Open Source with Christopher Lydon

We’re between breakdown and breakup, or maybe between the AI monster and human extinction. Those are the rough choices that the all-purpose American writer Kurt Andersen is offering us in his vast portrait of a broken country as a sort of bad marriage. He’s written a novel called The Breakup. Is the USA beyond repair? he’s asking us. Could a national divorce be better than the country we’ve got, on its 250th birthday, no less? Kurt Andersen. We’re taking up his book, a novel about a married couple in trouble inside a nation in trouble. But we have to note the moment we’re in, mid-September, when the titans of our technology have given us, in effect, apocalypse week in the news, warning us that artificial intelligence—the way they’re building it—runs a measurable risk of killing the human species, all of us, forever, in the next 10 years. Kurt Andersen is a one of a kind, tireless noticer, a serious funny man, too, founder of Spy magazine in another lifetime, also Studio 360 on public radio, and he’s an old hand inside the dark side of AI. The post The Breakup appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

We’re savoring a glorious story we thought we knew in the long ordeal of racial justice in America. It was the singer Marian Anderson’s moment in 1939, after the Daughters of the American Revolution barred the black contralto from their Constitution Hall in Washington. With President and Eleanor Roosevelt’s encouragement, Marian Anderson decided instead to sing in front of the Abraham Lincoln Memorial. Anthony Tommasini. 75,000 people came to listen outdoors and Marian Anderson opened the concert with that anthem of liberty, “My Country Tis of Thee.” It’s the crowning moment in our guest Anthony Tommasini’s book Voice of a Century, as the maestro Arturo Toscanini wanted to call her. The post Voice of a Century appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

We’re at sea this time on our own Odyssey, a voyage between the ancient epic that refuses to die and Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster movie version for us in this summer of 2026. It’s the story of course we all half-know about the wily old Greek warrior-king coming home ten years late from a horrible war against Troy, in maybe 1200 BC. Daniel Mendelsohn. Nobody knows the grip of it all better than our guest Daniel Mendelsohn, who sailed the route Odysseus took with his 81-year-old father and made an intimate mission of family discovery in it. He’s published his own translation of Homer’s whole poem, and now he’s reviewing this summer’s big movie for the New York Review of Books. The post Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

We’re high as a kite on World Cup football. The final test, coming Sunday, is down to Spain and Argentina. My question is whether this frenzied global contest might actually be rescuing our species from itself? Our guests are soccer coach Michael LaVigne and the sports broadcaster Seamus Malin. We’re looking to confirm my intuition that this beautiful game, as Brazilians were first to call it, is humankind at its best—and maybe even a new model of civilization. The post The World’s Sport appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

We’re still in the Fourth of July spirit around the 250th birthday of our nation, hooked in particular by one grand American historian’s question to it: is the United States on the road to a new civil war? David Blight. David Blight, Sterling Professor of History at Yale, has been our guest before—on his Pulitzer-winning biography of Frederick Douglass: The Prophet of Freedom. And now he’s our biographer of the American experiment, looking ahead by looking back. The experiment, he says, is in deep, maybe critical trouble. And here’s more from David Blight on the U.S. in crisis—this is a recent talk at the American Academy in Berlin: The post After the Fireworks appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.