We are astonished. The “we” is me and my guest, Charles Lipson, member of our old A-Team and one of the country’s five leading political scientists (by Rosenberg Ranking). Astonished by what? By the man who wasn’t there. Where? In Paris, of course.

Yet other things about the recent performance of our old colleague from the University of Chicago continue to astonish – among them his inability to call Islamic terrorism what it is. As usual with Charles the conversation wanders in many correlated directions including: the talent level of the President’s foreign policy advisors, the appalling consequences that followed from the stance announced way back in the Cairo speech and, probably essential for the rest of the century, the required policy for playing through the struggle with recidivist and homicidal Jihadism.

That’s the title of a wonderfully outspoken book by John Silber who was, for many years, the President of Boston University. Architecture is, of course, the most public of the arts. You can put a bad painting in the basement but  not a bad building. Always an outspoken critic, Silber finds many modern buildings that he would like to have torn down. In this discussion from 2008 he identifies and describes them and names the names of their designers, And to my mind, his judgments are absolutely correct!

That can be said to be the basic assignment of psychologists, psychiatrists and, these days particularly, neuroscientists. But the original investigators of the human mind were those we now call philosophers. They are still at it and, using only mind itself, they sometimes clarify many issues and come upon many exciting prospects that one does not get from the more formally scientific investigators. Here then, from a conversation in 2006, are two accomplished and articulate “philosophers of mind” illuminating human mentality itself.

Victor Davis Hanson is a fourth-generation California rancher has long been concerned about the poor prospects that face the flood of Mexican illegal immigrants even if – or when – they attain legal status. In his book “Mexifornia,” which we discussed with him way back in 2003, he made some worried predictions about the poor life prospects for under-educated young Mexicans who were crossing the border in vast numbers. Those predictions are apparently coming true some 12 years after he voiced them in this conversation.

After D-Day the general expectation was that Germany would be defeated within a few months if only because they had less than one-tenth of the planes and tanks than did the Allies. Instead it was  a “long, hard slog.” Sir Max Hastings, a great war historian, joined us for this program in 2004 to present the detailed overview, as developed in his book “Armageddon,” of the ultimate defeat of the Nazi nation.  His expert and fluent account of the march to Berlin is here richly illustrated with many sound clips from the battlefields.

The “then”  is represented by this program from 2007 with three Chicago-based counter-terrorism agents, one of them from the FBI. The “now” is represented by the recent news from France, Nigeria and, of course, from Iraq where the terrorist “Islamic State” is now engaged in killing non-orthodox Sunnis and any Shiites they can get their hands on while their leader announces that Jihadis should target all Americans. From this discussion we see how great the threat was a few years ago and from the present news we see….WHAT?

As Gilbert and Sullivan have someone sing in Pinafore, “things are seldom what they seem.” A great instance in recent American history is the Cuban Missile Crisis. This refers to the causes, the weapons, the Soviet motives, the deep disagreements at the White House and how close we actually came to war. A very important and valuable book on the crisis was written by John Gresham who was our guest, together with foreign policy historian Arthur Cyr, one night in 2006. That thrilling and, frankly, scary discussion held our listeners riveted. Also heard in this program is the speech by JFK that announced the full blockade of Cuba – and that ordered the Soviets to turn back their missile-carrying ships and have the missiles already based in Cuba fully dismantled.

Lots of them have been written though sometimes in rather stiff, academic language. A swinging, delightful (but still philologically accurate) version was done back in 2007. Its author Seth Lerer, a professor of English at Stanford, was an equally swinging and delightful guest. Here is our rather richly illustrated conversation about the Latin, Anglo-Saxon, German and French origins of the language which has now become the most widely used in all the modern world. Listen carefully and you can hear the host’s audacious attempt to recite the Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

During her last week in office (early 2001) U. S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright came to visit with us and here in a longish excerpt she does her “tour of the horizon” – focusing on the outstanding foreign affairs problems she was about to hand over to her successor. She was the first woman to fill that office and also the second of Jewish familial background. Like Kissinger, she is careful not to speak too favorably of the Israeli regime while managing to project an easy fluency in international politics.

…named Ed Conlon joined us one night back in 2004. Of the many beat cops who have written about “the life,”  he is the only one we have met who is also a graduate of Harvard. What he has to say about his adventures, misadventures and the eternal problem of crime-control is strikingly relevant to the current national “crisis” about violence in front of and behind the badge. One inevitably remembers the Gilbert and Sullivan lines: “a policeman’s life is not an ‘appy one.”