Added 6.7.19. Loaded with historical radio clips, Milt interviews broadcast historian J. Fred MacDonald about 20th Century broadcasting history. The show starts with a vintage clip that jolts the listener back to  a national turning point. The Sunday broadcast of the New York Philharmonic, live, playing Shostakovich’s Symphony #1 in F Minor, is interrupted by a news bulletin, and then continued radio news coverage of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The episode traces the role of broadcast communications in U.S. history, politics and public opinion going forward from that point.

Added 4.2.19. Milt interview the father-daughter author team Marvin and Deborah Kalb on their then-new book, “Haunting Legacy: Vietnam And The American Presidency From Ford To Obama.” Together they unearth how, why and to what effect U.S. presidents in the years since the Vietnam War’s end, have  let our nation’s unsatisfying experience in that conflict shape subsequent military and foreign policy decision making. Deborah Kalb is a writer, editor, and author, and has written several books about politics and history for adults and children. Marvin Kalb was for three decades a noted correspondent for CBS and NBC television news, and later founded the Shorenstein Center of Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

Added 1.22.19. Born in the 1930s in the United States but greatly appreciated, analyzed and advanced by European critics and auters, the film noir genre accented the predatory side of man and the city as a vortex of temptation and depravity. The femme fatale, the “good girl,” the flawed hero – not infrequently a detective married to the bottle – all these archetypes plus the brooding, atmospheric chiarascuro  cinematography helped to define the genre. Many of the early modern films now received as classics were film noir, such as Maltese Falcon; Murder, My Sweet; Double Indemnity;  Sunset Boulevard; and Asphalt Jungle. With numerous audio scenes from such films added to the mix, Milt explores the birth and life of film noir with Hugh Ingrasci, an expert on the topic who at the time of the broadcast was an English professor at DePaul University in Chicago.

Added 11.6.18. It’s been said that to be a U.S. Presidential contender requires “ambition, stamina, and pure shamelessness.” There’s a tradition among writers and political analysts of putting successful – and unsuccessful – U.S. Presidential campaigns under the microscope. It dates back at least as far as Theodore White’s classic of the genre titled “The Making Of The President 1960,” on JFK’s White House conquest; and includes Richard Ben Cramer’s classic “What It Takes,” on the ’88 contest. Mark Edward Taylor, an ordained minister with a doctorate in communications from Northwestern University, in his 2011 analysis “Branding Obamessiah: The Rise Of an American Idol,” posits – and seeks to painstakingly document – that President Barack Obama won his first term in office in an especially remarkable manner. It was, Taylor argues, with a carefully calibrated communications strategy inspired by religious images; religious words; a creation story; sacred rituals; true believers; and “an exceptional chief” defined as “an inexplicably impressive solution to all the nation’s problems” and by his “sense of hope in himself and the nation.” Milt and frequent guest Charles Lipson, a prolific author and professor emeritus of political science at the University of Chicago, sit down here in late 2011 with Taylor to dive deeper.

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.