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“The Wire” Rewired

Wed, Nov 4 Listen

“The Wire” was the genius series on HBO that “revealed” Baltimore today (”Bodymore, Murderland”) the way Dickens’ Bleak House and Oliver Twist revealed 19th Century London. It was “reality television,” finally, about no-go America: not just terror-stricken drugged-out public housing but the complexity of human responses inside it. It was the new-media [...]

Ralph Nader’s Flight of Fantasy

Tue, Nov 3 Listen

Ralph Nader has charted a utopian fictional flight out of the dystopia he sees all around him on the ground. In conversation I’m trying to figure whether Ralph has written a happy ending to his career, or a scream of despair. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Ralph Nader. (39 minutes, 18 [...]

How God Came Back: Gordon, Cox and West

Tue, Oct 27 Listen

Click to listen to the “Matters of Faith” conversation with Harvey Cox, Mary Gordon, Cornel West and Chris Lydon. (43 minutes, 20 mb mp3) This is a book-fair exchange that caught fire around a current version of the old graffiti duel: “God is dead,” signed Nietzsche. Then, “Nietzsche is dead,” signed God. How’s [...]

Mark Danner: Scoring Assymetrical Warfare

Mon, Oct 26 Listen

If, as guesstimated, Osama Bin Laden spent half a million dollars to recruit, feed and train the perpetrators of 911, and if the US has spent or committed something like $2-trillion on our 8-year response, the asymmetry of costs in this global war on terror is something like 4-million to 1. And that’s just [...]

Ted Sizer: Performance was the only test

Fri, Oct 23 Listen

Ted Sizer was a master teacher when he first kicked me into shape in the 1950s. He was just out of Yale and the United States Army. I was a driven, impoverished sophomore at the “Marine Corps of the Mind,” as we thought of our venerable, ancient Roxbury Latin School in Boston. [...]

Whose Words These Are (14): C.D. Wright

Wed, Oct 21 Listen

Prompted by last weekend’s Massachusetts Poetry Festival, the question has been: where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? C.D. Wright speaks of her output as “a few reams of freedom.” Father was an Arkansas judge and a nearsighted bookworm, like herself. Mother was a court reporter. “Of [...]

Chris Hedges: Requiem for the Republic

Mon, Oct 19 Listen

Chris Hedges is “Mr. Bad News” in our time, the obituary writer for our economy, our culture, our democracy, our media. When I got to the New York Times (some years before Chris Hedges) in the late Sixties, Alden Whitman had the bad news moniker, writing obits of great figures for the paper of [...]

Whose Words These Are (13): Michael Ansara

Fri, Oct 16 Listen

In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, which pops into full bloom tomorrow (Saturday) in the city of Lowell, the question has been: where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Michael Ansara stands for the poet lurking in every one of us, and in this conversation he instructs us [...]

Whose Words These Are (12): Teresa Cader

Fri, Oct 16 Listen

In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Teresa Cader used to think of herself as a child of Europe. Walt Whitman made her a poet and an American. Her father was an immigrant from Poland. Her mother’s side is [...]

Donald Pease: Obama’s “Transnational” Presidency

Wed, Oct 14 Listen

Herman Melville, C. L. R. James & Donald Pease: deep dreams of America as the utopian world-nation Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Donald Pease. (49 minutes, 23 mb mp3) Re-read Moby-Dick and be cured of these absurd Nobel blues. The Nobel Peace Prize for Barack Obama underlines the world’s idea of our “transnational” President, our [...]

Whose Words These Are (10): Stephen Burt

Fri, Oct 9 Listen

In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, the question has been: where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Stephen Burt makes you think of Samuel Johnson and also “The Simpsons.” If Harold Bloom were a precocious thirty-something again, if he loved science fiction and underground rock ‘n’ roll, [...]

Whose Words These Are (9): Sarah Kay

Thu, Oct 8 Listen

In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, the question has been: where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Before she could write, spoken word poet Sarah Kay began dictating poems to her mother. Today, at 21, Sarah has become a successful, artful practitioner of spoken word. Sarah’s [...]

Whose Words These Are (8): Rosanna Warren

Wed, Oct 7 Listen

In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Rosanna Warren says it’s a tremendous relief to meet people who know her work and don’t know that she’s the daughter of the triple-threat poet, critic and novelist Robert Penn Warren (1905 – 1989). [...]

Whose Words These Are (7): Vendler’s Stevens

Tue, Oct 6 Listen

What is it about Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955), that such a variety of our contemporaries speak of an attachment that does not hang on “meaning”? Ask who or what drew them to poetry and, over and over, the answer is: Wallace Stevens. Typically it was long before they quite knew what he [...]

Whose Words These Are (6): Ron Slate

Fri, Oct 2 Listen

In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Ron Slate is the poet who flies business class. He’s also the corporate strategist of darting eye and allusive readings with nothing of the boardroom or the brochure about himself or his language. [...]

Tracy Kidder: “…faith that looks through death”

Thu, Oct 1 Listen

Tracy Kidder actually finds a needle in the haystack — a kernel of inspiration in a continent of bad news — in his virtually irresistible new saga (with a Wordsworth title) Strength in What Remains. The bad news is the ongoing massacres and underlying misery in East Central Africa – in the neighborhood of Rwanda, [...]

Whose Words These Are (5): Jericho Brown

Wed, Sep 30 Listen

In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Jericho Brown was born and raised in Shreveport, but did his growing-up in New Orleans. Library daycare introduced him to Shelley’s love poetry; the black church introduced him to call-and-response testimony and poetic performance. Fresh [...]

Whose Words These Are (4): Joan Houlihan

Tue, Sep 29 Listen

In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Joan Houlihan has rebuilt a poetry nest in Concord, Massachusetts — home of the “American Renaissance” of Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott & Co. in the 1850s, the town where, in Susan Cheever’s line, “most of American [...]

James Morone: What healthcare politics lays bare

Mon, Sep 28 Listen

From FDR to Barack Obama, James Morone’s revelatory history of presidents and healthcare policy lays out some basic rules — the conditions, in short, that Lyndon Johnson met to pass Medicare in 1965, but that asked too much of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton in the losing campaigns of 1977 and 1994 for universal insurance. [...]

Whose Words These Are (3): Franz Wright

Fri, Sep 25 Listen

In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Franz Wright grew up as an estranged son of a famous American poet. At 18, he’d read everything, found an addictive pleasure writing poetry (”like a first shot of heroin”), and learned “there was [...]

Whose Words These Are: Regie Gibson

Thu, Sep 24 Listen

In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Chicagoan poet Regie Gibson places himself “somewhere between page and stage,” writing and speaking about life, art and philosophy. He won the 1998 National Slam Competition and founded the Church of The Funky [...]

Whose Words These Are: Jill McDonough

Mon, Sep 21 Listen

In anticipation of the 2009 Massachusetts Poetry Festival, where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going? Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Jill McDonough. (26 minutes, 12 mb mp3) Jill McDonough is reverent about traditional form, raucously funny and often dark about much else. Her first book, Habeas Corpus, gives [...]

Rory Stewart: “nonsense” policy in Afghanistan

Wed, Sep 16 Listen

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Rory Stewart. (17 minutes, 8 mb mp3) Rory Stewart in professorial mode The Kipling-esque adventurer and writer Rory Stewart – the man who walked alone across Afghanistan and made a best-seller of The Places In Between — was quoted by Nicholas Kristoff in the Times the other day dismissing [...]

Isaac Newton drops in at MIT

Mon, Sep 14 Listen

Alexander Pope’s couplet about Isaac Newton gives me goosebumps: Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said: Let Newton be! and all was light. Epitaph… Intended for Sir Isaac Newton, in Westminster Abbey Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Tom Levenson. (29 minutes, 14 mb mp3) Sir Isaac: an “angel of the Lord” for science If the [...]

Jackson Lears: on Obama’s Sorrows of Empire

Fri, Aug 28 Listen

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Jackson Lears (49 minutes, 23 mb mp3) Jackson Lears‘ cultural history, Rebirth of a Nation, from the Civil War to World War One, is the flip side of Louis Menand’s dazzling take on the same period, The Metaphysical Club (2001). Jackson Lears: “our historian of yearning” Menand wrote about [...]

New Music at Tanglewood: Beauty’s Turn

Fri, Aug 14 Listen

Check my ears here: I hear a turning toward humanity among the rising star composers at the Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood this week. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with composers Augusta Read Thomas, Aaron Travers, Cynthia Lee Wong and Jacob Bancks at Tanglewood (31 minutes, 14 mb mp3) Augusta Read Thomas Michael [...]

Jeff Klein’s Excellent Adventure in Gaza

Wed, Aug 5 Listen

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Jeff Klein (50 minutes, 25 mb mp3) Jeff Klein’s excellent adventure this summer was a mission to Gaza, the Palestinian beachhead between Egypt and Israel, to witness resilience, as he says, amidst horrific destruction. From Jones Hill in Dorchester, Massachusetts, Jeff Klein is a retired machinist and union [...]

Shahriar Mandanipour: The ‘Love’ Cure for Iran

Fri, Jul 24 Listen

Shahriar Mandanipour’s novel from exile, Censoring an Iranian Love Story, is the back-story of the shockingly brave green-banded resistance we watched on TV till the regime cracked down on reporting… and Michael Jackson died. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Shahriar Mandanipour (68 minutes, 31 mb mp3) CNN pictures of a botched election and [...]

Ronald Prinn and MIT’s Wheel of Fortune

Fri, Jul 17 Listen

Ronald Prinn is talking about what was arguably the biggest little news story on earth so far this year. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Ronald Prinn (31 minutes, 14 mb mp3) Ronald Prinn: it’s a planet changer It came from MIT’s global climate project: which reported in effect that the warming of the planet is [...]

Juan Enriquez: The Next Boom, by Zipcode

Thu, Jun 25 Listen

There is no rescuing this economy from our debt, denial and epic implosions like General Motors and the city of Detroit. The only hope is that our unfinished season of disaster will be inundated (and the new economy floated) by a flood of invention. Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Juan Enriquez. (27 [...]

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