Open Source with Christopher Lydon

Act One of the freaked-out 2016 campaign for president may be drawing to a close, with Clinton and Trump continually atop polls. So what have we learned?Trump may be the big story, with more than ...

Is racial justice on the ballot in 2016? In the past year, Charleston, South Carolina, grieved twice. First, Walter Scott was shot in the back by a police officer, and a Taser was planted next ...

The late justice Antonin Scalia boasted that his United States Constitution was definitively “dead.” But in a mixed-up political season, what if our founding document wants a new lease on life? And what if we ...

For the election watchers who were dissatisfied after the statistical stalemate in the Iowa caucuses, here’s a result worth wondering over: six to one! That’s the margin by which Iowa Democrats between 18 and 30 ...

In 2016, the presidential election became electric. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have separately disrupted the fixed matchup of another Clinton and another Bush, and flat-footed, for now, the mainstream consensus about everything from who ...

Timothy Snyder is a Yale historian who makes waves. Black Earth is his big new interpretation of “the Holocaust: as History and Warning.” He’s arguing, for starters, that the record of killing Jews – when, ...

In 1933, a group of freethinking American educators and academics took a look at their fresh, interwar world — and set about trying to remake it. They set up a campus in idyllic countryside outside Asheville, North Carolina, and Black Mountain ...

The English classicist and historian, Mary Beard, has become a T.V. star and a bestselling author. SPQR, her new capsule history of the Roman empire, remains hard to find on bookstore and library shelves weeks after its ...

There’s a big old *spoiler alert* hanging over this whole radio show. You’ve been warned! We’re beginning 2016 by confronting what is already its biggest cultural phenomenon. The Force Awakens, the latest installment of Star Wars, on ...

An Open Source experiment here: Chris Lydon kindly handed off the hosting reins to me for a day, for an interview with Leonard Gardner, author of the classic novel Fat City. — Max Larkin. Imagine ...