Christopher Lydon thinks of himself as the slow-reading child of a big family of Boston Irish autodidacts, and also as a sort of incurable Yale History major. In journalism, he is credited with the original podcast (2003), and known for his wide-screen, long-view conversations with leading lights in the arts, ideas, and politics -- over five decades, from many parts of the world, including India, Pakistan, Egypt, China, and West Africa. His political reporting began with the Boston Globe, covering Mayor Kevin White’s rescue of Boston politics in 1967, and then with the Washington bureau of the New York Times, covering presidential campaigns in the seasons of Nixon, McGovern, Carter, and Reagan. And then he'd tell you he learned almost everything he knows boning up for his public TV and radio interviews over the last 35 years from WGBH and WBUR. He writes:
"I celebrate Emerson's line in the Divinity School Address: 'We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had, in the dreary years of routine and of sin, with souls that made our souls wiser; that spoke what we thought; that told us what we knew; that gave us leave to be what we only were.' What I only am, it turns out, is a reader after all -- in love and in debt, especially to the Russian line from Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov to Nabokov; to the Victorians from Thackeray to George Eliot; to the American Transcendentalists from Emerson to William and Henry James, Whitman, Melville, and Wallace Stevens.” Next time round he wants to be a pianist.
Chris with myself and David Rubin
Chris Lydon has been the keeper of the conversation in Boston for 40-plus years, the journalist at large, and the interlocutor among the great minds in the liveliest big college town in America. He is credited with the first podcast (with Dave Winer) in 2003; before that, he was a radio broadcaster with a continuous forum of the widest range of arts, ideas, and politics. He’s our constant reader who also ran for the Boston mayor’s office on a pledge of major school reform. Here’s how he sees himself, in a paragraph:
Christopher Lydon thinks of himself as the slow-reading child of a big family of Boston Irish autodidacts and as a sort of incurable Yale History major. In journalism, he is credited with the original podcast (2003), and known for his wide-screen, long-view conversations with leading lights in the arts, ideas, and politics -- over five decades, from many parts of the world, including India, Pakistan, Egypt, China, and West Africa. His political reporting began with the Boston Globe, covering Mayor Kevin White’s rescue of Boston politics in 1967, and then with the Washington Bureau of the New York Times, covering presidential campaigns in the seasons of Nixon, McGovern, Carter, and Reagan. And then he'd tell you he learned almost everything he knows in the course of boning up for his public TV and radio interviews over the last 40 years from WGBH and WBUR.
I have known Chris as a colleague and friend for decades from perhaps our days together at National Public Radio-WBUR in Boston, where I was their foreign policy analyst.
To me, Chris is one of the most incisive brilliant interviewers and a polymath of extraordinary dimensions. I love the breadth and depth of his knowledge. He participated in several institute programs and symposia, always with credibility and wit. I remember one funny moment when he invited me together with Professor Henry Rosovsky to participate in one of his The Connection Hours on traditional versus experimental education with Chris not realizing we knew one another well.
After I explained what I was doing with the EPIIC program and immersive education, Chris asked Henry what he thought of what I was doing, and Henry replied, “Anything Sherman does is OK with me,” which left the great remainder of the hour with me as a bystander as Chris and Henry eruditely discussing the virtues of Latin and classical education.
Chris and I are thinking about how we can collaborate to discuss issues of the day. For me, what is in the works now is involving Chris in a forum on Truth, stimulated by a mutual friend, and one of his Squash buddies, Ron Rubin.