We’re going off script out here in the afterlife, in the imagination of the triple-threat novelist George Saunders. He’s eminent as a writer of stories and novels, as a critical reader, and as a teacher of modern fiction, and how to write it in the great Chekhov short story tradition. He’s also a man and an artist in a moment of ecstasy that he’s recently written about in his newsletter, describing a moment of overwhelming joy and sense of connection that reminded me of Emerson finding himself suddenly, he wrote, “glad to the brink of fear.”

Vigil, the latest novel by George Saunders.

He was looking into a puddle by the road and feeling an incredible thrill of insight into daily life. And George Saunders was writing about something like it about his last few days—on Stephen Colbert’s show, seeing best friends in New York, former students also in Philadelphia.

The post George Saunders on Life and the Afterlife appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Pico Iyer is the global citizen and now, inadvertently, the movie star—in the winter’s hot movie, Marty Supreme. Across a hundred conversations over the years, we thought we knew everything about him, the transcendentalist Buddhist who grew up with the Dalai Lama as a sort of third parent in and out of his father’s house.

He’s been the personal friend, almost, of our transcendentalists in this neighborhood, Emerson and Thoreau. He wrote a book about having the great novelist Graham Greene in his head. So who is this guy with the cameo role in Marty Supreme, standing athwart Timothée Chalamet’s raging drive to be the ping-pong champion of the universe?

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We’re getting our heads around the invasion of Venezuela and what feels like a rough new rule book for the so-called world order. Cue Greg Grandin, the hemispheric historian who wrote that big book America, América just in time last summer.

Greg Grandin.

The big theme in Grandin’s book is the very dicey business of sovereignty historically between North and South America. And Donald Trump has been teasing at that instability of borders and labels ever since he renamed the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf Of America.” He’s teasing us again this week when he says Cuba could be next, even Colombia on the list for invasion or regime change.

The post Age of Hemispheric Empires appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

We’re talking about capitalism this time, trying to reckon the power of big money to shape—even rule—the human species. Capitalism is the one-word name given to a thousand-year-old force. It’s not a science or doctrine or mere politics. It’s a thoroughly human and ever-changing arrangement of affairs that can produce rapid and vast expansion of wealth in private hands.

Sven Beckert.

And Capitalism is the title of our guest Sven Beckert’s new thousand-page history of the whole thing. A thousand pages covering a thousand years. The opening line in his book is, “We live in a world created by capitalism.” How did it happen? Is it still happening, for better or worse? Did it have to happen?

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We’re rediscovering John Updike in the afterlife of a great writer. The Selected Letters of John Updike, just published, come to 800 pages of unguarded messages to his wives and lovers, to his mother and his editors. We’re turning to his kids for a fresh measure of the artist who cracked open the sexual revolution of the 1960s and lived it his own way.

Miranda Updike, Michael Updike, Elizabeth Updike Cobblah, and David Updike. Photograph by Jameson Sempey, Reading Eagle, courtesy of A.A. Knopf.

Couples was his breakthrough novel and bestseller in 1968. His second son, Michael, and his second daughter, Miranda, were adolescent witnesses to the story. We’re gathered in Michael’s house on the North Shore of Boston, the heart of Updike Country, to resurface the glow in John Updike’s prose and the pleasure in his company.

The post John Updike’s Vocation appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope is Brandon Terry’s long-awaited personal and philosophical case for struggle and optimism in the long civil rights movement in our country. It’s a map of our minds and our memories, a catalog of our judgments and feelings around an epic era in American history that isn’t over. I take it as a brave and deeply thoughtful response to the charge leveled by the great W.E.B. Du Bois that the real plot of the civil rights story got lost or suppressed long ago.

Brandon Terry.

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What is breaking down or what’s broken when the governor of Illinois says he’s being invaded by the National Guard of Texas under President Trump’s orders, or when the president is dueling with Oregon and California over policing a public safety crisis that mostly disappeared five years ago in Portland, Oregon? What does it tell us that a senior federal judge in Boston declared in a formal opinion last week that the Trump team is bent on crushing free speech by wayward prosecutions, if only for their power to chill and intimidate?

Nancy Gertner.

The questions keep coming. Nancy Gertner is our guest to consider them. She’s overqualified by a celebrated career as a trial lawyer, then as a federal judge, and now retired from the court as a private practitioner again, independent and outspoken about a world that she knows intimately.

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Call this Mrs. Dalloway’s podcast. We’re reading classic fiction from a century ago for light on the strangeness of the world in our day, or maybe just for relief reading a great old book. The dazzling young critic Merve Emre is our guest and our guide to Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece, Mrs.Dalloway, from 1925. The novel is a day in the life, or a slideshow in the mind, of a rich, ruling class lady in London, volubly in love with life, out shopping for flowers on Bond Street on a morning in June for a party she’ll be giving at home that evening.

Merve Emre.

But Mrs. Dalloway is also a novel of ruin alongside rapture. A second major character, Septimus Smith, is a veteran of World War I. Broken by combat and shell shock, considering suicide because, in his madness, he supposes that only killing himself would allow him to honor life as it should be lived.

The post Mrs. Dalloway at 100 appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

We’re with the cultural historian Robin D.G. Kelley at UCLA, who has the nerve to ask: where have our thinkers gone in Trump time? Not the experts or the influencers, but the grander minds who might tell us where our country went.

James Baldwin and Noam Chomsky (by Susan Coyne).

Robin hooked us with his piece in the Boston Review on “The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Fascism and Genocide.” Whose job is it to tell us the truth in what can feel like a sort of waking nightmare or a revolution going backward? Will we ever see Benjamin Franklin’s common-sense republic again? Or put it another way: where’s Noam Chomsky, or James Baldwin for that matter? Will we ever again meet an unflinching truth-teller about our real condition in this autumn of 2025?

The post Where Are the Intellectuals? appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

We’re in the fourth summer of hot warfare between Russia and Ukraine. It’s a cruel and deadly war that doesn’t know how to stop.

Anatol Lieven.

Our guest to offer a helping hand is the journalist and analyst that I’ve leaned on heavily, Anatol Lievin, an esteemed correspondent for the Financial Times in London, now at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington, with his eyes on Eurasia in general.

The post Russia and Ukraine in 2025 appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

We’re grappling with the prize historian Greg Grandin’s take on the making of the modern world. There’s a 600-page version in hard covers, but also a two-word version in his title, America, América, code for his main point: that the story of global USA today has Latin America woven all through it.

Greg Grandin.

It’s a history of brutal conquest, some discovered ideals and values through five centuries, and maybe an exceptional all-American hybrid, after all, into today. In the roots, of course, were two colonial empires, Spanish and British, rivals and partners, reenacting over the decades their past far into the future.

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