Chris Lydon

Chris (at) radioopensource (dot) org
Christopher Lydon stumbled out of the media storm into the pleasures of smart talk radio about a decade ago, and he intends to keep talking, and listening, forever. He was born hungry into a big family of Boston Irish strivers (not so unlike Mary McGrath's family) and he's stayed hungry: for literature (Russians, Victorians, Transcendentalists, Roth-Bellow-Updike); for the music of Brahms, Ellington and Chucho Valdes and his own piano time; for spiritual study in the Hebrew-Christian bible and Gospel singing at the Twelfth Baptist Church in Boston; for family life, and gardening and exotic travel. In the background now are too many years in straight journalism, covering city and state politics for the Boston Globe and presidential campaigns (McGovern, Humphrey, Reagan, Carter et al.) for the New York Times, anchoring "The Ten O'Clock News" at WGBH-TV in Boston, and founding "The Connection" with Mary McGrath at WBUR. Chris Lydon had run for mayor of Boston in 1993 -- a spur-of-the-moment stab at making a difference, or perhaps just surprising himself. In 1994, it turned out, the surprise that made the difference was radio. In the new millenium the onset of blogging, podcasting and the myriad extensions of the Internet expanded all Chris Lydon's horizons and the resonance of Emerson's essay "Circles," a Lydon standby: "Life is a series of surprises. We do not guess today the mood, the pleasure, the power of tomorrow, when we are building up our being.... Now for the first time seem I to know any thing rightly. The simplest words, -- we do not know what they mean except when we love and aspire."

Juan Enriquez: The Next Boom, by Zipcode

Recorded
Thu, June 25

Alfred Gusenbauer: Euro-Socialism in America

Recorded
Tue, June 23

Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland: the Novel of the Age

Recorded
Tue, June 16

Thoreau’s Fire: the Spark of “Walden”

Recorded
Wed, June 10

Ken Robinson & John Maeda: Creativity for Breakfast

Recorded
Fri, June 05

Calabash 2009: A View of Us in the Age of Obama

Recorded
Thu, June 04

Marlon James: “You’re headless without history…”

Recorded
Thu, May 28

Pico Iyer in Jamaica: center of word and world

Recorded
Wed, May 27

Aleksandar Hemon: through bi-focals, darkly

Recorded
Thu, May 21

Colm Toibin: the living spell of Henry James

Recorded
Tue, May 19