2014 begins for us with a new radio show on WBUR. Call it a Boston conversation with global attitude. On Thursday nights (and rebroadcast on Sunday afternoons) we’ll remind you why Boston has been the capital of ideas in America since the heyday of Emerson and Thoreau in the 1840’s. Our first show, on January 2nd at 9pm, is about music education. We’ll begin with a look at an elementary school in Brighton, Massachusetts where every child, Pre K to 8th grade – makes music for three-and-a-half hours every day. The driving idea, spreading worldwide from Venezuela, is that every child wants to play an instrument and can. With musicians, a cognitive and development theorist and Howard Gardener from the Harvard Ed School, we’ll explore new ways to teach music and maybe new ways to organize schools. You can listen live on 90.9 or stream the show at wbur.org. We’ll have a podcast up on our site after the show.
Next up, on January 9th, is a conversation about the Pope Francis phenomenon with James Carroll who writes in the New Yorker that he’s a radical, not a liberal. We’ll examine the “conversion of the papacy” and what seems like a new Catholic conversation.
We have two other shows in the works: one on health care on January 16th with Dr. Thomas Lee of Mass General Hospital who’s written a book called “The Rise of Modern Medicine,” which is a history lesson of a kind about Boston medicine, and on January 23rd we’ll take a tour of the novelist David Foster Wallace’s Boston. Did you know that “Infinite Jest” is a Boston novel the way Ulysses is a Dublin novel?
As always, we’re looking for help in the planning of these shows, and we’re looking for ways to engage in conversation with you both on the air and on our website. We’ve remodeled things a bit at radioopensource.org, and we’ve added a couple of features. On the Veranda is a porch of sorts where you can share links, angles, ideas and digressions. On the top of our site we’ll feature a photo of the day, maybe a Boston vista or just a great snapshot. Send them to us, and we will reward you immeasurably.
Our show is weekly, which leaves time for podcast conversations and experiments. We’ve been reading (and recording) Chekhov stories in Chris’ living room and trying to learn WordPress. Ryan Cataloni, one of our new Emerson College friends, has given us a new look. Keep an eye out for the work of the young filmmakers Coop Vacheron and Loni Paone, also from Emerson, and make sure and welcome our intern, Kunal Jasty.