Open Source with Christopher Lydon

Fintan O’Toole has made a brilliant career watching Ireland (his home country) transform itself—its Catholic culture, its vanishing population, its frail economy—into something very modern and profoundly different. And he’s covered our country so well this year. Does he see something of a transformation that’s comparable in the United States?

In the long weekend of solemn suspense before our presidential election in 2024, our guest is Amber. I met Amber on a call-in radio show almost 30 years ago, and we’ve been talking ever since. I call Amber my oracle from underground, the voice of the unknown America, undocumented since she arrived in the United States as a child and an orphan. And she’s been without papers, as she says, ever since, despite our best efforts. When Donald Trump talks about sweeping deportations, if he gets reelected, the face I see is Amber’s.

Richard Powers may just be the bravest big novelist out there. His new book is titled Playground, in which AI plays with the natural world. The question is whether and how the digital transformation might undo the power of death, as in the death of long ago people, the death of species today, even the death of a planet.

Richard Powers.

This is our third trip through a new book of his, aiming his imagination and hard science at the scariest maladies of modern life. First it was Orfeo, about atonal music, then The Overstory, which won the Pulitzer prize and a huge audience, about disappearing tree species. And now Playground, going deep into the breakdown of oceans—also into dementia with Lewy bodies, also fate and friendships, and damaged people who make foolproof thinking machines.

For our shattering Age of October 7, Nathan Thrall has written a double masterpiece, in my reading. Already a Pulitzer Prize-winner for non-fiction, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is a searching work of reporting on the social roots of a traffic catastrophe. It becomes also a moral meditation on whatever it is that cripples human sympathy, understanding, connection. The key word at every level is Occupation, as in Israel’s rule over Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank through decades.

Nathan Thrall.

I read Nathan Thrall’s mind-bending book over a weekend, in a sort of fever, and finished it feeling I’d spent a month in East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank. The question that burns me still is: why hadn’t I felt the force of this story before, even when I wandered through Israel, north and south, from Jerusalem to the Sea of Galilee, a decade or so ago?

The central event in Nathan’s story is a traffic accident with a rickety school bus full of Palestinian kindergarten kids that collided with a trailer truck and blew up on a highway between Jerusalem and Ramallah. A deadly but random crash, it seemed at the time, though in Palestinian memory it was infinitely more grievous. As Nathan Thrall kept hearing, if it had been an Arab kid throwing a stone at Israelis, not a burning bus full of Arab children, Israeli troops would have been on it in seconds. In fact, however, troops and fire trucks at an Israeli settlement nearby all saw the smoking bus and did nothing, letting the fire rage and the children die for more than half an hour.

The most important thing for me in this book was to give a reader a visceral sense of what it is to live in this place, what it is for a Palestinian to live under this system of domination, what it is to live in a highly segregated set of circumstances, segregation that is geographic, that’s separating families, that’s separating parents from children. And it was less important for me that people have a kind of abstract or general understanding of the facts of the situation than that they understand emotionally what it would be like if they were to simply travel there and see it with their own eyes. For a number of years I have witnessed delegations come to Israel-Palestine, often advocacy organizations, organized trips for congressional staffers or parliamentarians and others. Often it’s a week-long trip with six days in Israel and half a day in the West Bank. And the half a day that they spend in the West Bank is by far the most important part of the trip because it is a gut punch. They go there and within a couple of hours on their own, they are making comparisons to Jim Crow and apartheid in South Africa. And that feeling stays with them.

– Nathan Thrall in conversation with Chris Lydon.

We’re in Climate Week 2024, with the indispensable, independent activist and authority Bill McKibben.

We catch him packing, in Vermont, for what’s far from his first climate rodeo in New York.

We’re in our very own post-debate spin room, taking the measure of Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and of ourselves, as the voters they were pitching. Did we get what we expected? Did we get what we wanted?

Fintan O’Toole, on the line from Ireland, is our guest and guide. He’s much admired now for his tart reporting on American life in the New York Review of Books. Fintan O’Toole built his reputation as a theatre critic in Dublin and to this day in New York. We’re asking him to review our presidential debate this week as live drama.

There’s a puzzle in this podcast, and it comes with our prize sociologist, Tressie McMillan Cottom. It’s roughly this: How does Kamala Harris, after the Democratic convention in Chicago and for the rest of this campaign, come to look and sound presidential, even though no other president has ever looked like her?

Tressie McMillan Cottom.

Tressie McMillan Cottom has put it this way: that all Kamala Harris has to prove is that a woman can lead, that a black woman can be qualified, that a South Asian woman can come to feel familiar, that a childless woman can become a nation’s Momala, and that a Gen-X sensibility can resonate with boomers.

Cornel West is our guest, the preacher-teacher in a tradition of black prophetic fire, as he puts it, the line of holy anger in American history, and this time on the presidential ballot in a variety of states.

Cornel West.

His will be the first book I want to read on this 2024 campaign, because he will be recounting a moral inquiry into the American condition at least as much as the ups and downs of his own candidacy.

The novelist Marilynne Robinson has a nearly constitutional role in our heads, our culture by now. She’s the artist we trust to observe the damaged heart of America, and to tell us what we’re going through. I’ve been re-reading her early fiction, particularly Housekeeping and Gilead from 20 years ago, and remembering her conversations with Barack Obama over the years, with tables turned from the start. It was never the usual writer profiling a president or a candidate. He was the inquiring politician asking her about Iowa and the country, about the image of God in other people, the presumption of goodness in others that underlies cooperation and democracy.

Last winter she said that if she and Citizen Obama were still writing letters back and forth, she’d begin by asking him to “Say something to cheer me up . . . Say it again: that the people ultimately are wise . . . are good.” How would that conversation go today?

In the strangeness of mid-summer 2024, the cosmopolitan novelist Joseph O’Neill is our bridge between the Republican convention in Milwaukee and the Summer Olympics in Paris. He knows both sides of that gap: politics and global celebrity sports.

Joseph O’Neill.

He’s famous as an amateur cricket player in New York, of all places, and as a writer about cricket and the many meanings of sports in general. His new novel, Godwin, is deep into soccer/football in a wild intercontinental search for the next superstar, the next Lionel Messi or Kylian Mbappé.