New Orleans, the Recovery Model: Ned Sublette Updated: 2009-01-20 02:21:26 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD “Our Putin” and Son: the Bushes Revealed Updated: 2009-01-14 21:06:41 Description: 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 re...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Music as a civic “conspiracy”: George Mathew Updated: 2009-01-12 21:51:38 Description: 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 o...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Our Music Man in Havana: Bobby Carcasses Updated: 2009-01-05 22:33:16 Description: 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 wa...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Enchantment and Ruin: Mario Coyula’s Havana Updated: 2009-01-06 21:18:21 Description: 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 count...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Cuba’s Healthcare Revolution… for the rest of us Updated: 2009-01-08 20:44:36 Description: 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 arou...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD What We’re Going Through: Anna Deavere Smith Updated: 2008-10-02 20:43:34 Description: 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 bo...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Bernard Lown’s Prescription for Survival Updated: 2008-10-08 18:39:48 Description: 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 putti...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Indispensable Musician: Barenboim Backstage Updated: 2008-11-25 20:33:27 Description: 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, t...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD In the Obama Moment: Robert Coover Updated: 2008-12-09 20:42:59 Description: 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 cha...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Grand Strategy: Posen on Obama Updated: 2008-12-19 18:21:07 Description: 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 sig...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD In the Obama Moment: Rick Moody Updated: 2008-12-06 00:27:15 Description: 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 ̶...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Amitav Ghosh and his Sea of Poppies Updated: 2008-11-21 03:20:39 Description: 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,...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Our Better Angel: Chris Adrian Updated: 2008-11-13 23:14:44 Description: 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 beginni...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD This Pariah-to-Messiah Moment: John Comaroff Updated: 2008-11-11 04:07:04 Description: 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 wor...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Thank you, Studs Terkel! Updated: 2008-11-03 20:38:24 Description: Click to listen to Studs Terkel declaiming on the gap between Walt Whitman’s America and ours. ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Hunters Evidence: Carlo Ginzburg Updated: 2008-11-04 04:52:21 Description: Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with micro-historians Carlo Ginzburg and David Kertzer. In Carlo Ginzburgs beautifully extended metaphor, the original public intellectual was the Stone Age hunter: Carlo Ginzburg: the historian as card...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD New Conversation, New Narrative: Stanley Fish Updated: 2008-11-05 22:17:19 Description: 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 o...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD J. S. Bachs Habit of Perfection: Andrew Rangell Updated: 2008-10-28 01:01:56 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD A Longer View of 2008: Historian Gordon Wood Updated: 2008-10-29 19:26:59 Description: 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 th...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Campaign 08: How was it for you, Jim Fishkin? Updated: 2008-10-31 20:57:07 Description: 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 politic...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD J. S. Bachs Habit of Perfection: Andrew Rangell Updated: 2008-10-28 01:01:56 Description: 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 t...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Poster Art Then and Now: RISDs John Maeda Updated: 2008-10-20 18:28:34 Description: 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 th...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Soviet Posters: The Art of Polarization Updated: 2008-10-16 21:19:07 Description: 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:...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Andrew Bacevich: The End of Exceptionalism Updated: 2008-10-10 17:31:44 Description: 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 Lon...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Virtual JFK: Vietnam (and us) if Kennedy had lived Updated: 2008-10-06 21:58:41 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Bernard Lowns Prescription for Survival Updated: 2008-10-08 18:39:48 Description: 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 putti...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Obama-McCain: the Worlds Main Event Updated: 2008-06-18 22:58:40 Description: 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 peopl...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Tony Schwartz for the Next Generation Updated: 2008-06-28 00:36:42 Description: 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 Kitc...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD What would Roger Williams say and do? Updated: 2008-07-03 20:41:50 Description: 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 redisco...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD George Lakoff: Obama in a Bind Updated: 2008-07-11 22:46:49 Description: 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 t...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD And now for something completely different Updated: 2008-07-18 20:37:28 Description: 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 embark...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The American Exception, Again Updated: 2008-07-24 20:50:07 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Hanging Out at Tanglewood Updated: 2008-08-07 17:57:52 Description: 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-...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Cass Sunstein: for the Homer Simpson in all of us Updated: 2008-08-24 15:49:24 Description: 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 y...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD As Others See Us: Godfrey Hodgson on the Democrats Updated: 2008-08-29 19:44:03 Description: 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 th...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Whats So Great About Us Updated: 2008-09-04 17:31:18 Description: 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,...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Rory Stewart: the Post-Imperialist Poster Hero Updated: 2008-09-05 17:54:07 Description: 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-sellin...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD An American Exception, in Danger Updated: 2008-09-12 14:15:33 Description: 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 Coll...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Philippe Sands Torture Team Updated: 2008-09-17 17:19:36 Description: 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?...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Torture, Part 3: the Philip Gourevitch version Updated: 2008-09-19 02:57:04 Description: 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 Gourevit...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Slavoj Zizek: What is the Question? Updated: 2008-09-23 22:21:08 Description: 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 lip...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Candid Capitalist: John Bogle Updated: 2008-09-27 00:59:50 Description: 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 seve...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The American Exception: Pop Culture Today Updated: 2008-09-30 23:04:56 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD What Were Going Through: Anna Deavere Smith Updated: 2008-10-02 20:43:34 Description: 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 b...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Dan Ariely: Confronting Irrationality Updated: 2008-06-10 14:00:00 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Calabash 08 (Pt 3) Reggae & the Obama Moment Updated: 2008-06-03 14:00:00 Description: 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 ce...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD What Novelists are For: Russell Banks Updated: 2008-06-05 14:00:00 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Calabash 08 (Part 2): As Others See Us Updated: 2008-05-30 14:00:00 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Calabash 08: First, the fireworks Updated: 2008-05-28 14:00:00 Description: "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 i...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Open Source Storytelling: Ben Haggarty Updated: 2008-05-21 14:00:00 Description: 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 my...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Glenn Loury: The Missing Voice of Jeremiah Updated: 2008-05-19 14:00:00 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Bad News in High Style: Kevin Phillips Updated: 2008-05-14 14:00:00 Description: 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, ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Errol Morris Feel-Bad Masterpiece Updated: 2008-05-09 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Mary Jo Salters Phone Call to the Future Updated: 2008-05-07 14:00:00 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Israel at 60: the Etgar Keret Version Updated: 2008-05-05 14:00:00 Description: 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 Brow...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Nicholson Bakers Human Smoke Updated: 2008-04-23 14:00:00 Description: 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 tri...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Deal-Maker on the Spot: Christopher Hill Updated: 2008-04-25 14:00:00 Description: 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. H...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Douglas Blackmon: Neo-Slavery in Our Times Updated: 2008-04-28 14:00:00 Description: 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) Doug...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Open Source Composer: David Amram Updated: 2008-04-30 14:00:00 Description: 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 asso...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Patrick Cockburn: The New War in Iraq Updated: 2008-04-18 14:00:00 Description: 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 f...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Pico Iyer: the Transcendentalist Dalai Lama Updated: 2008-04-11 14:00:00 Description: 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 inc...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Brazils Statesman at Large Updated: 2008-04-14 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Armed Chair: Bill Flynns Seat of Empire Updated: 2008-04-08 14:00:00 Description: 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 start...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The News about the News: Jay Rosen Updated: 2008-03-28 14:00:00 Description: 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 ho...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Speaking of Race: John Edgar Widemans Fanon Updated: 2008-03-21 14:00:00 Description: 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-Ce...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Real News: Ethan Zuckerman & Solana Larsen Updated: 2008-03-24 14:00:00 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Cuba in Our Ears (IV): Ned Sublette Updated: 2008-03-20 14:00:00 Description: 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 t...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Cuba on our Minds (III): David Kaisers JFK Updated: 2008-03-17 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Whats Coming in Cuba (I) Patrick Symmes Updated: 2008-03-12 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Cuba for the Long Run (II): Adrian Lopez Denis Updated: 2008-03-13 14:00:00 Description: 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 yea...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD London: The News about the News Updated: 2008-03-07 14:00:00 Description: "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 Afgh...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Post-Imperial Historian: Eric Hobsbawm Updated: 2008-03-04 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Iraq in the Long View: Behnam Abu Al-Souf Updated: 2008-02-22 14:00:00 Description: 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 exca...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Master Class: the Global Beethoven Updated: 2008-02-20 14:00:00 Description: 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 Ba...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD In the Neo-Liberal Ruins: Why Venezuela Matters Updated: 2008-02-14 14:00:00 Description: 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-infla...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD El Cambio: Latin Americas Change, and Ours Updated: 2008-02-13 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Pakistan for Beginners: 2 Updated: 2007-11-27 14:00:00 Description: 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 migh...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD After the Empire: Must Reading from Parag Khanna Updated: 2008-02-11 14:00:00 Description: 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, ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD A Moment for Oracles: Amber and Braunze Updated: 2008-02-06 01:02:09 Description: 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 deat...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Randall Kennedy: A Change is Gonna Come Updated: 2008-02-06 01:02:08 Description: A conversation with law professor Randall Kennedy the other night began with his new book ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD MLK Jr. after 40 years: a Fraternal Memoir Updated: 2008-01-25 14:00:00 Description: 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 apprent...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Backstage with Henry V: Updated: 2008-01-24 01:38:06 Description: 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... ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The post-imperial maestro: Sir Colin Davis Updated: 2008-01-21 14:00:00 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD George Bush in Jerusalem: Not Too Late for a Legacy Updated: 2008-01-13 22:47:27 Description: 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 Egy...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Anthony Barnett on Whats Changed Updated: 2008-01-09 14:00:00 Description: 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 Barn...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD At Home with Harold Bloom: (1) on Walt Whitman Updated: 2007-12-25 14:00:00 Description: 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, indu...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD At Home with Harold Bloom: (2) on the Humanities Updated: 2007-12-28 14:00:00 Description: 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; i...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD At Home with Harold Bloom: (3) The Jazz Bridge Updated: 2007-12-21 14:00:00 Description: 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 re...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Helen Vendler: Reading and Riffing on W. B. Yeats Updated: 2007-12-20 14:00:00 Description: 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. ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Speaking of Music: Alex Rosss 20th Century Updated: 2007-12-15 14:00:00 Description: 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, Sc...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Philip Guras American Transcendentalism Updated: 2007-12-18 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Juan Cole: from Bonaparte to Bush Updated: 2007-12-14 14:00:00 Description: ...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 ci...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD A Free Life: Ha Jins Immigration Story Updated: 2007-12-07 14:00:00 Description: 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? ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Chavismo with some new brakes on it Updated: 2007-12-04 14:00:00 Description: 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 friend...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Pakistan for Beginners: 3, with Omer Alvie Updated: 2007-11-29 14:00:00 Description: 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... ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Pakistan 2.0 Updated: 2007-11-26 14:00:00 Description: 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 G...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Art, Science & Truth: Jonah Lehrer Updated: 2007-11-20 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD A Way to Live: Craig Smiths Bach Project Updated: 2007-11-20 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD This was the worst war ever : Ken Burns WW2 Updated: 2007-11-21 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Speaking of Music Again: Oliver Sacks Updated: 2007-11-16 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD A Piano Master Class with Saleem Abboud Ashkar Updated: 2007-11-11 14:00:00 Description: 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 comin...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Harold Bloom Tapes (Part 2) Updated: 2007-11-10 01:01:02 Description: 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 reviv...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Harold Bloom Tapes (Part 1) Updated: 2007-11-10 01:01:02 Description: 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 reviv...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD They Got It Right: (6) Shibley Telhami Updated: 2007-10-31 14:00:00 Description: 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 grind...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD He Got It Wrong, Alas: Kanan Makiya Updated: 2007-11-07 14:00:00 Description: 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 main...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD William Gibsons Spook Country (Part 3) Updated: 2007-11-01 13:41:23 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD William Gibsons Spook Country (Part 2) Updated: 2007-11-01 13:41:23 Description: 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: ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Summer Reading: William Gibsons Spook Country Updated: 2007-11-01 13:41:23 Description: 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 Gibso...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD At Home in Global America: Juno Diaz (Part 3) Updated: 2007-11-01 13:41:23 Description: 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." H...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD At Home in Global America: Juno Diaz (Part 2) Updated: 2007-11-01 13:41:23 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD At Home in Global America: Junot Diaz (Part 1) Updated: 2007-11-01 13:41:23 Description: 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 c...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD To End Another War: Richard Holbrooke (Pt 2) Updated: 2007-11-01 13:41:23 Description: 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 Ir...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD To End Another War: Richard Holbrooke Updated: 2007-11-01 13:41:23 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD At Home and Global in the US: Edwidge Danticat Updated: 2007-11-01 13:41:23 Description: 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 D...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Speaking of Coltrane: Five Conversations (5) Updated: 2007-11-01 13:41:23 Description: 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 s...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Speaking of Coltrane: Five Conversations (4) Updated: 2007-11-01 13:41:23 Description: 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 ch...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Speaking of Coltrane: Five Conversations (3) Updated: 2007-11-01 13:41:23 Description: 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 o...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Speaking of Coltrane: Five Conversations (2) Updated: 2007-11-01 13:41:23 Description: 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 wer...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Speaking of Coltrane: Five Conversations (1) Updated: 2007-11-01 13:41:23 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Citizen in Exile: Lincoln Chafee (Part 2) Updated: 2007-11-01 13:41:23 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Citizen in Exile: Lincoln Chafee (Part 1) Updated: 2007-11-01 13:41:23 Description: 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,...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD They Got It Right: (3) Barry Posen Updated: 2007-11-01 13:41:22 Description: 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....more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD They Got It Right: (4) Steve Van Evera Updated: 2007-11-01 13:41:22 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD They Got It Right: (5) Peter Liberman Updated: 2007-11-01 13:41:22 Description: 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 mi...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD They Got It Right: (1) Robert J. Art Updated: 2007-10-23 13:18:53 Description: 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 Commen...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD They Got It Right: (2) Michael Desch Updated: 2007-10-23 13:18:53 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Harold Bloom Tapes Updated: 2007-08-03 14:00:00 Description: 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 reviv...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Lessons from Northern Ireland Updated: 2007-06-26 14:00:00 Description: 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 Nort...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Issue is Empire Updated: 2007-06-25 14:00:00 Description: 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 Am...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD We Interrupt This Program Updated: 2007-06-30 14:00:00 Description: 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 partne...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The New Community Updated: 2007-06-27 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD On Endings Updated: 2007-06-28 14:00:00 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Blogsday 2007 Updated: 2007-06-14 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Collapse of the Senate Immigration Bill Updated: 2007-06-12 14:00:00 Description: 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 Prosp...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Taking the Food Stamp Challenge Updated: 2007-06-13 14:00:00 Description: 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? Shes two weeks into it and says the free samples at Whole Foods help a lot. Heres part of her shopping list from last wee...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Plague: Camuss Fable in Our Time Updated: 2007-06-04 14:00:00 Description: 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 meta...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Hillary Clintons War Vote Updated: 2007-06-06 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD No Artist Left Behind Updated: 2007-06-07 14:00:00 Description: 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 B...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD South Africa in Context: The Story of Mac Maharaj Updated: 2007-05-29 14:00:00 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Comeys Dissent at Justice Updated: 2007-05-17 14:00:00 Description: 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 f...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Hitchens v. God Updated: 2007-05-21 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Varieties of Faith and Reason, Take Two Updated: 2007-05-22 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Equity: More Private, Less Public? Updated: 2007-05-15 14:00:00 Description: 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 na...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Gold Rush for Financial Information Updated: 2007-05-10 14:00:00 Description: 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 th...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD France: The Sarko vs. Sgo Prism Updated: 2007-05-03 14:00:00 Description: 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 candidat...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Ralph Ellisons America Updated: 2007-05-01 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Weinbergers Miscellany Updated: 2007-04-26 14:00:00 Description: 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 Amaz...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Globalizations Double-Edged Sword Updated: 2007-04-24 14:00:00 Description: 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, ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD At Dinner with David Halberstam Updated: 2007-04-25 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Re-Imaging Violence Updated: 2007-04-19 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Eddie Palmieri on Latin Jazz Updated: 2007-04-11 14:00:00 Description: 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 f...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD On the Watch List Updated: 2007-04-10 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Detroits Big Three and the EPA Updated: 2007-04-03 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Israel vs. Iran Updated: 2007-03-07 14:00:00 Description: 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 lo...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Obama and the Boomers Updated: 2007-02-12 14:00:00 Description: 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 r...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD What to Do in Space? Updated: 2007-02-15 14:00:00 Description: 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 th...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Plamegate: The Libby Trial Updated: 2007-02-13 14:00:00 Description: 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 ow...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Katrina and the Insurance Tsunami Updated: 2007-02-19 14:00:00 Description: 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 constructi...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Chalmers Johnson and his Nemesis Updated: 2007-02-08 14:00:00 Description: 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 Emp...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Ecstasy of Influence Updated: 2007-02-07 14:00:00 Description: 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 w...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The End of the Foreign Correspondent? Updated: 2007-02-05 14:00:00 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Elif Shafak: Voice of a New Turkey Updated: 2007-02-06 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Do Americans Need to Serve? Updated: 2007-01-30 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Groundhog Day (Day Two) Updated: 2007-02-01 14:00:00 Description: 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 t...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Major Jackson: Where Hes From Updated: 2007-01-24 14:00:00 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The History of Utopia Updated: 2007-01-25 14:00:00 Description: 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 relen...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Next Stop: Iran? Updated: 2007-01-15 14:00:00 Description: 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 respons...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Marching Toward Obsolescence Updated: 2007-01-17 14:00:00 Description: 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 Norm...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Micromanaging vs. Oversight Updated: 2007-01-09 14:00:00 Description: 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 Bushs war, and theres... SEN. BIDEN: It is. ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD How Do You Leave a Country? Updated: 2007-01-10 14:00:00 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Economics Reimagined Updated: 2007-01-11 14:00:00 Description: 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 economis...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD What the Active-Duty Military Wants Updated: 2007-01-08 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Franz Wright, Re-Fed Updated: 2006-12-28 14:00:00 Description: 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 mans chronicle of spirit as told by the spirit more than the man. He has said they they often seem ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Changing the World Updated: 2007-01-02 14:00:00 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Edge.org: Optimism Updated: 2007-01-03 14:00:00 Description: 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. ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Iraq: A Military Inquest Updated: 2006-12-12 14:00:00 Description: 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 t...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Classroom Lessons of Iraq Updated: 2006-12-13 14:00:00 Description: 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 pol...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Russia, 15 Years After the Revolution Updated: 2006-12-14 14:00:00 Description: 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 Ru...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD This I Believe Updated: 2006-11-28 14:00:00 Description: 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 de...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Bigotry 101:A Night in November Updated: 2006-11-21 14:00:00 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Daniel Barenboim: Sound, Thought&Activism Updated: 2006-11-23 14:00:00 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Out of Iraq Updated: 2006-11-29 14:00:00 Description: 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, ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD A New Israeli - Palestinian Mandate? Updated: 2006-11-13 14:00:00 Description: 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 lega...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Democrats New Reading List Updated: 2006-11-09 14:00:00 Description: 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 -...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD A Micro-Targeted Democracy Updated: 2006-11-07 14:00:00 Description: 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 con...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Homosexuality and the American Church Updated: 2006-11-06 14:00:00 Description: 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 Nationa...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Elections 06: Montana Senate Updated: 2006-11-01 14:00:00 Description: 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 few...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Elections 06: Pennsylvania Senate Updated: 2006-10-30 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Iraq, October 2006 Updated: 2006-10-26 14:00:00 Description: 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, ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Elections 06: Identities Politics Updated: 2006-10-23 14:00:00 Description: 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, i...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Elections 06: Missouri Senate Updated: 2006-10-24 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Georgia (and Russia) Off Our Minds Updated: 2006-10-25 14:00:00 Description: 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 mo...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Edna OBrien Updated: 2006-10-18 14:00:00 Description: 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.Edn...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Evolution of Football Updated: 2006-10-16 14:00:00 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Talking Turkishness Updated: 2006-10-19 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Death of Anna Politkovskaya Updated: 2006-10-10 14:00:00 Description: 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 sp...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The End of Free Will? Updated: 2006-10-04 14:00:00 Description: 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 ch...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD A Dutch Canary in the Multicultural Coalmine? Updated: 2006-10-05 14:00:00 Description: 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 tw...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Elections 06: The Arizona 8th Updated: 2006-10-02 14:00:00 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Green Chemistry Updated: 2006-09-27 14:00:00 Description: 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 regu...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Open Source in the Boardroom Updated: 2006-09-28 14:00:00 Description: 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 prospe...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Elections 06: Rhode Island Senate Updated: 2006-09-26 14:00:00 Description: 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 t...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Mea Culpa Updated: 2006-09-20 14:00:00 Description: 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 s...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Niall Fergusons War of the World Updated: 2006-09-21 14:00:00 Description: 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. ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD I.F. Stone Remembered Updated: 2006-09-25 14:00:00 Description: 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:...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Moderate Muslims Updated: 2006-09-19 14:00:00 Description: 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 dealin...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Blairs Long Goodbye Updated: 2006-09-13 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD After 9/11: The Long View Updated: 2006-09-12 14:00:00 Description: 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." ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Fear Factor Updated: 2006-09-11 14:00:00 Description: 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 Years Eve celebration. Brilliance flaring across the time...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Afghanistan Five Years After 9/11 Updated: 2006-09-06 14:00:00 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Rebroadcast: Black Men in America Updated: 2006-08-31 00:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Houston After Katrina Updated: 2006-08-24 14:00:00 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Munich, Yalta or Cambodia: What Year is It? Updated: 2006-08-23 14:00:00 Description: 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 con...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Europe, Lebanon and the Details of Peacekeeping Updated: 2006-08-21 14:00:00 Description: 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 Continents experiences in Bosnia, where foreign troops were not only unable to prevent la...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Houston After Katrina Updated: 2006-08-17 14:00:00 Description: 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 opene...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Meaning of Connecticut Updated: 2006-08-14 14:00:00 Description: 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 fro...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Chomsky: My Dinner with Hassan Updated: 2006-08-15 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Foiled London Plot Updated: 2006-08-10 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The War for Iran: Juan Coles Thought Experiment Updated: 2006-08-08 14:00:00 Description: 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 Bus...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD China: Watching from the Sidelines Updated: 2006-08-07 14:00:00 Description: Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Chinas 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 compe...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Israel and Lebanon: Refuge in Fiction Updated: 2006-08-03 14:00:00 Description: 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 co...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Generational Divide in the Middle East Updated: 2006-08-02 14:00:00 Description: 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 religio...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Israel at War Updated: 2006-07-31 14:00:00 Description: 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 Hezbollahs leader, Sheik Hassan...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Optics of This War Updated: 2006-08-01 14:00:00 Description: 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 Ir...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD On David and Goliath Updated: 2006-07-26 14:00:00 Description: 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 Gl...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Lebanon: What Happened to the Cedar Revolution? Updated: 2006-07-25 14:00:00 Description: 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 de...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD A New Map of the Middle East Updated: 2006-07-24 14:00:00 Description: 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 i...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Poetry of Franz Wright and Fanny Howe Updated: 2006-07-20 14:00:00 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Lorraine Hunt Lieberson Remembered Updated: 2006-07-13 14:00:00 Description: 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 caree...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Transcendental Women Updated: 2006-07-11 14:00:00 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Of Hand Counts and Voting Machines Updated: 2006-07-10 14:00:00 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Korea: The Politics of the Peninsula Updated: 2006-07-06 14:00:00 Description: 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 app...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Terrorism Index Updated: 2006-06-29 14:00:00 Description: 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'...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Emerson Redux Updated: 2006-07-04 14:00:00 Description: 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 (C...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD We Say Potato Updated: 2006-06-28 14:00:00 Description: 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 S...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Democrats: a Message Problem? Updated: 2006-06-27 14:00:00 Description: 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 i...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Limits of Crowds Updated: 2006-06-26 14:00:00 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Americas Dirty Elections Updated: 2006-06-21 14:00:00 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Encyclopedia of American Conservatism Updated: 2006-06-22 14:00:00 Description: 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 co...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Steal This Election Updated: 2006-06-20 14:00:00 Description: 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" - end...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD After Zarqawi: The Enemy in Iraq Updated: 2006-06-19 14:00:00 Description: 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 an...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Blogsday 2006 Updated: 2006-06-15 14:00:00 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Truth, Balance and the News Updated: 2006-06-14 14:00:00 Description: 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 unsatisfac...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Blogosphere: Dems vs. the G.O.P. Updated: 2006-06-13 14:00:00 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD John Updike and his Terrorist Updated: 2006-06-12 14:00:00 Description: 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 teach...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Explaining the World Cup Updated: 2006-06-08 14:00:00 Description: 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 fr...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The War Tapes: Cinema Guerrit Updated: 2006-06-06 14:00:00 Description: 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 de...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD New Orleans: Dead and Gone? Updated: 2006-06-07 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Condis Turn, To Diplomacy Updated: 2006-06-05 14:00:00 Description: 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 s...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Immigration and Development, with Amartya Sen Updated: 2006-05-30 14:00:00 Description: 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 im...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Philip Roth Updated: 2006-05-29 14:00:00 Description: Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3) Philip Roth [David Miller] This Memorial Day weekend were talking with Philip Roth about everything. Its a free-range conversation that gets us beyond the books and into the mind, heart and soul of the Tol...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Iraqi Police Updated: 2006-05-25 14:00:00 Description: 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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Great American Novel Updated: 2006-05-23 14:00:00 Description: 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 s...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD David Remnick on Boxing Updated: 2006-05-24 14:00:00 Description: 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 ca...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Price of Fantasy Updated: 2006-05-22 14:00:00 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Stephen Colbert, Court Jester Updated: 2006-05-02 14:00:00 Description: [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 celebritie...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Presidential Signing Statements Updated: 2006-05-03 14:00:00 Description: 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 l...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Net Neutrality Updated: 2006-05-04 14:00:00 Description: 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 pi...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Nir Rosen on Iraq Updated: 2006-05-08 14:00:00 Description: [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,"...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Harnessing Remittances Updated: 2006-05-18 14:00:00 Description: [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. T...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD China: The Biggest Migration Ever Updated: 2006-05-09 14:00:00 Description: [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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Hidden Histories of Slavery Updated: 2006-05-16 14:00:00 Description: 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 Kwa...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The NSAs New New Phone Database Updated: 2006-05-11 14:00:00 Description: 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 America...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The White House Lawyers Updated: 2006-05-15 14:00:00 Description: 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 withi...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Living Poetry, Living Poets Updated: 2006-05-16 14:00:00 Description: [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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Day After Prison Updated: 2006-05-01 14:00:00 Description: [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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Race, Class and Racism Updated: 2006-04-20 14:00:00 Description: [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 stude...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD China vs. India The Next 100 Years Updated: 2006-04-18 14:00:00 Description: [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 yea...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Chowhounds Updated: 2006-03-29 14:00:00 Description: 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 So...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Don Quixote at 400 Updated: 2005-12-16 03:09:12 Description: [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...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Google Print Updated: 2005-11-29 00:13:00 Description: 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 t...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Gary Hart: God and Caesar in America Updated: 2005-11-04 23:06:01 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Torture, Still, Again Updated: 2005-11-04 06:18:06 Description: 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 "wat...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD The Muscular Wilsonians: What do They Believe? Updated: 2005-11-02 00:27:50 Description: 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 ...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD Rethinking Race and Class: John McWhorter Updated: 2005-09-23 19:34:17 Description: [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 challeng...more... LISTEN NOW | VIEW CACHE | DOWNLOAD |
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