50 episodes

Open Source is the world’s longest-running podcast. Christopher Lydon circles the big ideas in culture, the arts and politics with the smartest people in the world. It’s the kind of curious, critical, high-energy conversation we’re all missing nowadays.



Be part of the action: leave a voice message to be played on the air; get in touch over Facebook or Twitter; or email us – info@radioopensource.org with show ideas, advice, requests and high-quality criticism.

Open Source with Christopher Lydon Christopher Lydon

    • Arts
    • 4.9 • 12 Ratings

Open Source is the world’s longest-running podcast. Christopher Lydon circles the big ideas in culture, the arts and politics with the smartest people in the world. It’s the kind of curious, critical, high-energy conversation we’re all missing nowadays.



Be part of the action: leave a voice message to be played on the air; get in touch over Facebook or Twitter; or email us – info@radioopensource.org with show ideas, advice, requests and high-quality criticism.

    Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets

    Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets

    We’re going to school on Taylor Swift, in the Harvard course. And all we know is, as her song says, we’re enchanted to meet her. Taylor Swift comes out of literature but she’s more than ...

    • 50 min
    Of Melville and Marriage

    Of Melville and Marriage

    We speak of the mystery of Herman Melville, or the misery of Melville, the American masterpiece man. For Moby-Dick alone, he is our Shakespeare, our Dante—though he fled the writing of prose for the last ...

    • 36 min
    Against Despair

    Against Despair

    The subject, in a word, is despair, both public and private. The poets and spiritual seekers Christian Wiman and his wife Danielle Chapman are back to goad us, each with a new book. Their project ...

    • 56 min
    The Rebel’s Clinic

    The Rebel’s Clinic

    Frantz Fanon is our interest in this podcast. The man had charisma across the board in a short life and a long afterlife. A black man from the Caribbean, he went to France, first as ...

    • 44 min
    Algorithmic Anxiety

    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.” ...

    • 42 min
    The Humbling of Harvard

    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 ...

    • 39 min

Customer Reviews

4.9 out of 5
12 Ratings

12 Ratings

Gibson76 ,

Consistently thought provoking.

One of the best online offerings there is.

Top Podcasts In Arts

Sentimental Garbage
Justice for Dumb Women
You Beauty
Mamamia Podcasts
Nothing To Wear
Mamamia Podcasts
The Shameless Book Club
Shameless Media
99% Invisible
Roman Mars
The Moth
The Moth

You Might Also Like

Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature)
Robert Harrison
The New Yorker Radio Hour
WNYC Studios and The New Yorker
The Ezra Klein Show
New York Times Opinion
On the Media
WNYC Studios
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
WNYC Studios and The New Yorker
The Nation Podcasts
The Nation Magazine

More by Radio Open Source