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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fintan O’Toole, an accomplished Irish journalist and author, shares his insights on the striking parallels between the transformations in Ireland and the United States. He examines how nostalgia fuels political movements amid economic struggles. O’Toole discusses the culture of fear spurred by influential political figures and the growing need for unity within progressive movements. He critiques the changing nature of political discourse, focusing on the normalization of crudeness and its impact on public perception. Ultimately, he underscores the importance of identity and narrative in navigating complex political landscapes.

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.

Richard Powers may just be the bravest big novelist out there. His new book is titled Playground, in which AI plays with the natural world. The question is whether and how the digital transformation might undo the power of death, as in the death of long ago people, the death of species today, even the death of a planet. Richard Powers. This is our third trip through a new book of his, aiming his imagination and hard science at the scariest maladies of modern life. First it was Orfeo, about atonal music, then The Overstory, which won the Pulitzer prize and a huge audience, about disappearing tree species. And now Playground, going deep into the breakdown of oceans—also into dementia with Lewy bodies, also fate and friendships, and damaged people who make foolproof thinking machines.

Nathan Thrall, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, delves into the haunting realities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through poignant narratives and personal stories. He examines a tragic bus accident involving Palestinian children, emphasizing systemic injustices and the contrasting indifference of Israeli security forces. The conversation also critiques societal dehumanization, highlights the emotional toll of segregation, and draws parallels to the anti-apartheid movement. Thrall calls for increased awareness and empathy amidst ongoing geopolitical struggles.