This week: a show from our archive from The Connection days. “It ain’t over till it’s over.” That’s Yogi Berra’s ageless line, in the title now of a summer hit movie just to prove Yogi was right about pretty much everything. He was a most valuable player in his New York Yankees uniform and a most beloved, most creative, most quotable source of American language and American wisdom. We got it first-hand in a radio studio with that dear man almost 25 years ago ..read more

The line is intoned now as a sort of chapter heading in our literary-artistic history: Eileen Myles grew up in Boston/Cambridge and moved to New York in 1974 to become a poet. Chris with Eileen Myles. And they did. 20 volumes later—their latest book of poetry is A “Working Life”— they’re very nearly the New York poet, with a branch office in Marfa, Texas, and still a strong Boston accent that is part of the poems. Recently, back in Boston, Eileen Myles sat down to talk about a life in poetry and in conversation with the world ..read more

We’re humbled—we’re also scared—by the power of chatbots like GPT-4 to do pretty much everything that word people have ever done, but faster and maybe more to the point. The twist in this conversation is that our guests are professional humanists, guardians, and teachers of the hard-earned old wisdom of books, not machines. And the double twist that they want to argue is that the enemy here is not evil AI: it’s us, who have enfeebled the old culture to a vanishing point in the practice of our politics, our media, our most expensive elite universities. Robert Pogue Harrison and Ana Ilievska. R ..read more

Here’s a last burst of wind in our sails, a last gentle guffaw, from a listener we came to adore: the cartoonist Ed Koren. You knew Ed Koren, too, for those furry, quizzical characters he drew and captioned—portraits of our general bemusement—through a 60-year run in The New Yorker magazine. His studio, it turned out, was in rural Vermont, where he’d gotten hooked on our public radio shows. Finally, just a few years ago, we met the sheer joy of that man, face to face. Chris Lydon with Ed Koren in Vermont, November 2021. Ed Koren knew that “the laws of entropy,” as he put it in conversation, w ..read more

There’s nobody quite like Sonny Rollins in the All-American sound and story of jazz. He was a teenager in Harlem in the 1940s when major players caught on to a rising star. Steadily over the decades, he built one of the genius careers on the tenor saxophone, alongside his rival and friend John Coltrane. More than that, Sonny Rollins was making his music a way of life, a mission of self-study and self-improvement, a moral and philosophical course of inquiry and reinvention—of gentleness and peace—all at the same time. Biographer Aidan Levy. Credit: Jahsie Ault. In his 93rd year of life, Sonny ..read more

Out of the blue a decade ago, Paul Harding won a huge popular following, first, and then the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, for his modern Maine sort of folk tale called Tinkers. His new one is deeper, darker, more ambitious philosophically, more poetic, more beautiful in long stretches—more ironical, too, starting with the title. Paul Harding. This Other Eden takes off from sketchy reality—a real colony of free poor people—Europeans, Africans, indigenous Penobscots, fishermen, farmers, all of them on a tiny island off the coast of Maine about a century ago, until they got swept up by the state ..read more

“Don’t forget” is a mantra in our shop: “don’t forget” specially the characters, the moments that made us. Norman Mailer is the spirit-seeker and sometimes reckless truth-teller we are un-forgetting in this podcast. We are summoning Norman Mailer in his hundredth-birthday season, what could be his revival time, to tell us what happened to his country and ours. Mailer lived and wrote it all: 40 books of eagle-eyed fact and fiction. First as a soldier in the Philippines, in the 1940s; then: epic poet of the Sixties in America; eventually as a celebrity and popular artist of Duke Ellington or Fra ..read more

Lydia Moland is reminding us that when present company in American public life comes up short, the ancestors of American democracy and spirit are lurking out there, in abundance and power to reset our judgment of who we are and what is possible, for a society, for each of us. Lydia Moland. Lydia Moland, our sometime radio colleague, is now a philosophy professor at Colby College in Maine. For her the shock of recognition came at the chance sight of a nineteenth-century letter from a battling idealist, Lydia Maria Child, whom she’d never heard of. (It reminds me of the Pulitzer Prize biographe ..read more

This show first aired on September 16, 2021. It’s hard not to notice that we’re flunking tests, right and left, and running out of strategies against global-size troubles. COVID, we said, was our test for the age of viruses. At summer’s end the variants are gaining and most of the world is unvaccinated. Afghanistan became a 20-year test of the notion that a public-private force of money, drones, a few troops, and contractors on the ground could win an asymmetrical war against the Taliban, and terror. We didn’t. And now comes Mariana Mazzucato, the brassy Italian-English-American who says: it’s ..read more

This show originally aired on September 23, 2021. Thomas Mann was one of those cultural giants the world doesn’t seem to make anymore—artists with authority, almost as big as their countries, at the level of Mark Twain, say, Voltaire, or Emerson! In his heyday a century ago Thomas Mann was called “the life of the mind in Germany”: the darkly philosophical novelist of obsession and illness in The Magic Mountain, the tale-spinner of Death in Venice, about a master writer, like himself, who falls quite madly in love with the sheer beauty of a 14-year-old boy on the beach. But Thomas Mann had a se ..read more