Added 9/10/18. Milt in this 2011 episode delves into education reform with top-tier veteran journalist Steven Brill, who had just authored, “Class Warfare: Inside The Fight To Fix America’s Schools.” They discuss how Brill developed the book and what he learned along the way. It’s an insider account including a close look at the personal dynamics among influencers – both in the front lines and the background – in key locales including the White House, and the New York City and Washington, D.C. mayor’s offices. President Barack Obama and city and state officials staked political capital on bold and controversial education reform initiatives including a major emphasis on charter schools. As Brill tells Milt, the book flowered after he wrote a New Yorker piece on that city’s “rubber rooms,” where abusive or incompetent teachers who could not be fired due to union contracts, were relegated each work day while still collecting their salaries.

Added 9/10/18. Milt in this 2012 episode interviews popular science author Dava Sobel about the subject of her then-latest book, “A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized The Cosmos.” The Renaissance mathematician and astronomer played it cagey on proofs and details after in 1510 issuing notice that the universe revolved in fact, around the sun, not the earth, as had been long supposed. Frustratingly, he kept the details private for several decades thereafter. So how was it that he eventually came to “show his work” in 1542? Sobel in her book sandwiches a provocative fictional treatment of the subject in the form of a play, in between nonfiction sections. She and Milt explore the life and times – and informed speculation surrounding – the man behind the Heliocentric breakthrough.

Added 9/4/18. Milt in this October, 1997 episode interviews noted historian Michael Beschloss on what he learned writing the first of two volumes based on once-secret White House tapes made by President Lyndon Baines Johnson in the first two years of his presidency – starting with the hurried taking of office by the former Vice President after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in November, 1963. The episode also includes the playing of some fascinating excerpts from the LBJ White House audio cache utilized by Beschloss. Listeners will gain insider insights to LBJ’s relationship with Lady Bird, as well as big topics faced by the administration such as civil rights, poverty, Vietnam and LBJ’s impending challenge from Republican Barry Goldwater.

Added 9/4/18. Mega-wealthy do-gooders such as George Soros and Warren Buffet speak forcefully of the moral imperative to guarantee the societal security of the less well-off – but in fact, they can be viewed as merely the latest in a long line of elites who advance that line in alliance with progressive leaders, to preserve their own class hegemony. So argues lawyer and writer Michael Knox Beran. His books include, “Pathology Of The Elites,” “Forge of Empires,” and “Jefferson’s Demons.” In this 2011 interview, Milt draws out and challenges Beran on his contention of elites’ misdirection and duplicity. The conversation is focused around several then-recent articles Beran authored, including “Exposing The Elites,” and “The Descent of Liberalism.”

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.