boston | Open Source with Christopher Lydon

January 16, 2014

The Rise of Modern Medicine

In the annals of Boston medicine two historic chapters in the last 50 years were the near conquest of sudden death by heart attack and (not unrelated) the rise of corporate, cathedral hospitals around the practice of heroic scientific medicine with a big arsenal of new drugs, surgical measures, bypasses, catheters and stents. Perhaps the core question is: where’s the better medicine that would make all of us all healthier, even without miracle surgery?

Eugene Braunwald: Heart to Heart

All this is the stuff of our guest Dr. Tom Lee’s biography of a giant cardiologist and an expanding industry in Boston. His book is Eugene Braunwald and the Rise of Modern Medicine, a complex and fascinating tale. Don Berwick – a doctor who’s running for governor — is covering the downsides all around this story: overtreatment for some, undertreatment for many, intrusions of finance and breakdowns in the humanity of doctoring, and of course gigantic expense.

We’re talking this hour about Boston’s bluest of blue-chip industries, medicine, in a prosperous maybe triumphant time that may also be the moment for rethinking and reform. Dr. Braunwald and Nobel Prize winner Bernard Lown make cameo appearances — drawn from longer podcast visits with each of them. Perhaps the core question is: where’s the better medicine that would make all of us all healthier, even without miracle surgery?

Podcast • January 9, 2014

Peter Manseau on Growing Up Catholic in Boston as the Son of a Priest and a Nun

Peter Manseau wrote a brilliant op-ed in the Times a few months ago about married priests, a no-no in the Catholic Church, of course. But, nevertheless, his father was one, is one. He met Peter’s mother in Dorchester years ago, married her and had to leave the priesthood as a result. They are still married today and his father still a priest, by his own lights. Peter is a devoted son but not an active Catholic. This goes in the file of the infinite varieties of religious experience – the individuality and courage and discrimination all kinds of people bring to their religious lives. We asked him to tell us his story of how this new Pope Francis has registered on his heart, his history.

By the Way • December 24, 2013

Waking up to the BRA

In our last podcast, “Where’s Boston,” citizen activist Shirley Kressel excoriated the Boston Redevelopment Authority as a corrupt, powerful, unaccountable and non-transparent organization that gives away Boston land and tax-money to wealthy developers, ignoring the ...

Today, the Boston Globe reiterates her claim in an article that reveals some shady deals by the BRA, contrasting Mayor Thomas Menino’s public statements supporting affordable housing in the city. By law, developers are required to allocate at least 13 percent of their housing units for middle-income families or pay fees to build the units in a different location.

However, Globe reporters discovered hidden “discounts” unequally granted by the BRA to some developers but not others. In one particularly egregious example, the BRA staff awarded a $5.9 million discount to Anthony Pangaro, the developer of the luxury Millenium Place and campaign contributor to Menino. Additionally, the Globe writes, “a four-month Boston Globe investigation has found that the BRA has allowed at least four other developers breaks on affordable housing fees valued at a combined $3.4 million without disclosing them publicly.”

Unfortunately, the problem seems to extend beyond the secret tax breaks and loopholes that erode public funds for affordable housing. When money is collected, it is misused. According to the Globe, “the BRA has spent just $18 million on affordable housing since Menino established the housing program in 2000, less than a quarter of the $75 million the agency should have collected if the BRA had consistently followed the rules… the rest either has not been collected, was diverted to other purposes, or languishes in a BRA account.”

Four out of five of the BRA board members are appointed by the Mayor, and all report directly to him alone. During his campaign, Mayor-elect Martin Walsh acknowledged the need for change in the BRA, saying “the BRA must be reformed for efficiency and transparency.”

Will he keep these promises and prevent the siphoning of money away from affordable housing and into the pockets of developers? How will these uncovered deals impact the legacy of Mayor Menino? Is the BRA giving away the city of Boston to its political friends?

December 19, 2013

Waiting a New Mayor, a New Radio Show

Where’s Boston? We’re piloting a new radio show here for WBUR in Boston and puzzling about the hometown. What can you tell from the pick of the first new mayor in a century well underway? ...

Where’s Boston? We’re piloting a new radio show here for WBUR in Boston and puzzling about the hometown. What can you tell from the pick of the first new mayor in a century well underway?

Where’s the emergent Boston — in the old cradle of liberty that’s become a perfect example of the new inequality? Where prices keep rising and real incomes keep falling: meaning an average worker in Boston can’t afford an average home. Where’s the spirit of Boston — the Puritans’ city on a hill, ready for another Irish Last Hurrah at City Hall… when the Boston accent is fading and in fact 100 different languages are spoken in the city… where most of the people (and three of every four school kids) are black, brown, Asian or Hispanic? In the city of champions — baseball, football, med tech and higher ed… On the new bicycle paths over the ancient cow paths: where’s this reinvented Boston going?

In the land of The Last Hurrah, mayor’s races are markers of social history: James Michael Curley’s Irish wars with the Protestant Yankees in four decades of the 20th Century; John Collins and Johnny Powers and then Kevin White and Louise Day Hicks in Irish contests among themselves; Ray Flynn against the black contender Mel King in the 1980s; then the Irish eclipse through the 20 year reign of Tom Menino. And finally this year in majority-minority Boston (you could argue the most globalized immigrant city in America) we had a final choice between two very different Irish flavors: the favorite John Connolly was Harvard educated and school-reform minded, but he was defeated in the end by the trade-union lobbyist and recovering drinker from the working-class and waterfront precincts, Marty Walsh.

Our guests in the WBUR studio are: John Connolly, because so often it’s the loser who learns more in the game than the winner. Shirley Kressel, a mere housewife from the Back Bay who may be the most relentlessly informed and critical citizen in the Republic of Boston — a combination of Jane Jacobs and I. F. Stone. And Barry Bluestone, the progressive and prolific social scientist who’s had an outsider’s eye on Boston for 40 years now.

The upshot of an hour’s gab seems to be that Boston — for all the knocks — is in a spot that almost any big city in America would dream of occupying. And further, that the hero and villain of the moment is the Graduate Student, most particularly the ones from “away” and “abroad.” It’s those graduate students who (for want of dormitories) are sucking up the three-decker apartments built for workers back in the day — at the same time they’re confirming Boston’s attractiveness and conceiving its future.

Our question — “Where’s Boston?” — was the title of a brilliant little bicentennial film collage of pictures and voices of Boston as of 1976, almost 40 years ago. It makes you wonder: do we still sound that interesting?

Thank you to Cambridge Seven Associates and Executive Producer Peter Chermayeff for the”Where’s Boston” video.

May 2, 2013

Where’s the Hodges – Carney Monument in Boston?

If Johnny Hodges and Harry Carney had grown up together a few blocks apart in, say, Paris, there would be statues in their honor, and streets named after them. In New York, they’d be ...

The singer, the arranger and the Duke’s Men: Saxophonists Johnny Hodges (left) and Harry Carney, with Sy Oliver and Frank Sinatra (1946).

If Johnny Hodges and Harry Carney had grown up together a few blocks apart in, say, Paris, there would be statues in their honor, and streets named after them. In New York, they’d be remembered with a monument — as in Ottawa there’s now a fine public sculpture of native son Oscar Peterson at his piano. In Boston, the obligation rests with Northeastern University — spreading out on that hallowed ground of Lower Roxbury — to give the city a Hodges-Carney museum of the incredibly fruitful core and hatchery of black Boston. Hodges (1906 – 1970), raised on Hammond St, off Tremont, first gave the alto saxophone its full range: earthy and lyrical, pristine and sexy, like a whisper in your heart. The star soloist in the Ellington orchestra, he had “a tone so beautiful it sometimes brought tears to the eyes,” as Duke Ellington put it when Hodges died; “our band will never sound the same.” Harry Carney (1910 – 1974), from Cunard Street across the way, invented the full voice of the baritone sax and anchored the Ellington reed section through 40 years of immortal music. The South End of their boyhoods – what the retired minister Michael Haynes calls the “strategic strip” between Massachusetts Avenue and Ruggles Street – was the Boston where drummer Roy Haynes and dancer Jimmy Slyde grew up, where Sammy Davis Jr. lived for many years. Of course, it wasn’t all show biz. This was where aspiring black Boston was formed in playgrounds, churches, schools and parades — the Boston that Alan Crite painted in spirit and detail. If we don’t mark the memories on this spot, we could to lose it for all time.

Parade on Hammond Street, 1935. By the “Harlem Renaissance” painter Alan Crite (1910 – 2007).

Podcast • March 14, 2012

Thomas Mallon: a “puffect” little digression

Click to listen to the outtakes with Thomas Mallon (1 min, 500 kb) From the editing room floor after our Thomas Mallon conversation, there’s a quick ramble here on Mallon’s awfully good ear for voices ...

Click to listen to the outtakes with Thomas Mallon (1 min, 500 kb)

From the editing room floor after our Thomas Mallon conversation, there’s a quick ramble here on Mallon’s awfully good ear for voices — and for sounds of region and rank that may never be heard again. Continue reading →

Podcast • March 3, 2011

Andre Dubus III: How “The Fighter” Became The Writer

Andre Dubus III has written a Dickensian memoir in a Mark Wahlberg sort of setting. Townie is the tale of a bullied little boy (eldest son of a Louisiana family in a broken-down Massachusetts mill ...

Andre Dubus III has written a Dickensian memoir in a Mark Wahlberg sort of setting. Townie is the tale of a bullied little boy (eldest son of a Louisiana family in a broken-down Massachusetts mill town) becoming, first, a one-punch knockout street fighter, and later a National Book Award finalist for The House of Sand and Fog. Strangely, beautifully, painfully along the way, he finds himself coming into the same demanding vocation — writing — that had drawn his famous father away from a severely neglected family.

The story unfolds in the 1970s along the Merrimack River, just downstream from the scene of Wahlberg’s almost-Oscar movie, “The Fighter.” We’re in the same rough bars with the same wacko clans, hearing the same bad Boston accents — his friend Cleary says he’s always “hawny in the mawning.” As in Dickens, we are confronting social squalor in the home of the great imperial nation and wondering where the glory went — or where it is hiding in the town, even now.

There’s a lot of wondrously authentic energy in Andre Dubus’s voice, on the page and in our conversation. I remarked to him: Townie reads like David Copperfield, with heaps of crystal meth, junk TV, Fritos and Vietnam thrown in. He’s speaking here about his own memory of metamorphosis, as the crysalis of the thug breaks and the artist starts to spread his wings:

It’s something that was semi-conscious, this thought of the membrane in my life, and then became more clarified as I began to describe it in this book. … One thing that I realized, I would see people that weren’t experienced fighters, and they would do this shoving match thing: “Oh yeah? Oh yeah?” Experienced fighters don’t do any foreplay; once they know it’s a fight situation they pound you in the face as hard as they can. … Once you learn how do it, that psychological hymen in you is always broken. You can always do it. Once you break through it you’ll know how to do it and you’ll keep doing it. And that’s the barrier; once you learn to cross that you can fight.

But to the writing: I had a very interesting, strange experience when I first began to write. It felt so familiar, and I couldn’t quite place what it was. But it was another kind of membrane, where I was allowing myself to seep into the being, into the private skin of another, an imaginary other. I had to somehow disappear to become them, in the same way as a fighter. I had to let my fear of my safety disappear and my sense of myself disappear.

Andre Dubus III in conversation with Chris Lydon in Boston, March 1, 2011.

Podcast • March 22, 2010

Linda Nathan’s Public HS for Artists, Scholars and Citizens

Click to listen to Chris’s field trip to Boston Arts Academy. (55 minutes, 33 mb mp3) For 20-plus years Linda Nathan has been showing me the peaks of effort, originality, achievement and humanity! that are ...

Click to listen to Chris’s field trip to Boston Arts Academy. (55 minutes, 33 mb mp3)

For 20-plus years Linda Nathan has been showing me the peaks of effort, originality, achievement and humanity! that are possible in big-city public schools. And now she is sharing her hard-won mountain-top lessons in a manual for anybody who cares about real education today: The Hardest Questions Aren’t on the Test: Lessons from an Innovative Urban School.

Linda’s led me to some peaks that seemed impossible, too. She asked me in the early Nineties to teach a course at her high school in Boston. I said: “See if there’s a handful of kids who’ll read The Brothers Karamazov with me over a semester. It’s not P.C. It’s not ‘relevant.’ It’s just great. As long as the kids live they’ll never have to ask what makes a work of art.” Linda quickly found about 15 volunteers — boys and girls, seniors and juniors, of all sizes and stripes — for 750 pages of dense Dostoevsky. Twelve kids read and talked their way through to the end of a masterpiece. Most wrote very strong papers about it. Twenty years later, some of those kids still stay in touch with me. All of them stay in touch with her.

Linda Nathan’s kids call her “Mom” in the corridors of the Boston Arts Academy — on three floors of a converted warehouse behind the right-field bleachers of the Red Sox’ Fenway Park. On the occasion of Linda’s book, we’re hanging out with her teenaged painters, poets, horn players, dancers and stage designers, and with the teachers who’ve chosen with the kids to find their own path to art, learning and citizenship.

Thinking-wise, it opens your mind, being around the arts all the time. If someone is struggling in middle school you would look and giggle; in regular high school you would look and giggle. “Look, oh, they are having a hard time.” Here you know what that struggle feels like because you struggled to get that note, you struggled to stay on the right key, you struggled to get that dance move down. It opens your mind. When you look at the world you look at it artistically, and with your normal mind. I don’t want to say normal mind because art is part of my normal mind. But you see the world differently from the way people at a regular Boston public school would.

“India,” a student in Mr. Ali’s Humanities class, with Chris Lydon at the Boston Arts Academy.

I was a physics major before I became a dancer, and I truly believe in my personal journey that I wouldn’t be the artist I have become had I not had a very strong academic background. It actually gave me a lot of skills, a lot of tools to go back on, even math. It taught me a different way of thinking. I also feel if you are a true artist you have to develop your own voice. What is your voice? And what are you trying to say? That is why we aim for wholistic training, because I don’t think you should spend all your time in the studio. And, yes, you can become a fabulous technician, but that is not the true sense of an artist. I think you also have to have something that comes from inside you. So you have to enrich every aspect of your brain, your soul, all of that. And that’s why in this school we don’t say: we’re training you just to become an artist. We say: … an artist, a scholar, a citizen.

Dance teacher Fern Chan with Chris Lydon at the Boston Arts Academy, Friday, March 5, 2010.

What we know from the arts is there is a whole range of experiences that fall outside of the mind. What our students get is a sense of the things that cannot be expressed in words or mathematical symbols, but deserve expression. That is where the arts live. I can’t tell you how often students tell me, ‘I’ve had experiences but I can’t put them in words.’ The arts provide sound and kinesthesia that help us explain these other things that we express and experience. Adolescence is this open field of complications and contradictions. How do you get through that unless you have a way of embracing it and in some way integrating it into your lives.

The other side is this: just because you’re giving me the arts, it doesn’t mean that all of a sudden my world becomes OK. When you give me the arts you’re actually creating new anxieties for me, or you’re agitating anxieties that I carry. Our model of teaching is one that involves mentorship. It’s important that older artists be a part of their educational experiences. We need you to tell us your story about how you crossed this creative bridge. The world of art-making is hugely anxiety-ridden. People are constantly worrying about reputation, they’re doubting themselves, they’re questioning themselves. How do we help students in that space to continue on, to feel like they have enough muscle in them to really feel like they can face some of those monsters? Because there are monsters that come up with art-making.

Humanities teacher Abdi Ali with Chris Lydon at the Boston Arts Academy, Friday, March 5, 2010.

The question in my head going in was: how’s to evaluate a public high school that doesn’t take tests as the true measure of anything? My question on the way out was: if I had to do high school all over again, wouldn’t I rather go to a place like Linda Nathan’s Arts Academy than to the sort of “Marine Corps of the Mind” exam-school where I did go — and where we sent our own three kids? Who else out there is puzzling through that sort of choice?

Podcast • January 20, 2010

Rebecca Goldstein’s Ontological Urge: the 36 Arguments

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Rebecca Goldstein (36 minutes, 22 meg mp3) Who knew that the God question is burning bright in our university neighborhood of brain scientists, mathematicians, computer geniuses, game theorists, ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Rebecca Goldstein (36 minutes, 22 meg mp3)

Who knew that the God question is burning bright in our university neighborhood of brain scientists, mathematicians, computer geniuses, game theorists, physicists and literary folk, too? — that is, in the postmodern precincts around Boston that I call “the frontal lobe of the universe.”

Photo Credit: Steven Pinker

The philosopher-novelist Rebecca Goldstein, both playful and stone-serious, has caught the chatter and mapped the territory in and around Brandeis, Harvard and MIT in 36 Arguments for the Existence of God — A Work of Fiction. The arguments rage in the head of the novel’s protagonist, Cass Seltzer, a best-selling psychologist of religion, a latter-day William James. TIME magazine has dubbed him “the atheist with a soul.” Career-climbing from Brandeis to Harvard, Cass (like Goldstein) is trying to triangulate a position between the death of God and the ecstasy of belief — at a safe distance from neo-atheists like, say, Sam Harris, and neo-believers like, say, Cornel West:

RG: Both sides will often offend me, and I think that’s why I felt I had to write the novel. I agree with Sam Harris. I’m on his board, of the Reason Foundation. I agree with him: our metaphysics is the same. But I’m very uncomfortable with some of the belittling descriptions of religious people. Not saying that he does it. But sometimes I hear it: “this is the fallacy that they make, this is their mistake, if we can point out where their reasoning goes astray.”

Religion and religious emotion are so much more complicated than that. One of the things that Spinoza taught us, and it’s being validated finally in neuroscientific labs, is that emotions and intellect, cognitions and passion, are inextricably bound up with one another. Cognitive states are also emotional states, and emotional states make cognitive claims.

So even for those of us who believe in reason — and again this is pure Spinoza — this itself is an emotional experience. I break into tears at beautiful mathematical proofs. This kind of intertwining is something that we all share. And so the notion that we could, on the reason side, just go through the arguments and show what’s wrong and people would stop believing is very, very false. There are reasons other than just strict logical arguments for people to be believing.

CL: Why draw a hard line between your experience of a mathematic truth, or beauty that brings you to tears, and a Dostoyevskean epiphany of the Almighty?

RG: I do believe ultimately, in terms of establishing truth, in objective means… The history of our species is filled with people being enraptured and enthralled and having private revelations that are completely counter to each other, and slaughtering each other because of these things. The Enlightenment grew out of it. John Locke, for example, has an essay “On Enthusiasm,” on religious enthusiasm, saying: look, it’s not a source of truth. It is powerful and it is ecstatic. I’m very prone to it myself. I often say ‘I spend more time out of my mind than in my mind.’ I’m extremely prone to this sort of thing.

There are all sorts of intellectual gifts that give us this feeling. For me, it’s science, math, art, music, philosophy… And it’s a kind of religious experience, you know, but for me these are much safer than trying to answer the nature of the universe… That God-almighty important question can’t be entrusted to enthusiasm.

Rebecca Goldstein in conversation with Chris Lydon, January 16, 2009

Podcast • December 3, 2009

Whose Words These Are (17): Henri Cole

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Henri Cole. (42 minutes, 19 mb mp3) The poet Henri Cole got his French first name from his Armenian mother. From his father, a military man, he got ...

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Henri Cole. (42 minutes, 19 mb mp3)

The poet Henri Cole got his French first name from his Armenian mother. From his father, a military man, he got his Southern speech and, in what sounds like sadness and irony, “a knack for solitude.” Poetry was the place where as a young gay man he worked through yearning and anger to astringency and order. French, Armenian and English were the languages of his home growing up in Virginia in the sixties and seventies. “And hearing this braid of languages regularly spoken,” he has written, “heightened my sense of words as a kind of loge in which desires were illuminated, memory was recovered and poems would be assembled.” On publication of The Visible Man in 2005, Harold Bloom pronounced Henri Cole “a central poet of his generation. The tradition of Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane is beautifully extended … Keats and Hart Crane are presences here, and Henri Cole invokes them with true aesthetic dignity, which is the mark of nearly every poem in The Visible Man.”

I was an undergraduate student at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, and I was reading the novels that we all read — Woolf, James, Conrad. These are novelists who, you might say they’re novelists of the interior – and that kind of transcript of the interior life in the novel somehow got me interested in how some version of that is achieved in a concentrated way in poetry. I grew up in a military and Catholic household, so I was used to rigid structure and passion you might say, the passion of the mass and the structure of conforming military uniforms. My brothers were jocks and I didn’t really have a way to be myself, I guess I was probably looking for a way to be a man or masculine in some different way, and somehow poetry entered my life and it gave me a way to have a conversation. It made me sociable, I wasn’t very sociable — I was a pretty shy undergraduate so it made me sociable…

In Boston, now his home base, Henri Cole is reading to us mostly from his latest collection, Blackbird and Wolf (2007). Listen to his “Dune” and consider Colm Toibin’s observation that “The self in his work is explored as a diver might explore the ocean bed, it is ready to be surprised, frightened, puzzled, while the world above the water is noted with something close to calm and half-remembered acceptance. Cole’s poems at times display an amazing eloquence and command of form, but they are usually also impelled by sorrow, by dark knowledge, by pleasure, by the body and its discontents, and by history and what it has left us. It is not surprising that he has invoked the language of prayer as being an early influence.”

Our Proust Questionnaire

Q: Who is your favorite all-time fictional character?

A: I remember reading a French novel called The Wanderer when I was a young man, by Alain Fournier. I don’t remember the character’s name, but let’s just call him the Wanderer.

Q: What’s the quality above all that you look for in a poem?

A: Two qualities: there has to be a commitment to emotional truth, and there has to be a little concerto of consonants and vowels.

Q: What is your idea of a perfect poem?

A: Almost every poem of Elizabeth Bishop’s. James Merrill has a poem called “The Broken Home” that I love. In the Merrill poems, the thing I like so much is the combination of a high register of speech with total colloquial moments – I like that the poem has a range that can go from very high to very demotic in a few short lines.

Q: Who do you write for?

A: I don’t think too much about it. I am more committed to the truth and sound thing. If you think about too many people in your head, that’s like having a bunch of guns pointed at you, and that will censor you I think. When I write a poem, I hope to be in conversation with Merrill, who hopes to be in conversation with Cavafy or Whitman, and it goes back and back to Horace. But I guess I am also aware of the need to push all of that out of my head and just write the poem that I want to write.

Q: Who do you think of as fellow travelers in other media? Who is doing the work of Henri Cole’s spirit in a different way?

A: I am probably most nurtured by visual art. I love Joan Mitchell, Louise Bourgeois, Vija Celmins, Alice Neel. I’ve collaborated with two great visual artists, Jenny Holzer and Kiki Smith. Visual artists tend to be freer than writers are. Writers seem to have more boundaries – maybe it’s because making art is more physical, but they just seem freer. Also in relation to public events, speaking to the moment in history.

Q: What is the talent that you would most love to have, that you don’t yet?

A: I would love to be able to fly. I would love to be able to sing and fly like a bird. That would be fantastic.

Q: How would you like to die?

A: Alone, in a way that is not painful for anybody that loves me.

Q: What is the keynote of your personality as a poet?

A: Empathy.

Q: What is your motto?

A: I like Henry James’s motto. “Be kind, be kind, be kind.”

Henri Cole with Chris Lydon in Boston, 11.20.09.