Added 9/10/18. Milt in this 2011 episode delves into education reform with top-tier veteran journalist Steven Brill, who had just authored, “Class Warfare: Inside The Fight To Fix America’s Schools.” They discuss how Brill developed the book and what he learned along the way. It’s an insider account including a close look at the personal dynamics among influencers – both in the front lines and the background – in key locales including the White House, and the New York City and Washington, D.C. mayor’s offices. President Barack Obama and city and state officials staked political capital on bold and controversial education reform initiatives including a major emphasis on charter schools. As Brill tells Milt, the book flowered after he wrote a New Yorker piece on that city’s “rubber rooms,” where abusive or incompetent teachers who could not be fired due to union contracts, were relegated each work day while still collecting their salaries.

Added 9/10/18. Milt in this 2012 episode interviews popular science author Dava Sobel about the subject of her then-latest book, “A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized The Cosmos.” The Renaissance mathematician and astronomer played it cagey on proofs and details after in 1510 issuing notice that the universe revolved in fact, around the sun, not the earth, as had been long supposed. Frustratingly, he kept the details private for several decades thereafter. So how was it that he eventually came to “show his work” in 1542? Sobel in her book sandwiches a provocative fictional treatment of the subject in the form of a play, in between nonfiction sections. She and Milt explore the life and times – and informed speculation surrounding – the man behind the Heliocentric breakthrough.

Added 9/4/18. Milt in this October, 1997 episode interviews noted historian Michael Beschloss on what he learned writing the first of two volumes based on once-secret White House tapes made by President Lyndon Baines Johnson in the first two years of his presidency – starting with the hurried taking of office by the former Vice President after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in November, 1963. The episode also includes the playing of some fascinating excerpts from the LBJ White House audio cache utilized by Beschloss. Listeners will gain insider insights to LBJ’s relationship with Lady Bird, as well as big topics faced by the administration such as civil rights, poverty, Vietnam and LBJ’s impending challenge from Republican Barry Goldwater.

Added 9/4/18. Mega-wealthy do-gooders such as George Soros and Warren Buffet speak forcefully of the moral imperative to guarantee the societal security of the less well-off – but in fact, they can be viewed as merely the latest in a long line of elites who advance that line in alliance with progressive leaders, to preserve their own class hegemony. So argues lawyer and writer Michael Knox Beran. His books include, “Pathology Of The Elites,” “Forge of Empires,” and “Jefferson’s Demons.” In this 2011 interview, Milt draws out and challenges Beran on his contention of elites’ misdirection and duplicity. The conversation is focused around several then-recent articles Beran authored, including “Exposing The Elites,” and “The Descent of Liberalism.”

Added 7.26.18. Milt is joined in this 2010 conversation by Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson, who had just authored “The Warmth Of Other Suns: The Epic Story Of America’s Great Migration.” It brings to life the travails, hopes and dreams of more than six million African-Americans who moved from the U.S. South to the cities of the north between 1915 and 1970. Wilkerson calls it one of the most under-reported stories of all time. She earlier won the Pulitzer while serving as the Chicago bureau chief for The New York Times, for feature articles on the great Midwest floods of 1993, and one about a 10-year-old boy who had to take a single-parent role to care for his four siblings.

Added 7.26.18. To preserve big game animals being hunted to extinction, legendary explorer and taxidermist Carl Akeley embarked time and again on perilous expeditions in the wilds of Africa. This champion of conservation created the African Hall at the New York Museum of Natural History and cavorted with outsize personalities of the times, such as Teddy Roosevelt and P.T. Barnum. His story is told by biographer Jay Kirk in “Kingdom Under Glass.” Milt in 2010 interviews Kirk about the life and times of Akeley. Publisher’s Weekly called Greene’s book, “a rollicking biography” and “epic adventure…a beguiling novelistic portrait of a man and an era straining to hear the call of the wild.”

Added 7.18.18. Milt in this 2010 episode interviews former FBI Agent Bob Hamer, author of “The Last Undercover: An FBI Agent’s Dangerous Dance With Evil.” Hamer specialized in undercover sting operations against the baddest of the bad guys. To catch them, he at various times impersonated a buyer of drugs from Los Angeles street gangs, a purchaser of counterfeit U.S. stamps made by the millions in China, a dealer of land-to-air missiles, and a contract killer. Among other things. Learn more about how the operations worked, the results, and the hair-raising risks.

Added 7.18.18. Urban sociology was born in Chicago at the University of Chicago in the 1930s by street-savvy scholars who got out, explored communities and dug into non-academic realities to develop and test their theories. Broadly speaking, they were seeking  to better understand and document how immigrants, politicians, classes and interest groups in major cities relate to each other and conduct necessary social transactions, so that the urban organism is able to thrive and develop. Milt digs into the roots and present-day lessons of urban sociology for Chicago with two eminent scholars. One is Robert Sampson of Harvard University, author of “Great American City: Chicago And The Enduring Neighborhood Effect.” The other is Philip Nyden, Director of Loyola University’s Center For Urban Research and Learning. Callers add their own insights and observations, including some quite salient intel from a Chicago policeman on escalating gang-related murders.

Added 7.10.18. Milt in 2010 interviewed three Chicago policemen about what their work is like. They are Brendan Daugherty, John Wrigley, and Martin Preib – who had recently authored, “The Wagon And Other Stories From The City.” Describing the book, The Guardian wrote, “At the age of 40, after years in dead-end jobs supporting his writing habit, Preib joined the Chicago police department. His first job was driving the wagon to collect dead bodies, ‘the messy remains of failed life’ ..Preib is clearly not a typical cop. He considers quoting King Lear in a police report and, in between calls, he tells his female partner about how he is inspired by Walt Whitman’s work…From gruesome accounts of collecting corpses to pieces about the daily catalogue of crime and disorder on the city’s streets, these personal essays offer a powerful portrait of the dark side of one of America’s greatest cities.”

Added 7.10.18. Everything you thought you knew about the history of baseball – our “national pastime” – is wrong. Or, at least, quite a bit of it. That is the upshot of a close look at the sport’s long arc in U.S. popular history by Mitchell Nathanson, a professor at the Villanova University School of Law, and author of “A People’s History Of Baseball.” For more of the play-by-play and color commentary, dig in to this 2012 interview of Nathanson, by Milt.