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Past Shows
The Pandemic’s Path
How did it happen? And who’s accountable? Seems now a lot of people saw it coming. Stephen King wrote his viral bestseller The Stand 30 years ago; Bill Gates put his warning in a TED ...
Profits or People
Week 4 was when dollar signs kept turning up, and up, astonishingly: price-tags on the virus’s damage, price-tags on fighting it. The bailout of bailouts came in at $2.2 trillion of disaster relief and, it’s ...
Springtime in the Plague Year
It’s the virus’s world. We just live in it: isolated, locked down for the duration, sheltering in place, with an alternate risk of cabin fever. The theme of the week is the shutting down—of the ...
Contagious Crisis
Our journals of the plague year start this week. Coronavirus went pandemic, and the investors’ bull market turned free-falling bear. In the conversation market, the monopolist Donald Trump is upstaged after 5 years, by a ...
Plagues, Pathogens, and Panic
Stuff we’re all learning in coronavirus time: the word miasma, for example, meaning noxious bad air; that we touch our faces 23 times an hour; that sanitizers like Purell were made to kill bacteria, not ...
The New Red Scare
The winter round of the presidential race goes to Bernie Sanders, not so much for winning the most votes from Democrats as for coining the key word, the big theme for 2020, which is: billionaires! ...
The Soul of Care
Arthur Kleinman is a name that comes up again and again when you search around our big college town of Boston / Cambridge for people asking the great human questions, about our lived experience — ...
Malcolm X in Boston and Beyond
The life of Malcolm X is the classic hero’s journey, in a setting we almost know: a story of anointment, dedication, fate, faith, family, incredible risk and reversals. There was spontaneous poetry in it, enough ...Etcetera
April 27, 2016
Eileen Myles’s Moment
This week, we’re tuning into the writer Eileen Myles. Born outside Boston in 1949, Myles is just now having an all-American moment. Myles has spent the last forty years as a queer and feminist icon, who’d like to be ...
November 7, 2019
In Hoffa’s Shadow
Jimmy Hoffa will never be found, and won’t be forgotten either. What was it about the Teamster tough guy that’s more compelling 45 years after his perfect-crime murder than in his larger-than-life career? He was ...
May 10, 2018
Trump Goes Rogue In Iran
Dropping out of the Iran nuclear deal has the feel of dropping into the John Bolton phase of the Trump era. Trump in Full. Trump Extra. The theme is No More Mr. Nice Guy, or ...
March 29, 2018
Van Morrison’s Cosmic Accident
In the annals of rock music albums, Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks is one of a kind. In an earthy medium, it’s a masterpiece of abstraction. Indecipherable. Irresistible. Influential. Accidental, it seemed, from the first licks ...
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