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Mark Blyth (9) : On the Dead End of Austerity
Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Mark Blyth (28 min, 26 meg) The Great Gatsby is out as a film again. Go see it! Think about it. Basically you have this tiny elite. How many yachts can they...
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Jeff Sachs on JFK’s last year: Between Doom and Miracle
Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Jeff Sachs (48 min, 39 meg) For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We...
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Albert Murray, the prophetic ‘Omni American,’ Rests in Peace
Al Murray, in a New York Times portrait from 1998. Not the least of it is that stunning tweed jacket, made by Mr. Murray’s (and Ralph Ellison’s, and Miles Davis’) tailor in Cambridge, Massachusetts,...
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Paul Harding, Transcendentalist. From Tinkers to Enon
Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Paul Harding (35 min, 20 meg) Short form: Tinkers was no fluke — the little gem of a novel that caught a word-of-mouth wave and won the Pulitzer Prize in...
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Linda Ronstadt riffing on the best-ever singers and songs
When I bend my ear to a singer’s performance, I often try to track who it was that influenced him or her. For instance, I can hear Nat “King” Cole in early Ray Charles, Lefty Frizzell in early Merle...
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James Douglass: JFK and the Unspeakable. Part One.
James Douglass is bracing us to reimagine John F. Kennedy around the 50th anniversary of his “rendezvous with death.” He’s encouraging us to face what has seemed to me a central question — not so much...
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James Douglass: JFK and the Unspeakable, Part Two
James Douglass is laying out a version of John F. Kennedy’s assassination that is sickening, in every way outrageous, but not exactly unfamiliar. In JFK and the Unspeakable Douglass makes it the story...
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Nicholson Baker Writes a Protest Song
Fred Field photo/ The New York Times/Redux in The New York Review of Books, 11.21.13 Songs are no joke. I’m not being ironic with these songs. I’ve never done anything in which I feel more vulnerable...
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Robert Dallek on Three Last Questions about JFK
Kennedy is so leery of the possibility that there could be a nuclear conflict. This was the greatest horror to him. Indeed he says to this young mistress, this Mimi Beardsley who spends one night with...
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Where’s Boston? 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 home town. What can you tell from the pick of the first new mayor in a century well underway? Where’s the...
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