http://www.radioopensource.org with Christopher Lydon Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:18:53 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en There is no rescuing this economy from our debt, denial and epic implosions like General Motors and the city of Detroit. The only hope is that our unfinished season of disaster will be inundated (and the new economy floated) by a flood of invention. Click to listen to Chris's ... http://www.radioopensource.org/juan-enriquez-the-next-boom-by-zipcode/ Maybe Newt Gingrich is right -- that Americans are getting used to something like European Socialism in this Bush-to-Obama bankruptcy and bailout era. Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Alfred Gusenbauer. (38 minutes, 17 mb mp3) Alfred Gusenbauer: desperate? serious?Alfred Gusenbauer seems to think so. Austria's hearty 49-year-old ... http://www.radioopensource.org/alfred-gusenbauer-euro-socialism-in-america/ I make two guesses here: that Barack Obama knows almost as little about cricket as I do (which is: zero); and further (much more interesting) that the president has found in Joseph O'Neill's cricket-in-New York novel Netherland a sort of founding text for this turnabout era, this reconciling moment we ... http://www.radioopensource.org/joseph-oneills-netherland-the-novel-of-the-age/ Baskin's Thoreau: nickel first-class (1967)Is it too late to celebrate Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862) with an honest, unblushing American face? Have we laid too much pavement, built too many Cheesecake Factories in too many malls, imprisoned and executed too many harmless rejects and overextended our military rule ... http://www.radioopensource.org/thoreaus-fire-the-spark-of-walden/ Sir Ken Robinson does most of the talking, over breakfast here, on the sketchy matter of "creativity" and the teaching of it. John Maeda, in the gossamer blazer and scarf, is the work in progress. Click to listen to Chris's conversations with John Maeda and Sir Ken Robinson. (24 minutes, ... http://www.radioopensource.org/ken-robinson-john-maeda-creativity-for-breakfast/ Jamaican wisdom: “When a black man becomes President of the USA, pigs will fly. And then what happened? Swine flu.” In Philip Womack's dispatch from Calabash in the London Telegraph, June 2, 2009. Click to listen to Chris's conversations with Melvin Van Peebles, Xu Xi, Robert Pinsky and Kwame ... http://www.radioopensource.org/calabash-2009-a-view-of-us-in-the-age-of-obama/ Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Marlon James. (50 minutes, 23 mb mp3) Poets and writers come to the Calabash literary festival in Jamaica from every corner of the world, and still the overpowering voice in the fiction readings belongs to a native son from down the road in Kingston. ... http://www.radioopensource.org/marlon-james-youre-headless-without-history/ Calabash, the Caribbean literary festival, is an outdoor church of the written word, rocking and resonating on the south coast of Jamaica with the voices of poets and writers from Hong Kong, New York, Barbados, Nigeria, London, San Diego and Boston, among other home addresses. In this first of our ... http://www.radioopensource.org/pico-iyer-in-jamaica-center-of-word-and-world/ Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Aleksandar Hemon (25 minutes, 11 mb mp3) Aleksandar Hemon: funny people, sad talesWhat the Bosnian-American fictionist Aleksandar Hemon loves about being compared to Vladimir Nabokov is not the part about mastering English as a new language -- praise Hemon doesn't feel he's earned quite ... http://www.radioopensource.org/aleksandar-hemon-through-bi-focals-darkly/ Colm Toibin at the James family graves: "hallowed ground" of novels, diaries, sacrifice. "It's very rare."Click to listen to Chris's conversation with novelist Colm Toibin. (44 minutes, 22 mb mp3) After The Master, his breakthrough meditation on Henry James, there's no detaching the Irish novelist Colm Toibin from James' own ... http://www.radioopensource.org/colm-toibin-the-living-spell-of-henry-james/ In this world of overrated pleasures and underrated treasures, as the songwriter said, I'm glad there is George Scialabba. Click to listen to Chris's conversation with George Scialabba (44 minutes, 20 mb mp3) George Scialabba: ideas as life, not a livingIn the din, that is, of over-caffeinated wonks and touts ... http://www.radioopensource.org/george-scialabba-the-untethered-untenured-mind/ Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Reif Larsen (45 minutes, 20 mb mp3) Reif Larsen: stories, pictures and margins!Maybe there are two Reif Larsens. One is, at 29, the precocious savior of the collapsing book business -- the game-changer, anyway, who in a desperately down market got $900,000 for ... http://www.radioopensource.org/reif-larsen-the-making-of-the-spivet-legend/ Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Paul Harding (58 minutes, 26 mb mp3) What is the rock drummer thinking? Well, if he's the dazzling first-novelist Paul Harding of Tinkers, the guy at the drums in the band known as "Cold Water Flat" was channeling Elvin Jones, reinventing time with ... http://www.radioopensource.org/paul-hardings-magical-tinkers/ Click to listen to Chris's conversation with James Der Derian and Catherine Lutz (46 minutes, 21 mb mp3) We're taking two fresh measures here of the United States as military colossus -- in two new books from the Watson Institute this spring. Two common points here: you won't forget these ... http://www.radioopensource.org/angles-on-empire-book-week-at-brown/ Twenty five years ago on a human-rights mission to Uruguay, David Kennedy fashioned the legal argument that freed five tortured prisoners (mostly medical students) from prison under a military dictatorship. The odd part is that Kennedy (now Brown University's vice president for international affairs) came away from his own ... http://www.radioopensource.org/david-kennedy-requiem-for-human-rights/ Click to listen to Chris's conversations with Amitav Ghosh and Robert Coover (17 minutes, 8 mb mp3) Amitav Ghosh & Robert Coover Our conversation draws on the novelist Robert Coover’s exercise of conscience about freedom of expression in the world. Today. Burma was the focus this week of what’s become ... http://www.radioopensource.org/amitav-ghosh-robert-coover-speaking-of-burma/ "What a pleasure," Carlos Fuentes was saying, "to speak praises of the United States again." Click to listen to Chris's conversations with Carlos Fuentes (22 minutes, 10 mb mp3) Mexico's statuesque novelist, the handsomest, best-tailored writer in the world, sounds euphoric in spite of The Crisis -- maybe because, as Brazil's President ... http://www.radioopensource.org/carlos-fuentes-fdr-to-bho-the-new-deal-revisited/ Click to listen to Chris's conversations with David Polonsky, James Der Derian, Amy Kravitz and Keith Brown about "Waltz with Bashir" (31 minutes, 14 mb mp3) David Polonsky: "Waltz with Bashir" is the Israeli war film that broke through to everything but an Oscar. It's the "documentary cartoon" that uses ... http://www.radioopensource.org/waltz-with-bashir-the-art-directors-cut-at-war/ Click to listen to Chris's conversations with James Carroll (56 minutes, 26 mb mp3) "Practicing" -- meaning: James Carroll: radical, pastoral, sacramental ...that through these disciplines, rituals, and searches, we have some prospect of getting better. This, therefore, is practice like the practice of an art or sport. That ... http://www.radioopensource.org/james-carroll-practicing-americanist-catholic/ We are hanging out here at an improvised Clubhouse of Candid Social Democratic Statesmen. Click to listen to Chris's conversations with Ricardo Lagos and Romano Prodi (61 minutes, 28 mb mp3) The drift of the conversation is that the global crisis is a mix of comeuppance and liberation. The crisis ... http://www.radioopensource.org/the-obama-effect-a-rebirth-of-global-politics/ Click to listen to Chris's conversations with Mahmood Mamdani (59 minutes, 25 mb mp3) Who can imagine that a Save Darfur coalition vocally including Al Sharpton ("we know when America comes together, we can stop anything in the world"), Mia Farrow, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Elie Wiesel ("Darfur today ... http://www.radioopensource.org/mahmood-mamdani-you-and-i-got-darfur-wrong/ Henry Siegman: a "fierce urgency"How many setbacks does it take to induce moral clarity, or to create an opportunity? This seems to be the general question at the Harvard-MIT conference on Gaza this week. In the short term, horror seems to freeze hearts and harden old positions. ... http://www.radioopensource.org/after-gaza-the-road-back-from-shame-and-silence/ What if "My President is black" is a reset button, marking the end of a cultural era? Just talking here again about the hip hop pulse of Obama Nation. Tricia Rose says the President of Flow will be (surely ought to be) the death of commercial hip hop... ... http://www.radioopensource.org/the-president-of-flow-and-the-end-of-hip-hop/ Click to listen to Chris's conversations on the global crisis. (37 minutes, 17 mb mp3) 1. Unless the West suddenly gets a new act together, China wins the global crisis -- because it has cash, a production machine, an orderly, top-down system co-designed by Milton Friedman and Stalin, and a ... http://www.radioopensource.org/obama-as-gorbachev-a-regime-in-crisis/ Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Adam Bradley. (47 minutes, 21 mb mp3) Adam Bradley is talking about the President of Flow -- about how 30 years of hip-hop ("the most widely disseminated poetry in the history of the world") laid down the rhyme-and-rhythm track for the Age of Obama. ... http://www.radioopensource.org/obama-hip-hop-the-transracial-drumbeat/ Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Fred Kaplan and James Der Derian. (61 minutes, 28 mb mp3) Fred Kaplan: a short history of bad ideasFred Kaplan, the "War Stories" columnist at Slate, reminds us in his trashing of the Bush-Cheney neo-cons, Daydream Believers, not only that his barbed book title ... http://www.radioopensource.org/fred-kaplan-on-the-neo-cons-daytime-dreamers/ Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore. (45 minutes, 21 mb mp3) Kamensky & Lepore: 2 madwomen, 1 atticBlindspot is a lark, with lessons. First, about sex and slavery in 18th Century Boston, where you didn't expect to find so much of either. And ... http://www.radioopensource.org/blindspot-lepore-and-kamensky-in-olde-boston/ Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Parag Khanna. (29 minutes, 13 mb mp3) Parag KhannaParag Khanna reads and sounds to me like the sane, worldly-wise, long-view alternative to the mainstream bloviators about American power in this new Age of Obama. His breakthrough piece in the New York Times Magazine ... http://www.radioopensource.org/parag-khanna-anxious-in-afghanistan/ Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Jonah Lehrer. (47 minutes, 22 mb mp3) Jonah Lehrer The joy of reading Jonah Lehrer is that he's scientist enough to navigate oceans of brain-science lab reports. He knows the neural pathways where Blink meets Nudge. But he's literature bug and humanist enough to ... http://www.radioopensource.org/jonah-lehrer-brain-science-for-the-rest-of-us/ Click to listen to Dave McKenna playing and talking music on Chris' piano. (87 minutes, 40 mb mp3) Dave McKenna chez Lydon: Jeff Dunn photoDave McKenna called himself a saloon pianist, but nobody else did. The genius Art Tatum heard in Dave a sort of successor. Miles Davis’s great ... http://www.radioopensource.org/dave-mckenna-my-private-collection-of-the-master/