Open Source

Christopher Nolan's Odyssey 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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 43:56 — 60.4MB) | Embed May 15, 2025 Download Queue Comment Tweet Share Email Capitalism and Its Critics We’re staring down the several crises in our economy—and recalling the grand old joke that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. John Cassidy.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 47:28 — 65.2MB) | Embed February 13, 2025 Download Queue Comment Tweet Share Email Muskology In the fog of Trump Two, we’re asking: what’s new? The co-presidency with Elon Musk is surely new, also the raging battle of exotic ideas among techno-optimists and libertarian anarcho-capitalists at war with the very idea of popular democracy and republican government. Further question: do citizens have to follow the action?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:58 — 49.4MB) | Embed January 30, 2025 Download Queue Comment Tweet Share Email Trump Part II We’re picking up the pieces of our country in the age of Trump, Part II. Is the USA still here? Is it still us? Kurt Andersen. Cue Kurt Andersen, with his finger in the wind.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 41:09 — 56.6MB) | Embed December 12, 2024 Download Queue Comment Tweet Share Email Blyth is Back We’re with the celebrated Scots-accented people’s economist—celebrated above all when he’s home with the locals in his own old pub in Dundee, settling all the arguments there are around money and power, and populism on the way to plutocracy in the comeback reign of Donald Trump. Mark Blyth.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:38 — 49.0MB) | Embed December 5, 2024 Download Queue Comment Tweet Share Email Not Your Standard Book Chat We’re with the Nobel Prize novelist from Turkey, Orhan Pamuk. It’s not your standard book chat: closer to head-butting than conversation, as you’ll hear. But it’s polite enough and nobody gets hurt. Chris and Orhan Pamuk.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:04 — 52.3MB) | Embed August 1, 2024 Download Queue Comment Tweet Share Email American Believer The novelist Marilynne Robinson has a nearly constitutional role in our heads, our culture by now. She’s the artist we trust to observe the damaged heart of America, and to tell us what we’re going through.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 47:44 — 65.6MB) | Embed April 11, 2024 Download Queue Comment Tweet Share Email 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 Union. And then she famously covered the trial in Israel of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi minister of death.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 42:37 — 58.6MB) | Embed February 1, 2024 Download Queue Comment Tweet Share Email 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.” What is the chance that devices that know your likes and dislikes better than you do are ever going to surprise you or teach you?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 39:53 — 36.6MB) | Embed January 18, 2024 Download Queue Comment Tweet Share Email 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 didn’t seem to know it was playing: a high-stakes free for all, it turned out to be, with poisonous words like plagiarism and anti-Semitism threaded...