Radio Open Source with Christopher Lydon

As revolution flares anew in Cairo's Tahrir Square, ecstasy and the deepest sadness and remembered pain are all in the mix...

The talk of Egypt's Revolution 2.0 in Tahrir Square. Did Hillary Clinton green-light President Morsi's decree of dictatorship -- and trigger the fight to oust him?

The Lebanese novelist of Palestinian suffering, Elias Khoury, is cheered -- despite Gaza, despite stalled revolutions -- by "a very precious, very rich moment in Arab life."

Khaled Fahmy calls the Tahrir uprising a living revolution, more cultural than political, the first "people's victory" in 5000 years of Egyptian history.

Farida Ayari has a journalist's short course on the Tunisian start of the Arab Spring: how workers triggered it, liberals captured it, Islamists won it.

Yasser Jradi, songwriter of the Tunisian revolt, says the old police state was undone by its own "bad culture" and "very bad music" ; and now it's the artists' job for the next 10 years to "construct" the country anew.

Nadia Khiari speaks of her new life in the Tunisian revolution. A painter schooled in France, she was born again as a political cartoonist.

Amin Maalouf on the Arab Spring: yes, the habit of patriarchy and bullying in the Arab home is related to the habit of public tyranny.

Roger Owen is briefing us for our conversational plunge into North Africa -- on how the Arab Spring became the Arab Revolution.

Pankaj Mishra, post-colonial literary light of London, argues that the "spell" of Western power is broken after Iraq, Afghanistan and the finance meltdown.

Eric Hobsbawm, the imperial historian dead at 95, spoke bluntly of the Bush-Blair misadventure in Iraq as dementia.

Bernd Heinrich, in his naturalist study of "the animal way of death," tell us humans: From life thou art, to life thou shalt return.

Jackson Lears, the cultural historian, is ticking off some of the words that won't be debated in our 2012 campaign -- among them: capitalism, neo-liberalism, sense of a "pre-World War I" moment.

Gore Vidal -- passionate historian, and indomitable comic -- at his best in 2003, contrasting Founding Heroes and Bathetic Pretenders in American politics.

The sorry shrinking of America started 35 years ago -- in theory, then practice, in Princeton historian Dan Rodgers' account.