Open Source with Christopher Lydon

We’re unearthing a model writer for an anxious America. Dwight Macdonald was his own eccentric voice through the Cold War politics and culture of the 1950s and 60s. He was a peacenik at heart, otherwise unpredictable, a New York intellectual of his own school. So in this podcast, we’re just reading Dwight Macdonald aloud with John Summers, who has edited a collection he calls Atrocities of the Mind: Essays on Violence and Politics in the American Century. John Summers. The premise in our conversation is that a certain urgent music in Dwight Macdonald’s prose still sounds clearly enough for a world that has nobody with quite like his range today. Who was Dwight MacDonald—the pedigreed populist, sometime Trotskyite, hard left, who came to call himself a conservative anarchist? The post America’s Orwell appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

We’re entranced in Molly Crabapple’s reanimation of the Jewish Labour Bund in Europe and Russia, of a century ago. Yiddish Socialism was a nickname. You could plausibly describe that old Bund as forgotten but not gone in the wider world today. The question may be whether the Bund’s humane ideals will have another chance against the lawlessness and cruelty of the 2020s. Molly Crabapple. We know Molly Crabapple as a one-off writer and artist, pens and paintbrushes at the ready, a sort of global muckraker in the rough places of the world. Last time she was here, she was just back from civil war in Syria. This time, she’s just back from unearthing history, World War I time, through an epidemic of hellish and deadly pogroms in pre-revolutionary Russia. The Bund, created in Poland, was a tough-minded working-class alliance demanding full rights for Jews at home. It was irreconcilably embattled against the rising young Zionist movement that would establish a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Molly Crabapple took it on herself—and learned the Yiddish language as part of the job—to research and write the whole story of the Jewish Bund: the old politics in it, the modern emotions that it still stirs, starting with the restored memory of her own family. And she’s made a monumental book of it under the title Here Where We Live Is Our Country. The post Here Where We Live Is Our Country appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

We’re talking about the new magic of money, or Musk-ism, as our guests call it. Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff are historians of different sorts—historians of the future. Oddly enough, their hair-raising new book is not really about the man Elon Musk or his famous money. It’s about the sci-fi system that he is creating to trap the rest of us inside it, as Jill Lepore puts it. Chris, Ben Tarnoff, and Quinn Slobodian. Techno sovereignty is the buzzword that rules the walled gardens of Musk World, private empires of far reaching wealth and power. Musk himself models the new class of emperors. Funny part is that the last time we spoke with Ben and Quinn, Elon Musk and his chainsaw were modeling just the opposite: his own ruthless destructive power in the chaotic post-democratic age of Donald Trump. A year and a half later, Donald Trump can look like a declining force compared with Elon Musk on the rise, at the dawn of a settled down, largely secret, post-capitalist or neo-capitalist age of Elon Musk. The post Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

We’re tuning in on the Pope and the President in what can sound like a historic showdown. Are we in the first rounds of an epic struggle between church and empire? Are we perhaps looking more nearly at two schoolboys sizing each other up? Will we get a moral test here finally around modern warfare without end? Paul Elie. Paul Elie writes wonderfully in The New Yorker about this very odd confrontation. “The first American pope is also a wartime pope,” he writes. His predecessor, Pope Francis, had observed a third world war in pieces all around us as he, the pope, was dying. And yet now, here we are in a war with Iran, clearly a new war of choice launched by an American president, in coordination with the Israeli prime minister, and Pope Leo, still new to the job, seems driven to do something about this. He’s not talking about strategic cards in his hand. He’s speaking rather of a moral necessity to make peace. And you could wonder: isn’t it about time? The post The Pope and the President appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

It’s Jackie Robinson Day, 2026, when every player in Major League Baseball wears the immortal Dodger’s number 42. Listeners, if you think you know the Jackie Robinson story, think again with us around the most affecting sports book I can remember reading. It’s titled Kings and Pawns, about two all-time star black athletes, both of them race pioneers, heroes of conscience. Howard Bryant. First, Jack Roosevelt Robinson, who integrated big league baseball in 1947, and then the all-American college football star and singer supreme Paul Robeson, whose earth-shaking bass baritone voice made history on opera stages around the world. Howard Bryant has written a book of tragic ironies and overpowering interest. Maybe the deeper subject then and now is: how does a black man make it into the Hall of Fame of American heroes, well beyond baseball? And at what price? The post Kings and Pawns appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.