Open Source with Christopher Lydon

Siri: what is ‘artificial intelligence’? In computer science, she says, AI can refer to any device that senses its environment and responds to reach a goal. A simple translation of A. I. as, say, ‘robotic thinking’ …

A conversation with John Kaag and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen on Nietzsche, philosophy, and life.

The news about Nietzsche, as you may have heard, is …

Could it possibly be that Stanford’s great humanist Robert Pogue Harrison invented René Girard out of sheer longing for an omni-theorist of our …

A conversation with George Church and Antonio Regalado about gene editing and the future of biotech.

Ready or not, we are at the gateway into CRISPR …

A conversation about the movies with A. S. Hamrah, Beth Gilligan, Katherine Irving.

We’ve reached that odd ritual of cultural reckoning. Between the …

Mahatma Gandhi led the liberation of India from British rule in the first half of the 20th Century, by massive and peaceful resistance. He is said to …

A conversation on the crisis in Venezuela with Alejandro Velasco, Jeff Sachs, Greg Grandin, and Leo Blanco.

The ruin of Venezuela and the world’s answer to it mark the climax of an epic, late in the Age of Oil. We …

A conversation about Astra Taylor’s new documentary What Is Democracy? with Astra Taylor, David Runciman, and Kali Akuno.

We used to know what we liked about that word ‘democracy,’ and we were ready to fight for it. …

Yes, Virginia, the world did change direction in the late summer of 2001, and it’s been changing us ever since. 9/11 had everything to do it, but it was also the panicky season of the dot.com bust, when little Google, …

A conversation with Andre Dubus III about his new novel, Gone So Long. 

An old-fashioned sort of writer from this part of the world, and a writer we …

A conversation about the “Green New Deal” with Bill McKibben, Naomi Oreskes, and Daniel Schrag.

The mission, as it turned out, was to transform the American economy and save the country, no less, over twelve years. …

A conversation with Stephen Walt and Fintan O’Toole on the state of the world at the beginning of 2019.

At the start of a new year, count the new …

A tribute to Leonard Bernstein with Nigel Simeone, Jamie Bernstein, and Augusta Read Thomas.

Leonard Bernstein, the multi-musician, did it all in his …

A conversation about Brexit, yellow vests, and the state of the European Union with Arthur Goldhammer, Vanessa Bee, Julian Bourg, and Alan Rusbridger.

You know you’re embedded in the Digital Age when you’re typing your anxieties into the Woebot app to get free, anonymous CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy). It’s Digital Age anxiety we’re all cringing at in the movie …

“The genie is out of the bottle,” says George Church, and he should know. Dr. Church at Harvard Medical School has been a respected keeper of the …

A conversation with Frederick Wiseman on his new film, Monrovia, Indiana, and a lifetime of observing.

We’re way back home in Monrovia, Indiana, in Frederick Wiseman’s deep cinematic dive into Red State America. This is …

A conversation with David Bromwich, Jill Lepore, David Bosworth, Briahna Gray, and Mark Blyth.

The political armies, red and blue, both won tough …

A conversation with Howie Carr, David Boeri, and Richard Marinick.

Jimmy Bulger, known as Whitey, was a nasty curse on the old Irish urban village of …

A conversation with Stephen Kinzer, Sarah Leah Whitson, Steve Simon, Chas Freeman, and Shireen Al-Adeimi.

Speaking of Saudi Arabia, in the ghastly light of Jamal Kashoggi’s dismemberment: what more do we care to know, …

Historian David Blight on his new biography of Frederick Douglass.

Frederick Douglass, scarred and tormented seeing men made slaves, set the course of his life to show how a slave became a man. In the cadences of the …

A conversation with Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, environmental policy expert Adil Najam, and social and political theorist Ajay Singh Chaudhary.

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TDS is the acronym. Trump Derangement Syndrome is the full name: a distaste for Donald Trump so severe that sufferers abandon all logic and reason, …

“What’s past is prologue,” Shakespeare’s phrase from “The Tempest,” is carved in stone in front of the National Archive in Washington. Ronald Reagan …

The Roman Catholic Church is staring transfixed at a cascading scandal of crime and non-punishment. Sex crimes by priests against children are …

It’s only a game, we used to say, but this season, between the US Open in tennis and pro-football’s opening games, our wide world of sports is an …

It’s Labor Day week 2018, and “The American Worker” doesn’t fit any single poster shot. Is it the Uber driver – working flex time in the ‘gig’ economy, for a magic dispatcher of taxis around the world? Is it the …

At a madcap mid-point in the Age of Trump, it is the season suddenly of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez in the Democratic party. A.O.C. time, for the bold …

A new wave of black arts has surfaced in the mainstream of American popular culture. It’s not your standard entertainment, and not “art for art’s …

The Shostakovich story — man and music in the apocalypse of world war and Cold War — seems to get more frightfully irresistible with every …

The jobs are back.  It’s the work that feels fishy: so much of it paid but pointless; safe and even secure, but often un-satisfying if you were …

Calling on the spies we know best – all of them fictional – to explain the Helsinki summit: If it was spy-craft in plain sight, what would James …

Grenfell Tower was that giant pillar of public housing on the West side of London that went up in flames a year ago.  Suddenly it was a smoky chemical torch in the night, fueled by the building’s own flammable …

Your friends and other experts will tell you the songs and sounds that are new and hot. What the music makers are happier telling you is: what’s old, …

The shock of migrant kids-in-cages on our border with Mexico is surfacing tough questions if you’re willing to look back at our history and ahead to an emerging world disorder. The issues run deep: why borders in the …

From “fire and fury” to a “terrific relationship” in less than a year sound like a happy turn in the Trump-Kim dance around nukes and North Korea. Better news coming is implied in the Singapore summit: an end of the …

Anthony Bourdain introduced us almost 20 years ago to Systeme D, the crisis procedures in the best kitchens that get the chef out of a jam.  I was eager to interview him not least because all three of my daughters were …

Seymour Hersh, known as Sy, made a brilliant career, at his best, of exposing Official US, at its worst: the Army massacre at My Lai, in Vietnam. The sadistic prison management at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. The forbidden …

The Studs Terkel edge on the radio was, first of all, picking guests who would sound more interesting 50, 60 years later: Mahalia Jackson, Bucky …

Our long, gabby afternoon with Philip Roth in 2006, at his farmhouse in Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut, was a sort of pay-off. I’d helped him find just the right Boston location for a scene in his last big counterfactual …

One split screen wasn’t really enough for the asymmetries we’re looking at now, but there it was: Ivanka unveiling the Trump embassy plaque in …

Dropping out of the Iran nuclear deal has the feel of dropping into the John Bolton phase of the Trump era.  Trump in Full. Trump Extra. The theme is …

A specter is haunting human affairs these days: it’s the thought that Karl Marx (on his 200th birthday this week) may have been more right than wrong about rich-get-richer bourgeois economics.  He may have been righter …

Henry David Thoreau founded our literature of trees, glorying in the Eastern White Pine as the “emblem of my life,” to stand for “the West, the …

What President Trump said he wanted was to get US firepower out of Syria. “Let the other people take care of it now,” in his words. What he settled for with his own generals was a restricted strike on chemical weapons …