Christopher Lydon is the host of Open Source, a public-radio conversation with Internet roots and links, syndicated in the US by Public Radio International. Proto-blogger Dave Winer calls Chris Lydon "the original podcaster." 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" on public radio with producer Mary McGrath. 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."

Blog Entries by Christopher Lydon

The Anthologist: Pining For The Four-Beat Rhythm Poem

Posted November 25, 2009 | 12:20 PM (EST)


Nicholson Baker bursts into our poetry series with a passion for form, a longing for four-beat rhythms a la Kipling and rhymes of the kind that Ira Gershwin and Dr. Seuss learned from Swinburne. For a couple of months now we've been puzzling: what's it like to...

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David Bromwich On Obama: Looking At Words Closely

1 Comments | Posted November 25, 2009 | 10:22 AM (EST)


It's a measure of the change in the discourse that David Bromwich, Yale's Sterling Professor of English who used to write op-ed in the New York Times, now keeps a sort of Times Watch in the Huffington Post, the New York Review of Books, and the London...

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John Updike: Ted Williams of Our Prose

Posted January 29, 2009 | 07:00 PM (EST)


John Updike had every kind of grace about him, including for me an aura of divine blessing. I liked his religious inquiries better than the Rabbit books -- novels like A Month of Sundays, Roger's Version and The Beauty of the Lilies, and of course stories...

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Thank you, Norman Mailer

Posted November 15, 2007 | 03:44 PM (EST)


It's been a pleasure all weekend to picture Norman Mailer finally meeting the Maker he's been courting so originally, so well, these many years. There was a theologian inside the novelist, I presumed to say in this last conversation in the spring. And then in just the last few weeks...

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We Have Been Here Before

Posted July 8, 2006 | 03:00 PM (EST)


It's a melancholy business this Fourth-of-July week to think hard about patriotism and love of country in the context of our war in Iraq. But somebody's got to do it. What do the real patriots say? Here's one:

"We were to relieve them from... tyranny... to enable them to...

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