Chris Lydon’s re-return

Christopher Lydon is back — again.

A couple of days ago I was checking my podcast subscriptions on iTunes when I saw that some new content had popped up in “Open Source,” his late, lamented public radio program. I made a mental note to investigate. Then, yesterday, Lydon and his producer, Mary McGrath, sent out an e-mail announcement that began, “The summer is over, and so is our hiatus,” and that explained the program has moved to Brown University.

It sounds as though Lydon has given up on radio: “Podcasting is the cheap, democratic, speedy, listener-friendly universal means of sharing and archiving original sound files of every kind.” But that’s fine with me. I’m not sure I ever listened to more than a few minutes of “Open Source” on the radio, but I frequently downloaded programs that sounded interesting. (They were.)

Looks like some good stuff is available. I’m going to start with Kanan Makiya — also the guest during a rip-roaring hour on Tom Ashbrook’s “On Point” recently — and Oliver Sacks.

Photo of Lydon (cc) by Andy Carvin. Some rights reserved.

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4 thoughts on “Chris Lydon’s re-return”

  1. Radio has given up on him, not the other way around.Lydon ineruptus is very hard to listen to for any period of time.

  2. Speaking of OnPoint, apparently Tom Ashbrook has had some kind of heart surgery? Yikes! This post on Radio-Info says he’ll be out until January, which does seem to imply that whatever it was, he’s expected to recover fully (thank goodness).

  3. Re: Lydon– one can only hope that they put a wind turbine in front of his mouth to harness all the hot air coming forth…Re: Ashbrook– ditto on the wind turbine for Jack Beatty, if he is WBUR’s idea of a replacement. Some people have a face made for radio; Beatty has a mouth made for print.

  4. Unfortunately, by now it’s “Chris who?” He shot himself in the foot by going against Jane Christo at WBUR. Apparently, Christo recalled that ‘BUR had earlier been shafted by the Car Talk guys when they took control of their program. Lydon believed that he could take control of The Connection, and she wouldn’t let him. BTW, I was amazed at how much ‘BUR was paying Lydon to host the show. I don’t recall the exact figures, but IIRC it was well into six figures.–raj

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