Open Source

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An American conversation with global attitude — on the arts, humanities, and global affairs — with your host, Christopher Lydon.

Consider adding us to your weekly schedule; we post regular broadcast hours for public radio Friday afternoons.

For shorter stand-alone radio stories and podcasts: check out our series "Open Source Shorts."

Full-length conversations are also available via podcast or at radioopensource.org

Ask us to make your station a custom promo! Contact us at info@radioopensource.org.

Series

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22 Pieces

Inspired by John Quincy Adams’s admonition that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” this limited-series collaboration with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft explores America’s role in the world across history in order to see a better way forward.

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30 Pieces

Everything but the broadcast hours.

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473 Pieces

An American conversation with global attitude - on the arts, humanities, and global affairs, hosted by Christopher Lydon.

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5 Pieces

“Reading Chekhov” is the name of this game – a podcast experiment with, by all accounts, the greatest short-story writer of them all, the medical doctor who was also the “Cherry Orchard” playwright, Anton Chekhov.


Pieces

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We’re reading and gabbing about a story called “The Teacher of Literature,” published in 1894; Chekhov was 34 years old. It’s a story about a young...

  • Added: Apr 11, 2014
  • Length: 01:21:57
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Errol Morris’s movie The Unknown Known is the provocation this week: cinema sequel to the Oscar winning documentary on Robert McNamara and Vietnam,...

  • Added: Apr 05, 2014
  • Length: 58:34
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Richard Powers is indulging us in a runaway riff on music, in a little room in the Boston Athenaeum, on the top of Beacon Hill, overlooking the Old...

Bought by WABE


  • Added: Apr 03, 2014
  • Length: 47:52
  • Purchases: 1
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We're revisiting the birthplace of the American mind. Five houses on three streets within a period of five years in Concord, Massachusetts launche...

Bought by KPIP-LP, WRPI, and KFOK-LPFM


  • Added: Mar 28, 2014
  • Length: 58:34
  • Purchases: 3
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Oyeyemi has a way of seeing modern life as a series of fairy tales, and she likes to scatter them throughout the forest, upending monsters and unde...

Bought by WCAI / WNAN Cape & Islands, Mass.


  • Added: Mar 27, 2014
  • Length: 21:58
  • Purchases: 1
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We’re reading a famous story called “The Student.” It’s a late winter, early spring night in the 1890s, Easter weekend. A student is coming home f...

Bought by KICI Iowa City and KWMR


  • Added: Mar 27, 2014
  • Length: 20:08
  • Purchases: 2
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Chekhov wrote “Gusev” on shipboard, returning from his stark study mission to the prison island of Sakhalin in 1890. He was 30 years old, ten years...

  • Added: Mar 27, 2014
  • Length: 52:19
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The story this time is called “Dreams.” It’s a dense 7-page fantasy of the good life in the far wilds of Eastern Siberia. It’s a dream of freedom t...

Bought by KMXT


  • Added: Mar 27, 2014
  • Length: 41:36
  • Purchases: 1
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Vanka is a tiny tale that has the feel of Dickens, about a 9-year-old orphan in Moscow, pining for his grandpa in the village, his only vestige of ...

  • Added: Mar 27, 2014
  • Length: 26:29
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We're picking up the thread of a long conversation with Gunther Schuller. He’s the man who first mapped a Third Stream of “jazzical” music between ...

Bought by WMNR, KMUW, KPIP-LP, and WABE


  • Added: Mar 25, 2014
  • Length: 33:10
  • Purchases: 4