Even though the spotlight had shifted back to Congress, the delay or discard of Obamacare, and whether some Senate Democrats might defect, Syria still festers and the Obama performance still, shall we say, puzzles. We talked in September, 2013 with Victor Davis Hanson about what then was at issue – and how the President played it and was played.

So what’s really wrong with you? The APA (American Psychiatric Association) has got your number or, rather, your diagnosis. And it is all laid out in the DSM-5.  Whazzat? The revised list of mental disorders wherein your neighborhood psychiatrist can find you, label you and make you eligible or ineligible for insurance coverage for the sometimes quite harmful drugs he will prescribe. So says psychologist Gary Greenberg in his new Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry. According to Greenberg that branch of medicine  is now in danger of becoming a sideshow turned into a racket.

On occasion we will put up a podcast of a past and “classic” encounter between Milt and a prominent political, journalistic or scholarly figure. Here’s a conversation with Henry Kissinger in 1994 which still makes much sense of international relations now.

We talked with Lord Conrad Black, author of the new book Flight of the Eagle, a tour of American history from 1754 to 1992. Black identifies nine different phases that America has gone through, and how these phases have developed America into the great nation it is today.

Roger Kimball is publisher, editor and brilliant taskmaster for the magazine, New Criterion. He is also the publisher of Encounter Books, known for scholarly but eminently readable contributions to the literature of modern conservatism. He is a most compelling speaker and conversationalist. Here he is in a 2013 discussion.