Open Source with Christopher Lydon

Series produced by Open Source

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

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

We post regular broadcast hours for public radio.

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

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


468 Pieces

Order by: Newest First | Oldest First
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We’re speaking with a hot name in disruptive innovation, Sebastian Thrun. He’s part of our conversation on hacking higher education. He’s the foun...

Bought by WCAI / WNAN Cape & Islands, Mass.


  • Added: May 26, 2014
  • Length: 11:54
  • Purchases: 1
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Continuing our series on higher ed, we're hacking our way to a better model; call it New U. There won't be a football team or a building and ground...

  • Added: May 23, 2014
  • Length: 58:36
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How did higher education, in general, turn from the days of the GI Bill — and the land grant colleges long before that — to being a trap for sevent...

Bought by KUOW


  • Added: May 21, 2014
  • Length: 04:23
  • Purchases: 1
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How did higher education, in general, turn from the days of the GI Bill — and the land grant colleges long before that — to being a trap for sevent...

  • Added: May 21, 2014
  • Length: 18:23
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Derek Bok is the only two-time president of Harvard University, which is to say he has twice reinvented the management of the oldest, richest, mayb...

Bought by KVSC and KPIK-LP


  • Added: May 21, 2014
  • Length: 31:11
  • Purchases: 2
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Here’s how to read David Foster Wallace’s thousand-page door stop and masterpiece Infinite Jest: it’s a Boston novel the way Ulysses is a Dublin n...

Bought by KFOK-LPFM


  • Added: Mar 25, 2014
  • Length: 58:34
  • Purchases: 1
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We’re trying also to locate Aaron Swartz as a landmark in the culture and the age.

  • Added: Mar 25, 2014
  • Length: 58:35
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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 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
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Gunther Schuller is a composer, conductor, horn virtuoso, jazz historian and critic who had the nerve and the authority years ago to decree that “a...

Bought by WMNR, KMUW, KPIP-LP, WCAI / WNAN Cape & Islands, Mass., and WABE


  • Added: Mar 25, 2014
  • Length: 36:26
  • Purchases: 5
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Thought experiment: given that many of our best insights into Russian character and temperament come to use from their literary geniuses, can we su...

Bought by KFOK-LPFM and WCAI / WNAN Cape & Islands, Mass.


  • Added: Mar 25, 2014
  • Length: 58:35
  • Purchases: 2
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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 Rhodes is the go-to analyst of nuclear weapons for most of thirty years now ever since the publication of his acclaimed history of the Manh...

  • Added: Apr 12, 2014
  • Length: 22:23
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We’re thinking our way through a plausible nuclear emergency with Elaine Scarry who reminds you – we’ve got a weapons monarchy in this democracy. H...

  • Added: Apr 12, 2014
  • Length: 58:34
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Eric Schlosser, the investigative reporter of Fast Food Nation fame, has assembled what reads like a Letterman list of hair-raising nuclear bungles...

Bought by KFOK-LPFM


  • Added: Apr 14, 2014
  • Length: 23:56
  • Purchases: 1
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We're clearing the deck to listen to wisdom of the physicists: where did we come from, what are we made of, what happens next, and why? And what do...

  • Added: Apr 20, 2014
  • Length: 58:34
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The writer that so many other writers are talking about is the Indian-born New Yorker, Akhil Sharma. His novel is “Family Life,” a faithful recount...

Bought by WCAI / WNAN Cape & Islands, Mass.


  • Added: Apr 23, 2014
  • Length: 27:46
  • Purchases: 1
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Capital is a giant, data-packed tome on income inequality covering three hundred years of history by the French economist Thomas Piketty. Is there ...

  • Added: May 02, 2014
  • Length: 58:35