Open Source with Christopher Lydon

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey

We’re at sea this time on our own Odyssey, a voyage between the ancient epic that refuses to die and Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster movie version for us in this summer of 2026. It’s the story of course we all half-know about the wily old Greek warrior-king coming home ten years late from a horrible war against Troy, in maybe 1200 BC. Daniel Mendelsohn. Nobody knows the grip of it all better than our guest Daniel Mendelsohn, who sailed the route Odysseus took with his 81-year-old father and made an intimate mission of family discovery in it. He’s published his own translation of Homer’s whole poem, and now he’s reviewing this summer’s big movie for the New York Review of Books. The post Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

The World’s Sport

We’re high as a kite on World Cup football. The final test, coming Sunday, is down to Spain and Argentina. My question is whether this frenzied global contest might actually be rescuing our species from itself? Our guests are soccer coach Michael LaVigne and the sports broadcaster Seamus Malin. We’re looking to confirm my intuition that this beautiful game, as Brazilians were first to call it, is humankind at its best—and maybe even a new model of civilization. The post The World’s Sport appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

After the Fireworks

We’re still in the Fourth of July spirit around the 250th birthday of our nation, hooked in particular by one grand American historian’s question to it: is the United States on the road to a new civil war? David Blight. David Blight, Sterling Professor of History at Yale, has been our guest before—on his Pulitzer-winning biography of Frederick Douglass: The Prophet of Freedom. And now he’s our biographer of the American experiment, looking ahead by looking back. The experiment, he says, is in deep, maybe critical trouble. And here’s more from David Blight on the U.S. in crisis—this is a recent talk at the American Academy in Berlin: The post After the Fireworks appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

The Boston Watch Party

We’re in a sort of watch party for a season when World Cup soccer, championship basketball, sports of every kind, all seem to run deeper, more believable, much better played than the rest of our lives, more memorable than our politics, surely more honest and closer to our ideals as human beings, not just Americans. Richard Johnson. We’re sampling the global sports mania on its home ground in Boston with the encyclopedic Richard Johnson, founder and longtime curator of the New England Sports Museum, which is spread out on the walls inside the second tier of the Boston Garden. We can look down to the ice that Bobby Orr skated on for the Boston Bruins and the parquet floor over that ice that Bill Russell and Larry Bird bounced basketballs on for the Celtics. We can also see those championship banners in green and white. Bill Russell won 11 of them in 13 years. It takes the breath away. The post The Boston Watch Party appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

America’s Orwell

We’re unearthing a model writer for an anxious America. Dwight Macdonald was his own eccentric voice through the Cold War politics and culture of the 1950s and 60s. He was a peacenik at heart, otherwise unpredictable, a New York intellectual of his own school. So in this podcast, we’re just reading Dwight Macdonald aloud with John Summers, who has edited a collection he calls Atrocities of the Mind: Essays on Violence and Politics in the American Century. John Summers. The premise in our conversation is that a certain urgent music in Dwight Macdonald’s prose still sounds clearly enough for a world that has nobody with quite like his range today. Who was Dwight MacDonald—the pedigreed populist, sometime Trotskyite, hard left, who came to call himself a conservative anarchist? The post America’s Orwell appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.