Open Source with Christopher Lydon

We’re in the wild west of cyberspace. It is a man-made ecosystem, this cyberspace, where man-made AI lives and flourishes, but we’re coming to know that it’s a dangerous place, crawling with bullies and predators, infinitely rich, rife with disruption, misinformation, bad advice, and prurient distractions as well.

Francine Berman.

And furthermore, we’re coming to know that super brainy AI could be quite capable of killing off our soulful old human species, extinguishing our humanity if we let it. So who is protecting us, you ask? What is the public interest? What’s the oversight in this new technology? Where are the guardrails in cyberspace? These are the questions raised by our guest Francine Berman in an urgent guidebook called Better Tech: Putting People First in Cyberspace.

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We’re staring down the life-and-death hazard of artificial intelligence. That phrase “AI apocalypse” sounds a little panicky, but when the masters of the craft started arguing this summer about how soon, in the next 10 years, their science might wipe out human life forever, we had to say attention must be paid.

Ben Hurlbut.

We’re joined by Ben Hurlbut, professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. He’s been a wary eye on science in general, the teacher and guide we reach for on issues that we simply don’t know how to talk about. Five years ago, he led us through the CRISPR conundrum around editing the human genome. How did we get to killer AI, lethal AI, and how might we get past it?

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We’re between breakdown and breakup, or maybe between the AI monster and human extinction. Those are the rough choices that the all-purpose American writer Kurt Andersen is offering us in his vast portrait of a broken country as a sort of bad marriage. He’s written a novel called The Breakup. Is the USA beyond repair? he’s asking us. Could a national divorce be better than the country we’ve got, on its 250th birthday, no less?

Kurt Andersen.

We’re taking up his book, a novel about a married couple in trouble inside a nation in trouble. But we have to note the moment we’re in, mid-September, when the titans of our technology have given us, in effect, apocalypse week in the news, warning us that artificial intelligence—the way they’re building it—runs a measurable risk of killing the human species, all of us, forever, in the next 10 years. Kurt Andersen is a one of a kind, tireless noticer, a serious funny man, too, founder of Spy magazine in another lifetime, also Studio 360 on public radio, and he’s an old hand inside the dark side of AI.

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We’re savoring a glorious story we thought we knew in the long ordeal of racial justice in America. It was the singer Marian Anderson’s moment in 1939, after the Daughters of the American Revolution barred the black contralto from their Constitution Hall in Washington. With President and Eleanor Roosevelt’s encouragement, Marian Anderson decided instead to sing in front of the Abraham Lincoln Memorial. 

Anthony Tommasini.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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?

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We’re entranced in Molly Crabapple’s reanimation of the Jewish Labour Bund in Europe and Russia, of a century ago. Yiddish Socialism was a nickname. You could plausibly describe that old Bund as forgotten but not gone in the wider world today. The question may be whether the Bund’s humane ideals will have another chance against the lawlessness and cruelty of the 2020s.

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.

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