Not Your Standard Book Chat

Open Source with Christopher Lydon

#Philosophy #Christopher Lydon #Society #Arts

26:18

How do you know when it’s time to make your next big career move? With International Women’s Day around the corner, we are excited to feature Avni Patel Thompson, Founder and CEO of Milo. Avni is building technology that directly supports the often overlooked emotional and logistical labor that falls on parents—especially women. Milo is an AI assistant designed to help families manage that invisible load more efficiently. In this episode, Avni shares her journey from studying chemistry to holding leadership roles at global brands like Adidas and Starbucks, to launching her own ventures. She discusses how she approaches career transitions, the importance of unpleasant experiences, and why she’s focused on making everyday life easier for parents. [01:26] Avni's University Days and Early Career [04:36] Non-Linear Career Paths [05:16] Pursuing Steep Learning Curves [11:51] Entrepreneurship and Safety Nets [15:22] Lived Experiences and Milo [19:55] Avni’s In Her Ellement Moment [20:03] Reflections Links: Avni Patel Thompson on LinkedIn Suchi Srinivasan on LinkedIn Kamila Rakhimova on LinkedIn Ipsos report on the future of parenting About In Her Ellement: In Her Ellement highlights the women and allies leading the charge in digital, business, and technology innovation. Through engaging conversations, the podcast explores their journeys—celebrating successes and acknowledging the balance between work and family. Most importantly, it asks: when was the moment you realized you hadn’t just arrived—you were truly in your element? About The Hosts: Suchi Srinivasan is an expert in AI and digital transformation. Originally from India, her career includes roles at trailblazing organizations like Bell Labs and Microsoft. In 2011, she co-founded the Cleanweb Hackathon, a global initiative driving IT-powered climate solutions with over 10,000 members across 25+ countries. She also advises Women in Cloud, aiming to create $1B in economic opportunities for women entrepreneurs by 2030. Kamila Rakhimova is a fintech leader whose journey took her from Tajikistan to the U.S., where she built a career on her own terms. Leveraging her English proficiency and international relations expertise, she discovered the power of microfinance and moved to the U.S., eventually leading Amazon's Alexa Fund to support underrepresented founders. Subscribe to In Her Ellement on your podcast app of choice to hear meaningful conversations with women in digital, business, and technology.…

for ca. et år siden 35:38

MP3•Episode hjem

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 hear the global writer’s take on the distemper, East and West, in the 2020s. He said he doesn’t talk contemporary affairs, but then he insisted on doing just that: he said that President Erdogan’s authoritarian politics is ruining Turkey, and Donald Trump could be just as dangerous in America. The news about Orhan Pamuk himself, coming out of his notebooks, is that he has been a passionately visual artist all along, keeping an alternative record of his own life in high-color drawings and aphoristic jottings, words and pictures like nothing our listeners have seen.

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Not Your Standard Book Chat

Open Source with Christopher Lydon

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Chris and Orhan Pamuk.

407 episoder

#Philosophy #Christopher Lydon #Society #Arts

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Open Source with Christopher Lydon

1
From Social to Spiritual Media 43:18

for 3 dage siden43:18

43:18

We’re reading our way out of a ruined time with the model reader, Patricia Lockwood. She’s the poet laureate of the internet, for starters. She’s a big-league literary critic, master of social media and the Twitter joke, but also of the mysticism of St. Teresa. She’s on a field-trip to Harvard this week from her home base in Savannah, Georgia, and we’re meeting for the first time, in Cambridge. Patricia Lockwood and Chris Lydon. In this almost archaic culture of books, her mindset is very 2025. This side of Harold Bloom, I’ve never met a wider scope in a reader.…

Open Source with Christopher Lydon

1
A New World 24:14

for 17 dage siden24:14

24:14

We’re looking for our American place in what can feel like a new world order, with Stephen Walt, our first and favorite so-called realist in the foreign policy game—realists being the people who steer by the interests of nations, not their egos or their dreams. And they look beyond the headlines to the long-term effects of policy, to the results. Stephen Walt. By Stephen Walt’s standards, it looks like a new world since that astonishing shouting match in the White House, Donald Trump telling Ukraine’s President Zelensky that the U.S. is out of the war on the border of Russia, that we’re bent on repairing our relationship with Vladimir Putin. And Walt is in the news with a commentary and a headline that said, “Yes, America is Europe’s Enemy Now.”…

Open Source with Christopher Lydon

1
Angus King’s Civics Lesson 32:14

for 4 weeks siden32:14

32:14

Angus King is the anti-partisan, independent United States Senator from the cranky Yankee state of Maine. He is giving us a conversational civics lesson in the tradition of James Madison and also of Schoolhouse Rock , the kids’ TV explainer. James Madison. Senator King has been in the thick of the frenzy in Donald Trump’s Washington, with a certain distinction. His tone on the Senate floor has been measured, his language old-fashioned, and his message a deadly warning. It’s the Constitution itself that’s at risk. What’s at stake, he has been saying, is the famously balanced U.S. Constitution, “this clumsy system” of self-rule, he calls it, that is “the mainspring of our freedom.” And it is under direct assault as never before in these first weeks of a new presidency. Rescuing that “we the people” charter will mark our place in history, Angus King is telling us. Losing it would mark the end of the American experiment.…

Open Source with Christopher Lydon

1
Muskology 47:28

for 6 weeks siden47:28

47:28

In the fog of Trump Two, we’re asking: what’s new? The co-presidency with Elon Musk is surely new, also the raging battle of exotic ideas among techno-optimists and libertarian anarcho-capitalists at war with the very idea of popular democracy and republican government. Further question: do citizens have to follow the action? Matt Taibbi’s headline is: Nation Shrugs as Godzilla Eats Washington. Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian. Here at Open Source in the first month of the Trump sequel, we’re hovering in the fog with two young historians of American finance, technology, and politics, and comparing clues about the future under construction.…

Open Source with Christopher Lydon

1
Trump Part II 35:58

for 8 weeks siden35:58

35:58

We’re picking up the pieces of our country in the age of Trump, Part II. Is the USA still here? Is it still us? Kurt Andersen. Cue Kurt Andersen, with his finger in the wind. We want him on a mission to track the spirit of the age, because he’s been a cool, creative, wide-angle eye on events since the ’80s, when he founded Spy magazine, and then Studio 360 on public radio.…

Open Source with Christopher Lydon

1
Aflame 37:56

for 9 weeks siden37:56

37:56

We’re with writer-world’s exotic traveller and truth-teller Pico Iyer. He’s been the Dalai Lama’s friend from boyhood, and our friend, too, in years now of reading and talk. In his new book, Aflame , subtitled Learning from Silence , we catch him at a turn in his thinking. His fresh question, for all of us, might just be: how do we surface our spiritual reality before we ever grasp the troubles of our world in 2025? Chris with Pico Iyer. This book is bigger than Pico Iyer—there’s a book here that lots of people would love to be writing called “My Spiritual Awakening.” In the new book, Iyer’s awakening happened over the last 30 years, in and out of a Benedictine monastery on the California coast at Big Sur.…

Open Source with Christopher Lydon

1
From Boston to Bethlehem 19:48

for 11 weeks siden19:48

19:48

We’re here with a capsule of memory from late last year. It was a spark of generosity in Liz Walker’s story that lit up the Christmas season for lots of us, and maybe the path ahead. She’s been a pathfinder—for decades—in television newscasting in Boston; then as an ordained minister, leading the Roxbury Presbyterian Church in town; and then in the work of post-traumatic healing in her church and in the wider community. And then out of the blue came the news before Christmas that she was going to visit Palestine to witness and learn about a scene she knew mainly from the headlines. The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. What made it exciting to me was her saying that she had barely the dimmest picture of what she was getting into with Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank town of Bethlehem. And yet what all of us knew was that she was up to it and that she would walk us through the experience when she came back.…

Open Source with Christopher Lydon

1
A Geopolitical Check-Up 48:28

for 13 weeks siden48:28

48:28

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 bloodless revolt by Syrians against their own deadly dictatorship. It’s a third year in a row that we’ve asked Freeman for an end-of-the-season checkup on the American empire and the changing rules of world order.…

Open Source with Christopher Lydon

1
Blyth is Back 41:09

for 15 weeks siden41:09

41:09

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 paradox. The economy was said to be the saving grace of Joe Biden’s short term, specifically the drive to rebuild the industrial base at home. But the same economy was the undoing of his would-be successor, Kamala Harris—specifically, inflation, a largely hidden cost-of-living crisis in food and energy that hurt real people, poor people most of all.…

Open Source with Christopher Lydon

1
Not Your Standard Book Chat 35:38

for 16 weeks siden35:38

35:38

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 hear the global writer’s take on the distemper, East and West, in the 2020s. He said he doesn’t talk contemporary affairs, but then he insisted on doing just that: he said that President Erdogan’s authoritarian politics is ruining Turkey, and Donald Trump could be just as dangerous in America. The news about Orhan Pamuk himself, coming out of his notebooks, is that he has been a passionately visual artist all along, keeping an alternative record of his own life in high-color drawings and aphoristic jottings, words and pictures like nothing our listeners have seen.…

Open Source with Christopher Lydon

1
The Roy Haynes Century 38:17

for 18 weeks siden38:17

38:17

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 Metheny among them. Michael Haynes and Roy Haynes. Perhaps Roy Haynes’s deepest satisfaction was introducing himself as he once did to me: “I was Charlie Parker’s favorite drummer.” Roy Haynes died two weeks ago, just four months before his one hundredth birthday. We are remembering him in a Thanksgiving spirit with the historian and jazz biographer Robin Kelley at UCLA. L-R: Charles Mingus, Roy Haynes, Thelonious Monk, and Charlie Parker at the Open Door, Greenwich Village, September 1953.…

Open Source with Christopher Lydon

1
Joshua Cohen’s Camp 37:22

for 19 weeks siden37:22

37:22

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’s State of Israel, two zones of huge power, not least military force, shadowed by darkness and danger.…

Open Source with Christopher Lydon

1
United States of Fear 24:51

for 20 weeks siden24:51

24:51

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?…

Open Source with Christopher Lydon

1
Amber’s America: Love and Outrage 31:05

for 21 weeks siden31:05

31:05

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 she’s been without papers, as she says, ever since, despite our best efforts. When Donald Trump talks about sweeping deportations, if he gets reelected, the face I see is Amber’s.…

Open Source with Christopher Lydon

1
Playground 42:56

for 22 weeks siden42:56