The Ideas Letter Podcast: A project of the Open Society Foundations

With his riveting chronicle of the New York Mets baseball team, AM Gittlitz is emerging as a rising star in the field of popular social history. Writing with what the Wall Street Journal calls “the lunatic panache of a utopian manifesto,” Gittlitz weaves together the genealogies of American’s Pastime and the complex histories of race, class, ethnicity, and politics in the nation’s largest city. In this conversation, he recounts the many occasions when the tortuous trajectory of the Mets (and its precursors) collides with the major events of the metropolis and the nation. Civil rights workers, labor organizers, urban master-builders, corrupt politicians, and titans of finance and industry all make cameo appearances in his fascinating account, alongside legendary players from Jackie Robinson to Cleon Jones, Tom Seaver, and Francisco Lindor.
Read the book, Metropolitans: New York Baseball, Class Struggle, and the People's Team, and read the transcript of the interview here.
AM Gittlitz is an organizer and writer living in Ridgewood Queens. He is the author of I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs, and Apocalypse Communism and co-host of The Wreckage podcast.
A former journalist and editor, Stephen Hubbell directs the Seven Cities Fellowship Program, part of the Ideas Workshop at the Open Society Foundations.

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"In my home country, they call me a 'bornfree'." Simukai Chigudu was born in Zimbabwe, two years after the end of its bitter war of liberation - a war in which his father had fought. This is the story of his childhood journey through the chaos of that new country's birth to Britain, where he arrived alone, a teenager, burning with ambition but utterly lost in ways he had yet even to discover. Told with astonishing insight, his memoir describes the drama of his quest to belong and to succeed, and how his worldview was both shaped and shattered by Britain, ultimately setting him on a quest to uncover the truth of his parents' past. In excavating their story alongside his own, he brings us closer than ever before to understanding one of the greatest upheavals in modern times - the freeing of a continent from colonial rule - not as history or politics but as a psychological and emotional force, one that divides families from within, even while those same divisions bind them fiercely together across time.

Read the transcript here.

Simukai Chigudu is Associate Professor of African Politics at the Oxford Department of International Development and Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford University. He is broadly interested in the politics of global health and epidemics, race and identity, citizenship and activist movements, with a regional focus on Africa and the African diaspora.

Simukai is the author of The Political Life of an Epidemic: Cholera, Crisis and Citizenship in Zimbabwe (Cambridge University Press, 2020), an examination of the social and political causes and consequences of Zimbabwe’s catastrophic cholera outbreak in 2008/09, the most extensive in African history. This monograph won the Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award from the American and International Political Science Associations. He has conducted research in Zimbabwe, Uganda, The Gambia, and Tanzania, and has publications in several leading social science and medical journals.

Simukai has recently published his first book for the trade, Chasing Freedom: Coming of Age at the End of Empire, published by The Bodley Head and Crown in March 2026. This book combines memoir, political history and cultural criticism to show how colonialism continues to shape politics, society and culture in Africa and in Britain and to explore what it really means to decolonise.

Prior to working in academia, Simukai was a medical doctor in the UK’s National Health Service. He holds a DPhil in International Development from the Oxford University for which he was awarded the biennial Audrey Richards Prize for the best doctoral thesis in African Studies examined at a UK university.

Simukai teaches on the MPhil in Development Studies and supervises DPhil students.

Ayisha Osori is a lawyer and Director at Open Society Foundations Ideas Workshop.

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¿Qué le ocurre al liberalismo cuando el guion que lo orientó durante tres décadas deja de corresponder al mundo? El analista político e historiador mexicano Carlos Bravo Regidor empezó a hacerse esa pregunta la noche del triunfo electoral de Donald Trump en 2016 —que coincidió con su cumpleaños— y dedicó los siguientes años a perseguirla a través de una serie de entrevistas largas que originalmente le encargó la revista Gatopardo. El resultado es Mar de Dudas: Conversaciones para navegar el desconcierto (Grano de Sal / Gatopardo, 2025), una colección de catorce conversaciones extensas con algunos de los pensadores políticos más agudos de nuestro tiempo, entre ellos Francis Fukuyama, Branko Milanović, Nadia Urbinati, Daniel Innerarity, Federico Finchelstein, Pablo Stefanoni, Rafael Rojas, Margaret MacMillan, Ivan Krastev, Sofia Rosenfeld, Rebecca Solnit y Laura Gamboa.

En este episodio del podcast Ideas Letter de la Open Society Foundations, producido en colaboración con la New Books Network, el conductor Mario Arriagada conversa con Bravo Regidor sobre el itinerario intelectual que lo llevó de las certezas noventeras —el triunfalismo de la posguerra fría, las transiciones democráticas, el liberalismo de mercado, el Estado de derecho— a un ajuste de cuentas con las fallas estructurales de ese paradigma. Hablan del carácter parcial y conducido por élites de las democratizaciones latinoamericanas, con la transición mexicana como caso paradigmático de una negociación partidocrática de raíces sociales superficiales; de las preguntas legítimas que el populismo le plantea a la democracia liberal sobre representación, redistribución y la distancia entre la calle que protesta y el silencio de los mármoles del Parlamento; del giro hacia la posverdad y la crisis de intermediación en la esfera pública tras el declive de los viejos guardianes del sentido común; y de las lógicas específicas y autóctonas de las nuevas derechas en Argentina, Brasil y El Salvador, que la conversación insiste en no meter en una misma bolsa.

Lo que emerge no es tanto un recorrido guiado por catorce autores como una meditación sobre el ejercicio mismo de la duda —lo que Ortega y Gasset, a quien Bravo Regidor cita como fuente del título, llamó el salvavidas de la inteligencia— y sobre la entrevista larga como antídoto a la velocidad y la estridencia de la vida pública contemporánea. Mar de Dudas, y esta conversación sobre el libro, son una invitación a desacelerar.

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Jeremy Harding has long been one of the premier essayists and journalists of our day. Elegant, committed and free of cant, Harding's writing has often appeared in the London Review of Books, from which a number of these essays were drawn. Harding explores the intersection of politics and culture on the African continent, and unearths stories that explain the dialectical relations between the two spheres during the colonial and post-colonial moments. Never heavy-handed, Harding's mode is the exploratory, and one comes away from his nuanced narratives edified. Discussed in the podcast are several of Harding's pieces, including the complicated and unanticipated journey of Kamel Daoud in his rewriting of Camus's The Stranger, and Camus's own ambivalent legacy around colonial rule.

Read the transcript here.

Leonard Benardo is a vice president for the Open Society Foundations.

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Noo Saro-Wiwa is an author and journalist. Born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and raised in England, she attended King's College London and Columbia University in New York.​

Her first book, Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria (Granta), was published to critical acclaim in 2012. It was selected as BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week in 2012; named The Sunday Times Travel Book of the Year, 2012; shortlisted for the Author’s Club Dolman Travel Book of the Year in 2013; nominated by The Financial Times as one of the best travel books of 2012. Looking for Transwonderland has been translated into French and Italian, and was awarded the Albatros Travel Literature Prize in Italy in 2016.

Noo's second book, Black Ghosts (Canongate, 2023) explores the African community in China and was named Edward Stanford Travel Book of the Year in 2025.

Her latest publication, The Burning Ground: Oil and Militancy in Nigeria (Columbia Global Reports) examines the social and environmental effects of the insurgency that arose in the oil-rich Niger Delta after the death of her father, the environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. In the report, Noo highlights the undervalued role of women and meets individuals who are working towards sustainable development. It will be published in the US on 14th April 2026, and in the UK on 28th May 2026.

Noo has also contributed to the following anthologies: Go Girl 2: The Black Woman’s Book of Travel and Adventure (2024); An Unreliable Guide to London (Influx Press, 2016); A Place of Refuge (Unbound, 2016), an anthology of writing on asylum seekers; and La Felicità Degli Uomini Semplici, an Italian-language anthology based around football. ​​

Noo is a staff writer for Condé Nast Traveller magazine, and she has contributed book reviews, travel, opinion and analysis articles for various publications including The Guardian newspaper, The Financial Times, The Times Literary Supplement, City AM, and Chatham House.

She lives in London and supports Liverpool FC.

Ayisha Osori is a lawyer and Director at Open Society Foundations Ideas Workshop.

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