collectik-evan's playlist

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: What's your breaking point? (11/29/08)

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 13:48:39 -0500

How long will you stand in line? Or wait on hold? This week, guest host Jonathan Torrens and crew are looking at "breaking points," and how far we can be pushed before we say, "We're mad as hell, and we're not going to take it anymore!" Plus, we look at our "best worst" moments - that point that seemed horrible at the time, but ultimately lead to something good.

Open Source: The Indispensable Musician: Barenboim Backstage

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 14:56:18 -0500

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 lands with both feet on the Middle East. “The situation in the Middle East has never been so bad,” [...]

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: Sending you some brotherly (and sisterly) love (11/22/08)

Sat, 22 Nov 2008 21:20:21 -0500

Siblings. Even if you don't have them, they're running your life - whether or not you know it (or like it). So this week, guest host Jonathan Torrens and crew explore our complicated relationships with our brothers and sisters.

Open Source: Amitav Ghosh and his Sea of Poppies

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 06:32:03 -0500

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, from the other side of the world. If we’d had his wondrous new novel, [...]

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: We're getting grounded at the airport! (11/15/08)

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 04:21:25 -0500

We're getting grounded at the airport. Between arrivals, departures, reunions, and farewells, the airport is a hotbed of human drama. But are you really yourself in the airport... or do you become someone different when you're in the space between cities? Guest host Marcy Markusa and company visit the airport to find out.

Open Source: Our Better Angel: Chris Adrian

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:56:10 -0500

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 that our bodies are not the problem. I think of Beatrice, an attempted suicide, “the jumping lady,” [...]

Open Source: This Pariah-to-Messiah Moment: John Comaroff

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 21:52:20 -0500

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 has embraced the Obama Moment as its own, Comaroff says, because it marks “the [...]

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: Giving 'til it hurts (11/08/08)

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 11:52:41 -0500

Are we giving 'til it hurts... or is the "economic downturn" bringing in a new age of stinginess? This week, we look at "charity." What do we give, who are we giving it to, and how do we decide to give, or not to give? Tune in to hear kids answer the question: is it better to give or to receive? Plus, Nick Purdon tells us how asking for money is like asking for a date.

Open Source: New Conversation, New Narrative: Stanley Fish

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 13:28:10 -0500

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 divinity to Barack Obama. Fish was a Milton scholar before he became a culture warrior and, more recently, the [...]

Open Source: The Hunter’s Evidence: Carlo Ginzburg

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 13:28:09 -0500

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 shark Man has been a hunter for thousands of years. In the course of countless chases he learned to reconstruct the shapes [...]

Open Source: Thank you, Studs Terkel!

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 21:12:37 -0500

Click to listen to Studs Terkel declaiming on the gap between Walt Whitman’s America and ours.

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: Take us to your leader! (11/01/08)

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 19:20:04 -0500

Take us to your leader! But who is that? This week, we're asking "who's in charge here?" Guest host Marcy Markusa and company look into what makes a good leader; why the person you think is in charge might not really be in charge; and whether we get the leaders we want, or the leaders we deserve.

Open Source: A Longer View of 2008: Historian Gordon Wood

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 04:56:04 -0400

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 that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck invoked in the famous Cambridge [...]

Open Source: Campaign ‘08: How was it for you, Jim Fishkin?

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 04:56:04 -0400

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 scientist long at the University of Texas, now at Stanford, he is the Johnny Appleseed of “deliberative democracy” — [...]

Open Source: J. S. Bach’s “Habit of Perfection”: Andrew Rangell

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 12:52:29 -0400

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 think and talk about to break the obsession with questions that have no answers until the night of [...]

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: Why do we love a love story? (10/25/08)

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 02:52:17 -0400

What's the most extreme thing you've done for love? We'll take a look at all the nutty things we do... from a little breaking and entering to voluntarily staying put in a war zone. Plus, we'll explore the phenomenon of the "bromance"; and hear from heartbreaker Martha Wainwright on... well, heartbreak.

Open Source: Poster Art Then and Now: RISD’s John Maeda

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 12:12:10 -0400

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 Rhode Island School of Design, John Maeda. On a gabby, [...]

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: What's your biggest flaw? (10/18/08)

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 09:52:15 -0400

What's your flaw - and how have you learned to deal with it? This week, we're all about looking at our imperfections, and how we embrace them. We'll talk with a photographer about taking pics of celebs in their natural, flawed glory; learn how to deal with your significant other's lil' faults; and find out how to answer the classic job interview question: "What's your biggest fault?"

Open Source: Soviet Posters: The Art of Polarization

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 19:56:49 -0400

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: those cult images of Lenin in the Twenties, Stalin in the Forties and Fifties, the icons of [...]

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: Has "thank you" lost its meaning? (10/11/08)

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:32:26 -0400

How many times a day do you say "thank you?" And how many times a day do you really, really mean it? This week, we're asking: has "thank you" lost its meaning? Tune in as we look at the "obligatory thanks" vs. genuine thanks; hear from a guy who set out to write "thank you" notes to everyone he wanted to thank; and find out who you never thanked, but wanted to.

Open Source: Bernard Lown’s Prescription for Survival

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 19:12:06 -0400

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 doctors (starting with Russians and Americans) into the fight against nuclear weapons in a global force called [...]

Open Source: Andrew Bacevich: The End of Exceptionalism

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 19:12:06 -0400

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 Peace that became the Long War — war today as “a seemingly permanent condition.” He burns with a Nieburhian realist’s [...]

Open Source: Virtual JFK: Vietnam (and us) if Kennedy had lived

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 18:48:14 -0400

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 is whether President Kennedy, had he lived, would have withdrawn from war in Vietnam in 1965. [...]

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: Who does the night bring out in you? (10/04/08)

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 08:56:06 -0400

When the sun goes down and the city grows dark do you become a different person? Under the cover of darkness are you more free to be the person you really are? This week Sook-Yin Lee wants to know: who does the night bring out in you?

Open Source: What We’re Going Through: Anna Deavere Smith

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 02:41:18 -0400

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 bootsoles.” Actress and documentarian, Anna Deavere Smith is all feeling, no bootsoles. Her new show is “a [...]

Open Source: The American Exception: Pop Culture Today

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 10:28:25 -0400

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 — before George got his American green card. The piece triggered a [...]

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: Crowds (09/27/08)

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 16:40:02 -0400

Have you ever done something that you wouldn't normally do? When we're young we blame it on peer pressure but as we grow we blame it on the crowd! Sook-Yin Lee experiments with the power of a crowd and finds out what happens when you try to control a crowd and lose. She also will talk with musical guest Matt Mays about what it's like to play to a crowd of one!

Open Source: Candid Capitalist: John Bogle

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 10:13:15 -0400

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 pain ahead, but something less than Armageddon, and no reason to realize Sarah [...]

Open Source: Slavoj Zizek: What is the Question?

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 17:56:22 -0400

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 lipstick”) to Naomi Klein, …from Barack Obama’s risk of the “John Kerry syndrome” to the experience we’re all having of putting on the reality sunglasses [...]

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: DNTO is in the driver's seat (09/20/08)

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 00:04:03 -0400

Sook-Yin Lee talks to country music star Shane Yellowbird, a woman describes what it was like living in her car for a month, and Lisha Hassanali tells Sook-Yin what her Mini Cooper says about her. What are we really using our cars for? Listen in to find out!

Open Source: Philippe Sands’ Torture Team

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 09:28:32 -0400

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 violations of the Geneva Conventions — and specifically of Common Article 3, against torture, cruelty and “outrages upon personal dignity” [...]

Open Source: Torture, Part 3: the Philip Gourevitch version

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 09:28:32 -0400

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 (58 minutes, 27 mb mp3) Philip Gourevitch (photo: Andrew Brucker) Even if you want to put it [...]

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: Take a jog with DNTO (09/13/08)

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 07:40:16 -0400

Why do we run? What are we running to... or from? Sook-Yin takes a jog with Olympic sprinter Anson Henry, and runs in inappropriate places with the ladies from the Movement Movement. And running coach Gilbert Tuhabonye tells us his remarkable story of running to survive. Plus, comedian Alix Sobler looks into getting the runner's high; and Rachel Sanders explains why we have so many dreams about running.

Open Source: An American Exception, in Danger

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 00:48:07 -0400

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 wrote the book in favor of “death” taxes: Wealth and Our Commonwealth: [...]

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: DNTO's back to look at Day One! (9/6/08)

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 14:56:02 -0400

DNTO launches a new season with a look at those highly-anticipated (or is it dreaded?) first days. Owen "Final Fantasy" Pallett will introduce our new theme music; Precious Chong tells us about her first day as Oliver Stone's assistant; Clare Lawlor explains how to fake it through your first day of work; and author Gail Bowen tells us why her first day as a mom wasn't what she was expecting. Plus, we play a round of "Would You Rather" with actor/producer/director/writer Paul Gross.

Open Source: What’s So Great About Us

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 23:56:10 -0400

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, while maintaining a political stability, a standard of living, and a love of country that are the [...]

Open Source: Rory Stewart: the Post-Imperialist Poster Hero

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 23:56:10 -0400

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 adventure. But that can’t be the only reason Rory Stewart’s account of The Places In Between is the gift book and [...]

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: Back to skool! (08/30/08)

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 22:20:02 -0400

Why can't we let go of high school? We'll find out as Sook-Yin visits Jully Black's alma mater with the songstress; Clare Lawlor tries to part with her yearbooks; we'll hear from This Can't Be Happening at Macdonald Hall author Gordon Korman; and comedian Alix Sobler explains why reruns of Beverly Hills 90210 are causing a slight identity crisis.

Open Source: As Others See Us: Godfrey Hodgson on the Democrats

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 15:28:23 -0400

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Godfrey Hodgson (39 minutes, 18 mb mp3) Godfrey Hodgson: now When you’ve had enough of the dugout chatter from Denver on the cable networks, try Godfrey Hodgson from Oxford, 5000 miles from the convention scene. I wonder if anybody sees American politics more essentially than the co-author of a [...]

LinuxCast: Cisco offers Microsoft Exchange replacement: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 04:52:04 -0400

LinuxWorld.com author Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, who recently wrote "Can Open Source replace Microsoft Exchange?" explains the technical and business rationale behind Cisco's entry into the e-mail and groupware market. Postpath promises to be not just easier to license, but less stressful on the hardware budget. (19:59)

Open Source: Cass Sunstein: for the Homer Simpson in all of us

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 06:28:34 -0400

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Cass Sunstein (30 minutes, 14 mb mp3) Cass Sunstein of the gentle Nudge Cass Sunstein gives us the half-hour short course here on “the most exciting intellectual movement of the last thirty years” — behavioral economics, that is, of which we had a taste recently with George Lakoff and Dan [...]

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: Talkin’ about… the human voice (05/03/08)

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 21:20:38 -0400

Sook-Yin looks at the instrument that is the human voice and what it says to the world. Lisha Hassanali explores why she falls into a "family dialect" with her mom; we'll hear from author (and voice of AT&T) Susan Berkley; Clare Lawlor takes advantage of being mistaken for a man on the phone; and Helix frontman Brian Vollmer busts out his classical vocals. Plus comedy from Chris Gibbs and Erica Sigurdson; and a lesson in makin' beats with yer mouth from human beatbox Exzam.

LinuxCast: The executive director speaks: Stormy Peters

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 12:20:02 -0400

Don Marti and Jeremy Allison get on the phone with GNOME's new executive director, and seek answers to the hard questions. What's planned for the coming KDE/GNOME combined developer conference? Why do GNOME apps scribble their debug messages on your Mutt session? What is Twitter good for? Who's less interesting to normal people, distributed revision control nerds or software license nerds? What's a Twiddler? What does the SECRET HISTORY OF STAR WARS reveal? And what does an executive director do, anyway? (61:16)

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: Meet meat (08/16/08)

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 04:56:02 -0400

In this era of conscious eating, meat elicits a visceral response from all sorts... from dedicated carnivores to ethical vegans. Sook-Yin talks to author and shameless carnivore Scott Gold; comedian Dawn Dumont discusses her lapsed vegetarianism; Adam Growe expounds on the unique relationship between one man and his BBQ; and the editors of "Meatpaper Magazine," Sasha Wizansky and Amy Standen, talk about meat metaphor and flesh-based art.

LinuxCast: Connecting with kernel developers: Jon Corbet

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 19:32:20 -0400

Need a feature in Linux, and don't want to face the firehose of information on linux-kernel? Jon Corbet, author of the Linux Foundation's new kernel contribution guide, explains where to go to get started, what the kernel developers are looking for from a new contributor, and how a hardware vendor can develop an open source driver while keeping hardware data confidential. (11:27)

Open Source: Cuba on our Minds (III): David Kaiser’s JFK

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:04:17 -0400

Click to listen to Chris's conversation with David Kaiser here (54 minutes, 25 MB MP3)

The journalist and diplomat William Attwood is the exceptional spirit in David Kaiser's new history of the JFK assassination, The Road to Dallas. Attwood leaps off the page as a man of imagination and mettle who (on a first reading) might have saved the Kennedy brothers and redrafted hemispheric relations. Out of LOOK magazine and the Adlai Stevenson campaigns in the 1950s, Attwood came into the Kennedy administration as JFK's ambassador to Guinea in West Africa, with a long-standing free-lance interest in Cuba. In late October, 1963, Attwood was looking for high-level permission to renew a conversation with Fidel Castro in Havana, specifically to pursue indications from Castro that, as Kaiser writes, "if the United States would lift the economic blockade against Castro, he would evict the Soviets from Cuba." But nobody in the Kennedy command was interested in anything that sounded like a relaxation of hostilities with Castro after the Bay of Pigs fiasco (April 1961) and the Missile Crisis (October 1962). In the fateful autumn of 1963, McGeorge Bundy in the White House, Robert Kennedy himself and the chiefs at State, Defense and the CIA all "agreed that it would be better for Attwood to return to private life before meeting with Castro."

David Kaiser: A Killer Conspiracy

A golden opportunity so narrowly missed, as I remark here in conversation with David Kaiser. But Kaiser, the much-praised historian at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I, brings me up short. I'd mistaken a double twist in his book. Kaiser says: "The men who wanted to kill JFK" -- notably the Mafia and the fiercest of the anti-Castro Cubans in the U.S. -- "would not have been pleased by any attempt to normalize relations with Castro. On the contrary..." JFK might have sealed his fate more certainly by encouraging Bill Attwood's detente initiative. In a round of conversations about the obsessive lure of Cuba, this is a historical digression on the eternal question of Who Killed JFK. We seem to be coming closer to the eternal answer, with Cuba at the core. Our guest David Kaiser argues (to me, persuasively) that Lee Harvey Oswald was the triggerman and fallguy for a diversified conspiracy of men and interests that wanted President Kennedy dead. Oswald was the "who" that killed Kennedy, but the historian's emphasis after nearly 50 years is on the "what" that killed him. In a story crackling with lethal ironies, the "what" was the convergence of two passionate public campaigns of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The first, by the mob-infected Kennedy brothers, John and Robert, was to crush organized crime in America. The other, initiated by the Eisenhower administration, was to eliminate Fidel Castro and Communism from Cuba, by virtually any means imaginable, including assassination by American mobsters. Oswald, in David Kaiser's telling, was a multi-purpose assassin who with minor shifts of circumstance might have shot Castro before he ended up shooting Kennedy. But he seems to have been working the mob's plan on November 22, 1963; and of course it was the mob's man Jack Ruby who, two days later, shot Oswald in Dallas police custody to shut him up. It is still a hair-raising tale of a host of men -- Richard Helms, Sam Giancana, Jimmy Hoffa, Loran Hall, Carlos Marcello, David Atlee Phillips among the scores -- with Cuba and killing on their minds. "Where did these men find the audacity to kill a president of the United States?" Kaiser asks. He believes JFK had compromised his immunity by taking girls from Frank Sinatra and by playing the assassination game against Castro. He argues that RFK lost official immunity by the recklessness of his vendetta against Jimmy Hoffa. "All these men knew that Hoffa's comment about the attorney general -- that Robert Kennedy would not rest until Hoffa was behind bars -- was true for them as well. These were desperate times that called for desperate measures?" Kaiser clarifies the story of a crime, the killing of a king, that -- as Olive Stone's JFK suggested -- touched each of us, and the country, with some of Hamlet's madness.

Open Source: The News about the News: Jay Rosen

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:29:01 -0400

This seems to be the moment in which the death of the American newspaper can be foretold with some authority -- by Eric Alterman in this week's New Yorker; by the new local owners of the great old papers (â€'The news business is something worse than horrible," says Sam Zell, in what sounds like buyer's remorse over Chicago's Tribune Company); by The New York Times itself in what has become a serial, almost daily obituary (here, for example) and by our guru and guide to the transformation of media, Jay Rosen of New York University.

Click to listen to Chris's classroom conversation with Jay Rosen (71 minutes, 33 mb mp3)

Jay Rosen of PressThink

Jay Rosen was the prophet of people-first "civic journalism" twenty years ago, before the Web gave citizen-bloggers the tools to be press lords, or at least publishers, on the cheap. In our first podcast nearly five years ago, Jay was among the first to see the breadth of the upheaval. "The terms of authority are changing," he put it then. His website PressThink has become the real Press Club of thinking practitioners in this drawn-out existential crisis. In James Der Derian's Global Media class at Brown last week, Jay Rosen gave his account of the Web stars becoming institutions: Instapundit, the first distributed newsroom; DailyKos, "by far the most vibrant community I know"; The Huffington Post, rising on the power of aggregation; and "the first Web-born media company," Joshua Micah Marshall's Talking Points Memo and its offspring. But Jay was at his most compelling on the bad news: what feels like the inexorable, personal, cosmic, professional, civic tragedy unfolding in front of our eyes at the New York Times:

JR: The Times is a unique property... an extremely valuable institution, and it would be a tragedy if it just fell apart, or became like everything else... They've gained huge numbers of readers online, but they're caught in an economic squeeze: that the readers are moving online but advertising is not, or at a much slower rate. The reason for that is even more fundamental. The newspaper of old was a sort of compendium of unlike things that were blended together because it made economic sense: sports together with the classifieds, international news, the bridge column. And now if you're interested in bridge, there are a zillion bridge sites that are better than the bridge column. And if you're interested in a car, you go to Auto Trader.com And if you want a roommate, you go to Craigslist. This is called un-bundling. It turns out that what the New York Times has that's really important is not the presses; theyre not that valuable. It's not the advertising; it's not the classifieds, which are basically over now. It's this reputation for trust and reliability. They're caught in one more dilemma that fascinates me. They understand that they need to become more transparent online. By transparent I mean: telling people where you're coming from, owning up to mistakes, explaining how you make decisions. These are the things that create trust online. However the New York Times as an institution has always operated the opposite way. It's been a Cathedral of News: you don't explain why you do stuff, you just put it on the front page. As [executive editor] Bill Keller says, "Watch the paper." They've built up their authority by not explaining themnselves, but theyre caught up in a publishing environment that values transparency. They don't want to relinquish their authority either. They end up veering from one standard to the other. They can't decide whether they want to be the priest of news, who had a certain mystique about him -- or the most potent, most transparent institution on the Web. The only person who could resolve that strategic choice-- Cathedral or Transparency? -- is the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. And the tragic thing for the New York Times is that he's just not up to it. He's not smart enough, he doesn't have enough depth or vision to make that choice. CL: I want to gild that lily with one thought. It seems to me you could argue that the most important thing about the New York Times, it's great value, is not even its reputation but its readership. Richard Rovere wrote a piece in the New Yorker in the Fifties, I think, that said basically: the American Establishment -- what is it? It's the people who read the New York Times. And vice versa. If you want to join the club, become a regular reader of the New York Times. I keep waiting for the New York Times to liberate its readers to report the news for them. Stop telling us what happened and ask us what happened. The Web is a perfect device to filter news and opinion. If they would only turn that telescope around, we could be approaching a new day. JR: Dan Gillmor, who covered Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, was the first newspaper reporter to get a blog, to know what blogging was. A few months in he realized -- he could have known, but it took the blog to teach him -- that "my readers know more than I do." That was always true of any beat reporter: that readers in the aggregate knew more than he did. What is different today is that because of the Web, that knowledge that readers have more of can now flow back toward the journalist. So the number-one asset of the New York Times is -- you're right -- is not just their trust and reputation. It's actually the knowledge and sophistication of the people who read the New York Times. And if the newspaper could begin to reverse that flow, so that they're taking in as well as broadcasting out, they would become, I believe, a news powerhouse. But they don't want to do that. They hesitate. They fumble the ball. They hem and they haw... because it doesn't fit with their notion of authority, to go back to the beginning. It undermines their ideas about the Cathedral of News. It undermines, in their view, their authority to start asking: "what do you know?" That's not the business they want to be in, that they thought they were going to be in when they joined the New York Times. The glory of the New York Times is not: "hey, tell us what you know." It's: "we're going to tell you what we know, and you're going to listen to it." And so it's this nostagia for the world of one-to-many communications. What fascinating to me as an observer is that they're very intelligent people... They know what open-source journalism is... They even read my blog occasionally. They know what I stand for... But they can't bite the bullet, primarily because it doesn't fit with their self-image. Isn't that funny?
Jay Rosen of New York University and PressThink, at Brown University, March 19, 2008

James Der Derian, esteemed head of the global security program at Brown's Watson Institute and our host professor, closed as he is wont to do with a quote from the German culture theorist Walter Benjamin (1892 - 1940). "When you live in times of terror, when everything is a conspiracy, then everyone must play the detective." Thank you, Jay Rosen, for showing us how to do it.

Open Source: “Armed Chair”: Bill Flynn’s Seat of Empire

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:29:01 -0400

Bill Flynn at his drawing board

Bill Flynn's mother was throwing out an old parlor chair five years ago. Bill Flynn -- master draughtsman and teacher at the Boston Museum School -- grabbed it as a "set-up" to draw. Almost immediately the chair started morphing into images of the war in Iraq. By this Spring of 2008 Bill Flynn has finished more than 500 mostly charcoal versions of the chair, and has mounted two exhibitions and published a book, Armed Chair, variations on a theme that could be called "one man's Guernica." To pore over the drawings is to be drawn into the raging and unfinished autobiography of a man, a war and a piece of furniture. "Two weeks into drawing the chair," Bill Flynn recounts in a conversation in his Dorchester studio in sight of Boston Harbor, "we got the news there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and it hit me...

Click to listen to Chris's conversation with artist William Flynn here (30 minutes, 14 MB MP3)

"The polished and nicely carved parts of the chair were our outward, democratic stance. The back of the chair" -- the stripped wood, the nail holes, the strings hanging down were the back story of the men and the fighting and of "how we were being manipulated and pushed into something that made no sense. Every week I got a little more perturbed... The question was: why are we doing this? And the real drawings began" -- drawings in which the chair writhes, explodes, sinks into black pools of oil, abstracts itself, catches fire with red crayon, morphs into barbed wire.

I like to draw, and it's what I've been doing for the last 40 years... I am excited by the emotional and formal aspects of drawing. It's very musical. I see it as music, not just line and form. I'm drawing to a beat, or making up a beat... I'd be listening to music -- to Tom Waits or to Shostakovich, people who seem to have opinions about things and have a beat and power in their work that could help me elevate my own marks. It changes what you see. The evolution of this political stance -- saying: if you weren't for this war you were against the troops -- made me very angry. It made me start to realize that the legs of this chair -- with lines in the foot indicating a claw and a ball -- were about control of the universe: so aggressive, so powerful, and righteous. That's the other things that hurts me. It's a righteous stand for democracy that would pummel us into submission. So sometimes the front leg of the chair is all power and claw, and the back is the residue. The nuances of the arms are frail and fragile and the threads and stains I left on the chair are the people that are left, the residue of a moral stance I have a lot of questions about.

Bill Flynn mocks the war media with a blank TV screen that comes to live inside the chair, and with newsprint that sometimes upholsters the chair, front and back.

The red crayon smears well, and it talks about the physicality of the act of making a drawing. The war in Iraq is very physical, except in the newspaper. People are losing limbs. There's blood on the wall, and destruction all over the place. And we keep getting this little shot of a car that's been destroyed, and a little boy in a white shirt which contradicts what might have happened. So when I see that in the newspaper the back of my neck gets a little bit anxious and I draw with a little more vengeance. I try to get at what they're trying to tell me. Is it that this war is okay because there's still a little boy in a white shirt? ... I see the war dissolving in front of us. No one in the country seems to be paying much attention; we're just going forward with the war. That's why I put the newspaper into the drawings. I'm just indicating type that isn't saying anything, as a backdrop. Chaos seems to be part of what I'm playing with. The first drawing of the day is a search. I caress the paper a little bit. I rearrange the chair, and I go searching. I hold the charcoal very lightly and flat, so it cruises over the paper. I create clouds. It's like looking at a series of clouds, and then I can bite into something that happens, and I probably overdo the first drawing, put in too much information. The second drawing I'm feeling more secure. The third drawing I can edit down and put the full physicality of my arm into it. I like making a drawing feel as if someone was there. I want a drawing to have perpetual motion. Every time you look at it, it's still moving. It's not going to burn out. I doesn't need a battery. It's there. And I want you to feel the fact that I was there making it.

Somewhere in back of Bill Flynn, inside his working arm and hand, stands his father, who sounds a great deal like my own: both of them wise, untutored Irish-American gents who learned their lessons from World War I. I'd asked the artist "what part of Bill Flynn" did the drawings.

I guess it's the older part. My father was always aware of the political connotations of things. He had a sense of the futility of war, of how war is manipulated. He used to tell me the story of Smedley Butler [the "Fighting Quaker" (1881 - 1940) and most-decorated Marine of his time, later the author of War is a Racket]. He said Butler refused to go back into battle and would shoot his sons if they joined the Marines, because he'd been shooting Remington rifles at the enemy and they were shooting Remington bullets back at him. He realized they were just selling weapons and they didn't care about the war. They cared about selling munitions. And I think that's still going on. That scares me, and that makes me draw harder... My chair will probably go on for a long time... I think I've found something I'm not going to be able to let go of for a long time.
William Flynn in conversation with Chris Lydon, in his studio on Savin Hill, Dorchester, Massachusetts, April 3, 2008

William Flynn's War Drawings (2004 - 2008) are on exhibit at the Victoria Munroe Gallery, 179 Newbury Street, Boston through April 12.

Open Source: Pico Iyer: the “Transcendentalist” Dalai Lama

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:29:01 -0400

In Tibet the Dalai Lama was an embodiment of an old culture that, cut off from the world, spoke for an ancient, even lost traditionalism; now, in exile, he is an avatar of the new, as if having traveled eight centuries in just five decades, he is increasingly, with characteristic directness, leaning in, toward tomorrow.
Pico Iyer, The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, page 203.

Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Pico Iyer here (43 minutes, 20 MB MP3)

Pico Iyer:'open road' Transcendentalism

The Dalai Lama becomes the best sort of New England Transcendentalist in Pico Iyer's crystalline meditation on the family friend he's been watching and interviewing for 40 years -- that is, almost all his life. The book opens with an epigraph from Henry David Thoreau ("So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real...), closes with Ralph Waldo Emerson ("Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit...") and is brim-full of William James's wisdom on science, psychology and religion. The title comes from D. H. Lawrence's paraphrase of Emerson's child, Walt Whitman: "The great home of the Soul is the open road. Not heaven, not paradise. Not 'above.'" Pico Iyer is himself a man of that open road -- born of Hindu parents, both from Bombay; schooled at Oxford; long an American citizen; now based at TIME magazine and in Nara, the ancient capital of Japan. In journalism's upper reaches these days Pico Iyer's pieces from Havana, Phnom Penh, Damascus and Delhi set the standard of global curiosity and confidence -- of the child-like eye and Old Masterly prose. But there is a home inside this traveler. The joy of our conversation was finding that he has vital roots not far from my own, in those beloved New Englanders. "I would like to call myself a Transcendentalist," he says. "The higher form of globalism, I've always thought, is Emerson. That's why I chose to write a book about the Dalai Lama: because he's talking globalism but not at the level of Microsoft, McDonalds or Britney Spears, but at the level of conscience, imagination and the heart."

Take this conversation with Pico Iyer as a first crack at the Tibet questions that will not go away in this year of the Chinese Olympics. This book, The Open Road, is a brief for the Dalai Lama's brand of urgent patience ("Speak out, not lash out," as Pico Iyer puts it) which many Tibetans and others find hard to hear. The hope in the Dalai Lama's circle seems to be that under constant world pressure the Chinese leadership would deign finally to meet with the exiled holy man. "He doesn't expect the Chinese leadership to come to its senses overnight," says Pico Iyer, but neither does he see fruits in militancy. "He knows that to prick their pride is to bring down even greater hardships on Tibet." Tell us, Open Sourcerers: who has a better take on responsibility, compassion and possibility with respect to Tibet?

Open Source: Brazil’s Statesman at Large

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:29:01 -0400

Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil

Fernando Henrique Cardoso , the lively, worldly-wise ex-president of Brazil -- "a genuine philosopher-king" in the estimate of Foreign Affairs magazine --invites you to a thought exercise. Suppose the world is in a "post-Napoleonic" moment, in need of a new "world order" (or "A World Restored," as the young historian Henry Kissinger put it in his first book, in 1957).

Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Fernando Henrique Cardoso (23 minutes, 10 mb mp3)

The "Waterloo" that precipitates the crisis of our order, in Cardoso's outline, is not only the United States' debacle in Iraq but includes also the fall of the Berlin Wall, "plus globalization, plus the transformational technologies, plus the emergence of China as one of the big powers." The Napoleon that has collapsed in our time is not only George W. Bush but the very idea of a uni-polar hyperpower, the utter frustration of the regime-change fantasy of democracy imposed around the world by American missiles and bombers. "Who could envision," Cardoso asks, "that the outcome of the end of bi-polarity would not be the Pax Americana but, rather, the end of the possibility for any Global Empire?" Cardoso is speaking conversationally here about "a new global pact" to bring the problems of the world into some constructive alignment with the realities of power in a wised-up context where "it is no longer possible to have one hegemon, or to impose a new hierarchical order." His thinking surely resonates with the impatient ambition of Parag Khanna's "Second World," most especially of Brazil, fifth-most populous nation in the world and woefully underrepresented at the table of power.

We have to remold the basic institutions [the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF] in the direction of more democracy, extented participation, more powerful institutions to deal with poverty... Look at the G-8. China is not there. Brazil is not there. India is not there. South Africa is not there. The Arabic world is not there. What kind of association is that? What do the G-8 represent? They have not enough strength even to give rules or set directions for the world, because they are not representative of anything... Look at the aspect of military power... The US is a superpower, but America has no more capacity to deal with another problem, if it exists in the world. Not maybe because of a lack of crazy ideas inside the White House. But even if the White House has the crazy idea, it would be another disaster because America has no more capacity to open up a new front. There is no one country capable of taking care of the world. In that sense it is necessary to have a new deal...
Fernando Henrique Cardoso, in conversation with Chris Lydon for Open Source at the Watson Institute, Brown University, April 2008

Fernando Henrique Cardoso is among the preeminent social scientists of modern Brazil. His classic Dependency and Development in Latin America, written with Enzo Faletto, was published in 1969. Exiled through much of the 60s and 70s by the military dictatorship in Brazile, Cardoso returned to an "accidental" political career in the 1980s. He is credited as finance minister with the lancing of the hyperinflation crisis of the early 90s. His two terms as the elected president of Brazil, from 1995 to 2002, marked the stabilization of Brazil's popular democracy. I found his autobiography, The Accidental President of Brazil: A Memoir, a beguiling introduction to an immeasuraby valuable and wise fellow at Brown's Watson Institute.

Open Source: Patrick Cockburn: The New War in Iraq

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:29:01 -0400

We are asking the bravest reportorial hand on the ground in Iraq, Patrick Cockburn of The Independent from London, to make a coherent picture of the news of the war -- starting with the flight of under-equipped and under-committed Iraqi Army units from their assigned war on Muqtada Al-Sadr's Mahdi Army... and, among other things, the assassination of Muqtada's brother-in-law in Najaf and, of course, General David Petraeus's plea in Congress for an extension of the American "surge." Cockburn's strongest theme is that the Bush team in Baghdad is in fact fomenting a civil war within the Shia majority -- a war that the government troops don't want to fight and cannot possibly win against Muqtada Al-Sadr's militias in Baghdad and elsewhere.

Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Patrick Cockburn (40 minutes, 18 mb mp3)

Patrick Cockburn

Patrick Cockburn:The US forces in Iraq are beginning a new war against a new enemy in Iraq. For five years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the US was confronting (fighting) the Sunni Arab community -- about 20 percent of Iraqis, or 5 to 6 million people. Now in the last few months it's confronting a large part of the Shia community -- those that are loyal to Muqtada Al-Sadr, his Sadrist movement and the Mahdi Army, which really represent the Shia poor. But, you know, one Iraqi official who's not sympathetic to Muqtada was saying to me the other day that the Shia are a majority of Iraqis and Muqtada's followers are a majority of the Shia. So this is probably 30 to 40 percent of the whole population. This is a massive new confrontation that the US is undertaking in Iraq. CL: And why is the US undertaking it? Patrick Cockburn: I think it's a misjudgment. It think that rather as in 2003 they thought it would be easy to confront the Sunni -- I remember going to endless press conferences in Baghdad where we used to have Jerry Bremer, the US viceroy, and various American generals all saying we were fighting the remnant of the old regime of Saddam Hussein. It was obviously untrue but they may well have believed it. This time around there seems to be the idea that if we eliminate Muqtada things will come right. But this won't happen, because Muqtada's supporters are too well integrated into Iraqi society. There are too many of them. They're too committed. They're not going to give up. This isn't just a political party. It's a religious movement.
Patrick Cockburn, Author of Muqtada
(Scribners, 2008), in conversation with Open Source, April 2008

Patrick Cockburn: The most convincing evidence that the surge isn't working, in terms of restoring security to Baghdad and central Iraq, is that we have 3.2-million Iraqi refugees -- that's about one in nine Iraqis -- who've fled to Jordan or Syria or within Iraq. Living in appalling conditions, money running out, poor health. I've been to refugee camps where there's no fresh water, where cholera is beginning. And they don't go home! These are the best judges of what the real security situation is in Iraq -- not Senator McCain, not me. But these people who if they felt they could go back to their homes in some security, if they and their children could be safe, they'd do it tomorrow. But they're not because they know it's not true; they know it's as dangerous as it ever was. And that's really what everybody should remember when they're asked: how is the surge doing, or for an optimistic moment they think things are getting better in Iraq.
Patrick Cockburn, Iraq correspondent of the London Independent, in conversation with Open Source, April 2008

Open Source: Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:29:01 -0400

Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Nicholson Baker (53 minutes, 25 mb mp3)

Nicholson Baker: history by hyperlink

A wing commander in the [British] Royal Air Force [in Iraq], J. A. Chamier, published his views on how best to deal with tribal rebellions. The commanding officer must choose the most inaccessible village of the most prominent tribe, said Chamier, and attack it with all available aircraft. "The attack with bombs and machine guns must be relentless and unremitting and carried on continuously by day and night, on houses, inhabitants, crops and cattle," Chamier wrote. "This sounds brutal, I know, but it must be made brutal to start with. The threat alone in the future will prove efficacious if the lesson is once properly learnt." It was 1921.
Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke, page 8.
Frederick Birchall, Berlin correspondent for The New York Times, published an article about Germany's preparations for war. It was October 8, 1933. Birchell quoted from a recent book by Ewald Banse, a teacher at the Technical High School in Brunswick, Germany. The book was called Wehrwissenschaft -- "Military Science." War was no longer a matter of marches and medals, Banse observed: "It is gas and plague. It is tank and aircraft horror. It is baseness and falsehood. It is hunger and poverty." And because war is so horrible, Banse said, it must be incorporated into the school curriculum and taught as a new and comprehensive science: "The methods and aims of the new science are to create an unshakable belief in the high ethical value of war and to produce in the individual the psychological readiness for sacrifice in the cause of nation and state."
Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke, page 44.
Neville Chamberlain told the House of Commons that England was officially at war with Germany... It was September 3, 1939. Churchill's mood, as he listened, wasn't sad at all. He felt, he wrote later, a sense of uplifted serenity and a detachment from human affairs. "The glory of Old England, peace-loving and ill-prepared as she was, but instant and fearless at the call of honour, thrilled my being and seemed to lift our fate to those spheres far removed from earthly facts and physical sensation," he said.
Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke, page 138.
Dorothy Day, the editor of the Catholic Worker, wrote an editorial called "Our Stand." "As in the Ethiopian war, the Spanish war, the Japanese and Chinese war, the Russian-Finnish war -- so in the present war we stand unalterably opposed to the use of war as a means of saving 'Christianity,' 'civilization,' 'democracy.'" She urged a nonviolent opposition to injustice and servitude: She called it the Folly of the Cross. "We are bidden to love God and to love one another," she wrote. "It is the whole law, it is all of life. Nothing else matters." It was June 1940.
Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke, page 192.
"This ordeal by fire has, in a certain sense, even exhilarated the manhood and the womanhood of Britain," [Churchill] said [in a radio speech, seven months into the German Blitz.] It had lifted them above material facts "into that joyous serenity we think belongs to a better world than this." "There are less than seventy million malignant Huns -- some of whom are curable and others killable," Churchill said. The population of the British empire and the United States together amounded to some two hundred million. The Allies had more people and made more steel, he said. The Allies would win. It was April 27, 1941.
Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke, page 192.

Some people want to make an issue of method and form around Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke, subtitled The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization. But the real problem is, of course, his message. In an afterword on almost 500 pages of vignettes, Nick Baker offers his own judgment that the pacifists and other resisters had the right strategic answer to the war-madness of the 20th Century -- people like Gandhi, the Quakers, ex-President Herbert Hoover who wanted to break the British food blockade on starving Europe in October, 1941 ("Can you point to one benefit that has been gained from this holocaust?" Hoover asked in a radio speech) and the diarist Howard Schoenfeld, who went to prison in Danbury, CT for standing against the draft and "against war, which I believe to be the greatest evil known to man." Human Smoke reads like a wall of Post-It notes -- pointilistic dots on a 40-year canvas -- which Louis Menand in the New Yorker, for example, says should not be confused with responsible history. I felt it, on the contrary, as a very familiar, virtually cinematic, quick-cutting, frame-shifting, angular and episodic style of story telling. It's not so unlike the method of Ken Burns' PBS epic on The War, which took its perspective from GI letters home and family memories today in just four American cities, like Waterbury, Connecticut and Mobile, Alabama. The difference is that the Burns TV film summoned up and revarnished a lot of old feelings. Baker tears into every bit of received sentiment about the war, and about its heroes -- Churchill most especially -- in the book and our conversation:

He's fascinating. He's brilliant. He had a mind well stocked with poetry... So one doesn't want to dismantle Churchill in the sense of saying he was not a great man. He has hugeness of personality, but he was a man of many phases... In this period that I'm looking at him, he was really a maniac. He was absolutely intent on widening the war and on getting as many people -- his own citizens and other countries -- involved as possible. I don't think I'm being unfair to him. It's just that if you quote him properly you realize he was just hell bent on this confrontation. As the prime minister of Australia [Robert Menzies] said on first meeting Churchill: "This man is a great hater." It was so fascinating to watch Menzies' visit. He first reaction was: "humorless... a great hater." A few nights later: "he's a great hater, but he does know an awful lot." And then, late night, 2:30 or 3 in the morning, he's up again listening to war stories from Churchill, and he writes, "the man has greatness." Finally, he's saying, "the Hun must be taught through his hide!" Menzies is now speaking the language of Churchill. So obviously this man Churchill has an incredible power over other human beings.
Nicholson Baker, in conversation with Chris Lydon, April 16, 2008

Human Smoke is a departure for Nicholson Baker, the high-stylist of The Mezzanine and of Vox, the phone-sex novel that Monica Lewinsky gave to Bill Clinton. He says, "I've always liked writing about the things that I hope make life worth living -- the reflections on the edge of moving objects, or the little theories you develop when you shoelace breaks... So I tried to use my same approach, my method, in writing about probably the worst 5-year period in human history." And yes, Iraq was at the root of it all. Baker conceived the project, he says, "in the run-up to the Iraq war, when the Second World War was repeatedly invoked as the one necessary war. I've never really understood the Second World War. It never made sense to me that we had to demolish cities in order to bring a regime down, but I always chalked it up to my own ignorance of history. But if this war is going to be invoked over and over again, then let's actually look at it. How does it begin? What happened in what order?" And more pointedly: whence came the disastrous doctrines of exemplary war, strategic starvation, bombing and indiscriminate abuse of civilians, that persist in our own long war on Iraq? Baker's format invites you to put Human Smoke down, annotate it, and keep picking it up. I for one cannot get its arguments out of my head.

Open Source: Deal-Maker on the Spot: Christopher Hill

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:29:01 -0400

Today's visiting fireman at the Watson Institute is under more pressure than most.

Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Christopher Hill (16 minutes, 7 mb mp3)

Christopher Hill, between East and West

Our man in East Asia, Christopher R. Hill, negotiating North Korea's nuclear disarmament, is evidently having a tougher time with the Bush principals in Washington than with the Pyongyang end of the wobbly old "axis of evil." David Sanger in the New York Times yesterday wrote that Bush administration support has "wavered" for the Hill-crafted deal that would take North Korea off the state terrorism hit list in return for a final dismantling of its now abandoned nuclear program. In Washington, Sanger writes, it is Hill, the asssistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific, who is feeling abandoned by President Bush and Secretary of State Rice -- and beset by the opposition of Vice President Cheney and former UN Ambassador John Bolton, on the lookout for "appeasement." It was Cheney, by implication, who has cleared for publication what sounds like awkward video evidence that North Korean technicians were working around the Syrian nuclear plant that Israel blew up last September. There's no abandonment, no appeasement in the conversation here. But there's a short course on diplomatic chess in three dimensions -- between Middle and Far East, between Rice and Cheney for the president's ear, between the rise of China as the "second agent of development" in Asia and the forseeable end of a century of American hegemony in the Pacific Rim.

Open Source: Douglas Blackmon: Neo-Slavery in Our Times

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:29:01 -0400

Douglas Blackmon of the Wall Street Journal has written a newsman's history book with staggering implications about racial reality in America today.

Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Douglas Blackmon here (53 minutes, 24 MB MP3)

Douglas Blackmon: truth about Jim Crow

The heart of the story is that slavery in the American South ended not with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and the end of the Civil War, but at the onset of World War 2. That is: state-sanctioned brutal and abusive bondage ended less than 70 years ago, well within the living memory of millions of Americans, black and white. The gap between "slave time" and now is not five or six generations, but one or two at most. The sidewalks of Atlanta today were paved in the 20th Century with millions of bricks made by "slaves by another name" -- by black men the city had seized and leased over to the ex-Mayor James English's Chattahoochee Brick Company. Some of Atlanta's finest families were in on neo-slavery, in Blackmon's telling -- men like Joel Hurt of Atlanta's Trust Company. No guard could ever "do enough whipping for Mr. Hurt," it was said. "He wanted men whipped for singing and laughing." Slavery by Another Name is Doug Blackmon's complete revision of the Jim Crow story, with an astonishing breadth and depth of documentation and none of the old sugar-coating or vagueness around phrases like peonage and sharecropping. "Neo-slavery" was the hard-core of a public-private system that undid the freedoms that came with Reconstruction for most of thirty years after the Civil War, and then enforced a new reign of terror over all African-Americans in the South.

What began to happen at the end of the 19th Century was the crushing new phenomenon in which whites in the North gave up on the process and made the decision that whites in the South were going to be allowed to do whatever they wished. The Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision that sanctified segregation in 1896 gave a legal basis for all this. And by 1900 all of the Southern states had passed an array of laws designed to make it impossible for a black man to avoid being in violation of some ridiculous statute at all times. Being black became the crime, and so any black man who could not prove that he had a job at a given time, any black man who sought to change employers, any black man who chose to sell the produce of his farm after dark, rather than selling to the white man nearest him... An endless number of statutes were passed which made it nearly impossible to avoid prosecution. These laws were designed to finish off the process of disenfranchising all black Americans in the South; and they effectively did it by creating this legal jeopardy that all African Americans had to live with. The hammer that hung over their heads was the idea that if you get convicted of any of these meaningless crimes, you'll end up in the horrifying circumstances of a slave mine or some other forced labor camp... There were endless beatings. In a relatively small work camp where you had 75 or 80 forced laborers, there might well be three to four hundred floggings in a given month. The men in the mines were beaten in the mornings if they failed to remove eight tons of coal the day before; and they were beaten at the end of the day if they failed to remove eight tons of coal that day. They were starved, and they were deprived of health care. The general attitude of the people who controlled these laborers was: as long as I'm able to keep them for a year or two years, I'll get back my investment in the cost of acquiring them. If they die I can cheaply find another...
Douglas Blackmon in conversation with Chris Lydon about Slavery by Another Name, April 21, 2008

Slavery by Another Name is hard reading that ought to be required. At a moment of reckoning around race in our country, Doug Blackmon, a studious child of the Mississippi Delta, has offered a monumental contribution to an agonizing re-learning of who we all are.

Open Source: The “Open Source” Composer: David Amram

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:29:01 -0400

David Amram at Brown's grand piano

We are hanging out at the piano here with the composer and Renaissance man David Amram, who has hung with the best -- starting with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Jack Kerouac in the 1950's. Each of those associates, as David observes in this conversation, was an encyclopedia of music in himself. From them he absorbed an ideal he is still practicing: not multi-cultural balancing or eclectic blending but "lovingly trying to learn some of the fundamentals about some of the most beautiful things that touch your heart." Charlie Parker introduced him to the pentatonic music of Frederick Delius. Dizzy transmitted his taste for Bartok and Stravinsky. Kerouac, David testifies, could improvise well at the piano and had, above all, "a phenomenal ear." Musicians "were always glad to see him, because we knew that meant at least one person would be listening."

Click to listen to Chris's conversation with David Amram (30 minutes, 14 mb mp3)

(l to r) Larry Rivers, Kerouac, Amram, Allen Ginsberg & Gregory Corso (bk to camera)

David Amram is the quiet, almost anonymous listener in many photos with cultural icons -- the guy next to Charles Mingus, or Leonard Bernstein, or Machito. David's the one who didn't burn out or go away, or change his style much. He is, not least, a fair embodiment of an "open source" ideal -- an entirely distinctive voice who's hard to imagine apart from the conversation that educated and produced him. At Brown, we have been listening to his work for ten days now. His movie scores (The Manchurian Candidate) and his chamber pieces can make a connection with Charles Ives or Dvorak or Alex North, with jazz and Jewish roots music. But it always sounds like David. We were blessed to get him at the keyboard. In an age of copyright madness, he reminds me that music is not something we human beings have, much less own. Music is something people do.

Open Source: Israel at 60: the Etgar Keret Version

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:29:01 -0400

The writer Etgar Keret was our Open Source witness in Israel two years ago to a general (local, global, existential) disbelief and alienation from the war on Lebanon. And now we have the pleasure of meeting him in the flesh on a campus visit to Brown.

Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Etgar keret here (24 minutes, 11 MB MP3)

Etgar Keret: "a Jew in a diaspora of Israel"

Edgar Keret's bizarre, violent, popular short stories (in a collection The Girl on the Fridge) are cited as a register of Israel's consciousness, post-Intifada and post-peace process. Crowbar beatings, sledge-hammer murders and other grotesque happenings abound in these fictions. In one, a kids' party magician reaches into the hat and pulls out, first, a rabbit's bleeding severed head and, later, a dead baby. He concludes: "It's as if someone was trying to tell me this is no time to be a rabbit, or a baby. Or a magician." Keret's Israeli characters are caught in states of mind and spirit between love and suicide, between boredom and brutal anger. As in this story, "Asthma Attack," reproduced here in full, the writer keeps fighting through the frenzy, for words:

When you have an asthma attack, you can't breathe. When you can't breathe, you can hardly talk. To make a sentence all you get is the air in your lungs. Which isn't much. Three to six words, if that. You learn the value of words. You rummage through the jumble in your head. Choose the crucial ones -- those cost you too. Let healthy people toss out whatever comes to mind, the way you throw out the garbage. When an asmatic says "I love you," and when an asthmatic says "I love you madly," there's a difference. The difference of a word. A word's a lot. It could be stop, or inhaler. It could even be ambulance.
Etgar Keret, "Asthma Attack," in The Girl on the Fridge, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2008.

In our conversation, Etgar Keret and I were both trying (and failing!) to remember the source of the notion that art, including fiction, is the layer of the human record (unlike the monuments of warfare and politics) that does not lie.

CL: Imagine a hundred years from now people are reading this red-hot popular Israeli writer from 2008, Etgar Keret, for the truth about Israel. What would they learn? Etgar Keret: Well, I think that they would learn that people in Israel know a little bit less than what they pretend to know; that they're a little bit bit less confident than they want their neighbor to think; that there's a very strong ambiguity and confusion among the Israeli people -- the same ambiguity and confusion that all human beings tend to share. CL: Can you explain how you became the rage among young Israelis in the last few years? Not the familiar image of the Israeli writer, you're anti-epic and anti-macho, a cuddly, eccentric vegetarian who writes about people who are beset with perplexity and pain and fearful violence and, as you say, confusion. EK: Well, I think that growing up In Israel, I think the one thing that's not allowed is to be confused. Being surrounded by so many enemies who want to attack us, the last thing you want to do is to raise more questions, or to be more confused and uncertain. But at some stage you realize it's actually the fact that you live in such an unsafe situation that makes all those questions that you are supposed to postpone more urgent. Because if you know you are going to die for something you want to know what you are going to die for. You don't want to postpone it for later. CL: Are these stories written from the perspective of a writer who's worrying what he's going to die for? EK: Well, yeah... It's not to die for, or live for. There is something about life, especially when you come from Israel, in a region where everything is so extreme, there's something very overwhelming about life, you know. And it leaves you with your mouth open, with your jaw falling down, you know. And this is the situation I wanted to write about. Because there is something about Israelis that whenever you speak to people they give you this feeling that they are certain about all those answers. And they have all those answers, but those answers don't seem to be working all around us. So if there's anything I want to say about this reality, it is maybe: take some sort of Socratic position and just say that we may know less about what's right, and what we are feeling at a certain moment and what should be done. I'm saying I feel it's important to admit our limitations and our confusion just so we can start finding the real answers, and it's much better than kind of doing that than settling for some fake answers that seem to be going around in circulation for the last 60 years.
Etgar Keret, in conversation with Chris Lydon, May 1, 2008.

Open Source: Mary Jo Salter’s “Phone Call to the Future”

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:29:01 -0400

Mary Jo Salter

Up with poets. Send us your favorites, please. We begin a new series of poetry conversations with the well-known American formalist, Mary Jo Salter, who teaches at Mount Holyoke and Johns Hopkins and co-edits The Norton Anthology of Poetry.

Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Mary Jo Salter (34 minutes, 16 mb mp3)

In the poem below, we are standing in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The poet is spinning out a tribute to Nicolael Maes, a student of Rembrandt's, and his painting of a girl with an apple-round, red-ribboned head. The girl is paring an apple, and dangling a fragile coil of apple skin as she goes. The poet's coil is plain in the layout and the links of rhyme -- "pun... bun" in the heart of the first stanza, "unbroken... spoken" at the start and finish of the last. So this is a formal paean to craft -- in the peeler, the painter, the poet, and in poetry itself: "this spiral of making while unmaking while the world goes round."

Nicolaes Maes: "Young Girl Peeling Apples" at the Metropolitan Museum, New York

Young Girl Peeling Apples (Nicholaes Maes) It's all an elaborate pun: the red peel of ribbon twisted tightly around the bun at the crown of her apple- round head; the ribbon coming loose in the real apple-peel she allows to dangle from her lifted hand; the table on which a basket of red apples waits to be turned into more white-fleshed apples in a water- filled pail on the floor; her apron that fills and falls empty, a lapful of apples piling on like the apron itself, the napkin, the hem of her skirts -- each a skin layered over her heart, just as he who has painted her at her knife paints the brush that puts life in her, apple of his eye: if there's anything on earth but this unbroken concentration, this spiral of making while unmaking while the world goes round, neither the girl nor he has yet looked up, or spoken.
from A Phone Call to the Future, New and Collected Poems by Mary Jo Salter, Knopf, 2008, page 100.

In our conversation, I volunteer that Ms. Salter, a student of Elizabeth Bishop and a famous teacher in real life, has given us a modern American manual of lessons -- about form, beauty, womanhood, wifehood, artistic and family life. She can sound like our daughter and our mother, both. There are just a few "public" poems here -- about paying for a war in Iraq that shocks us into silence; about feeling like a fossil in a digital age. But most of her interests are inward, even domestic. She writes in "Au Pair," a poem on a Swiss girl's encounter with small-town America: "she had no boyfriend yet, but she was hoping." There, and in "Lullaby for a Daughter," she can encompass the lifetime of womanhood in a few lines: Someday, when the sands of time Invert, may you find perfect rest as a newborn nurses from the hourglass of your breast. We are speaking here about tradition and a contemporary poet's reality -- and about what may be a renewed appeal of formal poetry. With all the poets we engage, we want to hear also about the place of new poetry in the wider American conversation. Nominations, please!

Open Source: Errol Morris’ “Feel-Bad” Masterpiece

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:29:01 -0400

Lynndie England with "Gus" at Abu Ghraib

Errol Morris's Standard Operating Procedure is a shocking, depressing work of art that might tell you almost nothing you didn't know in your bones: that the torture chambers at Abu Ghraib were a perfect kernel of the war on Iraq. See the movie anyway, for confirmation or as penance. It is a blood sample of a gross policy of humiliation, emasculation, sophisticated mental cruelty and pitiless domination in the Arab Middle East. Errol Morris makes no bones about it. He says: we are looking at icons of American foreign policy.

Click to listen to Chris's classroom conversation with Errol Morris (49 minutes, 23 mb mp3)

One of the most infamous photographs from Abu Ghraib is a photograph of Lynndie England: 20 years old at the time; 5 feet tall, I believe under 100 pounds, holding what in effect is a tie-down strap [on] a prisoner named 'Gus', who is naked on the ground. The photo is taken by Lynndie England's then boyfriend Chuck Graner. Well, the photograph of course has fascinated me for many, many reasons. Here would be the central reason. I believe the picture is a graphic representation of American foreign policy, pure and simple.

Errol Morris: "the word is denial"
Pictures become iconic for some reason. They answer a certain idea we have. It's not just simply by happenstance. Oddly enough I know that that method of removing Gus from his cell had been approved by the medical authorities at Abu Ghraib. There was nothing "illegal" about what was happening. But in fact the photograph is absolutely appalling, because part of our foreign policy -- and make no mistake about this -- was this idea that American women should be used to humiliate Iraqi men, without a thought of course that this might be degrading to the American women as well. It's not something that was devised by a handful of MPs on one tier at Abu Ghraib. It was part of our foreign policy. And one of the things I find most appalling is that the photographs were used to blame a handful of MPs, really letting everybody else off the hook, as though nobody else was involved and this was just a few guys on this one tier. By the way Abu Ghraib was not one one tier or two tiers. It was a city. There were close to 10,000 people in there -- a vast concentration camp in the middle of the Sunni Triangle. The pictures are misleading in that respect as well. They made you think you were dealing with something much, much smaller and more confined than the reality of what was there.
Filmmaker Errol Morris, talking about Standard Operating Procedure at the Watson Institute at Brown, May 7, 2008.

A lot of pretty forgettable questions buzz around Standard Operating Procedure. There are Errol's own philosophical distractions: is it true that "seeing is believing"? Or must we commit ourselves to "believing" before we can "see" the truth of these pictures. Do photographs in fact encourage us not to look (or think) further? Then there are the critical nit-picks: can we credit the witnesses that Errol Morris paid to be interviewed? Do some visualizations and reenactments belong in the picture? There's a darker set of political questions, nested like those Russian dolls, around many levels of cowardice, scapegoating and denial of responsibility for Abu Ghraib. Only a few lost souls (and no civilians) went on trial for the wholesale dirty-work. The officer class and the political chiefs excused themselves. The voters in 2004 seemed to absolve George Bush in reelecting him. And by now moviegoers (in a stampede to get behind the armor of Marvel Comics' Iron Man) have made it clear that they don't much want to see S.O.P. or any other movie about the war in Iraq. See Errol Morris' movie anyway, and take your kids. It's sickening, but your kids should know what was done in our name -- and what their kids, too, will pay for those world-famous pictures.

Open Source: Bad News in High Style: Kevin Phillips

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:29:01 -0400

Kevin Phillips: how bad is it really?

People I know count on Paul Krugman in The Times to give us all the bad news we can believe in. But Kevin Phillips (a Nixon-brain turned populist grand historian) not only trumps Krugman in the Cassandra Stakes, he also explains why Krugman and media in general have gone soft and squishy ("now that the financial clouds have lifted a bit") on the global apocalypse coming in the convergence of our housing collapse, the explosion of public and private debt, the fall of the dollar, the rise of (a) China and (b) $125 oil, and the consolidation of finance (the debt business) as our leading industry. Phillips notes that the best of big media, meaning the Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, hate to be out front with bad news. And Krugman, the best of the best, is too heavily invested in the Clinton Democrats' myth of a renewable once-and-future politics of prosperity -- and too polite to dwell, for example, on the financialization of the Clinton campaign base. Nobody I know tells the story of catastrophe with higher style and a broader sweep of knowledge than Kevin Phillips -- in his new book, Bad Money and in conversation here:

Click to listen to Chris's conversation with Kevin Phillips here (36 minutes, 16 MB MP3)

There's a growing sense that the imperial era of the United States is over almost before it started. I think we're seeing the weakness of the United States that has allowed the financial sector to take over the private economy... 20 to 21 percent of GDP is now finance, pushing manufacturing way down. I think what you'll see happen to the US is... a degree of implosion that will involve everything from too much debt, collapsing home prices, rising oil prices and the declining dollar. It doesn't spell the end of the United States, but it spells the end of the United States as the total big cheese in the world. We're going to lose some of the yardsticks that everybody enjoyed for a long time... We used to be leading world creditor nation, lead world manufacturer, leading world producer of oil; we're now leading the world's leading debtor, the largest importer of manufactures in the world, and we're the worlds largest oil importer. It's a disastrous transformation. The only part of the economy that's really profited is the financial sector because an awful lot of the transition is towards more debt, more credit, more living on things you can't afford, more keeping up pretenses, and more ambition around the world and less to back it up. And the consummation of this in many ways has been the George W Bush administration... They invade Iraq, partly in order to get Iraq's oil which hasn't been tapped too much historically, and they thought they might be able to get 6 or 7 million barrels a day, and they could use that to bust open OPEC, and that would bring the price down -- that was their ambition. And the futures market showed briefly in 2003, that there was an expectation that oil would come down to $15-18 dollars a barrel. At the time it was $20-25 -- and now its $120-125. The notion that this imbecility was orchestrated, totally contrary to what they wanted, by two people who came from the oil industry -- we could have done better with two bums or two Good Humor men, than these two men from the oil industry who knew nothing about the forces they were unleashing... There was the 'neutron loan' - it kills the people but leaves the housing standing. The real thing they did that made this thing gain legs, is that no matter how crummy the loans were, most were securitized.... It's mindboggling -- If these people were in the manufacturing business, production of these things would have been enjoined because they were unsafe. You have consumer safety product commissions and things like that -- you don't have a financial products safety commission, which we sure as hell should have.
Kevin Phillips, in conversation with Chris Lydon on Open Source, May 14, 2008

collectik-evan's playlist

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: What's your breaking point? (11/29/08)

Open Source: The Indispensable Musician: Barenboim Backstage

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: Sending you some brotherly (and sisterly) love (11/22/08)

Open Source: Amitav Ghosh and his Sea of Poppies

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: We're getting grounded at the airport! (11/15/08)

Open Source: Our Better Angel: Chris Adrian

Open Source: This Pariah-to-Messiah Moment: John Comaroff

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: Giving 'til it hurts (11/08/08)

Open Source: New Conversation, New Narrative: Stanley Fish

Open Source: The Hunter’s Evidence: Carlo Ginzburg

Open Source: Thank you, Studs Terkel!

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: Take us to your leader! (11/01/08)

Open Source: A Longer View of 2008: Historian Gordon Wood

Open Source: Campaign ‘08: How was it for you, Jim Fishkin?

Open Source: J. S. Bach’s “Habit of Perfection”: Andrew Rangell

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: Why do we love a love story? (10/25/08)

Open Source: Poster Art Then and Now: RISD’s John Maeda

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: What's your biggest flaw? (10/18/08)

Open Source: Soviet Posters: The Art of Polarization

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: Has "thank you" lost its meaning? (10/11/08)

Open Source: Bernard Lown’s Prescription for Survival

Open Source: Andrew Bacevich: The End of Exceptionalism

Open Source: Virtual JFK: Vietnam (and us) if Kennedy had lived

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: Who does the night bring out in you? (10/04/08)

Open Source: What We’re Going Through: Anna Deavere Smith

Open Source: The American Exception: Pop Culture Today

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: Crowds (09/27/08)

Open Source: Candid Capitalist: John Bogle

Open Source: Slavoj Zizek: What is the Question?

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: DNTO is in the driver's seat (09/20/08)

Open Source: Philippe Sands’ Torture Team

Open Source: Torture, Part 3: the Philip Gourevitch version

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: Take a jog with DNTO (09/13/08)

Open Source: An American Exception, in Danger

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: DNTO's back to look at Day One! (9/6/08)

Open Source: What’s So Great About Us

Open Source: Rory Stewart: the Post-Imperialist Poster Hero

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: Back to skool! (08/30/08)

Open Source: As Others See Us: Godfrey Hodgson on the Democrats

LinuxCast: Cisco offers Microsoft Exchange replacement: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Open Source: Cass Sunstein: for the Homer Simpson in all of us

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: Talkin’ about… the human voice (05/03/08)

LinuxCast: The executive director speaks: Stormy Peters

CBC Radio: The Best of DNTO: Meet meat (08/16/08)

LinuxCast: Connecting with kernel developers: Jon Corbet

Open Source: Cuba on our Minds (III): David Kaiser’s JFK

Open Source: The News about the News: Jay Rosen

Jay Rosen of New York University and PressThink, at Brown University, March 19, 2008

Open Source: “Armed Chair”: Bill Flynn’s Seat of Empire

William Flynn in conversation with Chris Lydon, in his studio on Savin Hill, Dorchester, Massachusetts, April 3, 2008

Open Source: Pico Iyer: the “Transcendentalist” Dalai Lama

Pico Iyer, The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, page 203.

Open Source: Brazil’s Statesman at Large

Fernando Henrique Cardoso, in conversation with Chris Lydon for Open Source at the Watson Institute, Brown University, April 2008

Open Source: Patrick Cockburn: The New War in Iraq

Patrick Cockburn, Author of Muqtada (Scribners, 2008), in conversation with Open Source, April 2008

Patrick Cockburn, Iraq correspondent of the London Independent, in conversation with Open Source, April 2008

Open Source: Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke

Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke, page 8.

Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke, page 44.

Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke, page 138.

Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke, page 192.

Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke, page 192.

Nicholson Baker, in conversation with Chris Lydon, April 16, 2008

Open Source: Deal-Maker on the Spot: Christopher Hill

Open Source: Douglas Blackmon: Neo-Slavery in Our Times

Douglas Blackmon in conversation with Chris Lydon about Slavery by Another Name, April 21, 2008

Open Source: The “Open Source” Composer: David Amram

Open Source: Israel at 60: the Etgar Keret Version

Etgar Keret, "Asthma Attack," in The Girl on the Fridge, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2008.

Etgar Keret, in conversation with Chris Lydon, May 1, 2008.

Open Source: Mary Jo Salter’s “Phone Call to the Future”

from A Phone Call to the Future, New and Collected Poems by Mary Jo Salter, Knopf, 2008, page 100.

Open Source: Errol Morris’ “Feel-Bad” Masterpiece

Filmmaker Errol Morris, talking about Standard Operating Procedure at the Watson Institute at Brown, May 7, 2008.

Open Source: Bad News in High Style: Kevin Phillips

Kevin Phillips, in conversation with Chris Lydon on Open Source, May 14, 2008

Patrick Cockburn, Author of Muqtada
(Scribners, 2008), in conversation with Open Source, April 2008