Open Source with Christopher Lydon

In this podcast, two old friends in and out of journalism talk about the Middle East war, which comes to feel more like a contest in war crimes. Steven Erlanger joins us—he’s the New York Times‘ chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe.

Steven Erlanger.

We start with the terms Steve recently put forth in the Times: the assumptions—or some of the many, many assumptions—that have been upended by this war. The thought, for example, even in Bibi Netanyahu, that Hamas could manage Gaza as an open-air prison, or that Israel is invulnerable to attack.

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We are listening in the dark, after a catastrophe yet to be contained: more than 1,000 Israeli civilians killed in a terrorist invasion from Gaza two weeks ago, thousands more Palestinians dead in a first round of punishment from Israel. “Only the beginning” says Prime Minister Netanyahu, while President Biden, in support, warns him against “all-consuming rage.” In all-consuming anxiety, more than a million Palestinians, under Israeli orders, have fled their homes in Gaza, without a clue where safety will be found.

David Shulman and Hussein Ibish.

What we went to find in conversation was the sound of deep experience in the war zone of the Middle East, and also, in a time of dread, some measure of confidence in restraint.

The question is marriage. The answer in this podcast is Clare Carlisle’s sparkling book, The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life. George Eliot, born Marian Evans, was the towering novelist of Middlemarch, Silas Marner, and more. She put a man’s name on her author’s page. She built very nearly a religion on her foundational ideas about marriage, yet she never married the man she loved and for 24 years called her husband.

Clare Carlisle.

It was an astonishing feat that George Eliot pulled off in Victorian England. It’s another considerable feat of Clare Carlisle’s to fill out for modern readers the question that she and George Lewes were exploring together.

Zadie Smith is a writer who matters, twenty years now after White Teeth, her breakthrough novel when she was just out of college. Her new one is titled The Fraud: fiction that pops in and out of two centuries. It can feel very Victorian and it can feel very 2023. Frauds, trials, disbelief abounding.

Think of Zadie Smith as the current title-holder in the glorious old lineage of English and American fiction, looking both forward and backward, and sideways, in this new novel about her professional family over the generations: literary ancestors and cousins in the game today. It can feel confessional at one moment, comical the next, stone serious before you’re done. Founders of the Victorian novel turn up in The Fraud. At the same time, she’s addressing the extended family of readers and writers today.

It’s Labor Day week, 2023, and Henry David Thoreau is the heart of our conversation. It’s not with him, but it’s driven by his example: American thinking at its best on the matter of how to make a living.

John Kaag.

Have no doubt that the gabby man-about-Concord in the 1850s was a worker: expert surveyor, gardener, as many trades as fingers, he said, not to mention the writer of Walden and Civil Disobedience, of course, and a life journal that came to two million words. We read Henry Thoreau anew for his insight into our work, not his: the often fruitless, driven, underpaid labor of the 2020s, and, oddly enough, our midnight anxiety that ChatGPT could take it all away. This is a conversation in the Harvard Bookstore with our friend the philosopher John Kaag, who co-wrote the pungent and personal handbook titled Henry at Work.

Harry Smith was the oddest duck you never heard of in the art underground: an unsightly, often obnoxious genius. Only the artists knew him, but it was a multitude: Bob Dylan, who sang the roots music that Harry Smith collected; Thelonious Monk, who talked him through the bop era; Patti Smith, the songster—no relation; the poet Allen Ginsberg, who looked after the homeless Harry Smith.

John Szwed.

And now the historian/detective John Szwed has filled in a thousand details in his portrait of the cosmic scholar and catalyst of our culture, Harry Smith. He was a compulsive worker who never took a straight job, a heavy drinker and a druggie, “a social outcast with time on my hands,” he called himself. He was a working artist in film, a mystic and a philosopher who said late in life that he had had the thrill of proving Plato right. Music, he declared, can change the direction of a civilization.

It is said about Noam Chomsky that he has been to the study of language what Isaac Newton was to the study of gravity after the apple hit his head. Chomsky had the “aha!” insight: that the power of language is born in our biology—it’s not acquired. Chomskyan linguistics came to explain how the human species alone got that gift of language.

But it’s not the only reason Professor Chomsky is on our minds this summer of 2023. Frail and quiet approaching his 95th birthday in the fall, he has been for half a century the model of Socrates in the American square: the public pest with questions that sting. So we are listening again to some of our best conversations with this fortress of science and political dissent. This one was in his MIT office in 2017.

In The Country of the Blind, where the writer Andrew Leland is guiding our tour, they do things differently. They have their own identity riddles, their network of heroes and not-so-heroes.

They have their own senses of beauty and of sexual interest. They have their own sore spots when sighted people speak of their disability. They have their own Facebook pages and their own panic attacks—their own wacky humor, as well. They have their own Hall of Fame, back to Homer, among the ancients. They have a sense of their modern selves as strivers, even adventurers, more than victims. They argue fine points among themselves, like whether Lady Justice in front of the courthouse is, or ought to be, blind, and whether a male gaze persists among men who cannot see.

This is the vitalism episode, with the passionate polymath Jackson Lears. His new book is beyond category, and gripping, too: it’s titled Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street.

Jackson Lears.

The historian Jackson Lears is reintroducing us to the energy, enchantment, courage, spontaneity, and longing that have driven the American story uphill and down, to wherever we are in the 2020s—a big question in itself. He gives us a world that’s thrumming with invisible currents of power: something more than animal magnetism, bigger than electricity.

We’re marking the 20th birthday of podcasting in conversation with Erica Heilman, a prize practitioner. Here we are with Erica in Peacham, Vermont, settled in 1776 in the Northeast Kingdom, up toward Canada. We seek out Erica because she’s the great artist emerging in this young medium.

With Erica Heilman in Vermont.

People speak of podcasting as radio on the internet, but it’s really something else. It can feel like pen-paling with strangers, except that the human voice goes far and wide to the world. And Erica’s podcast Rumble Strip shows just how deep it can go. She gets regular Vermonters talking, and then she listens and edits their voices with an almost religious attention and care. What strikes her listeners is the ring of truth, first and last in her work.