Author: Rebecca

This Week's Show •

Why We’re Addicted to Facebook

Could it possibly be that Stanford’s great humanist Robert Pogue Harrison invented René Girard out of sheer longing for an omni-theorist of our interlocking social and spiritual trials? Harrison presented Girard in a striking piece ...

Could it possibly be that Stanford’s great humanist Robert Pogue Harrison invented René Girard out of sheer longing for an omni-theorist of our interlocking social and spiritual trials?

Harrison presented Girard in a striking piece in the New York Review of Books, “The Prophet of Envy,” last December as “the last of that race of Titans” in the “human sciences” of the 19th and 20th centuries — as far-reaching as Marx or Freud, and shockingly alert to the distresses in Trump time. “The explosion of social media, the resurgence of populism, and the increasing virulence of reciprocal violence all suggest that the contemporary world is becoming more and more recognizably ‘Girardian’ in its behavior,” Harrison wrote.

I recognized Girard (1923–2015) as a total stranger, but Harrison makes his late Stanford colleague vivid and vital: a thoroughly French mind and eye (think de Toqueville) who found his great assignment in America; a thinker challengingly avant-garde and also Christian; a legendary teacher himself who is remembered by Peter Thiel, no less, as a formative influence in realms of innovation and investment.

I’ve read a lot of Girard by now and Cynthia Haven’s friendly biography, and I can’t think of a figure more obscure who feels more relevant, and vice versa. My conversation with Pogue Harrison — at root a Dante scholar, by now a prolific podcaster in the wide realm of ideas — turns eventually to the biological sciences today at the advent of CRISPR gene-editing technology. We are experimenting here with a coast-to-coast podcast conversation on almost anything.

You can find Harrison’s podcast, Entitled Opinions, here.

This Week's Show •

Intelligent Redesign?

A conversation with George Church and Antonio Regalado about gene editing and the future of biotech. Ready or not, we are at the gateway into CRISPR world and CRISPR think: CRISPR the acronym for biology’s ...

A conversation with George Church and Antonio Regalado about gene editing and the future of biotech.

Ready or not, we are at the gateway into CRISPR world and CRISPR think: CRISPR the acronym for biology’s longest leap. It’s the gene-editing tool that can tweak the inherited DNA code of your being, and mine. We heard this winter about the Chinese doctor who applied CRISPR science to the embryos of twins–to make them HIV proof, he said. After that, the CRISPR story is mostly riddles: is it about curing disease, or adapting the human species for a back-up planet? Is it about genius in science, or hubris? Is it ripe for investment? Safe for mankind? Is the race over CRISPR between Boston and Berkeley, California? Or between the US and China? 

 

We have tip-toed into the cave of CRISPR this hour, to listen closely on and between the lines to Dr. George Church at the Harvard Medical School. He’s the nearest thing to a voice of CRISPR, the revolutionary science of our time. For courage and professional company, I have Antonio Regalado at my side. He is the relentless beat reporter and bio-science editor at MIT’s Tech Review, and he went with me recently to George Church’s lab. Quick history: CRISPR is Step 3 in a revolution most of us slept through in the science of reproduction: first, 1953, the circular-staircase of a double-helix let us visualize the genetic molecule, DNA; then 2003, fifty years later, the whole map came clear: of DNA’s web in every human cell; now comes the trick of reading, writing and editing that DNA, like a book. No matter that no one’s quite seen or heard the language of it, though Dr. Church is getting closer than anyone else we know.

This Week's Show •

Second Guessing the Oscars

A conversation about the movies with A. S. Hamrah, Beth Gilligan, Katherine Irving. We’ve reached that odd ritual of cultural reckoning. Between the Super Bowl and Opening Day of the national pastime, Hollywood holds up ...

A conversation about the movies with A. S. Hamrah, Beth Gilligan, Katherine Irving.

We’ve reached that odd ritual of cultural reckoning. Between the Super Bowl and Opening Day of the national pastime, Hollywood holds up its scorecard on the Dream Factory, and our dreams. There’s no host on the Oscars show this year—no Billy Crystal, much less Bob Hope—betokening cultural confusion. We’re in Trump time, after all, under the cloud of a hurting climate, waiting for “That’s all, folks” from Porky Pig. Turns out Hollywood, as work space for the imagination, was also epicenter of predatory sex, trigger of #MeToo outrage. Netflix is the new super-studio; home screens are the new multiplex. But nothing’s coming to an end here: black talent made the ultimate blockbuster in Wakanda, and little off-the-grid indies, like Leave No Trace, left some of the deepest impressions in 2018.

It’s Oscars week in Hollywood and the hearts of wannabe auteurs all over. We’re all end-of-February cinephiles, just for the the contrasts we saw in the cinematic reading of the social-cultural-political maelstrom of 2018. The Oscar nominees are the face that Hollywood wants us to see. We’re just as intrigued this time by the near-misses, like Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade, Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, and Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace. We’re looking into many mirrors of us this hour with movie buffs we cherish.

Lydon’s Oscar picks:

  • Black Panther
  • Roma
  • Never Look Away

And favorite un-nominated classics:

  • Sorry to Bother You
  • First Reformed
  • Leave No Trace

 

Podcast • February 14, 2019

Gandhi and “The Years That Changed the World”

Mahatma Gandhi led the liberation of India from British rule in the first half of the 20th Century, by massive and peaceful resistance. He is said to be out of political fashion in India these ...

Mahatma Gandhi led the liberation of India from British rule in the first half of the 20th Century, by massive and peaceful resistance. He is said to be out of political fashion in India these days; he was not a man of fashion. He is thrillingly, dauntingly alive again in a grand biography, the project of decades by India’s leading popular scholar, Ramchandra Guha, visiting us in Boston.

It’s good to be remembering that odd Man of the Century: living with him through 900 pages, his family, his fights, 70 years later, on a different planet. My feet are tired—he never stops walking. But the mind charges us in all directions. The daring of the man, his unshakable conviction about resistance in peace, the instant rapport with children, workers, poor people, the world, the amazing consistency of the way puffed up power—the British viceroys in India, Winston Church over many years—dismissed him as a fakir, a freak, a pain in the neck.

George Orwell reflected on Gandhi at his death began by noting that “Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent,” and he ended with a great line Guha quotes: “compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind.”

This Week's Show •

A Coup in Caracas

A conversation on the crisis in Venezuela with Alejandro Velasco, Jeff Sachs, Greg Grandin, and Leo Blanco. The ruin of Venezuela and the world’s answer to it mark the climax of an epic, late in ...

A conversation on the crisis in Venezuela with Alejandro Velasco, Jeff Sachs, Greg Grandin, and Leo Blanco.

The ruin of Venezuela and the world’s answer to it mark the climax of an epic, late in the Age of Oil. We might understand it better if Steven Spielberg and Marlon Brando hadn’t abandoned their movie Nostromo back in the day. The novel Nostromo was Joseph Conrad’s sequel to Heart of Darkness. It became his longest and darkest exposé of European and American plundering in South America, as of 1900. It’s the backstory of the last century: oil empires at the Rockefeller scale extracting colossal wealth from under ground, and poor people’s politics lurching from revolution to repression to authoritarian populism, which holds the fort and the army today.

Venezuela is sinking as the world watches. The Bolivarian Republic founded two decades ago by the late Hugo Chavez is hemorrhaging people, rights, respect—even Venezuela’s Saudi-class oil assets are not the treasure they used to be. None of the misery comes a moment too soon for the furious opposition in Venezuela to Chavez’s elected successor for the last six years, Nicolas Maduro; and none of the hardship is a mite too severe for people (in Washington especially) who all along hated the swaggering “oil” populism of Chavismo—an extension of Castroismo, the virus of a “Pink Tide” of Socialism seen to threaten North American hegemony in the Hemisphere.

This Week's Show •

All in Favor…

A conversation about Astra Taylor’s new documentary What Is Democracy? with Astra Taylor, David Runciman, and Kali Akuno. We used to know what we liked about that word ‘democracy,’ and we were ready to fight for ...

A conversation about Astra Taylor’s new documentary What Is Democracy? with Astra Taylor, David Runciman, and Kali Akuno.

We used to know what we liked about that word ‘democracy,’ and we were ready to fight for it. Democracy meant “the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time,” as E. B. White put it during World War II. In Civil Rights time, Malcolm X rubbed in the rhyme with hypocrisy: a real democracy would never short-change so many people of justice, freedom, the dignity of equality. In our time it’s money that seems to have bound and gagged democracy. And it’s social media that has wired a sort of zombie democracy into world-wide waves of anger, and the values of circus entertainment.

Astra Taylor and Silvia Federici in “What Is Democracy?”

What can we say about our democracy when a Princeton study finds that the political preferences of the average American have “only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact” on public policy? The filmmaker Astra Taylor took the cue to write one more “death of democracy” book and to make a movie about her own global search for democracy over the ages.

January 28, 2019

RIP: Russell Baker (no audio)

We loved that man, on top of worshipping his cool, insightful, hilarious Times column. Newspaper guys didn’t say this sort of thing, but Russ Baker made your heart flutter. Lunch or even a few words with the ...

We loved that man, on top of worshipping his cool, insightful, hilarious Times column. Newspaper guys didn’t say this sort of thing, but Russ Baker made your heart flutter. Lunch or even a few words with the great Baker in the office felt like prom night. He was so handsome, in his Jimmy Stewart way; such a kind, wise, good man. At the top of his profession, he savored James Reston’s line that a man’s career was not to be confused with his life. “Your job is a means to your private life,” as Reston once put it to me. Russ Baker’s life was exemplary. His first reader and editor was always Mimi, his stunning wife and soulmate. His daughter and two sons were and are characters, blessed and funny originals. Russ’s friendship was a treasure, often just a few words. He would pause at my desk as I sweated and groaned on deadline. “Chris,” he would say, “just tell them what happened.” Thank you, Russ, then and now. My wife Cindy came to adore the man exactly as I did, and we amended our vows to allow that if she ran away with Russell Baker, I would understand. I happen to know that the press box gods in those decades — David Halberstam, Anthony Lewis, Neil Sheehan, Scotty Reston himself, Anthony Lukas, Tom Wicker, Ned Kenworthy, Hendrik Hertzberg and, yes, I. F. Stone — felt crushes like mine and Cindy’s: pangs of blushing elevation, excitement, something like redemption around this guy. Reston knew that the key stroke in assembling his immortal Times Washington Bureau of the 50s and 60s was hiring the lean country kid from the Baltimore Sun to cover Lyndon Johnson’s Senate. Tony Lewis in his Cambridge kitchen had a poster-size blow up of Russ Baker’s takeoff on Craig Claiborne’s $4000 expense account meal, on Times duty in Paris. Baker’s home-cooked version, “a Lucullan repast for one,” was beans in bacon grease, eaten out of the pan, with a shot of room-temperature gin. “I had a Gilbeys, 1975, which was superb,” he noted.

Years later, Russell Baker credited me with nominating him to succeed Alistair Cooke as host of Masterpiece Theater on PBS. I had suggested him to WGBH’s Rebecca Eaton, though in fact I’d also proposed John Updike, and Claire Bloom as well, thinking before they split that Philip Roth might write her copy. Uncannily, Rebecca reported that Baker and Updike had both responded at first in nearly the same words, to the effect: “I don’t think my mother would approve my doing television.” Baker got the nod, in any event, apologizing at first, in Baker style, because “my hands and elbows instinctively start flailing and clawing the air as if an alarming case of St. Vitus Dance is taking place right in front of the camera.” But then he thanked me for “one of the best jobs a bookish old guy could have.” It was the least I could do, dear Russ, for the man who embodied our newspaper dream.
–Chris Lydon

This Week's Show •

Under Surveillance: Capitalism in the Digital Age

Yes, Virginia, the world did change direction in the late summer of 2001, and it’s been changing us ever since. 9/11 had everything to do it, but it was also the panicky season of the ...

Yes, Virginia, the world did change direction in the late summer of 2001, and it’s been changing us ever since. 9/11 had everything to do it, but it was also the panicky season of the dot.com bust, when little Google, in fear of death, morphed from search service to data mining from its users. Our government, post 9/11, was ready to compromise privacy and underwrite a new science of surveillance—the object was to know everything about everybody. And here we are, not two decades later: Google is a trillion-dollar company, in an industry that knows more than we know about ourselves, and sells it. Omni-analyst Shoshana Zuboff argues we are being re-purposed for a new age of mankind.

Shoshana Zuboff

Shoshana Zuboff is a business school professor and scholar with a Theory of Pretty Much Everything about our American condition in 2019. Unlike most theories of everything, this one is simple enough to remember. It’s also complex and researched enough to feel critically intelligent, not to say: plausible. The theory, in two words, is Surveillance Capitalism, the big business of social-network companies (think: Google, Facebook, Apple) who sift the signals from your phones and laptops to know, moment to moment, your heart’s desire and then sell it to you. Add a fashionable ideology of markets, a culture of consumer comfort, and the force of wealth—and the rest is details. Our disquieting modern condition is not in your mind. It’s in our lopsided landscape, as our guest Shoshana Zuboff maps it in stunning big book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

 

 

Podcast • January 19, 2019

Andre Dubus’s Carny World

A conversation with Andre Dubus III about his new novel, Gone So Long.  An old-fashioned sort of writer from this part of the world, and a writer we love for his swerves and surprises, Andre Dubus ...

A conversation with Andre Dubus III about his new novel, Gone So Long. 

An old-fashioned sort of writer from this part of the world, and a writer we love for his swerves and surprises, Andre Dubus III is the child of both a famous literary father and, same time, a rough, tough mill town boyhood. Last time around with Andre and his memoir Townie, I told him his growing up read like David Copperfield with heaps of crystal meth, junk TV, Fritos, daily fistfights, and Vietnam all thrown in. (Listen to that conversation here.)

This time, reading his new novel Gone So Long, I wondered out loud if Andre was stooping just a bit, getting back to the old neighborhood. You stick with Andre Dubus for his imagination and his compassion. He’s writing in Trump-time, of course, but in the company more nearly of Hillary Clinton’s basket of deplorables, of all kinds. Andre’s flow is not what we’re used to these days. Not the self-conscious exploration of the writer’s head. It’s mostly the sound of sadness among characters we don’t often get to care about in print anymore. I asked Andre if he was conscious of bucking the literary culture in this moment.

This Week's Show •

Is the Green New Deal For Real?

A conversation about the “Green New Deal” with Bill McKibben, Naomi Oreskes, and Daniel Schrag. The mission, as it turned out, was to transform the American economy and save the country, no less, over twelve years. ...

A conversation about the “Green New Deal” with Bill McKibben, Naomi Oreskes, and Daniel Schrag.

The mission, as it turned out, was to transform the American economy and save the country, no less, over twelve years. Franklin Roosevelt called it his New Deal, starting in 1933. New-breed Democrats in Congress today are talking about a Green New Deal, starting now, deep into the crisis of a changing climate that goes way beyond the weather. FDR had a working class revolt driving him forward, and later he had a Nazi threat and a world war to focus every fiber of mind and muscle on a reinvention. Which may be what the climate is demanding. Here’s one test: at mention of an all-new renewable energy system, is your first thought Costs? Savings? Or Survival? Getting real about the Green New Deal, this week on Open Source.

Naomi Oreskes, Bill McKibben, and Daniel Schrag

Three words and one picture sum up the new scene in Washington—and the relief, for starters, from a two-year fixation on President You-Know-Who. The picture is of the so-called Sunrise Movement siege of Nancy Pelosi’s office from last November, and of the rapturous, insurgent Congressperson from the Bronx, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, sweeping up the moment and putting its three little words—Green New Deal—at the top of the evolving agenda in D.C. It’s as slippery a promise as universal health care, but here’s our first crack at what it could mean: a resurrection of spirit, perhaps, at the bold Rooseveltian scale, after 75 years? A reset in relations with work, among workers, which Roosevelt’s New Deal was? We’ll see. Does it mean a war for clean, renewable energy, against the embedded power of fossil-fuels? Unavoidably. A “system upgrade” for the power grid and the whole economy? About time, you say! But can it be done?