Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts joined us in 2006 to discuss his then just-published book “Becoming Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood.” He deals here with problems which have persisted: how to prepare a black child for contacts with police; the effects of feminist theory upon black fatherhood; absent-father black families as a source of social pathology and as a source of suffering for the father himself. Strong stuff, strongly articulated!

Well, maybe not everything but in this spirited conversation with two physicians and one psychologist – all specialists on aging – we get around to almost everything. Including: longevity and its extension, modes of decline, methods of cognitive maintenance and, more broadly, the joys as well as the burdens of aging.

Over 800 people died in the middle of the Chicago River on an early morning at dockside one sunny day in July of 1915. Matching the tragedy of the Titanic, it is now lost in memory except for the tales still told in Chicago. Here is a striking account by Jay Bonansinga. He did the definitive history and discussed it with us one night in 2004. Of equal interest are the phone calls from descendants of some of the survivors.

Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Horthy, and Antonescu all led fascist states in 20th century Europe. The first two listed led their nations against us in World War II. How did fascism arise? What were its central ideas and intentions? Was war essential to the fascist program? How and why did the populations of Germany, Italy, Hungary, Spain and Romania support their fascist regimes? Why and how does fascism persist in contemporary political life? These are some of the questions addressed in 2006 by our two expert historians of the fascist states.

The Old Testament – the Hebrew Bible or Tanach – combines myth, allegory and particularly in the later books, historical events. Modern biblical scholarship has worked for over a hundred years to decode the text so as to reveal the “true story” of the group that became the Jews. James Kugel is one of the leading contributors to that effort. Now at Bar Ilan University in Israel, he taught before that at Harvard where his undergraduate course in the Hebrew Bible usually drew 800 or 900 registered students. He joined us in this memorable 2007 program about the hidden meanings of the biblical text.