America’s Orwell

Podcast: Open Source with Christopher Lydon (LS 55 · TOP 0.5% what is this?)Episode: America’s OrwellPub date: 2026-06-11Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationWe’re unearthing a model writer for an anxious America. Dwight Macdonald was his own eccentric voice through the Cold War politics and culture of the 1950s and 60s. He was a peacenik at heart, otherwise unpredictable, a New York intellectual of his own school. So in this podcast, we’re just reading Dwight Macdonald aloud with John Summers, who has edited a collection he calls Atrocities of the Mind: Essays on Violence and Politics in the American Century. John Summers. The premise in our conversation is that a certain urgent music in Dwight Macdonald’s prose still sounds clearly enough for a world that has nobody with quite like his range today. Who was Dwight MacDonald—the pedigreed populist, sometime Trotskyite, hard left, who came to call himself a conservative anarchist? The post America’s Orwell appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Christopher Lydon, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.