iPhone app iPad app Android phone app Android tablet app

Entries by Christopher Lydon from 04/2010

Nell Painter's History of White People: It's Coming to an End

| Posted 04.01.2010 | Books
Read More: History, Princeton, Radio, Conversation, Nell Painter, Genetics, Whiteness, Christopher Lydon, Race, Emerson, Brown University, Books News

Now that we are all supposed to have absorbed the genomics of it -- that "race" is a social concept, not a scientific one; a construction, not a fact -- she is asking: who invented "whiteness" as a human category?

Read Whole Story

Ted Bogosian: Confessions of a Truth Hound

| Posted 04.02.2010 | Media
Read More: Ted Bogosian, Radio Conversation, Armenian Genocide, Chris Lydon, James Der Derian, Documentary, Armenia, Film, Brown University, Media News

Ted Bogosian's story of his own motivation could be construed as ethnic determinism or something stranger: a rationale for ethnic revenge by journalism.

Read Whole Story

Arundhati Roy's Version of Disaster in "This Year of India"

| Posted 04.05.2010 | World
Read More: Communism, India, Maoists, Radio, Arundhati Roy, Conversation, Gandhi, Christopher Lydon, Capitalism, World News

Arundhati Roy is giving us "the other side of the story" in this "Year of India" at Brown University and elsewhere. Media consumers in the US don't g...

Read Whole Story

Colum McCann: American Literature and New York's Redemption (AUDIO)

| Posted 04.07.2010 | Books
Read More: Literature, New York, National Book Award, Chris Lydon, Radio, Conversation, Colum McCann, Colin Channer, Reading, Brown University, Wellesley-College, Books News

Colum McCann wrote the New Yorkiest and, many feel, the best of 9.11 novels, Let the Great World Spin, and won the National Book Award for it.

Read Whole Story

David Shields' Reality Hunger: Kicking Ass and Dropping Names (AUDIO)

| Posted 04.09.2010 | Books
Read More: Michiko Kakutani, Literature, Radio, David Shields, Novels, Conversation, Aphorisms, Theory, Academia, Christopher Lydon, Brown University, Ian McEwan, Books News

David Shields practices what he preaches. Aphorisms in the Nietzsche manner are the coin of the literary realm that surfaces in his manifesto, Reality Hunger.

Read Whole Story

Michael Lewis' Big Short and Our Appetite for Apocalypse (AUDIO)

| Posted 04.13.2010 | Politics
Read More: Bestsellers, Michael Lewis, Finance, Books, Chris Lydon, Radio, Conversation, The Big Short, Brown University, Politics News

Michael Lewis is the non-fiction novelist of our apocalyptic American mindset in 2010 and the author of The Big Short. Listen to an interview here.

Read Whole Story

James Kwak: The Problem is Bank-o-cracy (AUDIO)

| Posted 04.15.2010 | Politics
Read More: James Kwak, Books, Chris Lydon, Radio, Conversation, Michael Lewis, Wall Street, Oligarchy, 13 Bankers, Brown University, Financial Meltdown, Simon Johnson, Politics News

James Kwak extends Michael Lewis's point and feeds my fascination with apocalyptic hysteria and helpless torpor as the twin markers of American politi...

Read Whole Story

David Hoffman: A Walking Tour of YouTube Nation (AUDIO)

| Posted 04.19.2010 | Media
Read More: Radio, Youtube, Conversation, Documentary, Christopher Lydon, Film, Wikileaks, Brown University, David Hoffman, Media News

David Hoffman produced 88 PBS documentary features and five feature-length films over a forty-year career. But that was then. And this is a guy whos...

Read Whole Story

Anthony Shadid: Questions a Reporter Asks Himself (AUDIO)

| Posted 04.26.2010 | World
Read More: War in Iraq, Radio, Conversation, New York Times, Anthony Shadid, Washington Post, Pulitzer, Iraq, Christopher Lydon, Brown University, Journalism, World News

I find it almost painful to come to the States... I tell you, part of me is convinced that the legacy of this war is that Americans come away thinki...

Read Whole Story