THIS WEEK'S SHOW: January 12
A lesson in corruption, scandal, and post-truth democracy—Italian-style
Past Shows
Beethoven at the Piano
This show originally aired December 2014.We’re getting the Beethoven fundamentals, as never before, at my own piano. At a short safe distance from the keyboard, I’m learning, among other things: As volcanic was the man’s ...
Post-Democracy in America
"Donald Trump is a post-democratic leader. The liberal democratic model—of which Obama was the last president—is completely dead."
Bob Dylan, The Poet
Bob Dylan, the poet, has been singing more than 50 years, but have you ever really stopped to listen to the words? Now that Dylan is a Nobel giant of literature, we asked Christopher Ricks, professor of English ...
Trump in the World
Trump says he knows more than the generals, so this week we’re talking to the colonels about the future of U.S. foreign policy.Col. Lawrence Wilkerson joins us to try and sort through all the noise and ...
Swingin’ with Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith is the writer who likes to say she learns more from dancers – Fred Astaire to Michael Jackson, Baryshnikov, Beyoncé – than from writers and a young lifetime of reading. Author of the ...
Normalize This!
Last week, the election of Donald J. Trump came as a thunderclap. This week, the echoes are still ringing in the ears of the American polity. Reports of the demise of the Republican party turned ...
Seeing Red in Trump’s America
So! It happened. Hillary Clinton failed. Donald J. Trump will become the 45th of the United States. His election marks an earthquake in American politics – one that the seismic monitors of Big Media political pundits, data ...
Class Conflict
Here in Massachusetts, in the birthplace of Horace Mann’s free American ‘common school’, an intense battle over charter schools — one with outsized national stakes — will be decided at the ballot box next week. ...Etcetera
August 25, 2016
DFW, FTW: Life In the Internet Age
This week sees the opening of The End of the Tour, an updated My Dinner with Andre about David Foster Wallace’s book tour in 1996 for his immeasurable novel, Infinite Jest.On that tour Wallace stopped by ...
October 26, 2015
Kailash Satyarthi: A Union Label In Every...
The U.S. labor force (officially 157 million) is a little smaller now than the pool of impoverished child laborers in the world (168 million) in Kailash Satyarthi’s provocative account. More than half the child workers ...
September 28, 2015
Thomas Mallon’s Real Reagan
“He’s still winking at us,” Thomas Mallon says of our 40th president. Ronald Reagan’s essential quality (as official biographer Edmund Morris discovered with some embarrassment) was being “ungraspable.” In Finale, Mallon’s panoramic fiction of “the ...
August 19, 2013
Albert Murray, 1916 – 2013
Of the incomparably stylish, argumentative and, in the end, authoritative Sage of Harlem, it surely could be argued that his “Stomping the Blues” (1976) is still the most provocative (and without question best illustrated) book ...
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What in James Joyce's Ulysses was so dangerously obscene? And why were the novel's greatest champions women? | Hear More
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