Christopher Lydon with two takes on the New India. First, NYT columnist Anand Giridharadas, champion of India's globalizing economy and capitalist success. Then we get the other side of the story from novelist and anti-globalization activist Arundahti Roy.

This hour brings politics with Chris Hedges and poetry with Damion Searls. Chris Hedges' new book recounts The Death of the Liberal Class. And the precocious story-writer and translator Damion Searls is our guide to the immortal Rainer Maria Rilke.

James Kaplan has a fresh take on the life of Frank Sinatra, the iconic—maybe the greatest—performing artist of the American Century, with more and more emphasis on the word 'artist.' This one is about the music of the man, a ring-a-ding-ding swinger and a wee-small-hours depressive who had spectacular falls and returns to glory through seven decades of stardom, and who is, as he said he would be, still around.

Christopher Lydon is in Ghana this hour, starting out at Cape Coast Castle -- the holding pen for millions of slaves on the way to the New World and a wound to human civilization that still bleeds. From the Castle Chris goes to village Ghana, with an outspoken modern chief who says Africa could be self-sufficient if it licked a second AIDS: Acquired Import Dependency Syndrome. In the third part of the hour Chris is sampling the renewal of Ghanaian music with Koo Nimo, the Segovia of West African strings.

Christopher Lydon in conversation with two writing talents on the rise: Paul Harding is first, talking about his debut novel "Tinkers" and musing on his modern incarnation of the New England transcendentalists. In the second part of the show, Chris talks with Israeli short-story writer Etgar Keret.

Christopher Lydon in two conversations on Cuban music: first with Ned Sublette, author of "Cuba and its Music", and second with Roberto Zurbano, DJ and music historian in Havana. Mixed with plenty of amazing Cuban music, of course.

Christopher Lydon, first in conversation with Harold Bloom on Walt Whitman and the state of the humanities today -- then in conversation with Helen Vendler, close reader of the poet Wallace Stevens.

Christopher Lydon in conversation with author Pico Iyer. In the first half from the beaches of Jamaica at the Calabash literary festival, Pico Iyer preaches a literary gospel of enrichment by the mixing-up and mongrelization of identities and language. In the second half, in Boston, he talks about his life-long friendship with the Dalai Lama.

Christopher Lydon in conversation with Pulitzer winning author Douglas Blackmon. Slavery in the American South ended only a generation or two ago, not with the Emancipation Proclamation

Christopher Lydon is in conversation hour with Robin Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original. His superb biography brings the Thelonious Monk story back from the ragged edge to the creative center of American music.

This week we're talking with the soldier-turned-author of Washington Rules, Andrew Bacevich. Then we sit down at the piano with the jazz improv star Vijay Iyer.

This week the conversation moves from Kabul to Paris, as we talk with John Mearsheimer, the foreign policy "realist" from the University of Chicago, and then with Graham Robb, whose book Parisians puts the vividness of "story" back in "history."

Election day is closing in, and Jill Lepore has a hip historian's take on the question: What Would the Founding Fathers Do? Jill Lepore says there's more religion than politics in the 2010 Tea Party. Then, the Nobel-winning author V.S. Naipaul talks about his new book The Masque of Africa.

Past is prologue with Ian Morris and Dennis Lehane. Dennis Lehane is the author of "Mystic River," "Gone Baby Gone," "Shutter Island," and most recently, "Midnight Mile." We are testing a favorite Open Source premise that the most observant anthropologists and historians of our time may be novelists. But first, Stanford's Professor Ian Morris, with his prescient history "Why the West Rules--For Now." In his take, geology has the final say.

Isabel Wilkerson is the epic tale teller of the Great Migration of Southern black people that remade America — sound, substance and spirit — in the 20th Century. Her book is The Warmth of Other Suns.

This hour we sit with Lydia Davis as she reads her beautifully honed, firecracker prose. She writes in the company of Montaigne, Emerson, Proust, Beckett, Flannery O'Connor and Dorothy Parker. But we start the hour not so far away, in Africa, with Howard French, whose book-in-progress follows a new business class of Chinese migrants in a neo-gold rush for Africa's resources.

Even as we watched transfixed as the protests in Egypt and Tunisia pushed the region's political scene into new waters, Nir Rosen stayed (will stay) focused on the ongoing, ever-imperative stories of Iraq and Afghanistan. And he's doing the difficult work to get them right. The independent journalist hits the street with an ability to relay a country's human textures on the receiving end of American military influence.

Then Marianne Leone Cooper of Soprano's fame proves herself as a writer, with Knowing Jesse. It's a book to ambush the heart and feed our neglected hunger for a humanistic revival, and to challenge our notions of disability.

Elliott Colla talks about the poetry of revolution and its role for transformation in Egypt. Then, we're with Jaimy Gordon, whose novel The Lord of Misrule won the National Book Award this winter.

Journalist Philip Weiss reflects on the links and gaps between European anti-semitism, the neoconservative movement, the modern idea of Zionism, and the revolutions going on right now across the Middle East.

New Yorker correspondent Peter Hessler reports from the road in China on the human side of miracle growth and epic migration. Then, we meet poet Christian Wiman, writing in the shadow of a mortal illness with a certain dark clarity about God, devotion, disbelief, and family memory.

First, we join biographer John Szwed in thanking the eccentric musical anthropologist Alan Lomax for his rare recordings of early twentieth century American life. Lomax spent his long life traveling the world with his ear to the ground and capturing the people's music - folk and roots, work songs, praise songs, and prison songs - that turned out to be the foundation of everything else.

Then, conductor and composer Paul Phillips is plunging us into the synesthetic universe of the odd genius who wrote "A Clockwork Orange." Anthony Burgess wished all his life that the world knew him as a composer who wrote novels, instead of a novelist who wrote songs and symphonies on the side.

Open Source "Shorties" are 7 to 8 minute cuts of our best timely and evergreen material. Today, we're joining biographer John Szwed in thanking the eccentric musical anthropologist Alan Lomax for finding and recording the real American music. His recordings of sound and song from the 1930s onward turned out to be the foundation for everything else

How do war stories work, and where do we find them? Our guests this week are mapping out terrains of conflict and confusion in our lifetimes, from the brutal Balkan conflicts of the 1990s to the Mideast wars of this decade and the Arab revolt of 2011. Melani McAlister is an American Studies anthropologist at George Washington University, and her work follows the late Edward Said's premise that empire always finds a counterpart in culture. If you want to understand American reactions to 9/11, to Israel, and to the Arab spring, McAlister is saying, look first to our pop culture, our bestsellers and our action movies, and to race relations within the US. Then, young novelist Téa Obreht is spinning myths on top of fables about the war-torn Balkan cities of her childhood. For Téa, the art of the novel is about the creation of place -- in this case, a backdrop of civil war and chaos that borders on mystical.

With the news of Osama Bin Laden's death punctuating the reports from Libya, Syria, and Yemen, we're wondering: is this the beginning of the end, or as Churchill said, the end of the beginning? Or is it an intermission in a permanent conflict? Will the democratic wave that seems to be sweeping the region finally run aground in Syria, or perhaps, be revived in Libya?

Juan Cole is a Professor of History at the University of Michigan, and he's a first-rate public intellectual thanks to his website, "Informed Comment," which he started to help Americans cut through the fogs of ideology and falsehood surrounding the Iraq war. Steven Heydemann is a Vice President at the U.S. Institute for Peace, and a scholar of Syria since the 1980s. He's here to assess our claims of Syria as an outlier, a thuggish security state where we fear the Arab revolt might grind to a halt.

Sharp-talking political economist Mark Blyth is back in the Glasgow pub, so we say, and he's expounding on the melt-down that's still melting down -- why our debts to China are less cause for worry than, say, another "routine" crisis in Europe. One of Mark Blyth's favorite phrases, he says, is that things continue until they stop. In this whirlwind primer on the health of today's global economy, we'll hear why the Queen of England is writing off the next 50 years of Irish history; why the IMF should have closed its doors some 30 years before the sex scandal that seems to rivet all of us; and why the Dodd-Frank plan to bring Wall Street back under control is merely a "set of airbags" in the same high-risk vehicle.