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 blood…

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 …

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 h…

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 Methen…

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’…

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 …

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 …

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, unders…

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.De către Christopher Lydon

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 Re…

There’s a puzzle in this podcast, and it comes with our prize sociologist, Tressie McMillan Cottom. It’s roughly this: How does Kamala Harris, after the Democratic convention in Chicago and for the rest of this campaign, come to look and sound presidential, even though no other president has ever looked like her? Tressie McMillan Cottom. Tressie Mc…

Cornel West is our guest, the preacher-teacher in a tradition of black prophetic fire, as he puts it, the line of holy anger in American history, and this time on the presidential ballot in a variety of states. Cornel West. His will be the first book I want to read on this 2024 campaign, because he will be recounting a moral inquiry into the Americ…

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. I’ve been re-reading her early fiction, particularly Housekeeping and Gilead from 20 years ago, and remembering her conversations with Barack O…

In the strangeness of mid-summer 2024, the cosmopolitan novelist Joseph O’Neill is our bridge between the Republican convention in Milwaukee and the Summer Olympics in Paris. He knows both sides of that gap: politics and global celebrity sports. Joseph O’Neill. He’s famous as an amateur cricket player in New York, of all places, and as a writer abo…

In a forlorn Fourth of July week, in the pit of an unpresidential, anti-presidential campaign year, 2024, we welcome back John Kaag, who writes history with a philosophical flair, never more colorful than in his new account of American Bloods: The Untamed Dynasty that Shaped a Nation. It’s a family saga in three centuries of frontier settlers and f…

Zionism has been the question that keeps changing. Once it was: “How to build a safe home for the Jews of the world?” Today it’s more nearly: “How to build a safe neighborhood around the mighty militarized state of Israel?” Yuval Noah Harari, the Israeli philosopher-historian, put the question bluntly in the Washington Post this spring: “Will Zioni…