Alluring Wreckage: from Robert Polidori’s impressions of Centro Havana, facing the Malecon
Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Architect Mario Coyula. (43 minutes, 20 mb mp3)
Havana by now can be imagined as one city in two...
Our Music Man in Havana: Bobby Carcasses
The polite name for it was folklore, but it was the daily stuff of peoples’ lives. Dancing and music were never very far away, It didn’t mean people were happy. It meant that — not for all Cubans, but for many — dancing was the...
Grand Strategy: Posen on Obama
Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Barry Posen (33 min, 15 MB)
Barry Posen is a very smart, connected foreign-policy “realist” who runs the MIT Security Studies Program. Â He was one of those prized 33 policy types who signed...
In the Obama Moment: Robert Coover
Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Robert Coover. (47 minutes, 22 mb mp3)
Robert Coover: Where we’ve always been…
Robert Coover — in contrast to Rick Moody — would give you the measure of what doesn’t change....
In the Obama Moment: Rick Moody
Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Rick Moody. (36 minutes, 16 mb mp3)
Rick Moody: Rabbit’s kids reach middle age
The novelist Rick Moody is one measure of what has changed. He has been known as a generational figure, the...
In the Obama Moment: Rick Moody
The Indispensable Musician: Barenboim Backstage
Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Daniel Barenboim. (32 minutes, 15 mb mp3)
Daniel Barenboim: every day from scratch
Daniel Barenboim’s conversation starts high as a kite on the fumes of the Wagner he’s been rehearsing, then...
Amitav Ghosh and his Sea of Poppies
Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Amitav Ghosh. (67 minutes, 31 mb mp3)
Amitav Ghosh: on addiction and amnesia
The Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh brings the British Empire to life again — the other side of the story, so to speak,...
Our Better Angel: Chris Adrian
Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Chris Adrian. (44 minutes, 20 mb mp3)
Chris Adrian: Pain’s Artist, Doctor, Minister
The writer Chris Adrian is a medical doctor, a pediatric oncologist, who seems to have known from the beginning...
This Pariah-to-Messiah Moment: John Comaroff
Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with John Comaroff. (52 minutes, 24 mb mp3)
The Obama Moment in America reminds the Chicago anthropologist John Comaroff of the Mandela Moment in his native South Africa in the early 1990s. The whole world...
New Conversation, New Narrative: Stanley Fish
Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Stanley Fish. (41 minutes, 19 mb mp3)
Stanley Fish: Paradise Regained?
Stanley Fish made the campaign’s most audacious — also the most thoughtful — attribution of a certain aspect of...
The Hunter`s Evidence: Carlo Ginzburg
Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with micro-historians Carlo Ginzburg and David Kertzer.
In Carlo Ginzburg`s beautifully extended metaphor, the original public intellectual was the Stone Age hunter:
Carlo Ginzburg: the historian as card...
Thank you, Studs Terkel!
Click to listen to Studs Terkel declaiming on the gap between Walt Whitman’s America and ours.
Campaign ‘08: How was it for you, Jim Fishkin?
James Fishkin’s ideal democracy is ruled by “the voice of the people, when they are thinking.”
Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with James Fishkin (52 minutes, 24 mb mp3)
James Fishkin: a thinking democracy?
A political...
A Longer View of 2008: Historian Gordon Wood
What does a real historian make of this 2008 election that we all (reflexively now) call “historic�
Gordon Wood: a lot of Lincoln in Obama
This is our opportunity with Gordon Wood – ace historian of 18th Century America at Brown, the trump card...
J. S. Bach`s “Habit of Perfectionâ€: Andrew Rangell
Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Andrew Rangell (51:15 minutes, 23.5 mb mp3)
Andy Rangell at his Well-Tempered Clavier
The Bradley Effect is by definition unmeasurable. The recession, or depression, is unfathomable. So what can we...
Poster Art Then and Now: RISD`s John Maeda
Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with John Maeda (20 minutes, 9 mb mp3)
Call this Take 2 on the show of Soviet poster art, through the eyes of a 40-year-old Japanese American graphic artist who just happens to be the new president of the...
Soviet Posters: The Art of Polarization
Click here for slideshow
Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Tom Gleason (21 minutes, 10 mb mp3)
We’re on a digressive walk and talk here through a master collection of those Soviet posters we all half-know and half-recoil from:...
Andrew Bacevich: The End of Exceptionalism
Andrew Bacevich: realism and remorse
Andrew Bacevich incandesces with the rage of a serious professional: with a West Pointer’s scorn for political weasels and embarrassment at incompetent generalship; with a citizen’s horror at the Long...
Bernard Lown`s Prescription for Survival
Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Bernard Lown (33 minutes, 15 mb mp3)
Bernard Lown: Rx for sudden nuclear death
The world-renowned cardiologist Bernard Lown won the Nobel Prize for Peace, (outside his field, so to speak) for putting...
Virtual JFK: Vietnam (and us) if Kennedy had lived
Six crisis decisions forecast the seventh
Find a way to see Virtual JFK — a documentary film chasing a what-if riddle — and have your own presidential debate before choosing between John McCain and Barack Obama.
The question in Virtual JFK...
What We`re Going Through: Anna Deavere Smith
Anna Deavere Smith: grace notes
Anna Deavere Smith works barefoot on stage — the better to walk in the words of the people she’s impersonating; perhaps also to summon Walt Whitman, who said we’d feel his spirit “under your...
The American Exception: Pop Culture Today
On the exceptional power of American culture, what first pops out of my own head is a moment about ten years ago, after narrating Aaron Copland’s A Lincoln Portrait (1942) at the JFK Library in Boston with the Indian conductor George Mathew —...
Candid Capitalist: John Bogle
John Bogle of Vanguard
We asked the legendary investor, John C. Bogle, patriarch of the trillion-dollar Vanguard family of funds, for wisdom that would get us past the weekend in this financial rockslide. He sees an avalanche and three years of severe...
Slavoj Zizek: What is the Question?
The Elvis of the intelligensia, Slavoj Zizek, hot-links in our one-way conversation…
…from nominating George W. Bush (for his trillion-dollar bail-out) to the Communist Party to Kung-Fu Panda,
…from John McCain (”Bush with...
Torture, Part 3: the Philip Gourevitch version
In our third go at this miserable business of sanctioned American torture, Philip Gourevitch turns it around, Pogo-style. We have met the victims, he says in effect, and they are us.
Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Philip Gourevitch...
Philippe Sands` Torture Team
First, the Spencer Tracy “verdict” from “Judgement at Nuremberg” (1961).
Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Philippe Sands (45 minutes, 21 mb mp3)
Who will pay for the illegal abuse of detainees at Guantanamo? If...
An American Exception, in Danger
Chuck Collins is an analyst and agitator around the grand canyon of inequality in American incomes and property.
With Bill Gates Sr., the grandfather of Microsoft, so to speak, and father, till yesterday, of the richest man in the world, Chuck Collins...
Rory Stewart: the Post-Imperialist Poster Hero
Rory Stewart at full stride across Asia
One young Scotsman’s dauntless walk across Afghanistan — at peril from bandits, wolves, dysentery, snow-blindness and Taliban thugs with Kalashnikovs — makes a crackling fine and best-selling...
What`s So Great About Us
Which words and ideas in the definition of exceptional America do you underline?
Is is a bit odd for any nation to be deeply divided, witlessly vulgar, religiously orthodox, militarily aggressive, economically savage, and ungenerous to those in need,...
