That’s the title of a wonderfully outspoken book by John Silber who was, for many years, the President of Boston University. Architecture is, of course, the most public of the arts. You can put a bad painting in the basement but  not a bad building. Always an outspoken critic, Silber finds many modern buildings that he would like to have torn down. In this discussion from 2008 he identifies and describes them and names the names of their designers, And to my mind, his judgments are absolutely correct!

That can be said to be the basic assignment of psychologists, psychiatrists and, these days particularly, neuroscientists. But the original investigators of the human mind were those we now call philosophers. They are still at it and, using only mind itself, they sometimes clarify many issues and come upon many exciting prospects that one does not get from the more formally scientific investigators. Here then, from a conversation in 2006, are two accomplished and articulate “philosophers of mind” illuminating human mentality itself.

Victor Davis Hanson is a fourth-generation California rancher has long been concerned about the poor prospects that face the flood of Mexican illegal immigrants even if – or when – they attain legal status. In his book “Mexifornia,” which we discussed with him way back in 2003, he made some worried predictions about the poor life prospects for under-educated young Mexicans who were crossing the border in vast numbers. Those predictions are apparently coming true some 12 years after he voiced them in this conversation.

After D-Day the general expectation was that Germany would be defeated within a few months if only because they had less than one-tenth of the planes and tanks than did the Allies. Instead it was  a “long, hard slog.” Sir Max Hastings, a great war historian, joined us for this program in 2004 to present the detailed overview, as developed in his book “Armageddon,” of the ultimate defeat of the Nazi nation.  His expert and fluent account of the march to Berlin is here richly illustrated with many sound clips from the battlefields.

The “then”  is represented by this program from 2007 with three Chicago-based counter-terrorism agents, one of them from the FBI. The “now” is represented by the recent news from France, Nigeria and, of course, from Iraq where the terrorist “Islamic State” is now engaged in killing non-orthodox Sunnis and any Shiites they can get their hands on while their leader announces that Jihadis should target all Americans. From this discussion we see how great the threat was a few years ago and from the present news we see….WHAT?