It is said about Noam Chomsky that he has been to the study of language what Isaac Newton was to the study of gravity after the apple hit his head. Chomsky had the “aha!” insight: that the power of language is born in our biology—it’s not acquired. Chomskyan linguistics came to explain how the human species alone got that gift of language. But it’s not the only reason Professor Chomsky is on our minds this summer of 2023. Frail and quiet approaching his 95th birthday in the fall, he has been for half a century the model of Socrates in the American square: the public pest with questions that sting. So we are listening again to some of our best conversations with this fortress of science and political dissent. This one was in his MIT office in 2017.

In The Country of the Blind, where the writer Andrew Leland is guiding our tour, they do things differently. They have their own identity riddles, their network of heroes and not-so-heroes. They have their own senses of beauty and of sexual interest. They have their own sore spots when sighted people speak of their disability. They have their own Facebook pages and their own panic attacks—their own wacky humor, as well. They have their own Hall of Fame, back to Homer, among the ancients. They have a sense of their modern selves as strivers, even adventurers, more than victims. They argue fine points among themselves, like whether Lady Justice in front of the courthouse is, or ought to be, blind, and whether a male gaze persists among men who cannot see.

This is the vitalism episode, with the passionate polymath Jackson Lears. His new book is beyond category, and gripping, too: it’s titled Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality from Camp Meeting to Wall Street. Jackson Lears. The historian Jackson Lears is reintroducing us to the energy, enchantment, courage, spontaneity, and longing that have driven the American story uphill and down, to wherever we are in the 2020s—a big question in itself. He gives us a world that’s thrumming with invisible currents of power: something more than animal magnetism, bigger than electricity.

We’re marking the 20th birthday of podcasting in conversation with Erica Heilman, a prize practitioner. Here we are with Erica in Peacham, Vermont, settled in 1776 in the Northeast Kingdom, up toward Canada. We seek out Erica because she’s the great artist emerging in this young medium. With Erica Heilman in Vermont. People speak of podcasting as radio on the internet, but it’s really something else. It can feel like pen-paling with strangers, except that the human voice goes far and wide to the world. And Erica’s podcast Rumble Strip shows just how deep it can go. She gets regular Vermonters talking, and then she listens and edits their voices with an almost religious attention and care. What strikes her listeners is the ring of truth, first and last in her work.

We’re back in the pub a year later with Mark Blyth, the outspoken political economist at Brown University—which means he works and talks and thinks at the intersection of big money and big power. In this pub, the forbidden word is “bankruptcy.” When Mark Blyth moved to the United States, the national debt was about a quarter of the gross national product for one year. It is now 125% of GNP. The government does not cover its costs. It chooses not to raise taxes, and it cannot stop borrowing.

This week: a show from our archive from The Connection days. “It ain’t over till it’s over.” That’s Yogi Berra’s ageless line, in the title now of a summer hit movie just to prove Yogi was right about pretty much everything. He was a most valuable player in his New York Yankees uniform and a most beloved, most creative, most quotable source of American language and American wisdom. We got it first-hand in a radio studio with that dear man almost 25 years ago.

The line is intoned now as a sort of chapter heading in our literary-artistic history: Eileen Myles grew up in Boston/Cambridge and moved to New York in 1974 to become a poet. Chris with Eileen Myles. And they did. 20 volumes later—their latest book of poetry is A “Working Life”— they’re very nearly the New York poet, with a branch office in Marfa, Texas, and still a strong Boston accent that is part of the poems. Recently, back in Boston, Eileen Myles sat down to talk about a life in poetry and in conversation with the world.

We’re humbled—we’re also scared—by the power of chatbots like GPT-4 to do pretty much everything that word people have ever done, but faster and maybe more to the point. The twist in this conversation is that our guests are professional humanists, guardians, and teachers of the hard-earned old wisdom of books, not machines. And the double twist that they want to argue is that the enemy here is not evil AI: it’s us, who have enfeebled the old culture to a vanishing point in the practice of our politics, our media, our most expensive elite universities. Robert Pogue Harrison and Ana Ilievska. Robert Pogue Harrison is our Dante scholar at Stanford, our professional humanist, and a West Coast friend in smart podcasting. We asked ChatGPT about his voice, and we got the instant answer that his voice “has a certain mellowness and introspection” that go with his “keen ear for language and a precise, articulate way of expressing his ideas.” He’s joined by Ana Ilievska, initials A.I. She is Robert’s colleague from Europe in humanistic studies at Stanford. Recently, in the podcast Entitled Opinions, they both defended AI as a wake-up call, maybe in the nick of time, to rescue humanity, human stewardship, human culture from its corrupted condition. They both said they expect their students to use AI and to learn from it.

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. 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. 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. 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.