What’s Putin doing in the title? That’s to remind ourselves that if the first two items don’t totally exhaust our correlated capacities for worry, pessimism and despair, there’s always the reactivated cadaver of the Soviet Union to keep us in persisting dysphoria. There are Russianists and Russianists and lots of them still linger in Fukayamish optimism that at least the “cold war” ended years ago. A few of the best students of the present Russian reality think otherwise and have good and easily demonstrable reasons. One is David Satter who has appeared here on two of our earlier podcasts. Another is Gary Saul Morson of Northwestern University who recorded this conversation with us just before the emergence of the ISIS and Ebola nightmares.

Here then is his properly pessimistic reading of Putin and the anti-democratic culture from which he comes and by which he and his happy army of kleptocrats are sustained. In other words, when the Ebola scourge has passed and Islamic Jihadism has finally been brought down to a manageable level, the Russian threat to eastern European societies will still be there and may have done them a good deal more damage than Ukraine has already sustained.

That burden was nothing less than mental disease which kept Sherwin Nuland in a mental hospital for over a year. A distinguished Professor Of Surgery at Yale, he is also the celebrated author of many finely-wrought books drawn from medical science and culture, among them “How We Die” and “The Wisdom of the Body.” Though I had known him for years, I was stunned by what he revealed in this conversation in 2003 and in his then-new book “Lost in America.”

Is euthanasia the shape of things to come? The basic question of the emergent field of bioethics is discussed here in its many varieties – and varying verities – by three concerned and sophisticated scholars: Dr. Leon Kass, who served as the head of the bioethics commission for the second President Bush, plus John Tilner and Nigel Cameron.

Here’s a head-on and confrontational discussion of some of the main issues – immigration, health care, decline of marriage and family-formation, economic recovery – that differentiate liberal and conservative these days. Chris Robling and Charles Lipson are mainstays of our A-team and Kitty Kurth is partner in her own political public relations firm.

Among the many scholars who have argued that Freudianism is fraudulent, the outstanding American contributor is Frederick Crews, author of Follies of the Wise, Unauthorized Freudand The Memory Wars. Here he is in full form, arguing the case that Freudian psychoanalysis has no scientific standing and, as therapy, has no demonstrated value.