Here’s a last burst of wind in our sails, a last gentle guffaw, from a listener we came to adore: the cartoonist Ed Koren. You knew Ed Koren, too, for those furry, quizzical characters he drew and captioned—portraits of our general bemusement—through a 60-year run in The New Yorker magazine. His studio, it turned out, was in rural Vermont, where he’d gotten hooked on our public radio shows. Finally, just a few years ago, we met the sheer joy of that man, face to face.

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Chris Lydon with Ed Koren in Vermont, November 2021.

Ed Koren knew that “the laws of entropy,” as he put it in conversation, were not in his favor. But he did not believe in dying, and in his case, I don’t either. Most of a year ago, in the late stages of treatment for inoperable lung cancer, he told me he’d withdrawn from hospice care because hospice framed its mission around death, and his passion, as he said, was life and living. What I heard was not the sound of denial, or evasion of anything. I felt him embracing a truth that I’d felt from the start of a precious friendship: Ed Koren stood for the elusive strands of humanity that do not die. The wonder of our connection has been discovering, oddly enough, that we could talk about such things. And so we did, producer Mary McGrath and I, visiting Ed and his wife Curtis, late in March, up in Mary’s ski country. As we entered his studio this time he was absorbed in reading a New Yorker profile of the godfather of modern graphic design, Milton Glaser.

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Ed Koren’s hairy creatures.

Scenes from Ed Koren’s studio last month. In the center: Ed with Mary McGrath.

William James, thinker and writer, was known widely in the nineteenth century as the adorable genius who invented American pragmatism. He was a brain scientist, student of war and religion, a philosopher who can feel like a very lively presence in the shadows of our condition, whatever we call it.

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John Kaag.

In the 2020s, the philosopher John Kaag is our guest to enlist William James in a sort of quest for insight and healing in a divided nation. His books on William James include Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life.

There’s nobody quite like Sonny Rollins in the All-American sound and story of jazz. He was a teenager in Harlem in the 1940s when major players caught on to a rising star. Steadily over the decades, he built one of the genius careers on the tenor saxophone, alongside his rival and friend John Coltrane. More than that, Sonny Rollins was making his music a way of life, a mission of self-study and self-improvement, a moral and philosophical course of inquiry and reinvention—of gentleness and peace—all at the same time.

Biographer Aidan Levy. Credit: Jahsie Ault.

In his 93rd year of life, Sonny Rollins now has the affirmation of a 700-page biography, meticulous and monumental—modeled on Robin Kelley’s life of Sonny’s friend Thelonious Monk. It lets all of us see Sonny Rollins up with Walt Whitman and a few others on the Olympus of American art and storytelling.

Out of the blue a decade ago, Paul Harding won a huge popular following, first, and then the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for his modern Maine sort of folk tale called Tinkers. His new one is deeper, darker, more ambitious philosophically, more poetic, more beautiful in long stretches—more ironical, too, starting with the title.

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Paul Harding.

This Other Eden takes off from sketchy reality—a real colony of free poor people—Europeans, Africans, indigenous Penobscots, fishermen, farmers, all of them on a tiny island off the coast of Maine about a century ago, until they got swept up by the state and banished to confinement, some of them in the Maine School for the Feeble Minded. In the novel, it’s Paul Harding’s invented characters and imagination that compose a tale of family love encompassing the damages of incest and murder and official state cruelty.

“Don’t forget” is a mantra in our shop: “don’t forget” specially the characters, the moments that made us. Norman Mailer is the spirit-seeker and sometimes reckless truth-teller we are un-forgetting in this podcast. We are summoning Norman Mailer in his hundredth-birthday season, what could be his revival time, to tell us what happened to his country and ours. Mailer lived and wrote it all: 40 books of eagle-eyed fact and fiction. First as a soldier in the Philippines, in the 1940s; then: epic poet of the Sixties in America; eventually as a celebrity and popular artist of Duke Ellington or Frank Sinatra proportions.

J. Michael Lennon, Chris Lydon, and John Buffalo Mailer.

Sinatra taught us love songs, Mailer read the maelstrom of our American dream life to us. The premise in our conversation is that Norman Mailer, 15 years after his death, is still speaking to his country. Certainly to John Buffalo Mailer, youngest of seven sons and daughters, co-editor with J. Michael Lennon of a Mailer distillation for 2023, titled A Mysterious Country: The Grace and Fragility of American Democracy.

Lydia Moland is reminding us that when present company in American public life comes up short, the ancestors of American democracy and spirit are lurking out there, in abundance and power to reset our judgment of who we are and what is possible, for a society, for each of us.

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Lydia Moland.

Lydia Moland, our sometime radio colleague, is now a philosophy professor at Colby College in Maine. For her the shock of recognition came at the chance sight of a nineteenth-century letter from a battling idealist, Lydia Maria Child, whom she’d never heard of. (It reminds me of the Pulitzer Prize biographer Stacy Schiff feeling much the same rapture at the same moment in 2016, rediscovering the sturdy giant of the American Revolution, Samuel Adams.) Lydia Moland’s big book became a story not just of a central figure in the abolition of slavery, but of her own passion as a contemporary scholar finding a model of moral courage for our own times. We spoke together at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge on the publication of Lydia Maria Child: A Radical American Life.

This is family talk in rural Ireland toward the end of an extraordinary life. My brother Patrick was the youngest of six, the saint among us and always the brightest company. Two winters ago he’d struck an odd note in our regular catching-up by phone, from his community farm in County Kilkenny to my base in Boston. He said, “Chris, I’ve aged more in the last 10 weeks than in the last 10 years.” To walk 50 yards had become an ordeal. The villain turned up in a Dublin exam: it was ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease of the “motor neurons,” which spares the victim’s thinking and speech even as it cripples the body. There was nothing to be done about this – except, I ventured, to record a gabby memoir in the time we had, over Zoom, and then face-to-face on the porch of Patrick’s little farmhouse in the town of Callan. We are tracking the glow of a soul. What had made such a life even possible?

Patrick was the brother who never had a salary, or a personal savings account. His famous high school, Phillips Exeter, gave him its highest award, for a life “non sibi,” not for self. He’d found his match in Gladys Kinghorn, from Aberdeen in Scotland, visionary and inexhaustible, like himself. What they did together over 50 years across the southeast of Ireland was build a network of farms and school communities to support people with Down syndrome, autism, epilepsy. In Patrick’s Camphill communities, inspired by the Austrian guru Rudolf Steiner, support was founded on love and attention. Music became central in Camphill therapy. So was gardening, both vegetables and flowers. There may be more to see and say about Patrick, but I’m just as hungry for other accounts around the self-disciplined blossoming of beautiful lives.

Special thanks to the Irish filmmaker Eamon Little, who recorded the sound of this podcast. With Curious Dog Films, he is making a feature documentary on Patrick Lydon, titled Born That Way.

This show first aired on September 16, 2021.

It’s hard not to notice that we’re flunking tests, right and left, and running out of strategies against global-size troubles. COVID, we said, was our test for the age of viruses. At summer’s end the variants are gaining and most of the world is unvaccinated. Afghanistan became a 20-year test of the notion that a public-private force of money, drones, a few troops, and contractors on the ground could win an asymmetrical war against the Taliban, and terror. We didn’t. And now comes Mariana Mazzucato, the brassy Italian-English-American who says: it’s our thinking that’s got to change, and find its way back to the idealism and scale of JFK’s space program.

The Apollo 11 lunar module.

We’ve got COVID, climate, chaos in the rush from Afghanistan, plus cruelties of capitalism and a cultural rift in the heart of the country. Who are we by now? Who remembers a certain cool competence in the self-image of Americans? And who can imagine recovering it? Mariana Mazzucato wants to tell you: she can! Born in Italy, raised in the US, holding forth now from University College London, she’s got an audience on both sides of the Atlantic. Her message is: we’ll change our luck only by transforming ourselves with ideas and dreams at the grand scale of the emergencies in energy, jobs, health, and justice. When she speaks of a Moonshot Mission to change capitalism, she’s evoking John F. Kennedy’s promise to put a man on the moon in the ’60s. On the 2021 agenda, I’m asking her to grade our wins and losses in the struggle with COVID so far, and the prospects in our struggle to save the climate.

This show originally aired on September 23, 2021.

Thomas Mann was one of those cultural giants the world doesn’t seem to make anymore—artists with authority, almost as big as their countries, at the level of Mark Twain, say, Voltaire, or Emerson! In his heyday a century ago Thomas Mann was called “the life of the mind in Germany”: the darkly philosophical novelist of obsession and illness in The Magic Mountain, the tale-spinner of Death in Venice, about a master writer, like himself, who falls quite madly in love with the sheer beauty of a 14-year-old boy on the beach. But Thomas Mann had a secret: he had been that love-stricken man on the beach. He was a happy husband, the father of six, and all his long life scanning for love that was not allowed. The trick today is to reimagine a whole Thomas Mann, and the novelist Colm Tóibín has pulled it off.

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The Irish and transnational novelist Colm Tóibín is inviting us into a rare feast for alert readers this hour. The Magician is his new title: it’s a biography in the form of a novel about the twentieth-century German master Thomas Mann, both statesman and artist. The rare part is that Colm Tóibín is also giving us a sort of anatomy lesson in the processes that make high art and artists: the family politics, the erotic engines seen and unseen, the historical memory in a country and culture that were coming apart. Toss in what Thomas Mann felt was the spiritual energy that reached him through art and music especially. The Magician is a marvel, and so is Colm Tóibín.

This show was originally broadcast on July 15, 2021.

We know their songs, not so much what they were going through, those Black women artists who wrote and sang so many anthems of American life: Bessie Smith’s “Gimme a Pigfoot” and Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues”; stars beyond category like Ethel Waters singing “Shake that Thing” in the ’20s; then Gospel hits like “His Eye Is On the Sparrow,” on tour in the 1950s with evangelist Billy Graham. Billie Holiday gave the world “Strange Fruit.” Nina Simone went deep with “Sinnerman.” Eartha Kitt was sly and sexy with a French twist on “C’est Si Bon.” Mahalia Jackson sang Duke Ellington’s spiritual “Come Sunday.” These are “the sisters who made the modern” in Daphne Brooks’s monumental inquiry into the souls, the minds, the experience that added up to more than entertainment.

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Daphne Brooks.

“From Bessie Smith to Beyoncé” is the inescapable bumper-sticker on this hour of historical, musical radio. We’re talking about a century of Black female singers in the churn of gender, race, class, region, technology, and celebrity that drive the culture and the music biz. Daphne Brooks is our archivist and our authority, professor of African American Studies at Yale. Liner Notes for the Revolution is the title of her opinionated compendium of performances we all sort of know. And there’s nothing at all shy about Daphne Brooks’s argument that runs cover to cover through her book, subtitled The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound. In short, she saying Black women singers are our truth-tellers, about love and work, color, caste, God, and man, and woman.