Listeners in the other 80 markets the show reaches may simply assume Lydon is on vacation. In fact, as readers of the Boston papers have known since the story broke on the front of the Boston Globe, there’s been what an impolite person would call a scab filling in for him the last 10 days. The station, bogged down in a battle over whether Lydon had any ownership rights to the show, simply locked him out a week ago Friday, saying that for at least two weeks he would have to listen to someone else man his microphone.

The dispute is interesting enough on its face: Lydon says that, like WBUR compatriots the “Car Talk” guys, Bill Moyers or Charlie Rose, he and his staff deserve an ownership stake in his show, and should profit from it as more and more public radio affiliates place it on their schedules. Management says no, that the station owns the show and that public broadcasting shouldn’t be about making profits.

But all of it only really matters because of this: “The Connection” is the best call-in radio show that anyone’s ever done; Lydon is America’s best interviewer; and the hours between 10 a.m. and noon feel lonely as hell without him.

Those are large claims, but you can test them out for yourself at theconnection.org, where a full archive of recent shows can be accessed via streaming audio. Maybe you’d enjoy Paul Theroux on why we love wicked books, or Chris Cerf on 30 years of “Sesame Street,” Lorrie Moore, Illinois Jacquet, David Halberstam on the art of rowing, Arthur Danto on “Where Is Beauty in Modern Art?” Maybe you’d like to program your fantasy film festival, discuss the structure of algebra, hear from Lou Reed or spend an hour learning about Nigeria.

Lydon devotes an hour or two most weeks to some contemporary political issue (after the first 10 days of the Florida recount story, he found some of the only interesting angles), and he gets the authors of the big books while they’re out on tour. But what sets him apart is the ability to discuss the poetry of Wallace Stevens back to back with the last episode of “Seinfeld” — followed a couple of days later by Loudon Wainwright III, and then Robert Coles on “The Great Gatsby.”

And it’s not just the topics — it’s the flow. The reason all talk shows, even good ones, sound alike is that they follow a predictable rhythm: The host tees up an issue, the guest takes a swing, and 18 holes later we’re finished. You can usually guess the answer before it’s given; politicians simply repeat their stump speeches. It’s the exceptions that prove the rule. For instance, Terry Gross, host of “Fresh Air,” mixes it up wonderfully — but even her job is relatively simple: one guest at a time, usually from the world of popular culture, and no callers to deal with.

Lydon’s great love is jazz, and he no-doubt-about-it swings: Conversations go off in different directions, or circle back to sore points. You can hear guests, even those zombies out on book tours, think aloud about some new tack on their subject. Lydon will solo for a long minute, showing off a very-nearly-but-not-quite annoying erudition, then back off gracefully for a ramble from his guest, or interrupt abruptly with a call or two.

If you think this is easy, listen to “Talk of the Nation,” the main NPR chat show, some afternoon. Juan Williams currently presides over the festivities, sounding uncannily like a man ordering cheeseburgers over a drive-through microphone. He is no nincompoop; “Eyes on the Prize,” his TV history of the civil rights movement, was hot stuff. But the radio has clearly defeated him. With its intimacy and its acres of open time, it requires a nimbleness that he can’t muster.

Other public radio talk hosts in different cities can be pretty darn good: Diane Rehm in Washington, Michael Krasny in San Francisco and so forth. But in my years of listening, and my years of book touring, only John Hockenberry, who ran “Talk of the Nation” before he disappeared into the television, came close to Lydon. (Full disclosure: I’ve been on most of these shows, including Lydon’s, and on “Talk of the Nation,” though not with its current host. Terry Gross has ignored the repeated begging of my various publishers, and the “Car Talk” guys failed to respond to a query about the starter on my 1981 Honda Civic.)

The reasons go beyond Lydon’s unusual set of skills. He also has a hard-charging staff, anchored by Mary McGrath (whose brother Chip — further full disclosure — was the anchor of the New Yorker in my years there, and now edits the New York Times Book Review). In fact, to watch them work reminds me of nothing so much as a fighter and his cornerman. McGrath in the control room gestures and signals, whispers through his earpiece and rushes in during the station breaks; her caffeinated drive clearly makes his cool possible. (WBUR locked McGrath out, too — most of the rest of the show’s staff walked out in protest of the station’s treatment of the pair.)

The final secret ingredient is the callers. Somehow the producers manage to weed out the political diatribes, the obvious bores. If Shostakovich is the subject, you’re likely to have the principal violinist from some metropolitan symphony ring in with tales of the great man. The program shows its Boston roots whenever a graduate student phones up with the latest au courant notion of genre film or gene-splicing. Listening in, you can convince yourself you live in a civilized society.

WBUR can argue all it wants that it somehow created this alchemy, but though it surely played some role, the mark of individual ingenuity is much too strong for anyone to take the claim seriously. The station’s other two nationally beloved shows — “Car Talk” and “Only a Game” — are similarly idiosyncratic, wonderful in ways that no committee could invent. Bostonians, in fact, can judge all too easily just how successful WBUR is when it tries something on its own. “The Connection” is followed immediately by a local news hour, “Here and Now,” which manages to create a radio version of happy-talk television news without even the fires and car crashes to break the jovial monotony.

The station’s management has attempted to paint Lydon and McGrath as greedy, in part by leaking the salaries they’d been offered if they’d stick with the current ownership deal: $230,000 annually for Lydon, $150,000 annually for McGrath. That’s a lot of money, and it clearly has saddened some of their otherwise devoted listeners who’ve been debating the controversy on the program’s bulletin board. For me, it mainly raises the worry that they’ll eventually manage to turn into rich people — either uninteresting or dilettantes, free from the moral, practical and emotional urgency that fires the show at its best.

If anyone’s worth the money, though, it’s them: Two weeks of strike baseball has left loyal listeners rolling their ears. We want discussions of living on a kibbutz, we want Mark Morris talking dance and we want Donald Hall on the poetry of grief. What if we’re missing a show on, say, the Song of Solomon and sex in the Bible? Or John Kabat Zinn on “What Your Children Can Teach You”?

Dave Brubeck is in town next week, and I want to hear him talk — talk to Lydon. If the real “Connection” isn’t back soon, some of us may actually have to spend the mornings working, just for lack of an alternative.

It was almost too easy. For a few moments the crowd forgot to chant, taken with the sheer sweet precision of it all. The A16 demonstrations in downtown Washington were under way, and the new face of civil disobedience could be seen, even more clearly than last fall in Seattle.

The Web ethos — speed, technical savvy, an almost instinctive understanding of media — has informed both sets of protests, and organization over the Internet will bring most of the thousands of protesters expected by week’s end to Washington. The three environmental groups and the Gandalfian Ruckus Society organized the kickoff demonstrations on a tiny budget: some cell phones, a rental truck, a few banners, some bail money, all in all an outlay of several thousand dollars that has already leveraged millions in free coverage.

It worked. World Bank officials, who do indeed spend vast sums to subsidize fossil-fuel developments instead of backing small-scale renewable projects, were on the defensive from the start of the week, sputtering out the backpedaling, hedging qualifier-filled evasions we all have come to expect from politicians and corporate flacks under fire.

What a remarkable role reversal. For a couple of decades, big institutions and big corporations have been able to set the public agenda. Their sheer slickness made them nearly invulnerable, offered no traction for activists. The glossy brochure, the TV commercial with the herons nesting on the drilling platform, the op-ad in the Times — your average vegetarian Oberlin sophomore bounced harmlessly off that plexiglass surface. But now, as everyone is finding out, she can be just as shiny, maybe more so. Her Web site certainly looks better than Chevron’s. And she can be endlessly more nimble.

This week’s demonstrations run on cell phones. On Monday, staffers were calling Passacantando, Washington’s feistiest environmental leader, with speech suggestions while he stood on top of the van. One of the arrested Ruckus Society activists, “Sprout,” talked live via cell phone from the D.C. clink to a press conference that followed the bust.

And if the cops (who have so far been calm and professional) had decided to move in ` la Seattle with tear gas and rubber bullets, that would have worked at least as well on the evening news. In short, the activists who planned all this were every bit as adept as the folks who once made sure Ronald Reagan never posed without an American flag behind him.

Since I’ve spent the past dozen years trying to get anyone to take issues like global warming seriously, I’m all for this newfound savvy. Look at what’s happened this year: A campaign led largely by Ozone Action has forced Ford, Daimler-Chrysler, GM and many others to quit the Global Climate Coalition, an organization which is to atmospheric science as the Tobacco Institute is to emphysema. These giants are exquisitely vulnerable to such attacks; the Net has finally allowed the truth to make an end-run around propaganda, finally allowed people to organize effectively against big lies and bigger half-truths.

Several big forestry companies have tossed in the towel on old-growth lumbering; Occidental may be wavering on its plans to drill in the tropical Colombian homeland of the U’wa people. Big bad projects will increasingly be brought to a standstill. Only a few authoritarian nations like China will be able to withstand the tsunami of criticism aimed at big new dams. The WTO is paralyzed post-Seattle; the chance for a new trade round is small, and China’s hopes for entry grow slimmer each day. Nimble Lilliputians can stop titans in their tracks. I wouldn’t want to be Exxon’s P.R. chief.

Now, though, the new forms of dissent have an even harder task ahead of them. If we’re ever going to reverse, say, global warming, it will require enormous changes on the part of individual Americans. We will need to burn much less fossil fuel, we’ll need to shift habits, deflect our economy in new directions, take real risks.

These changes will come when policy shifts, but revving people up to demand such action from their representatives will be the biggest political organizing challenge of the decade to come. Right now the political world thinks that down deep people really don’t care. It’s worth remembering that the last time the U.S. Senate took up the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, a treaty negotiated by more than 150 countries in 1997 that specifies cuts in greenhouse gas emissions each country must make, it voted against it 97-0.

And so national changes will require more than technical savvy. Every movement for social change in this country triumphed when it found the right emotional chords: the combination of hope, fear, boldness, patriotism, guilt, anger and love that moved people to change who they were and how they thought of themselves.

It’s true that the civil rights movement managed to shut down Birmingham, Ala., even more effectively than protesters shut down Seattle, but their real victory came as Americans saw the suffering protesters were willing to undergo. In a million living rooms, people recalculated the depth of their commitment to racial equality, and thus began the real sea change in our national politics. People finally began to act on what they knew in their heart of hearts was right.

This struggle will be even harder, because almost all of us benefit, or at least think we do, from the fossil-fuel culture we’ve constructed. Cheap, easy mobility. Cheap, easy everything. Look at the anger unleashed by a 50-cent increase in the price of a gallon of gas (which still leaves it costing less than a gallon of bottled water), at a time when the popularity of sports utility vehicles is driving gas consumption up, not down.

And the stakes are highest in other places. New York may have West Nile River fever, but the Nile River Delta is going to be under the ocean before too long. So those of us who campaign against global warming will need ways to reach people on the deepest levels, to make them understand the sheer blasphemous absurdity of massively altering the globe’s climate in a single generation, of undertaking an experiment where the beaker is the size of our home planet.

It will be a battle of symbols: of the greenback against the green mountains, the blue sea, the white beach. A battle of the spring and summer and fall and winter of memory, against the surreal, amped-up seasons we’re already creating today. It’s a battle than can be won, but if that victory is to matter, it will have to happen relatively fast, before there’s so much carbon in the atmosphere that the temperature will spiral.

Three cheers, then, for the Ruckus Society and all their wonderful companions. They’re fighting the bad guys to at least a draw. But if that fight is going to be won, we need an emotional creativity to match the technical genius. That’s why I was glad to see my favorite Seattle banner, the work of Rainforest Action Network’s Kelly Quirke, reappear on the streets of Washington this week. In words any Harry Potter fan will recognize, it read simply: “Wake Up Muggles.” With any luck, it will be an interesting decade.

Despite its wounded grammar, this ad is not very difficult to decode. Gandhi has great power as an icon (in the archaic meaning of the word). One look at him and you think, “simplicity,” “calm,” “rebellion without violence.” The associations come as quickly and as powerfully as they do in an ad with, say, Pamela Anderson Lee, where you immediately think, “sex on a beach.” And for Apple, of course, it’s important to endow its box of chips with those associations. Fairly or not, Apple has long since lost the battle for “efficiency,” which is the chief virtue of the data age. It’s stuck defending a few niche markets — design, education, certain kinds of media — where rebellion remains a nostalgic touchstone. So Gandhi makes a certain kind of mercenary sense.

But Gandhi is different. While it is ignoble to use Albert Einstein (another of Apple’s icons) as a pitchman, it is not perhaps immoral in quite the same way. Einstein was more or less a part of his century; his magnificent mind did not take him outside the flow of recent history.

Gandhi really is different, far more different than the copywriter seems to have understood.

He was the eruption in this century, and in some ways this millennium, of a venerable idea, an idea that stretches back at least to the Buddha — the idea that by leaving yourself behind you find yourself, that by renunciation you conquer. So it is bizarre to use him to sell products. When he died, all his belongings — toothbrush, Bhagavad Gita, loincloth — fit inside a couple of shoe boxes.

But that’s not the real degradation. Were Apple merely selling computers it would only be grubby to use Gandhi’s picture. Instead, of course, they’re trying to sell each of us an image of ourselves. Which is precisely what Gandhi spent his life trying to help people strip away. In the fight for Indian independence (against the biggest brand name of his era, the British Empire), he succeeded in helping a nation shrug off its own internalized sense of subjugation, its own sense that Britishness, like Appleness, was superior. And he did it without trying to substitute the usual nationalist passions.

He went well beyond that, too — his battle against the caste system was in reality a battle against even more insidious self-labeling, against identities ingrained in the unconscious of an entire subcontinent. And though he was a devout man, he even tried to fight against the religious brands — his prayers each night came not just from the Hindu scriptures, but from the Gospels, from the Koran. He was assassinated by a fanatic Hindu precisely for his lack of brand loyalty.

Gandhi believed there was something sacred and lovely at the center of people, and that to get to it each of us needed to cut through the various lusts and fears of everyday life. That was hard enough to do in village India; how much harder in our time and place, when we live amid a hurricane of messages and symbols all designed to overlay our own identity. Gandhi, in other words, was the chief spokesman against the consumer mentality since Christ — against the idea that the ownership of a particular kind of computer might free you, make you more creative or rebellious or attractive.

Trying to sell a Macintosh with Gandhi’s image is every bit as ironic as selling cigarettes with a picture of healthy, sexy young bodies. (Or as ironic as the Land Rover ad some years ago that said: “Celebrate Thoreau’s Birthday. Drive Through a Pond.”)

Eknath Easwaran, the California meditation teacher whose book “Gandhi the Man” is the simplest, and therefore loveliest, of the many Gandhi biographies, describes seeing Gandhi meditate during the evening prayer service in the last years of his life. The text that evening was from the second chapter of the Gita. As the sonorous verses were read, you could see him completely absorbed, his mind growing calm and still. His concentration was so complete that it was no longer the second chapter you were listening to, it was the second chapter you were seeing, witnessing for yourself the transformation it describes:

They are forever free who have broken

Out of the ego-cage I and mine
To be united with the Lord of Love.
This is the supreme state. Attain thou this
And pass from death to immortality.

On the other hand, you could have 1.6 Gb, a 10xCD-ROM, 128 MB RAM and a smug dose of superiority.

It’s not a question I’d given endless thought, but like most people I know I pretty much assumed that Dr. Jack Kevorkian was, well, right. That is, though Doctor K seems like a certifiable loon, it seemed logical to me that people nearing the end of their lives should be able to choose to kill themselves. More, it seemed logical that they should. Now I’m not so sure.

One of the first stories in Peck’s book concerns a young Air Force sergeant with a brain tumor whom Peck treated 30 years ago in his early days as a military doctor. Tony slipped into a coma, breathing through a respirator. He was kept “alive” only by massive doses of adrenaline, but he was clearly dying: “What disturbed me more than anything was the copious amount of frothy light brown liquid that had begun to ooze out along the edges of his tracheotomy. It seemed to me that Tony’s body had clearly begun to rot.”

So, disobeying a direct order from the Army doctor above him, Peck clamped the IV tube supplying Tony’s body with drugs, and 10 minutes later Tony was dead. Peck defends such decisions squarely; he is no advocate of “heroic measures,” and in the past few decades most other doctors have joined him — pulling the plug is no longer unusual practice in most cases. Peck and his wife have living wills asking that medical technology not be used to prolong his life “at the expense of our humanity by maintaining us as ‘vegetables.’”

So he is not in any way an absolutist, nor is he a sadist — the next chapter of his book is devoted to physical pain, and it reads like a script and a screed. The script is for morphine, Demerol, codeine. The screed is against the many doctors and hospitals that dole them out in stingy, inadequate doses and on inflexible timetables that leave patients shivering in fear. Everyone should read this section, whatever their interest in questions like euthanasia; it is a valuable user’s guide to the hospital and its pharmacy.

Left to their own devices, with a handy pump that allows them to deliver their own dose of morphine, Peck says patients often use less of the drugs than a doctor would supply; even if they use more, the fear of addiction is insufficient cause to deny them relief from pain. In fact, he writes, it is “torture,” “malpractice” and “a crime.” “If I ever encountered a patient suffering serious chronic pain for which there was no hope of relief, I would consider euthanasia — physician-assisted suicide — a valid option,” says Peck. But that justification is “purely theoretical for me” since “I’ve never actually encountered such a patient.”

So far, so good — all right-minded people can agree. But why does Peck go on to say that sometimes he hopes for a lingering death? His answer lies in the realms of theology and psychology, and in some sense it is aimed at those Americans who feel they have souls — something inside them connected to a larger reality. Which, as he points out, is the vast majority of this professed religious society — even a great number of those who would never go to a church buy books about caring for their souls. But as he also points out, we simultaneously live in an essentially secular society, where even most of those who identify themselves as religious are in fact good materialists. Peck thinks euthanasia may be the best issue to shake that secularism a bit — to make the culture think seriously about something beyond convenience and comfort.

To take seriously the notion that we are creations of God, he points out, imposes certain limits on us. “This is not solely my life to do with as I see fit. To kill myself is to deny God, to deny Her timing and right to my life,” he writes. Peck argues not that we can’t kill ourselves — free will gives us every opportunity to do so — but that we shouldn’t.

But why on earth not? Is there any really convincing reason, one that might infect even a non-religious person with doubt? Peck doesn’t take the intuitive (and hideous) Protestant position that dying is one more trial that God throws at you and you should show your toughness by dealing with it bravely. No, his argument is considerably weirder. For Peck, dying is, well, educational. In fact, it’s “the opportunity of a lifetime for learning and soul development.”

This is not glib happytalk. All Peck’s books are pretty fierce, especially for therapeutic bestsellers. They are about relinquishing one’s illusions, about “doing the work of depression.” They are about giving up parts of ourselves: arrogance, unrealistic fantasies, a habit of sarcasm. This one in particular is about defeating the very ego that most of his psychological colleagues stoke and soothe. It’s about killing off parts of yourself before you die.

Peck says that the stages of dying that Elisabeth Kubler-Ross identified in her book “On Death and Dying” (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) are the schema for any of these kinds of ego-death — in individuals, in marriages, even in national traumas like Vietnam. (Of Vietnam, he writes, “Only recently, 25 years after the fact, does it look as if we have done some portion of the work of that depression by learning to relinquish a shred of our arrogant desire to control the world and come to some modicum of humility in our international relations.”)

Of all the opportunities for denying the ego, for reaching the religious understanding that “ego is its own worst enemy,” none is so powerful as one’s death. Kenosis, which Peck describes as “the process of the self emptying itself of self,” is the exact opposite of a consumer understanding of the world, and so in this culture it is hard for most of us to engage in it short of extremity. But at its end is a kind of acceptance that he claims is beautiful to watch — and that many of us have had the privilege to see in those deaths we call “good.”

Why not simply plan your death so as to cut off the last few weeks of unpleasantness, by orchestrating your demise so as to make it neat? Because in two or three or four weeks at the end of your life, with your physical pain controlled by morphine, hopefully in your own home or a hospice, you might learn about “how to negotiate a middle path between control and total passivity, about how to welcome the responsible care of strangers, about how to be dependent once again … about how to trust and maybe even, out of existential suffering, at least a little bit about how to pray or talk with God.”

To me, that is a powerful idea — it is not even necessary to share Peck’s belief in some form of afterlife to feel its power. It accords with all that I intuit about the world: most crucially, that our survival as a species and our happiness as individuals demands that we mature beyond the mindless consumerism that we currently identify as “human nature.” A culture that begins to understand death in new ways would almost certainly begin to understand life in new ways, too.

Peck has not solved every issue about euthanasia. In fact, he’s not convinced me that it shouldn’t be a choice for those who don’t care about any of the questions he discusses. And there are cases (ironically, many of those addressed by Kevorkian) that do not fit his model: people who may linger helplessly but consciously on the edge of death for years or decades, which seems rather a long semester to learn these lessons. There are difficult economic questions, too, in a society that feels it can’t afford to provide decent basic health care for Americans with many potentially happy years ahead.

But I’ve never read anything that made me think more seriously about my own death and what it might involve, and for that I am very grateful. Death — God willing a long ways away — scares me a tiny bit less than it did before I picked up this book.