Philip Weiss co-edits the online forum Mondoweiss, covering "the war of ideas" in the Middle East. He calls the revolts in Egypt and Tunisia a gift for Americans too - one that can liberate us from 50 years of policy and flaw ideology that left us on the wrong side of history and justice. Philip is trying to start something between a moral argument and a civil war over the big book of Jewish tradition, spiritual and moral wholeness - over US national interest, the Palestinian condition, and the judgement from 19th and 20th century Europe that Jewish people require a national home to be safe. 

Advisory: show is clean, but contains several bleeps. 

Our hour starts with Peter Hessler, the New Yorker's first full-time correspondent in China and the author of "Country Driving: A Journey from Farm to Factory." Ten years in China made Peter Hessler wonder when change at the Chinese rate is too much for anybody's health or happiness.

Then, we'll engage an essential American poet, Christian Wiman, spinning subtle verse on God or a lack thereof in his third book, "Every Riven Thing." From a bookless boyhood poem in West Texas, Christian Wiman now lives in Chicago, where he edits the ever-evolving, ever-provacative Poetry Magazine.

First, our guest John Szwed has written a classic American biography of Alan Lomax, aptly subtitled "The Man Who Recorded the World." Alan Lomax's career began when he was 15, when he and his father set off with early Edison recording equiptment on what they called a "hobo-ing" trip through the South at the height of the Great Depression. Part talent scout, part anthropologist, Alam Lomax became obsessed with rooting global cultures onto musical elements, performance styles, and the way that people stand and move together in space.

Then, conductor Paul Philips has been leading the Brown Unversity orchestra this winter in the symphonic music of Anthony Burgess. Phillips has just published "A Clockwork Counterpoint," exploring the interplay between literary and musical structures in Burgess's impressive cannon. Burgess's masterpiece "A Clockwork Orange," he tells us, was written in sonata form. Burgess's orchestral style was post-modern before post-modernism had a name -- a blend of styles and rhytms, instruments and vocals, ballet and raunchy pub songs -- and somehow, it all fits together.

Alan Lomax (1915 – 2002), The Man Who Recorded the World in Szwed’s subtitle, was the son of a proper folklorist at the University of Texas. The old folklore compiled texts; the new would revel in the truth of sound that had body language in it, too. Together in the early Thirties, father John and his teenage apprentice had set out across the South with early Edison recording equipment on what John Lomax used to call a “hobo-ing” trip. What Alan ended up compiling was a sort of unofficial, non-commercial people’s soundtrack of the Great Depression. Homegrown songs of spirit seem in retrospect to be pouring out of the suffering soil wherever Alan Lomax turned.

Alan Lomax grew up to be a walking trove of all the world’s musics — especially its songs. By the end he’d built “folksonomies” of song elements and delivery styles, a whole anthropology in which the ways people sing marked the main links and differences between the cultures of continents. John Szwed is talking about an ecstatic genius whom many friends found “oppressive” if only because of his certainty that nobody anywhere knew what he knew about songs. “But Lomax was arguably one of the most influential Americans of the twentieth century,” Szwed writes, “a man who changed not only how everyone listened to music but even how they viewed America.”

Professor McAlister of George Washington University is talking out Edward Said’s premise that we Westerners are trapped in the old moral map defined by an exotic Orient and a rational Occident. Our understanding of 9.11 and Egypt, Melani McAlister tells us, is filtered through the sexy sheikh films of the 20s and the terrorist hostage flicks of the 80s. Not to mention the theology of race in America – that old liberation crossover between the civil rights movement and decolonization overseas – and the rise of a President whose middle name means a lot of things to a lot of people, from American backwaters to Tahrir Square. As Said would say, there’s an intertwining of culture and Empire that we cannot shake and we rarely recognize. Professor McAlister does say that movies like The Kingdom, Syriana and Hurt Locker mark a changing cultural topography, but our mis-labeling of the uprising in Egypt as a “Facebook revolution” reveals the persistence of our need to find ourselves at the root of all freedoms. Look instead, McAlister says, to the whole networks of Egyptian civil society that predate the social media age – the women’s groups, the labor unions, and yes, the Islamists.

At only 25, Téa Obreht is the youngest of the New Yorker Magazine's 20 Best Writiers Under 40. The paired stories on which Téa Obreht has built her praiseworthy novel The Tiger’s Wife are told by an older doctor to his grand-daughter; they are presented in turn as the framework in which the man invented his life. The first, a sort of fable, involves a tiger that escaped the city zoo during the German bombing in 1941, and settled in the forest ridge near grandfather’s town when he was an impressionable lad of 12. The second invention is a Deathless Man who keeps showing up in the grandfather’s life, making it his odd business to tell people clearly when they are about to die. Téa Obreht’s conversation has the precocious free flow and solid substance her writing does. But let’s not be misled by her light touch: the first novel by this young woman from the Balkans is about the landscape of permanent war — the very geography of tribal and personal violence — and the stories we make up to navigate it.

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.