Added 6.14.19. Milt interviews Kyle Olson in 2011 about his then-new book, “Indoctrination.” Olson is the founder and CEO of the Education Action Group, a Michigan-based non-profit which favors charter schools and education vouchers and has attracted attacks from pro-teachers-union advocates as a tool of the DeVos family, Republicans, and conservatives. Olson maintains – and discusses with Milt – his contentions that intellectual diversity and free inquiry are being subjugated in U.S. public school classrooms for anti-American, redistributionist advocacy driven in part by teacher training programs at the nation’s colleges and universities.

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 5.31.19. Modern Russia is a study in intersectionality. How is it shaped by the overlapping spheres of strongman leader Vladimir Putin, the criminal oligarch class, plus a media more and more owned by said oligarchs, and the restless but still somewhat cowed masses? What are the key takeaways on the nation’s resurgent geopolitical profile? Milt probes the problems and prospects of modern Russia with two eminent “Russianists.” They are John Bushnell, a Northwestern University historian, and Martha Merritt, then of the University of Chicago.

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 3.7.19. Renowned war historian Max Hastings, a former editor of the The Telegraph newspaper in the U.K., sits down with Milt to discuss his then-new account of World War II titled “Inferno: The World At War – 1939-1945.” It was time, Hastings tells Milt, to turn the focus away from generals, prime ministers and presidents, and examine the age-old question of “what was the war like” from the perspective of those far from the headlines. The focus turns to participants such as an American paratrooper, a French collaborator, a Polish Jew, and many others. Everyone’s story was different but most shared a variation of the phrase, “and then, all hell broke loose.” Exploring those stories and the war’s place in our minds and history is the focus of this lively conversation.