We’re with the one-off diplomat, strategist, and historian Chas Freeman.

Chas Freeman.

Call this “Curious Citizen Meets the Most Knowledgeable Straight-Talker Anywhere Near the U.S. Government.” At a turn in the calendar, a transition in American politics, and a global crisis that can feel like a rolling nightmare even after the quick, almost bloodless revolt by Syrians against their own deadly dictatorship. It’s a third year in a row that we’ve asked Freeman for an end-of-the-season checkup on the American empire and the changing rules of world order.

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.

Before we get to Trump 2, we speak of the lingering Biden paradox. The economy was said to be the saving grace of Joe Biden’s short term, specifically the drive to rebuild the industrial base at home. But the same economy was the undoing of his would-be successor, Kamala Harris—specifically, inflation, a largely hidden cost-of-living crisis in food and energy that hurt real people, poor people most of all.

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.

Orhan Pamuk wanted to talk about his hard-cover collection of notebook drawings and diary entries in recent years; I wanted to hear the global writer’s take on the distemper, East and West, in the 2020s. He said he doesn’t talk contemporary affairs, but then he insisted on doing just that: he said that President Erdogan’s authoritarian politics is ruining Turkey, and Donald Trump could be just as dangerous in America. The news about Orhan Pamuk himself, coming out of his notebooks, is that he has been a passionately visual artist all along, keeping an alternative record of his own life in high-color drawings and aphoristic jottings, words and pictures like nothing our listeners have seen.

We’re saluting one man’s century in American music. Roy Haynes was the jazz drummer from Boston who shaped the bebop sound in Harlem 80 years ago. He got nicknamed Snap Crackle for his own crisp, lyrical, almost melodic touch. Over the decades, he accompanied and energized scores of jazz stars: Thelonious Monk, Sarah Vaughan, Bud Powell, Pat Metheny among them.

Michael Haynes and Roy Haynes.

Perhaps Roy Haynes’s deepest satisfaction was introducing himself as he once did to me: “I was Charlie Parker’s favorite drummer.” Roy Haynes died two weeks ago, just four months before his one hundredth birthday. We are remembering him in a Thanksgiving spirit with the historian and jazz biographer Robin Kelley at UCLA.

L-R: Charles Mingus, Roy Haynes, Thelonious Monk, and Charlie Parker at the Open Door, Greenwich Village, September 1953.

We’re with the writer’s writer Joshua Cohen—beyond category, but ever ahead of the game. He’s a realist, a fantasist, a satirist, New Jersey-born and at home in Israel.

Joshua Cohen.

It’s his imagination we need, just to peer through his vision of a changed world and, in particular, two force fields in motion: Donald Trump’s USA and Bibi Netanyahu’s State of Israel, two zones of huge power, not least military force, shadowed by darkness and danger.

Fintan O’Toole has made a brilliant career watching Ireland (his home country) transform itself—its Catholic culture, its vanishing population, its frail economy—into something very modern and profoundly different. And he’s covered our country so well this year. Does he see something of a transformation that’s comparable in the United States?

In the long weekend of solemn suspense before our presidential election in 2024, our guest is Amber. I met Amber on a call-in radio show almost 30 years ago, and we’ve been talking ever since. I call Amber my oracle from underground, the voice of the unknown America, undocumented since she arrived in the United States as a child and an orphan. And she’s been without papers, as she says, ever since, despite our best efforts. When Donald Trump talks about sweeping deportations, if he gets reelected, the face I see is Amber’s.

Richard Powers may just be the bravest big novelist out there. His new book is titled Playground, in which AI plays with the natural world. The question is whether and how the digital transformation might undo the power of death, as in the death of long ago people, the death of species today, even the death of a planet.

Richard Powers.

This is our third trip through a new book of his, aiming his imagination and hard science at the scariest maladies of modern life. First it was Orfeo, about atonal music, then The Overstory, which won the Pulitzer prize and a huge audience, about disappearing tree species. And now Playground, going deep into the breakdown of oceans—also into dementia with Lewy bodies, also fate and friendships, and damaged people who make foolproof thinking machines.

For our shattering Age of October 7, Nathan Thrall has written a double masterpiece, in my reading. Already a Pulitzer Prize-winner for non-fiction, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is a searching work of reporting on the social roots of a traffic catastrophe. It becomes also a moral meditation on whatever it is that cripples human sympathy, understanding, connection. The key word at every level is Occupation, as in Israel’s rule over Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank through decades.

Nathan Thrall.

I read Nathan Thrall’s mind-bending book over a weekend, in a sort of fever, and finished it feeling I’d spent a month in East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank. The question that burns me still is: why hadn’t I felt the force of this story before, even when I wandered through Israel, north and south, from Jerusalem to the Sea of Galilee, a decade or so ago?

The central event in Nathan’s story is a traffic accident with a rickety school bus full of Palestinian kindergarten kids that collided with a trailer truck and blew up on a highway between Jerusalem and Ramallah. A deadly but random crash, it seemed at the time, though in Palestinian memory it was infinitely more grievous. As Nathan Thrall kept hearing, if it had been an Arab kid throwing a stone at Israelis, not a burning bus full of Arab children, Israeli troops would have been on it in seconds. In fact, however, troops and fire trucks at an Israeli settlement nearby all saw the smoking bus and did nothing, letting the fire rage and the children die for more than half an hour.

The most important thing for me in this book was to give a reader a visceral sense of what it is to live in this place, what it is for a Palestinian to live under this system of domination, what it is to live in a highly segregated set of circumstances, segregation that is geographic, that’s separating families, that’s separating parents from children. And it was less important for me that people have a kind of abstract or general understanding of the facts of the situation than that they understand emotionally what it would be like if they were to simply travel there and see it with their own eyes. For a number of years I have witnessed delegations come to Israel-Palestine, often advocacy organizations, organized trips for congressional staffers or parliamentarians and others. Often it’s a week-long trip with six days in Israel and half a day in the West Bank. And the half a day that they spend in the West Bank is by far the most important part of the trip because it is a gut punch. They go there and within a couple of hours on their own, they are making comparisons to Jim Crow and apartheid in South Africa. And that feeling stays with them.

– Nathan Thrall in conversation with Chris Lydon.

We’re in Climate Week 2024, with the indispensable, independent activist and authority Bill McKibben.

We catch him packing, in Vermont, for what’s far from his first climate rodeo in New York.

We’re in our very own post-debate spin room, taking the measure of Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and of ourselves, as the voters they were pitching. Did we get what we expected? Did we get what we wanted?

Fintan O’Toole, on the line from Ireland, is our guest and guide. He’s much admired now for his tart reporting on American life in the New York Review of Books. Fintan O’Toole built his reputation as a theatre critic in Dublin and to this day in New York. We’re asking him to review our presidential debate this week as live drama.