Against Despair

FromOpen Source with Christopher Lydon

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Against Despair

FromOpen Source with Christopher Lydon

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Length:

57 minutes

Released:

Mar 1, 2024

Format:

Podcast episode

Description

The subject, in a word, is despair, both public and private. The poets and spiritual seekers Christian Wiman and his wife Danielle Chapman are back to goad us, each with a new book. Their project ...

Released:

Mar 1, 2024

Format:

Podcast episode

Titles in the series (47)

Christopher Lydon in conversation on arts, ideas and politics

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Cruel Britannia: George Orwell said, “It’s so easy to be witty about the British Empire.” As in the throwaway line that English people had conquered the world in a fit of absentmindedness. No big deal. But that ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
50 min listen
A Just Cause: Talking time around the war in Ukraine may be approaching. This radio hour may be a moment in that trend: reaching out for strong views we hadn’t heard, in head-on disagreement about the morality and ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
51 min listen
The Maelstrom of Geopolitics: A briefing session this hour from our strategic special branch, which is to say: the mind of Chas Freeman in the maelstrom of geopolitics. If President Obama had been given his first choice to sketch ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
50 min listen
Humane Wartime: Try a simple riddle, about the time and climate we Americans are living in, today: Do we call it (a) wartime or (b) peacetime? Tense time, for sure, and there’s war in the headlines. But ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
51 min listen
The Historians’ Diagnosis: The conversation about a world in disarray feels urgent, elusive, etherized. Who will name this crisis and the roots of it: war, tribalism, maldistributed money, and pain, exceptionalism for rich people, maybe, for a rich ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
51 min listen
Polycrisis: Finally, there’s a word for it: the polycrisis, to describe the multiple messes we’re in. Our guest the historian Adam Tooze says it’s a polycrisis when old crises like war, weather, and disease are breeding ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
50 min listen
The New Right: The hatching of a New Right Republican party, under fire, is the substance of this radio hour. It was simpler in Gilbert and Sullivan when the song said: every boy and every gal that’s born ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
50 min listen
Silent Spring, 60 Years Later: How’s to rescue the Earth from us people? Rachel Carson’s way – 60 years ago – was to write a book, and call it Silent Spring. She’d been a shy but defiant biologist in government ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
50 min listen
Norman Mailer Turns 100: “Don’t forget” is a mantra in our shop: “don’t forget” specially the characters, the moments that made us. Norman Mailer is the spirit-seeker and sometimes reckless truth-teller we are un-forgetting in this podcast. We are ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
38 min listen
Thank You, Patrick Lydon: This is family talk in rural Ireland toward the end of an extraordinary life. My brother Patrick was the youngest of six, the saint among us and always the brightest company. Two winters ago he’d ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
32 min listen
Sonny Rollins: Saxophone Colossus: There’s nobody quite like Sonny Rollins in the All-American sound and story of jazz. He was a teenager in Harlem in the 1940s when major players caught on to a rising star. Steadily over the ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
39 min listen
A Radical American Life: Lydia Moland is reminding us that when present company in American public life comes up short, the ancestors of American democracy and spirit are lurking out there, in abundance and power to reset our judgment ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
35 min listen
Multipolarity: Our unipolar moment may be remembered as the United States’ turn as “king of the hill,” two decades or so between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rocket rise of China’s economy. What ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
50 min listen
Taiwan, the World-Class Puzzle: Next on the global agenda comes Taiwan, the island off China once known as Formosa, meaning shapely, beautiful. Today it’s a puzzle with moving parts: a not-quite nation of 24 million people that has two ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
50 min listen
Failing Intelligence by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
53 min listen
Liner Notes for the Revolution: This show was originally broadcast on July 15, 2021. We know their songs, not so much what they were going through, those Black women artists who wrote and sang so many anthems of American life: ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
51 min listen
Origin Stories: This show was originally broadcast on December 5, 2019. Origin stories can be educated guesses, or leaps of collective imagination as to who we are, how we got to this point. The Big Bang is ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
50 min listen
This Other Eden: Out of the blue a decade ago, Paul Harding won a huge popular following, first, and then the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for his modern Maine sort of folk tale called Tinkers. His new one ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
35 min listen
A Working Life with Eileen Myles: The line is intoned now as a sort of chapter heading in our literary-artistic history: Eileen Myles grew up in Boston/Cambridge and moved to New York in 1974 to become a poet. Chris with Eileen ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
32 min listen
Prudent Statecraft: John Quincy Adams was the model president in the early republic who declared that the United States “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” But “go abroad” we did, as the republic became ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
51 min listen
How William James Can Save Your Life: William James, thinker and writer, was known widely in the nineteenth century as the adorable genius who invented American pragmatism. He was a brain scientist, student of war and religion, a philosopher who can feel ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
39 min listen
It Ain’t Over: This week: a show from our archive from The Connection days. “It ain’t over till it’s over.” That’s Yogi Berra’s ageless line, in the title now of a summer hit movie just to prove Yogi ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
43 min listen
Happy Birthday to Us: 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 ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
41 min listen
Noam Chomsky: American Socrates: 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: ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
20 min listen
Henry at Work: 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 ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
36 min listen
The Country of the Blind: 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 ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
42 min listen
Blyth Returns: We’re back in the pub a year later with Mark Blyth, the outspoken political economist at Brown University—which means he works and talks and thinks at the intersection of big money and big power. In ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
39 min listen
Frozen Moments with Ed Koren: Here’s a last burst of wind in our sails, a last gentle guffaw, from a listener we came to adore: the cartoonist Ed Koren. You knew Ed Koren, too, for those furry, quizzical characters he ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
33 min listen
Time’s Echo: The question that resurfaces in a time of horror may be what remains when memory is wiped out, when the unspeakable is left unspoken, in someone’s hope, perhaps, that it’ll be forgotten? Where does history ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
51 min listen
George Eliot’s Marriage Story: 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 ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
41 min listen

More Episodes from Open Source with Christopher Lydon

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American Disorder: The key battle taking place in this American crisis year of 2024 is happening in our heads, according to the master historian Richard Slotkin. He’s here to tell us all that we’re in a 40-year ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
43 min listen
Lessons from Hannah Arendt: We’re calling on Hannah Arendt for the twenty-first century—could she teach us how to think our way out of the authoritarian nightmare? Arendt wrote the book for all time on Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
48 min listen
Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets: We’re going to school on Taylor Swift, in the Harvard course. And all we know is, as her song says, we’re enchanted to meet her. Taylor Swift comes out of literature but she’s more than ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
51 min listen
Of Melville and Marriage: We speak of the mystery of Herman Melville, or the misery of Melville, the American masterpiece man. For Moby-Dick alone, he is our Shakespeare, our Dante—though he fled the writing of prose for the last ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
37 min listen
The Rebel’s Clinic: Frantz Fanon is our interest in this podcast. The man had charisma across the board in a short life and a long afterlife. A black man from the Caribbean, he went to France, first as ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
44 min listen
Algorithmic Anxiety: The question is how digital tech picks and chooses the content that comes to your phones and your brain, or, as Kyle Chayka puts it in a brave new book Filterworld: “how algorithms flattened culture.” ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
43 min listen
The Humbling of Harvard: Oldest and far the richest among American universities, Harvard is the apex, in some sense, of American intellectualism, and it will be a long time figuring out just how it lost a big game it ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
40 min listen
The Most Secret Memory of Men: The only way into this podcast is a long leap headfirst into postcolonial French fiction, of all things, and a novel titled The Most Secret Memory of Men. Our guest is the toast of literary ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
48 min listen
The Revolutionary: On the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, we’re face to face, almost, with an American political type that’s gone missing in our third century. Check this resume: he’s principled, he’s prepared, a two-fisted ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
34 min listen
Israel and Palestine Across History: With the historian John Judis we are looking for a longer timeline in the crisis of Gaza, Israel, Palestine. It has been, in fact, a century of layered conflict between Arabs and Jews, two peoples ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
45 min listen
Time’s Echo: The question that resurfaces in a time of horror may be what remains when memory is wiped out, when the unspeakable is left unspoken, in someone’s hope, perhaps, that it’ll be forgotten? Where does history ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
51 min listen
Chas Freeman on a Kaleidoscopic Turn: Just a month into the ferociously brutal and reckless war in Israel-Palestine, on what feels like a hinge of history—outcomes wildly uncertain—our refuge is Chas Freeman, the American diplomat, strategist, and historian. We call Chas ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
43 min listen
Upended Assumptions: 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 ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
38 min listen
War and Dread: 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 ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
56 min listen
George Eliot’s Marriage Story: 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 ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
41 min listen
Zadie Smith on The Fraud: 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 ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
31 min listen
Henry at Work: 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 ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
36 min listen
The Cosmic Scholar: 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 ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
39 min listen
Noam Chomsky: American Socrates: 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: ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
20 min listen
The Country of the Blind: 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 ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
42 min listen
Animal Spirits: 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. ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
34 min listen
Happy Birthday to Us: 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 ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
41 min listen
Blyth Returns: We’re back in the pub a year later with Mark Blyth, the outspoken political economist at Brown University—which means he works and talks and thinks at the intersection of big money and big power. In ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
39 min listen
It Ain’t Over: This week: a show from our archive from The Connection days. “It ain’t over till it’s over.” That’s Yogi Berra’s ageless line, in the title now of a summer hit movie just to prove Yogi ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
43 min listen
A Working Life with Eileen Myles: The line is intoned now as a sort of chapter heading in our literary-artistic history: Eileen Myles grew up in Boston/Cambridge and moved to New York in 1974 to become a poet. Chris with Eileen ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
32 min listen
Failing Intelligence by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
53 min listen
Frozen Moments with Ed Koren: Here’s a last burst of wind in our sails, a last gentle guffaw, from a listener we came to adore: the cartoonist Ed Koren. You knew Ed Koren, too, for those furry, quizzical characters he ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
33 min listen
How William James Can Save Your Life: William James, thinker and writer, was known widely in the nineteenth century as the adorable genius who invented American pragmatism. He was a brain scientist, student of war and religion, a philosopher who can feel ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
39 min listen
Sonny Rollins: Saxophone Colossus: There’s nobody quite like Sonny Rollins in the All-American sound and story of jazz. He was a teenager in Harlem in the 1940s when major players caught on to a rising star. Steadily over the ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
39 min listen
This Other Eden: Out of the blue a decade ago, Paul Harding won a huge popular following, first, and then the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for his modern Maine sort of folk tale called Tinkers. His new one ... by Open Source with Christopher Lydon
35 min listen

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Discover this podcast and so much more

Against Despair

Against Despair

Description

Titles in the series (47)

More Episodes from Open Source with Christopher Lydon

Related podcast episodes