We’re calling on Hannah Arendt for the twenty-first century—could she teach us how to think our way out of the authoritarian nightmare? Arendt wrote the book for all time on Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. And then she famously covered the trial in Israel of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi minister of death. Her study of the origins of totalitarianism keeps her current fifty years after her death and, pointedly, in our own rancorous presidential campaign of 2024.
Hannah Arendt.
Lyndsey Stonebridge.
In this podcast, the surprise turns on finding a profound humanity and hope, believe it or not, in the collected wisdom of Hannah Arendt. She noted in one essay, “We are free to change the world.” Our guest, Lyndsey Stonebridge, lifted that line for the title of her gripping, fresh take on Hannah Arendt. We Are Free to Change the World is her title, and thinking has everything to do with it.
Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets
Mar 28, 2024
We’re going to school on Taylor Swift, in the Harvard course. And all we know is, as her song says, we’re enchanted to meet her. Taylor Swift comes out of literature but she’s more than a poet, or a pop star. Maybe the word is “enchanter” for the artist who gets it all into a song, who knows the fusion power of sharp words with the right minimum of melody.
Stephanie Burt and M.J. Cunniff.
We’re anticipating Taylor Swift’s next album, her “Tortured Poets Department,” coming in April. Stephanie Burt and M.J. Cunniff have made a hit course of it all for Harvard undergraduates. Professor Burt has been a critical gateway to contemporary poetry. And she knows her songwriters as well.
Of Melville and Marriage
Mar 14, 2024
We speak of the mystery of Herman Melville, or the misery of Melville, the American masterpiece man. For Moby-Dick alone, he is our Shakespeare, our Dante—though he fled the writing of prose for the last half of his life, and in death The New York Times misspelled his name.
Jennifer Habel and Chris Bachelder.
This podcast is a demonstration of another way, a better way to crack the riddle of Melville: read the book aloud with someone you love and jot down every question that comes to your mind. Before you know it, you’ll have written your own novel on a few hundred Post-it notes. Our guests, Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel, call their novel Dayswork, and it’s a marvel.
Against Despair
Mar 01, 2024
The subject, in a word, is despair, both public and private. The poets and spiritual seekers Christian Wiman and his wife Danielle Chapman are back to goad us, each with a new book. Their project is staring into the abyss, in the Nietzsche formula, to see if the abyss stares back, or talks back. And I think it does.
Christian Wiman and Danielle Chapman.
Listeners, you be the judge. Christian Wiman’s new book is Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair. It’s more interesting because the woman who broke his life open in love, most of 20 years ago, is in on the conversation. And it’s more urgent when we can all feel despair out there, coming on like a cold front—some say an epidemic of loneliness or melancholy.
The Rebel’s Clinic
Feb 15, 2024
Frantz Fanon is our interest in this podcast. The man had charisma across the board in a short life and a long afterlife. A black man from the Caribbean, he went to France, first as a soldier to help free the French from Germany, then to become a medical doctor and a psychiatrist, and then to North Africa to serve a revolution against France in Algeria. Along the way, he wrote about politics with the touch of a poet.
Adam Shatz.
To this day, when the world talks about healing itself, Frantz Fanon hovers and gets quoted among the giants of modern thought about race and justice, about post-colonial wisdom, if there is such a thing. So how to draw on Fanonism anew and test it in the real emergencies of a divided world in the 2020s? Adam Shatz is our idea of a public intellectual of the widest range, and all the while, it turns out he’s been hooked on Frantz Fanon and gathering string for his big new book: The Rebel’s Clinic. Readers will feel an uncanny resonance between Frantz Fanon’s time in the 1950s and the cruel news of the 2020s: at the U.S. border with Mexico, to take one of many examples, and of course the killing field of Gaza, between Israelis and Palestinians.
Algorithmic Anxiety
Feb 01, 2024
The question is how digital tech picks and chooses the content that comes to your phones and your brain, or, as Kyle Chayka puts it in a brave new book Filterworld: “how algorithms flattened culture.” What is the chance that devices that know your likes and dislikes better than you do are ever going to surprise you or teach you? What’s the tilt, over time, of an information system that’s tuned to the smiley face?
Kyle Chayka with Chris.
The joke version is that the algorithm walks into the bar and the bartender asks, “What would you like?” And of course, the algorithm answers, without thinking, “I’ll have what everyone else is having.” Kyle Chayka seems to have answered the question why TikTok voices and Instagram faces are so uniform, why AirBnB is showing what looks like the same room for rent all over the planet, why pop music is down to one super-singer who can fill stadiums all over the earth, for an Eras tour that could go on forever. We’re talking about algorithmic culture in a brave new world.
The Humbling of Harvard
Jan 18, 2024
Oldest and far the richest among American universities, Harvard is the apex, in some sense, of American intellectualism, and it will be a long time figuring out just how it lost a big game it didn’t seem to know it was playing: a high-stakes free for all, it turned out to be, with poisonous words like plagiarism and anti-Semitism threaded through the media coverage and then in airborne ad banners and other blunt instruments.
Diana Eck and Randall Kennedy.
Suddenly, the president of Harvard—a black woman, as chance would have it—resigned her job under pressure, as if to confirm that something serious had indeed happened. But what in the world was the Harvard fight about? And was this the beginning or the end of a great battle?
The Most Secret Memory of Men
Jan 05, 2024
The only way into this podcast is a long leap headfirst into postcolonial French fiction, of all things, and a novel titled The Most Secret Memory of Men. Our guest is the toast of literary Paris, the first novelist from sub-Saharan Africa to win France’s highest book prize, the Goncourt: Mohamed Mbougar Sarr.
The first thing we feel in this magical book is Sarr himself: the doctor’s son from Dakar in Senegal, eldest of seven sons—military school, advanced education in France, and now, of course, the Goncourt. At the start of Sarr’s book, we’re at play in a Parisian nest of artists and writers, hustlers and searchers, men and women out of France’s one time colonies—Senegal, Mali, Ivory Coast. They’re watching the World Cup, they’re smoking weed, they’re making love, but they’re thinking about literature. “This is our life,” one writer says, “but we also talk about it, because talking about it keeps it alive. And as long as it’s alive, our lives, even if they’re pointless, even if they’re tragically comical and insignificant, won’t be completely wasted. We have to behave as if literature were the most important thing on earth.”
The Revolutionary
Dec 20, 2023
On the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, we’re face to face, almost, with an American political type that’s gone missing in our third century. Check this resume: he’s principled, he’s prepared, a two-fisted aristocrat networked with farmers and workers; a thinker and writer at risk, without fear, talking ideas and enacting them, getting results; a man with no interest in money, no envy of riches or rank. He’s got a Harvard education, but no profession, no real career. He’s a republican, he’ll tell you, who takes self-government seriously—and the personal virtues that sustain it. The hero in this podcast is Samuel Adams of Boston, revived after two and a half centuries by the magical biographer Stacy Schiff.
Stacy Schiff (credit: Elena Seibert).
Thomas Jefferson of Virginia saw Sam Adams as the man who lifted a tax protest up to the launch of a new nation—a bigger figure even than his second cousin, John Adams, main author of the U.S. Constitution.
Israel and Palestine Across History
Dec 08, 2023
With the historian John Judis we are looking for a longer timeline in the crisis of Gaza, Israel, Palestine. It has been, in fact, a century of layered conflict between Arabs and Jews, two peoples in stop-and-go warfare over a small plot of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
John Judis.
What if (as in James Joyce’s most famous line) that hundred years of history is itself the nightmare from which we are all trying to awake? Can we break the nightmare war cycle by relearning the history, by taking it again, by doing it over?
Time’s Echo
Nov 22, 2023
The question that resurfaces in a time of horror may be what remains when memory is wiped out, when the unspeakable is left unspoken, in someone’s hope, perhaps, that it’ll be forgotten? Where does history live? Jeremy Eichler’s answer is that music becomes the code of our darkest secrets.
Jeremy Eichler.
Babi Yar is the ravine in Kyiv where Nazi invaders killed and dumped the bodies of more than 33,000 Jews in the last couple days of September 1941. It became an officially unmentionable disgrace to the Germans who executed the atrocity and to the Ukrainians and Russians who didn’t stop it. Almost 20 years later, and ever since then, Babi Yar got its standing as the biggest mass murder in the Nazi war on the Soviet Union, but only because Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote a famous poem about it called “Babi Yar,” and Dmitri Shostakovich, in turn, defied Stalin to compose a Babi Yar memorial at the head of his thirteenth symphony.
There in one grim anecdote is how history lives inside music, music as a last refuge of history that we confront no other way. Jeremy Eichler’s irresistible new book from the ruins of the twentieth century is called Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance. It’s very particularly about four giants in twentieth-century music: Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten.
Chas Freeman on a Kaleidoscopic Turn
Nov 09, 2023
Just a month into the ferociously brutal and reckless war in Israel-Palestine, on what feels like a hinge of history—outcomes wildly uncertain—our refuge is Chas Freeman, the American diplomat, strategist, and historian. We call Chas our “chief of intelligence” in the realm of world order and disorder. Chas Freeman calls himself sick at heart at the war crimes abounding in this war, some aided and abetted by the United States, he says.
Chas Freeman.
We’re at a turning point, he’s telling us—not far, perhaps, from nervous breakdown.
Upended Assumptions
Nov 03, 2023
In this podcast, two old friends in and out of journalism talk about the Middle East war, which comes to feel more like a contest in war crimes. Steven Erlanger joins us—he’s the New York Times‘ chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe.
Steven Erlanger.
We start with the terms Steve recently put forth in the Times: the assumptions—or some of the many, many assumptions—that have been upended by this war. The thought, for example, even in Bibi Netanyahu, that Hamas could manage Gaza as an open-air prison, or that Israel is invulnerable to attack.
War and Dread
Oct 19, 2023
We are listening in the dark, after a catastrophe yet to be contained: more than 1,000 Israeli civilians killed in a terrorist invasion from Gaza two weeks ago, thousands more Palestinians dead in a first round of punishment from Israel. “Only the beginning” says Prime Minister Netanyahu, while President Biden, in support, warns him against “all-consuming rage.” In all-consuming anxiety, more than a million Palestinians, under Israeli orders, have fled their homes in Gaza, without a clue where safety will be found.
David Shulman and Hussein Ibish.
What we went to find in conversation was the sound of deep experience in the war zone of the Middle East, and also, in a time of dread, some measure of confidence in restraint.
George Eliot’s Marriage Story
Oct 05, 2023
The question is marriage. The answer in this podcast is Clare Carlisle’s sparkling book, The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life. George Eliot, born Marian Evans, was the towering novelist of Middlemarch, Silas Marner, and more. She put a man’s name on her author’s page. She built very nearly a religion on her foundational ideas about marriage, yet she never married the man she loved and for 24 years called her husband.
Clare Carlisle.
It was an astonishing feat that George Eliot pulled off in Victorian England. It’s another considerable feat of Clare Carlisle’s to fill out for modern readers the question that she and George Lewes were exploring together.
Zadie Smith on The Fraud
Sep 21, 2023
Zadie Smith is a writer who matters, twenty years now after White Teeth, her breakthrough novel when she was just out of college. Her new one is titled The Fraud: fiction that pops in and out of two centuries. It can feel very Victorian and it can feel very 2023. Frauds, trials, disbelief abounding.
Think of Zadie Smith as the current title-holder in the glorious old lineage of English and American fiction, looking both forward and backward, and sideways, in this new novel about her professional family over the generations: literary ancestors and cousins in the game today. It can feel confessional at one moment, comical the next, stone serious before you’re done. Founders of the Victorian novel turn up in The Fraud. At the same time, she’s addressing the extended family of readers and writers today.
Henry at Work
Sep 07, 2023
It’s Labor Day week, 2023, and Henry David Thoreau is the heart of our conversation. It’s not with him, but it’s driven by his example: American thinking at its best on the matter of how to make a living.
John Kaag.
Have no doubt that the gabby man-about-Concord in the 1850s was a worker: expert surveyor, gardener, as many trades as fingers, he said, not to mention the writer of Walden and Civil Disobedience, of course, and a life journal that came to two million words. We read Henry Thoreau anew for his insight into our work, not his: the often fruitless, driven, underpaid labor of the 2020s, and, oddly enough, our midnight anxiety that ChatGPT could take it all away. This is a conversation in the Harvard Bookstore with our friend the philosopher John Kaag, who co-wrote the pungent and personal handbook titled Henry at Work.
The Cosmic Scholar
Aug 24, 2023
Harry Smith was the oddest duck you never heard of in the art underground: an unsightly, often obnoxious genius. Only the artists knew him, but it was a multitude: Bob Dylan, who sang the roots music that Harry Smith collected; Thelonious Monk, who talked him through the bop era; Patti Smith, the songster—no relation; the poet Allen Ginsberg, who looked after the homeless Harry Smith.
John Szwed.
And now the historian/detective John Szwed has filled in a thousand details in his portrait of the cosmic scholar and catalyst of our culture, Harry Smith. He was a compulsive worker who never took a straight job, a heavy drinker and a druggie, “a social outcast with time on my hands,” he called himself. He was a working artist in film, a mystic and a philosopher who said late in life that he had had the thrill of proving Plato right. Music, he declared, can change the direction of a civilization.
Noam Chomsky: American Socrates
Aug 10, 2023
It is said about Noam Chomsky that he has been to the study of language what Isaac Newton was to the study of gravity after the apple hit his head. Chomsky had the “aha!” insight: that the power of language is born in our biology—it’s not acquired. Chomskyan linguistics came to explain how the human species alone got that gift of language.
But it’s not the only reason Professor Chomsky is on our minds this summer of 2023. Frail and quiet approaching his 95th birthday in the fall, he has been for half a century the model of Socrates in the American square: the public pest with questions that sting. So we are listening again to some of our best conversations with this fortress of science and political dissent. This one was in his MIT office in 2017.
The Country of the Blind
Jul 27, 2023
In The Country of the Blind, where the writer Andrew Leland is guiding our tour, they do things differently. They have their own identity riddles, their network of heroes and not-so-heroes.
They have their own senses of beauty and of sexual interest. They have their own sore spots when sighted people speak of their disability. They have their own Facebook pages and their own panic attacks—their own wacky humor, as well. They have their own Hall of Fame, back to Homer, among the ancients. They have a sense of their modern selves as strivers, even adventurers, more than victims. They argue fine points among themselves, like whether Lady Justice in front of the courthouse is, or ought to be, blind, and whether a male gaze persists among men who cannot see.
The historian Jackson Lears is reintroducing us to the energy, enchantment, courage, spontaneity, and longing that have driven the American story uphill and down, to wherever we are in the 2020s—a big question in itself. He gives us a world that’s thrumming with invisible currents of power: something more than animal magnetism, bigger than electricity.
Happy Birthday to Us
Jun 29, 2023
We’re marking the 20th birthday of podcasting in conversation with Erica Heilman, a prize practitioner. Here we are with Erica in Peacham, Vermont, settled in 1776 in the Northeast Kingdom, up toward Canada. We seek out Erica because she’s the great artist emerging in this young medium.
With Erica Heilman in Vermont.
People speak of podcasting as radio on the internet, but it’s really something else. It can feel like pen-paling with strangers, except that the human voice goes far and wide to the world. And Erica’s podcast Rumble Strip shows just how deep it can go. She gets regular Vermonters talking, and then she listens and edits their voices with an almost religious attention and care. What strikes her listeners is the ring of truth, first and last in her work.
Blyth Returns
Jun 16, 2023
We’re back in the pub a year later with Mark Blyth, the outspoken political economist at Brown University—which means he works and talks and thinks at the intersection of big money and big power.
In this pub, the forbidden word is “bankruptcy.” When Mark Blyth moved to the United States, the national debt was about a quarter of the gross national product for one year. It is now 125% of GNP. The government does not cover its costs. It chooses not to raise taxes, and it cannot stop borrowing.
It Ain’t Over
Jun 01, 2023
This week: a show from our archive from The Connection days.
“It ain’t over till it’s over.” That’s Yogi Berra’s ageless line, in the title now of a summer hit movie just to prove Yogi was right about pretty much everything.
He was a most valuable player in his New York Yankees uniform and a most beloved, most creative, most quotable source of American language and American wisdom. We got it first-hand in a radio studio with that dear man almost 25 years ago.
A Working Life with Eileen Myles
May 16, 2023
The line is intoned now as a sort of chapter heading in our literary-artistic history: Eileen Myles grew up in Boston/Cambridge and moved to New York in 1974 to become a poet.
Chris with Eileen Myles.
And they did. 20 volumes later—their latest book of poetry is A “Working Life”— they’re very nearly the New York poet, with a branch office in Marfa, Texas, and still a strong Boston accent that is part of the poems. Recently, back in Boston, Eileen Myles sat down to talk about a life in poetry and in conversation with the world.
Failing Intelligence
May 04, 2023
We’re humbled—we’re also scared—by the power of chatbots like GPT-4 to do pretty much everything that word people have ever done, but faster and maybe more to the point. The twist in this conversation is that our guests are professional humanists, guardians, and teachers of the hard-earned old wisdom of books, not machines. And the double twist that they want to argue is that the enemy here is not evil AI: it’s us, who have enfeebled the old culture to a vanishing point in the practice of our politics, our media, our most expensive elite universities.
Robert Pogue Harrison and Ana Ilievska.
Robert Pogue Harrison is our Dante scholar at Stanford, our professional humanist, and a West Coast friend in smart podcasting. We asked ChatGPT about his voice, and we got the instant answer that his voice “has a certain mellowness and introspection” that go with his “keen ear for language and a precise, articulate way of expressing his ideas.” He’s joined by Ana Ilievska, initials A.I. She is Robert’s colleague from Europe in humanistic studies at Stanford. Recently, in the podcast Entitled Opinions, they both defended AI as a wake-up call, maybe in the nick of time, to rescue humanity, human stewardship, human culture from its corrupted condition. They both said they expect their students to use AI and to learn from it.
Frozen Moments with Ed Koren
Apr 19, 2023
Here’s a last burst of wind in our sails, a last gentle guffaw, from a listener we came to adore: the cartoonist Ed Koren. You knew Ed Koren, too, for those furry, quizzical characters he drew and captioned—portraits of our general bemusement—through a 60-year run in TheNew Yorker magazine. His studio, it turned out, was in rural Vermont, where he’d gotten hooked on our public radio shows. Finally, just a few years ago, we met the sheer joy of that man, face to face.
Chris Lydon with Ed Koren in Vermont, November 2021.
Ed Koren knew that “the laws of entropy,” as he put it in conversation, were not in his favor. But he did not believe in dying, and in his case, I don’t either. Most of a year ago, in the late stages of treatment for inoperable lung cancer, he told me he’d withdrawn from hospice care because hospice framed its mission around death, and his passion, as he said, was life and living. What I heard was not the sound of denial, or evasion of anything. I felt him embracing a truth that I’d felt from the start of a precious friendship: Ed Koren stood for the elusive strands of humanity that do not die. The wonder of our connection has been discovering, oddly enough, that we could talk about such things. And so we did, producer Mary McGrath and I, visiting Ed and his wife Curtis, late in March, up in Mary’s ski country. As we entered his studio this time he was absorbed in reading a New Yorker profile of the godfather of modern graphic design, Milton Glaser.
Ed Koren’s hairy creatures.
Scenes from Ed Koren’s studio last month. In the center: Ed with Mary McGrath.
How William James Can Save Your Life
Apr 06, 2023
William James, thinker and writer, was known widely in the nineteenth century as the adorable genius who invented American pragmatism. He was a brain scientist, student of war and religion, a philosopher who can feel like a very lively presence in the shadows of our condition, whatever we call it.
There’s nobody quite like Sonny Rollins in the All-American sound and story of jazz. He was a teenager in Harlem in the 1940s when major players caught on to a rising star. Steadily over the decades, he built one of the genius careers on the tenor saxophone, alongside his rival and friend John Coltrane. More than that, Sonny Rollins was making his music a way of life, a mission of self-study and self-improvement, a moral and philosophical course of inquiry and reinvention—of gentleness and peace—all at the same time.
Biographer Aidan Levy. Credit: Jahsie Ault.
In his 93rd year of life, Sonny Rollins now has the affirmation of a 700-page biography, meticulous and monumental—modeled on Robin Kelley’s life of Sonny’s friend Thelonious Monk. It lets all of us see Sonny Rollins up with Walt Whitman and a few others on the Olympus of American art and storytelling.
This Other Eden
Mar 09, 2023
Out of the blue a decade ago, Paul Harding won a huge popular following, first, and then the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for his modern Maine sort of folk tale called Tinkers. His new one is deeper, darker, more ambitious philosophically, more poetic, more beautiful in long stretches—more ironical, too, starting with the title.
Paul Harding.
This Other Eden takes off from sketchy reality—a real colony of free poor people—Europeans, Africans, indigenous Penobscots, fishermen, farmers, all of them on a tiny island off the coast of Maine about a century ago, until they got swept up by the state and banished to confinement, some of them in the Maine School for the Feeble Minded. In the novel, it’s Paul Harding’s invented characters and imagination that compose a tale of family love encompassing the damages of incest and murder and official state cruelty.
Norman Mailer Turns 100
Feb 23, 2023
“Don’t forget” is a mantra in our shop: “don’t forget” specially the characters, the moments that made us. Norman Mailer is the spirit-seeker and sometimes reckless truth-teller we are un-forgetting in this podcast. We are summoning Norman Mailer in his hundredth-birthday season, what could be his revival time, to tell us what happened to his country and ours. Mailer lived and wrote it all: 40 books of eagle-eyed fact and fiction. First as a soldier in the Philippines, in the 1940s; then: epic poet of the Sixties in America; eventually as a celebrity and popular artist of Duke Ellington or Frank Sinatra proportions.
J. Michael Lennon, Chris Lydon, and John Buffalo Mailer.
Sinatra taught us love songs, Mailer read the maelstrom of our American dream life to us. The premise in our conversation is that Norman Mailer, 15 years after his death, is still speaking to his country. Certainly to John Buffalo Mailer, youngest of seven sons and daughters, co-editor with J. Michael Lennon of a Mailer distillation for 2023, titled A Mysterious Country: The Grace and Fragility of American Democracy.
A Radical American Life
Feb 09, 2023
Lydia Moland is reminding us that when present company in American public life comes up short, the ancestors of American democracy and spirit are lurking out there, in abundance and power to reset our judgment of who we are and what is possible, for a society, for each of us.
Lydia Moland.
Lydia Moland, our sometime radio colleague, is now a philosophy professor at Colby College in Maine. For her the shock of recognition came at the chance sight of a nineteenth-century letter from a battling idealist, Lydia Maria Child, whom she’d never heard of. (It reminds me of the Pulitzer Prize biographer Stacy Schiff feeling much the same rapture at the same moment in 2016, rediscovering the sturdy giant of the American Revolution, Samuel Adams.) Lydia Moland’s big book became a story not just of a central figure in the abolition of slavery, but of her own passion as a contemporary scholar finding a model of moral courage for our own times. We spoke together at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge on the publication of Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life.
Thank You, Patrick Lydon
Jan 26, 2023
This is family talk in rural Ireland toward the end of an extraordinary life. My brother Patrick was the youngest of six, the saint among us and always the brightest company. Two winters ago he’d struck an odd note in our regular catching-up by phone, from his community farm in County Kilkenny to my base in Boston. He said, “Chris, I’ve aged more in the last 10 weeks than in the last 10 years.” To walk 50 yards had become an ordeal. The villain turned up in a Dublin exam: it was ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease of the “motor neurons,” which spares the victim’s thinking and speech even as it cripples the body. There was nothing to be done about this – except, I ventured, to record a gabby memoir in the time we had, over Zoom, and then face-to-face on the porch of Patrick’s little farmhouse in the town of Callan. We are tracking the glow of a soul. What had made such a life even possible?
Patrick and Chris in Lisbon in 2018.Patrick and Gladys at their farm.
Patrick was the brother who never had a salary, or a personal savings account. His famous high school, Phillips Exeter, gave him its highest award, for a life “non sibi,” not for self. He’d found his match in Gladys Kinghorn, from Aberdeen in Scotland, visionary and inexhaustible, like himself. What they did together over 50 years across the southeast of Ireland was build a network of farms and school communities to support people with Down syndrome, autism, epilepsy. In Patrick’s Camphill communities, inspired by the Austrian guru Rudolf Steiner, support was founded on love and attention. Music became central in Camphill therapy. So was gardening, both vegetables and flowers. There may be more to see and say about Patrick, but I’m just as hungry for other accounts around the self-disciplined blossoming of beautiful lives.
Patrick Lydon in 1970.Patrick in 1973.
Special thanks to the Irish filmmaker Eamon Little, who recorded the sound of this podcast. With Curious Dog Films, he is making a feature documentary on Patrick Lydon, titled Born That Way.
Moonshot Economics
Jan 12, 2023
This show first aired on September 16, 2021.
It’s hard not to notice that we’re flunking tests, right and left, and running out of strategies against global-size troubles. COVID, we said, was our test for the age of viruses. At summer’s end the variants are gaining and most of the world is unvaccinated. Afghanistan became a 20-year test of the notion that a public-private force of money, drones, a few troops, and contractors on the ground could win an asymmetrical war against the Taliban, and terror. We didn’t. And now comes Mariana Mazzucato, the brassy Italian-English-American who says: it’s our thinking that’s got to change, and find its way back to the idealism and scale of JFK’s space program.
The Apollo 11 lunar module.
We’ve got COVID, climate, chaos in the rush from Afghanistan, plus cruelties of capitalism and a cultural rift in the heart of the country. Who are we by now? Who remembers a certain cool competence in the self-image of Americans? And who can imagine recovering it? Mariana Mazzucato wants to tell you: she can! Born in Italy, raised in the US, holding forth now from University College London, she’s got an audience on both sides of the Atlantic. Her message is: we’ll change our luck only by transforming ourselves with ideas and dreams at the grand scale of the emergencies in energy, jobs, health, and justice. When she speaks of a Moonshot Mission to change capitalism, she’s evoking John F. Kennedy’s promise to put a man on the moon in the ’60s. On the 2021 agenda, I’m asking her to grade our wins and losses in the struggle with COVID so far, and the prospects in our struggle to save the climate.
Mann the Magician
Jan 05, 2023
This show originally aired on September 23, 2021.
Thomas Mann was one of those cultural giants the world doesn’t seem to make anymore—artists with authority, almost as big as their countries, at the level of Mark Twain, say, Voltaire, or Emerson! In his heyday a century ago Thomas Mann was called “the life of the mind in Germany”: the darkly philosophical novelist of obsession and illness in TheMagic Mountain, the tale-spinner of Death in Venice, about a master writer, like himself, who falls quite madly in love with the sheer beauty of a 14-year-old boy on the beach. But Thomas Mann had a secret: he had been that love-stricken man on the beach. He was a happy husband, the father of six, and all his long life scanning for love that was not allowed. The trick today is to reimagine a whole Thomas Mann, and the novelist Colm Tóibín has pulled it off.
With Colm Tóibín at the James family gravesite in Cambridge. Photo credit: Benjamen Walker.
The Irish and transnational novelist Colm Tóibín is inviting us into a rare feast for alert readers this hour. The Magician is his new title: it’s a biography in the form of a novel about the twentieth-century German master Thomas Mann, both statesman and artist. The rare part is that Colm Tóibín is also giving us a sort of anatomy lesson in the processes that make high art and artists: the family politics, the erotic engines seen and unseen, the historical memory in a country and culture that were coming apart. Toss in what Thomas Mann felt was the spiritual energy that reached him through art and music especially. The Magician is a marvel, and so is Colm Tóibín.
Liner Notes for the Revolution
Dec 29, 2022
This show was originally broadcast on July 15, 2021.
We know their songs, not so much what they were going through, those Black women artists who wrote and sang so many anthems of American life: Bessie Smith’s “Gimme a Pigfoot” and Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues”; stars beyond category like Ethel Waters singing “Shake that Thing” in the ’20s; then Gospel hits like “His Eye Is On the Sparrow,” on tour in the 1950s with evangelist Billy Graham. Billie Holiday gave the world “Strange Fruit.” Nina Simone went deep with “Sinnerman.” Eartha Kitt was sly and sexy with a French twist on “C’est Si Bon.” Mahalia Jackson sang Duke Ellington’s spiritual “Come Sunday.” These are “the sisters who made the modern” in Daphne Brooks’s monumental inquiry into the souls, the minds, the experience that added up to more than entertainment.
Daphne Brooks.
“From Bessie Smith to Beyoncé” is the inescapable bumper-sticker on this hour of historical, musical radio. We’re talking about a century of Black female singers in the churn of gender, race, class, region, technology, and celebrity that drive the culture and the music biz. Daphne Brooks is our archivist and our authority, professor of African American Studies at Yale. Liner Notes for the Revolution is the title of her opinionated compendium of performances we all sort of know. And there’s nothing at all shy about Daphne Brooks’s argument that runs cover to cover through her book, subtitled The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound. In short, she saying Black women singers are our truth-tellers, about love and work, color, caste, God, and man, and woman.
Thoroughly Modern Mozart
Dec 22, 2022
This show first aired on September 30, 2021.
Who else could be said to make you smarter, just listening to the sound of his music? Only Mozart, that we know. For 300-and-some years now, he has set the standard for whatever lies beyond perfection. “Too beautiful for our ears,” said the Emperor of the Enlightenment, Joseph the Second, “and far too many notes, my dear Mozart.” Too many melodic ideas, some cerebral, but mostly straight-to-the-heart. He could be more German than Handel and Bach, more singable than Italian opera. The catch with Mozart in a big new life story is that the Mozart Myths are mostly wrong: he didn’t live poor, and he wasn’t buried in a pauper’s grave. He loved gambling at billiards and told his wife his supreme gift was dancing! This was no suffering genius, but a happy man, all in all.
Mozart, with Robert Levin and Jan Swafford.
We’re speaking of Mozart, man and music, with the modern biographer of the little man from eighteenth-century Austria, and with a master performer of his keyboard inventions. Brace yourself for these Mozart professionals: you could feel you’re listening to old basketball stars talking Michael Jordan leaps and Larry Bird threes. In the Mozart case, it was said—it is still said—there was literally nothing in music he couldn’t do better than anybody else: string quartets like the best conversations, cinemascopic piano concertos, farcical operas with psychological depth, and then he could hold his audience all night improvising at the keyboard. Impossible, as they say, but it happened and we’re summoning the magic at a living-room piano in Boston. Jan Swafford has documented the story in 700 pages titled Mozart: The Reign of Love. And Robert Levin, who has recorded a vast swath of the keyboard music with Mozartian felicity, seems to have it all at his fingertips. Our conversation begins around the child prodigy and what Mozart’s father and teacher called “the Miracle of Salzburg,” January 24, 1764.
Prudent Statecraft
Dec 15, 2022
John Quincy Adams was the model president in the early republic who declared that the United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” But “go abroad” we did, as the republic became a world colossus. And monsters there were in the mixed casualties of American power. 200 years later comes the question: what is left to be rescued of Quincy Adams’s “austere doctrine of restraint,” as his modern biographer puts it, his benign detachment in the wider world? Adams prescribed for his young nation that “she is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all,” but “she is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” Really? In the twenty-first century, with the biggest military budget in human history, and fighting men standing guard around the planet?
Portrait of John Quincy Adams, by Nahum Bell Onthank.
Looking at John Quincy Adams’s original manuscript.
We’re back two centuries this hour to the source code of the American experiment: very particularly back to John Quincy Adams’s caution about United States’ role in a contentious world.
This is the concluding installment of In Search of Monsters, our limited-series collaboration with The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. We’ve been highlighting extra conversations lately with foreign policy thinkers on questions of statecraft—here, find a short conversation with Stephen Van Evera:
The Maelstrom of Geopolitics
Dec 09, 2022
A briefing session this hour from our strategic special branch, which is to say: the mind of Chas Freeman in the maelstrom of geopolitics. If President Obama had been given his first choice to sketch the state of the world for him every morning, it would have been the same Chas Freeman, the man who knows too much and says what he sees. It’s not what you read in the paper, or hear on NPR. In the coming world order, Chas Freeman is telling us, great empires like ours have lost their grip. China is still rising, and lesser powers too. The US is still hooked on primacy and still Number One, but only in firepower. We’re out of joint with much of the world and, it can seem, with ourselves.
Chas Freeman.
The legend of our guest Chas Freeman derives from the moment in Beijing 50 years ago, when as a young Foreign Service officer, still in his twenties, he interpreted Richard Nixon and Mao Zedong to each other in the breakthrough conversations of 1972. Even then Chas Freeman was a master of languages, history, strategy, and diplomacy. A great career ensued, and it isn’t over. He’s a writer and lecturer online now, often sharper and more believable than the news media: about the quasi-war between the United States and China, for example, becoming a proxy war in the Middle East, of all places, as he wrote this fall. The US is estranged from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel to various degrees, China now the largest trading partner and foreign investor in the Middle East—in Israeli technology, and Saudi arms production, among other things. This is not the familiar beltway picture.
How’s to rescue the Earth from us people? Rachel Carson’s way – 60 years ago – was to write a book, and call it Silent Spring. She’d been a shy but defiant biologist in government service. Her book had science behind it, and the rhythm of poetry all through it: one woman’s outcry—as she herself was dying of cancer—against pesticides, most notoriously DDT, what she called “the chemical barrage” being “hurled against the fabric of life.” She was hurling her prose at not just DDT but Dupont, Monsanto, the big business of agriculture, and the slick ad slogan: “better living through chemistry.” Silent Spring became a historic bestseller and a rallying cry for the twentieth century. It’s an unmet challenge for the twenty-first.
Sandra Steingraber.Maria Popova.
A troubled world is tuning in on Rachel Carson again, for lots of good reasons, and so are we. She was a hard scientist of the environment who could speak bluntly—about her masterpiece Silent Spring, for example: she called it the “poison book,” or sometimes “Man Against the Earth.” She was a common-sense crusader who won sweeping victories. She wrote high-flying prose about oceans before she’d seen one, and about the love of her life, as time was running out. Her opening chapters of Silent Spring can sound today, it is said, like “God calling the world into being” back in Creation time.
This show was originally broadcast on December 5, 2019.
Origin stories can be educated guesses, or leaps of collective imagination as to who we are, how we got to this point. The Big Bang is one kind, Adam and Eve make another. 1492 and 1776 are American starting points. The argument gets stickier around 1620, when Mayflower Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock; and 1619, when the first African slaves came ashore in Virginia. Just a year apart, they’re the opening chapters of two very different epics of a single nation: one born in the flight of pious Puritans to freedom, the other born in the theft of people and land to build an empire of cotton and capitalism.
It’s a funny thing about origin stories—who we are, how we got here. We know going in that the stories are made up, one way or another. And we come to find out that a lot of them are just plain wrong. Then what? The Sunday magazine of the New York Times took a bold run this past summer at the year 1620 as the start of the American story— the year, of course, when the Mayflower landed about one hundred dissenting English Puritans, our pilgrims, at Plymouth Rock. But no, the Times argued, our first chapter was dated 1619, a year earlier when a ship bearing some 20 African slaves landed in Point Comfort, Virginia, which was to say the drive to implant a slavocracy in the new world had a step on building a temple of freedom.
We’re talking with Nikole Hannah-Jones, Philip Deloria, and Peter Linebaugh about national origin stories. The thread here is storytelling that explains and often hides what happened.
Nikole Hannah-Jones is the writer and editor who led what the Times called a major initiative at the paper to reframe American history. And she strikes the keynote of this radio hour around slavery at the foundations of U.S. history and in our own origin stories in general.
Peter Linebaugh is a transnational historian of economics and culture. He’s been tracking the privatization of common land in England and the New World. 1792 is his magic start date of what is now the world system.
The historian Philip Deloria—the first tenured professor of Native American history at Harvard—considers the Native American encounters with those colonists in the 1600s.
Multipolarity
Nov 17, 2022
Our unipolar moment may be remembered as the United States’ turn as “king of the hill,” two decades or so between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rocket rise of China’s economy. What comes next is the open question. Multipolarity is the tentative answer we’re getting at the end of 2022: it’s a spirit of “getting to know you” again, in a new light, as if for the first time. Joe Biden and Xi Jinping were practicing it this week on a beach in Bali, where the G20 nations were taking their stand for peace. On another beach, next to the Red Sea in Egypt, the climate defenders were taking stock of a meltdown. We seem to have fallen backwards into a short interval for reinventing order among nations.
Roberto Unger.Sarang Shidore.Trita Parsi.
Unipolarity is “my way or the highway” in practice. George W. Bush virtually spoke it on his way to war in Iraq in 2003. The nations of the world had to decide, he said: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Twenty years later, the nations of the world seem drawn experimentally to multipolarity as an alternative: emphasis on listening, dispersion of power, peace as a victory. Joe Biden and Xi Jinping—off their collision course of just a month ago—gave the world a fresh image of adversaries cordially relaxed at their beach resort in Bali, rejecting notions of imminent war over Taiwan. And China’s foreign ministry issued a crisp statement that could put multipolarity on a bumper-sticker; it said, “The world is big enough for the two countries to develop themselves and prosper together.” This radio hour is a multi-polar conversation, with views shaped in Brazil and India. Trita Parsi strikes the keynote: born in Iran, raised in Sweden, an American by now well known for three incisive histories of diplomacy in the Middle East, he’s been decorated in particular for “ideas improving world order.”
This is the latest installment of In Search of Monsters, our limited-series collaboration with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.Here, Connor Echols of Responsible Statecraft (the online magazine of the Quincy Institute), describes responses to the deadly explosion in Poland:
The New Right
Nov 11, 2022
The hatching of a New Right Republican party, under fire, is the substance of this radio hour. It was simpler in Gilbert and Sullivan when the song said: every boy and every gal that’s born into the world alive was either a little liberal, or else a little conservative. The difference this year is the multiple relabelings of Republicans on the right, by factions. You can find, say, an educated version of cultural conservatives and even some lifestyle liberals at odds with evangelicals and nationalists; you can find anti-interventionists, too, in a party of neo-conservatives. Every syllable of those labels can mean something—something to fight about, or to start a new magazine around.
Sohrab Ahmari.Matthew Sitman.
Meet the New Right this hour: the anti-liberal and wannabe populist future of the Republican party. Our guest to start the conversation is Sohrab Ahmari, the editor of the combative, young Compact magazine. The left-liberal podcaster Matt Sitman will put him to the test. Sohrab Ahmari is known for his way with radical ideas, and also for his journey, to the age of 37: born a modern Muslim in Tehran, he’s been moving west since his teens, through many varieties of politics and also journalism, mostly on the right, on the opinion pages of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. But then he made a very public turn to an articulate Catholicism. And his politics—he calls it conservative—has turned militantly anti-establishment. He could sound like a shape-shifter, or maybe a model of improvisation and growth.
Polycrisis
Nov 04, 2022
Finally, there’s a word for it: the polycrisis, to describe the multiple messes we’re in. Our guest the historian Adam Tooze says it’s a polycrisis when old crises like war, weather, and disease are breeding deadly new variants of anxiety and danger. It’s a polycrisis when you feel the old world you knew is undergoing not change but transformation. It’s symptomatic of the polycrisis that the three giant military powers in the world today sit apart and aloof, each one suffering its own identity crisis, each one on the defensive about looking and acting so aggressive. You’re feeling this polycrisis when you realize you can’t go home again, because home’s not there anymore.
Adam Tooze.
Adam Tooze is our rat-a-tat talker on the tightrope, our English-American historian of this age of waking nightmares: pandemic, mega-storms, migration, inflation, grain war, energy war, “war war” in Ukraine. He’s our polymath in what he has just decided to call the polycrisis. The “poly” part refers not just to many crises but to the variety of shapes and sizes and origin stories that come with the disruption. Together they are transforming the world faster now than ever in history, he says. But they are not together, meaning that no common remedy will treat them. One more key thing about the polycrisis, Adam Tooze will tell you, is that nobody really has a handle on this monster: not the bankers, or the military men, or the experts, not even Adam Tooze.
This is the latest installment of In Search of Monsters, our limited series collaboration with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.The Quincy Institute and the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Accord recently hosted a discussion with Ambassador Jack Matlock, Svetlana Savranskaya, and Tom Blanton from the National Security Archive on the lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The full discussion is available on quincyinst.org— but here are some excerpts.
A Just Cause
Oct 27, 2022
Talking time around the war in Ukraine may be approaching. This radio hour may be a moment in that trend: reaching out for strong views we hadn’t heard, in head-on disagreement about the morality and the meanings of the war. Ukraine can be hard to talk about, not least because the blind killing since the Russian invasion and the risks of nuclear escalation are almost unspeakable. The risks of talking, and not-talking, are there, too. 30 self-styled progressives in Congress wrote (and then withdrew) a letter to President Biden this week, urging pro-active talks now to end the war. If Republicans win control of the Congress, it is said, they will start cutting expenditures on military aid to Ukraine. So, strong talk of all sorts is on the way.
James Carroll.Andrew Bacevich.
What we’re hearing this hour is seriously different ways of thinking about the war in Ukraine. James Carroll is the novelist, historian, former Catholic priest and peace activist; Andrew Bacevich is the writer, fighter, and university-based historian. When Jim Carroll went off to the seminary as a teenager, Andy went off to West Point as a soldier and then to Vietnam, but he came round to a strong antiwar conviction and activism in the form of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, which is our collaborator in this radio series. James Carroll started this conversation with a six-part essay published last month with the New School in New York, in their online Public Seminar. He called it: “an anti-war activist’s personal and political reckoning.” The big surprise was his realization, from last spring, that for the first time in decades, he said: “I was unabashedly in favor of war.”
Next on the global agenda comes Taiwan, the island off China once known as Formosa, meaning shapely, beautiful. Today it’s a puzzle with moving parts: a not-quite nation of 24 million people that has two jealous imperial sponsors—the giants US and China, heading toward their own historic breakdown in relations. The deepest truth about Taiwan, some say, is that it’s a problem that cannot be solved, but can be managed in peace, prosperity, and democracy that have transformed Taiwan since World War II. One trick in thinking about Taiwan is to recognize a success story. The question is how to keep Taiwan from becoming Ukraine: the lost province that a great power decided it had to recover by force.
Shelley Rigger.Senator Ed Markey.Lev Nachman.Jake Werner.Wen Liu.
Taiwan is the world-class puzzle we are inspecting this hour with some urgency. It’s world-class because the thriving, boisterously democratic island off the coast of China lives geopolitically at the junction of giant imperial interests and egos, Chinese and American, both itching for a contest. And still Taiwan is its own identity puzzle on an island ruled for most of the past century by off-islanders. Who is Taiwan, after all? The formula for decades now is that Taiwan is a less-than-sovereign part of One China, bristling also with heavy arms from America. Could today’s Taiwanese stand a fight for independence? Could they stand to be absorbed by the People’s Republic on the mainland? And how, at all events, does Taiwan escape the fate of Ukraine?
This is the latest installment of In Search of Monsters, our limited series collaboration with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Bonus: Sarang Shidore of the Quincy Institute on the Global Divisions over Ukraine
Humane Wartime
Oct 13, 2022
Try a simple riddle, about the time and climate we Americans are living in, today: Do we call it (a) wartime or (b) peacetime? Tense time, for sure, and there’s war in the headlines. But we’re not at war, not declared war anyway. There’s no draft, and no body bags coming home that we notice. War spending is up steeply, but it’s on weaponry for faraway Ukraine, fending off Russia. The firm promise from the start of our lend-lease to Ukraine was no American boots on the ground, and the Biden team is sticking with that. Should we call it a nervous sort of peacetime, on edge about the challenge of China, our missiles and bombs at the ready if it ever comes to war over Taiwan? Or should we call it wartime in denial?
Mary Dudziak.Samuel Moyn.
The dark cloud we can see and feel overhead and all around us is our target this hour. Is it one cloud or many, connected how? We’re aiming at the war question in the cloud. Americans pay more for our military than any nation in history, but we expect less: not victories nor an end of war. George W. Bush proclaimed “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq but we stayed in the war for another decade. President Obama said we live in “an age without surrender ceremonies.” Mary Dudziak at Emory University in Atlanta gets our conversation started. She is eminent among historians of war and death in American experience. Her particular study nowadays is the persistence of American wars and their disengagement from popular feeling. The Yale legal scholar Samuel Moyn will join us with a question both historical and practical: Have almost two centuries of rule-making and regulation of warfare had the perverse effect of keeping war alive? Has the modern world been trying to prettify war when we should have abolished it by now?
This is another installment of In Search of Monsters, our limited-series collaboration with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Here’s a bonus conversation with Quincy Institute fellow Annelle Sheline:
The Historians’ Diagnosis
Oct 06, 2022
The conversation about a world in disarray feels urgent, elusive, etherized. Who will name this crisis and the roots of it: war, tribalism, maldistributed money, and pain, exceptionalism for rich people, maybe, for a rich nation in a poor world? Historians are the guides we turn to first, for the big picture, the connections between, say, a brutal turn in our weather, and the Age of Easy Oil now closing; the nasty hangover of our own American Century; the palsy in democratic politics here and abroad; the rise of nativist nationalism again, the lurch toward strongman rule; and in Ukraine, the catastrophic reversion to war as the way. Who’ll get us to see it whole and to confront it in time?
Robin D.G. KelleyJackson LearsHelen Thompson
Helen Thompson is the first of three very different historians we’re calling on this hour to trace patterns from the past into the global predicament today. Oil and gas are Helen Thompson’s angle of observation. Jackson Lears will be up next, tracking the course of American empire. Robin Kelley, who writes about Freedom Dreams in the black radical imagination, will follow with an argument about the old roots of twenty-first century fascism. And so we begin the second season of a radio-podcast series we call “In Search of Monsters,” in collaboration with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Bonus conversation with the Quincy Institute’s George Beebe:
Cruel Britannia
Sep 29, 2022
This show first aired on May 19, 2022.
George Orwell said, “It’s so easy to be witty about the British Empire.” As in the throwaway line that English people had conquered the world in a fit of absentmindedness. No big deal. But that empire was no joke. Boris Johnson, in the Prime Minister’s office today, says he can’t forget that his nation over the last 200 years “has directed the invasion or conquest of 178 countries – that is: most of the members of the UN.” Our guest, the historian and prodigious imperial researcher Caroline Elkins has written a shocker of a big book about just how the English got to rule the world for two centuries, and it’s a gruesome story, all told. The title of her big book is Legacy of Violence, about the brutality of “thinking imperially” to this day.
Caroline Elkins.
Think of the British Empire in its day as a colossal trading company with the world’s number-one navy to police its traffic in pretty much everything—including about 3 million slaves to North America in the 17th and 18th centuries, also a variety of notably addictive substances like opium and oil, then sugar and tobacco. It thought of itself as a distinctively liberal empire, civilizing the people it exploited, and everywhere spreading the language of Milton and Shakespeare, free speech and the rule of law. That is the imperial line that our guest Caroline Elkins set out to bury with the official records of a police state and its practice of terror that ruled half a billion people at Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897.