Molly Crabapple.

We know Molly Crabapple as a one-off writer and artist, pens and paintbrushes at the ready, a sort of global muckraker in the rough places of the world. Last time she was here, she was just back from civil war in Syria. This time, she’s just back from unearthing history, World War I time, through an epidemic of hellish and deadly pogroms in pre-revolutionary Russia.

The Bund, created in Poland, was a tough-minded working-class alliance demanding full rights for Jews at home. It was irreconcilably embattled against the rising young Zionist movement that would establish a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Molly Crabapple took it on herself—and learned the Yiddish language as part of the job—to research and write the whole story of the Jewish Bund: the old politics in it, the modern emotions that it still stirs, starting with the restored memory of her own family. And she’s made a monumental book of it under the title Here Where We Live Is Our Country.

The post Here Where We Live Is Our Country appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Chris, Ben Tarnoff, and Quinn Slobodian.

Techno sovereignty is the buzzword that rules the walled gardens of Musk World, private empires of far reaching wealth and power. Musk himself models the new class of emperors. Funny part is that the last time we spoke with Ben and Quinn, Elon Musk and his chainsaw were modeling just the opposite: his own ruthless destructive power in the chaotic post-democratic age of Donald Trump. A year and a half later, Donald Trump can look like a declining force compared with Elon Musk on the rise, at the dawn of a settled down, largely secret, post-capitalist or neo-capitalist age of Elon Musk.

The post Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Paul Elie.

Paul Elie writes wonderfully in The New Yorker about this very odd confrontation. “The first American pope is also a wartime pope,” he writes. His predecessor, Pope Francis, had observed a third world war in pieces all around us as he, the pope, was dying. And yet now, here we are in a war with Iran, clearly a new war of choice launched by an American president, in coordination with the Israeli prime minister, and Pope Leo, still new to the job, seems driven to do something about this. He’s not talking about strategic cards in his hand. He’s speaking rather of a moral necessity to make peace. And you could wonder: isn’t it about time?

The post The Pope and the President appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Howard Bryant.

First, Jack Roosevelt Robinson, who integrated big league baseball in 1947, and then the all-American college football star and singer supreme Paul Robeson, whose earth-shaking bass baritone voice made history on opera stages around the world. Howard Bryant has written a book of tragic ironies and overpowering interest. Maybe the deeper subject then and now is: how does a black man make it into the Hall of Fame of American heroes, well beyond baseball? And at what price?

The post Kings and Pawns appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Lewis Hyde. Credit: The Radcliffe Institute.

“At last it occurred to me,” he wrote, “that what I had lost was a country.” The question becomes: what would Thoreau say today if he learned that hard workers and taxpayers of long standing in this country and his state were being locked up and deported for want of immigration papers? Our guest Lewis Hyde says Thoreau would blame us, citizens, for the failure of our country and our Commonwealth to keep all its residents safe and secure in their adopted communities, regardless of their immigration status.

Lewis Hyde’s essay, “ICE and our Immigrants: Lessons from the Abolitionists,” is forthcoming in the summer issue of Liberties quarterly. Thoreau’s essay, “Slavery in Massachusetts,” can be found in Hyde’s edited edition of The Essays of Henry David Thoreau (Milkweed Editions). 

The post Thoreau Meets ICE appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Heather Ann Thompson.

40 years later, our guest Heather Ann Thompson is digging up doubts—not so much about the case as about all of us who followed it and fixed it on our timeline of social history, of crime, fear, race, and poverty, the city of New York itself and its self-esteem. The book is Fear and Fury: The Reagan Eighties, the Bernie Goetz Shootings, and the Rebirth of White Rage.

The post Fear and Fury appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Daniel Immerwahr.

The post Hit-and-Run Belligerence appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Jeffrey Sachs.

He has worn his dread on his face. And in his voice, no matter that people get tired of it. And he’s very specific about the risks: of nuclear escalation for one; about grave economic damage in the rise of the BRICS alternatives to the trading nations, the old imperial remnant; but also about sleepwalking into World War III.

The post Sleepwalking into World War III appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Huss Banai.

Hussein Banai, known as Huss, is our guest—the guide we turn to partly because he was born and schooled in Iran. He is informed but not official, a professor of international studies at Indiana University in Bloomington.

The post War with Iran appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Dan Chiasson with Chris.

It’s a masterpiece, full of surprises—the best I’ve read on the power game in our country since Theodore White’s Making of the President 1960, a long time ago. 60 years later, Chiasson has written the Bernie journey in Burlington as his own story. Dan Chiasson’s life is an outcome, he writes, of the Bernie years. But what are we going to call Bernie’s own story—a romance that failed, or arguably a tragedy? Maybe it’s a lesson that we were never encouraged to learn about the expansive promise lurking in our own American democracy

The post Bernie’s Journey appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Vigil, the latest novel by George Saunders.

He was looking into a puddle by the road and feeling an incredible thrill of insight into daily life. And George Saunders was writing about something like it about his last few days—on Stephen Colbert’s show, seeing best friends in New York, former students also in Philadelphia.

The post George Saunders on Life and the Afterlife appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

He’s been the personal friend, almost, of our transcendentalists in this neighborhood, Emerson and Thoreau. He wrote a book about having the great novelist Graham Greene in his head. So who is this guy with the cameo role in Marty Supreme, standing athwart Timothée Chalamet’s raging drive to be the ping-pong champion of the universe?

The post Pico Supreme appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Greg Grandin.

The big theme in Grandin’s book is the very dicey business of sovereignty historically between North and South America. And Donald Trump has been teasing at that instability of borders and labels ever since he renamed the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf Of America.” He’s teasing us again this week when he says Cuba could be next, even Colombia on the list for invasion or regime change.

The post Age of Hemispheric Empires appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Sven Beckert.

And Capitalism is the title of our guest Sven Beckert’s new thousand-page history of the whole thing. A thousand pages covering a thousand years. The opening line in his book is, “We live in a world created by capitalism.” How did it happen? Is it still happening, for better or worse? Did it have to happen?

The post A Thousand Years of Capitalism appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Miranda Updike, Michael Updike, Elizabeth Updike Cobblah, and David Updike. Photograph by Jameson Sempey, Reading Eagle, courtesy of A.A. Knopf.

Couples was his breakthrough novel and bestseller in 1968. His second son, Michael, and his second daughter, Miranda, were adolescent witnesses to the story. We’re gathered in Michael’s house on the North Shore of Boston, the heart of Updike Country, to resurface the glow in John Updike’s prose and the pleasure in his company.

The post John Updike’s Vocation appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Brandon Terry.

The post Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Nancy Gertner.

The questions keep coming. Nancy Gertner is our guest to consider them. She’s overqualified by a celebrated career as a trial lawyer, then as a federal judge, and now retired from the court as a private practitioner again, independent and outspoken about a world that she knows intimately.

The post Stress-Testing the Rule of Law appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Merve Emre.

But Mrs. Dalloway is also a novel of ruin alongside rapture. A second major character, Septimus Smith, is a veteran of World War I. Broken by combat and shell shock, considering suicide because, in his madness, he supposes that only killing himself would allow him to honor life as it should be lived.

The post Mrs. Dalloway at 100 appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

James Baldwin and Noam Chomsky (by Susan Coyne).

Robin hooked us with his piece in the Boston Review on “The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Fascism and Genocide.” Whose job is it to tell us the truth in what can feel like a sort of waking nightmare or a revolution going backward? Will we ever see Benjamin Franklin’s common-sense republic again? Or put it another way: where’s Noam Chomsky, or James Baldwin for that matter? Will we ever again meet an unflinching truth-teller about our real condition in this autumn of 2025?

The post Where Are the Intellectuals? appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Anatol Lieven.

Our guest to offer a helping hand is the journalist and analyst that I’ve leaned on heavily, Anatol Lievin, an esteemed correspondent for the Financial Times in London, now at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington, with his eyes on Eurasia in general.

The post Russia and Ukraine in 2025 appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Greg Grandin.

It’s a history of brutal conquest, some discovered ideals and values through five centuries, and maybe an exceptional all-American hybrid, after all, into today. In the roots, of course, were two colonial empires, Spanish and British, rivals and partners, reenacting over the decades their past far into the future.

The post America, América appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Michael Ansara.

The post The Hard Work of Organizing appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Marilynne Robinson with Chris.

This summer, she crossed a line, relabelling the American condition in Trump time. Our politics and our culture, she writes, are “under occupation” by a faction of our fellow citizens. And it’s quite unlike your normal, ordinary right-to-left or left-to right political shift. It is not what people mean by polarization. It’s something quite different.

The post Occupied America appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Huss Banai.

Our guest to watch a mystery unfolding is the Iranian-American scholar at Indiana University in Bloomington, Hussein Banai, known as Huss. He’s been my refuge and resource for 20 years and some on not just venomous politics, but high-tech warfare and now tentative, sudden peace, it appears, between two governments.

The post Trump at War appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Danielle Allen.

In all the talk we’re hearing, what’s different about Danielle Allen is her timeline. Her eye goes back to ancient days in Athens and Rome, especially to her friend Aristotle, who wrote the book on democracy and its corruptions—in oligarchy and other ways.

The post Divided, Defensive Democracy appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Paul Elie and Chris.

Think Leonard Cohen and his all-time hit with “Hallelujah.” Think Prince singing “I Would Die For You.” Think Bob Dylan and his gospel period with “Gotta Serve Somebody.” And it’s not just songs. Crypto-religion is the zone where the filmmaker, Martin Scorsese, imagined The Last Temptation of Christ. It’s where the pop artist Andy Warhol, himself a Catholic, made endless versions of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece of Jesus at the Last Supper with his disciples.

The post The Last Supper appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

John Cassidy.

John Cassidy of The New Yorker magazine has written a sprightly catalog of capitalism’s critics over the centuries: who got it right, for example, about today’s inequality crisis, or the climate damage, or the threat to democracy, or the alternatives to capitalism that might still work better, or even rescue it.

The post Capitalism and Its Critics appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Penguins on an uninhabited island that’s been hit with a 10% tariff.

We’ve been bracing for a universal trade war, not just China, but Canada, France, Mexico, you name it—uninhabited islands (where only penguins and seals live) will be touched. President Trump’s ultimate weapon of choice in such a war is a 125% tariff, on most of what comes from China, raising prices, of course, but the Trump line also says the flood of new tariff income could pay for what he calls his big, beautiful tax cut.

The post Trade, Trumped appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Sarah Churchwell.

The book makes every list of great American novels, but it’s more than that. It’s a high-style satire and prophetic tragedy about a dreamer who invented not just a fake self, but a whole cast of rich, mostly repellent characters and wannabes all around him—those famously careless people who smash things up for as long as they can and then let other people clean up their messes. Our guest, Sarah Churchwell, is not the first to make the Gatsby-Trump connection, but nobody has mapped it as broadly as she has.

The post Gatsby at 100: Fitzgerald’s Warning about Trumpism appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Elaine Pagels.

By the way, we’re in history class, not Sunday school, but she’s tackling the big questions about just what happened to this restless young rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth, who got crucified for his ambition in his battle with the chief priests of the temple and the Romans who ruled Jerusalem at the time.

The post Miracles and Wonder appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Ryan Enos.

What’s required, they said, is open, coordinated resistance, which gives the rest of us time to learn what this fight is all about. Ryan Enos is a young professor in Harvard’s government department, among the first of the 800 signers of that petition.

The post Trump vs. Harvard appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Patricia Lockwood and Chris Lydon.

In this almost archaic culture of books, her mindset is very 2025. This side of Harold Bloom, I’ve never met a wider scope in a reader.

The post From Social to Spiritual Media appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Stephen Walt.

By Stephen Walt’s standards, it looks like a new world since that astonishing shouting match in the White House, Donald Trump telling Ukraine’s President Zelensky that the U.S. is out of the war on the border of Russia, that we’re bent on repairing our relationship with Vladimir Putin. And Walt is in the news with a commentary and a headline that said, “Yes, America is Europe’s Enemy Now.”

The post A New World appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

James Madison.

Senator King has been in the thick of the frenzy in Donald Trump’s Washington, with a certain distinction. His tone on the Senate floor has been measured, his language old-fashioned, and his message a deadly warning. It’s the Constitution itself that’s at risk. What’s at stake, he has been saying, is the famously balanced U.S. Constitution, “this clumsy system” of self-rule, he calls it, that is “the mainspring of our freedom.” And it is under direct assault as never before in these first weeks of a new presidency. Rescuing that “we the people” charter will mark our place in history, Angus King is telling us. Losing it would mark the end of the American experiment.

The post Angus King’s Civics Lesson appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian.

Here at Open Source in the first month of the Trump sequel, we’re hovering in the fog with two young historians of American finance, technology, and politics, and comparing clues about the future under construction.

The post Muskology appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Kurt Andersen.

Cue Kurt Andersen, with his finger in the wind. We want him on a mission to track the spirit of the age, because he’s been a cool, creative, wide-angle eye on events since the ’80s, when he founded Spy magazine, and then Studio 360 on public radio.

The post Trump Part II appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Chris with Pico Iyer.

This book is bigger than Pico Iyer—there’s a book here that lots of people would love to be writing called “My Spiritual Awakening.” In the new book, Iyer’s awakening happened over the last 30 years, in and out of a Benedictine monastery on the California coast at Big Sur.

The post Aflame appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

What made it exciting to me was her saying that she had barely the dimmest picture of what she was getting into with Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank town of Bethlehem. And yet what all of us knew was that she was up to it and that she would walk us through the experience when she came back.

The post From Boston to Bethlehem appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Chas Freeman.

Call this “Curious Citizen Meets the Most Knowledgeable Straight-Talker Anywhere Near the U.S. Government.” At a turn in the calendar, a transition in American politics, and a global crisis that can feel like a rolling nightmare even after the quick, almost bloodless revolt by Syrians against their own deadly dictatorship. It’s a third year in a row that we’ve asked Freeman for an end-of-the-season checkup on the American empire and the changing rules of world order.

The post A Geopolitical Check-Up appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Mark Blyth.

Before we get to Trump 2, we speak of the lingering Biden paradox. The economy was said to be the saving grace of Joe Biden’s short term, specifically the drive to rebuild the industrial base at home. But the same economy was the undoing of his would-be successor, Kamala Harris—specifically, inflation, a largely hidden cost-of-living crisis in food and energy that hurt real people, poor people most of all.

The post Blyth is Back appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Chris and Orhan Pamuk.

Orhan Pamuk wanted to talk about his hard-cover collection of notebook drawings and diary entries in recent years; I wanted to hear the global writer’s take on the distemper, East and West, in the 2020s. He said he doesn’t talk contemporary affairs, but then he insisted on doing just that: he said that President Erdogan’s authoritarian politics is ruining Turkey, and Donald Trump could be just as dangerous in America. The news about Orhan Pamuk himself, coming out of his notebooks, is that he has been a passionately visual artist all along, keeping an alternative record of his own life in high-color drawings and aphoristic jottings, words and pictures like nothing our listeners have seen.

The post Not Your Standard Book Chat appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Michael Haynes and Roy Haynes.

Perhaps Roy Haynes’s deepest satisfaction was introducing himself as he once did to me: “I was Charlie Parker’s favorite drummer.” Roy Haynes died two weeks ago, just four months before his one hundredth birthday. We are remembering him in a Thanksgiving spirit with the historian and jazz biographer Robin Kelley at UCLA.

L-R: Charles Mingus, Roy Haynes, Thelonious Monk, and Charlie Parker at the Open Door, Greenwich Village, September 1953.

The post The Roy Haynes Century appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Joshua Cohen.

It’s his imagination we need, just to peer through his vision of a changed world and, in particular, two force fields in motion: Donald Trump’s USA and Bibi Netanyahu’s State of Israel, two zones of huge power, not least military force, shadowed by darkness and danger.

The post Joshua Cohen’s Camp appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

The post United States of Fear appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

The post Amber’s America: Love and Outrage appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Richard Powers.

This is our third trip through a new book of his, aiming his imagination and hard science at the scariest maladies of modern life. First it was Orfeo, about atonal music, then The Overstory, which won the Pulitzer prize and a huge audience, about disappearing tree species. And now Playground, going deep into the breakdown of oceans—also into dementia with Lewy bodies, also fate and friendships, and damaged people who make foolproof thinking machines.

The post Playground appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Nathan Thrall.

I read Nathan Thrall’s mind-bending book over a weekend, in a sort of fever, and finished it feeling I’d spent a month in East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank. The question that burns me still is: why hadn’t I felt the force of this story before, even when I wandered through Israel, north and south, from Jerusalem to the Sea of Galilee, a decade or so ago?

The central event in Nathan’s story is a traffic accident with a rickety school bus full of Palestinian kindergarten kids that collided with a trailer truck and blew up on a highway between Jerusalem and Ramallah. A deadly but random crash, it seemed at the time, though in Palestinian memory it was infinitely more grievous. As Nathan Thrall kept hearing, if it had been an Arab kid throwing a stone at Israelis, not a burning bus full of Arab children, Israeli troops would have been on it in seconds. In fact, however, troops and fire trucks at an Israeli settlement nearby all saw the smoking bus and did nothing, letting the fire rage and the children die for more than half an hour.

The most important thing for me in this book was to give a reader a visceral sense of what it is to live in this place, what it is for a Palestinian to live under this system of domination, what it is to live in a highly segregated set of circumstances, segregation that is geographic, that’s separating families, that’s separating parents from children. And it was less important for me that people have a kind of abstract or general understanding of the facts of the situation than that they understand emotionally what it would be like if they were to simply travel there and see it with their own eyes. For a number of years I have witnessed delegations come to Israel-Palestine, often advocacy organizations, organized trips for congressional staffers or parliamentarians and others. Often it’s a week-long trip with six days in Israel and half a day in the West Bank. And the half a day that they spend in the West Bank is by far the most important part of the trip because it is a gut punch. They go there and within a couple of hours on their own, they are making comparisons to Jim Crow and apartheid in South Africa. And that feeling stays with them.

– Nathan Thrall in conversation with Chris Lydon.

The post A Jerusalem Tragedy appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

We catch him packing, in Vermont, for what’s far from his first climate rodeo in New York.

The post The Climate Story’s Breaking Point appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Fintan O’Toole, on the line from Ireland, is our guest and guide. He’s much admired now for his tart reporting on American life in the New York Review of Books. Fintan O’Toole built his reputation as a theatre critic in Dublin and to this day in New York. We’re asking him to review our presidential debate this week as live drama.

The post Bear-Baiting Debating appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Tressie McMillan Cottom.

Tressie McMillan Cottom has put it this way: that all Kamala Harris has to prove is that a woman can lead, that a black woman can be qualified, that a South Asian woman can come to feel familiar, that a childless woman can become a nation’s Momala, and that a Gen-X sensibility can resonate with boomers.

The post The Harris Machine appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.