Democracy Café

What better day than May Day to have on our podcast, The Openist, the inimitable Larry Lessig, professor of law and leadership at Harvard University, and our nonprofit Democracy Cafe's beloved advisory board member,. Larry remains deeply moved, indeed more so than ever, by the spirit and conviction of his protege, open data activist Aaron Swartz, whose life was tragically truncated in 2013, to do all he can in his own mortal moment to revive our democracy while there's still time. In his latest book, 'America, Compromised,' Lessig offers a nuanced yet sweeping diagnosis of what ails us as a nation when it comes to pervasive institutional corruption enabled by largely good but tipsy purveyors of a corrosive democracy-destroying system. But take heart: he also offers a number of doable prescriptions for combating and upending this endemic problem. Larry is a combination of rabble rouser in the spirit of our original Founding Fathers and Mothers, of Don Quijote tilting at windmills but determined to fight the