We’re reading our way out of a ruined time with the model reader, Patricia Lockwood. She’s the poet laureate of the internet, for starters. She’s a big-league literary critic, master of social media and the Twitter joke, but also of the mysticism of St. Teresa. She’s on a field-trip to Harvard this week from her home base in Savannah, Georgia, and we’re meeting for the first time, in Cambridge.

Patricia Lockwood and Chris Lydon.

In this almost archaic culture of books, her mindset is very 2025. This side of Harold Bloom, I’ve never met a wider scope in a reader.

We’re looking for our American place in what can feel like a new world order, with Stephen Walt, our first and favorite so-called realist in the foreign policy game—realists being the people who steer by the interests of nations, not their egos or their dreams. And they look beyond the headlines to the long-term effects of policy, to the results.

Stephen Walt.

By Stephen Walt’s standards, it looks like a new world since that astonishing shouting match in the White House, Donald Trump telling Ukraine’s President Zelensky that the U.S. is out of the war on the border of Russia, that we’re bent on repairing our relationship with Vladimir Putin. And Walt is in the news with a commentary and a headline that said, “Yes, America is Europe’s Enemy Now.”

Angus King is the anti-partisan, independent United States Senator from the cranky Yankee state of Maine. He is giving us a conversational civics lesson in the tradition of James Madison and also of Schoolhouse Rock, the kids’ TV explainer.

James Madison.

Senator King has been in the thick of the frenzy in Donald Trump’s Washington, with a certain distinction. His tone on the Senate floor has been measured, his language old-fashioned, and his message a deadly warning. It’s the Constitution itself that’s at risk. What’s at stake, he has been saying, is the famously balanced U.S. Constitution, “this clumsy system” of self-rule, he calls it, that is “the mainspring of our freedom.” And it is under direct assault as never before in these first weeks of a new presidency. Rescuing that “we the people” charter will mark our place in history, Angus King is telling us. Losing it would mark the end of the American experiment.

In the fog of Trump Two, we’re asking: what’s new? The co-presidency with Elon Musk is surely new, also the raging battle of exotic ideas among techno-optimists and libertarian anarcho-capitalists at war with the very idea of popular democracy and republican government. Further question: do citizens have to follow the action? Matt Taibbi’s headline is: Nation Shrugs as Godzilla Eats Washington.

Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian.

Here at Open Source in the first month of the Trump sequel, we’re hovering in the fog with two young historians of American finance, technology, and politics, and comparing clues about the future under construction.

We’re picking up the pieces of our country in the age of Trump, Part II. Is the USA still here? Is it still us?

Kurt Andersen.

Cue Kurt Andersen, with his finger in the wind. We want him on a mission to track the spirit of the age, because he’s been a cool, creative, wide-angle eye on events since the ’80s, when he founded Spy magazine, and then Studio 360 on public radio.

We’re with writer-world’s exotic traveller and truth-teller Pico Iyer. He’s been the Dalai Lama’s friend from boyhood, and our friend, too, in years now of reading and talk. In his new book, Aflame, subtitled Learning from Silence, we catch him at a turn in his thinking. His fresh question, for all of us, might just be: how do we surface our spiritual reality before we ever grasp the troubles of our world in 2025?

Chris with Pico Iyer.

This book is bigger than Pico Iyer—there’s a book here that lots of people would love to be writing called “My Spiritual Awakening.” In the new book, Iyer’s awakening happened over the last 30 years, in and out of a Benedictine monastery on the California coast at Big Sur.

We’re here with a capsule of memory from late last year. It was a spark of generosity in Liz Walker’s story that lit up the Christmas season for lots of us, and maybe the path ahead. She’s been a pathfinder—for decades—in television newscasting in Boston; then as an ordained minister, leading the Roxbury Presbyterian Church in town; and then in the work of post-traumatic healing in her church and in the wider community. And then out of the blue came the news before Christmas that she was going to visit Palestine to witness and learn about a scene she knew mainly from the headlines.

The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

What made it exciting to me was her saying that she had barely the dimmest picture of what she was getting into with Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank town of Bethlehem. And yet what all of us knew was that she was up to it and that she would walk us through the experience when she came back.

We’re with the one-off diplomat, strategist, and historian Chas Freeman.

Chas Freeman.

Call this “Curious Citizen Meets the Most Knowledgeable Straight-Talker Anywhere Near the U.S. Government.” At a turn in the calendar, a transition in American politics, and a global crisis that can feel like a rolling nightmare even after the quick, almost bloodless revolt by Syrians against their own deadly dictatorship. It’s a third year in a row that we’ve asked Freeman for an end-of-the-season checkup on the American empire and the changing rules of world order.

We’re with the celebrated Scots-accented people’s economist—celebrated above all when he’s home with the locals in his own old pub in Dundee, settling all the arguments there are around money and power, and populism on the way to plutocracy in the comeback reign of Donald Trump.

Mark Blyth.

Before we get to Trump 2, we speak of the lingering Biden paradox. The economy was said to be the saving grace of Joe Biden’s short term, specifically the drive to rebuild the industrial base at home. But the same economy was the undoing of his would-be successor, Kamala Harris—specifically, inflation, a largely hidden cost-of-living crisis in food and energy that hurt real people, poor people most of all.

We’re with the Nobel Prize novelist from Turkey, Orhan Pamuk. It’s not your standard book chat: closer to head-butting than conversation, as you’ll hear. But it’s polite enough and nobody gets hurt.

Chris and Orhan Pamuk.

Orhan Pamuk wanted to talk about his hard-cover collection of notebook drawings and diary entries in recent years; I wanted to hear the global writer’s take on the distemper, East and West, in the 2020s. He said he doesn’t talk contemporary affairs, but then he insisted on doing just that: he said that President Erdogan’s authoritarian politics is ruining Turkey, and Donald Trump could be just as dangerous in America. The news about Orhan Pamuk himself, coming out of his notebooks, is that he has been a passionately visual artist all along, keeping an alternative record of his own life in high-color drawings and aphoristic jottings, words and pictures like nothing our listeners have seen.