What can Chicago teach the rest of the nation? Where is the light at the end of the tunnel? Here we diagnose the patient and, hopefully, suggest a way out of the mess for our beloved yet beleaguered city.

Ted Dabrowski of the Illinois Policy Institute has been studying this issue in depth and joins us alongside Donald Haider, a one-time mayoral candidate and esteemed professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management.

Interesting to this conversation is the input of our listeners. Some think our days are numbered. Others see a bright future for this beautiful town.

(Cartoon courtesy of Eric Allie. Even more of Mr. Allie’s work here)

Joining Lindberg is one of our favorite guests, John Drummond. John is a legendary newsman who knew of all of the crooks and bosses during his day and is still keeping up with it.

Via phone we check in with Fred Kagan of American Enterprise Institute and Fred Burton, VP of Intel at Stratfor.

In this episode, we’re joined by to fine academics who study terror and its machinations–John Allen Williams of Loyola and Barry Kellman of DePaul–in studio. Via phone we talk to Daniel Greenfield, who has some very strong assertions toward Islam and the role of the faith in terror and the inimitable Victor Davis Hanson, who had a timely article on the tragedy.

To discuss, we have in studio Dick Ciccone and Joe Morris, two members of our political A-Team.

His latest, Origins: The Scientific Story of Creation, is a concise history of how we got here, how life has evolved on this planet, and where life may be heading next. Baggott joins us here for an hour. We only wish that we’d had more time.

John Thavis has years of experience working in the Vatican as he was the Rome Bureau Chief of the Catholic News Service and has written previously about what goes on with the Holy See. He goes deep into how this secretive team must vet miracles of those to be canonized, how they go around the world doing detective work on apparitions, or sightings of the Saints or demons. In The Vatican Prophecies Thavis also sheds some light on Pope Francis, a pope who has been thrust into the limelight at a time when the Church has passionate debate within and increasing pressure from the outside to adapt to an increasingly secular world.

Stacy Schiff is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a master storyteller. She has turned her attentions to Salem, 1692 to bring to life the real people behind the legend and to investigate how hysteria gripped a town and a nation. Not only were women the focus of the investigations–an inquisition, really–but there were men also. Families turned their backs on each other. Educated people left their senses–certain the devil was at work–and became complicit in murder.

The Wtiches: Salem, 1692 is a certain bestseller and a welcome inquiry into a story and a time that have had, unfortunately, only the most rudimentary understanding in American history.

Our second in-studio guest is the esteemed Dr. Charles Clency, who recently retired as the professor of music and director of choirs at the College of Lake County. Dr. Clency has had a distinguished career as a musician and toured with many legends of Gospel.

A bonus here are some readings that most people won’t have heard from selections most don’t know. They show you just how creative Twain was and how he was never off his game.

First up to join is Bret Stephens, the Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign-affairs columnist at the Wall Street Journal. His latest book, America in Retreat, has been quite influential. He and Milt talk about ‘The Tyranny of a Big Idea‘.

Edward Klein has been keeping up with Hillary Clinton, and writes about the many scandals beyond Benghazi and a private email server. His newest book is Unlikable, about the sure-to-be Democrat candidate in 2016.

Finally, Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA man and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, examines the oft-employed diplomatic tool of soft power. When does it work, when does it fail and, more important, how is it failing us in the Middle East at present? His fine contribution to the Weekly Standard titled ‘Victory without Soldiers‘ is a scathing review of how we engage with militant jihadists.

In hour one we are joined by Tom Lewis, professor emeritus, English at Skidmore College. He’s written extensively on the mid-Atlantic states and, for an aside, an absolutely superb history of our business of radio. In Washington: A History of Our National City, we learn of just what Washington the man had to overcome to give us a seat of government.

In hour two (begins at 49:02), Gerard Koeppel joins us. Koeppel is no stranger to radio himself, having a distinguished career with CBS in addition to historical writings on his city, New York. Today the basis for our broadcast is the shape of New York, that, to newcomers and tourists is a confounding street system. To New Yorkers it makes perfect sense, and here you’ll learn of the simple wisdom that gave birth to that system, and how that simplicity gave the city many of its problems yet many of the characteristics that are so endearing. If Washington D.C. is the seat of government, surely New York is the seat of finance. Milt knows it well, having spent many early years there. Koeppel gives us a fine history and backstory to the Big Apple with his latest, City on a Grid: How New York Became New York.

To shed light on the proceedings–if there was any of political value–we turn to a fine panel. In studio, Richard Baehr and Ed Lasky of American Thinker, Larry Sabato of the Center for Politics and Sabato’s Crystal Ball, and Jonathan Last and Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard.

But there’s another side to Big Comrade. It’s a legion of brilliant programmers and hackers who serve as a counterbalance to Putin’s goal of totalitarianism. It’s an epic struggle waged not with guns and bombs, but with mouse clicks and websites, disinformation, misinformation and leaks.

Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov are in a tenuous position. They are journalists in a nation where there really is no clear delineation between freedom of the press and when it’s better for your health to stop looking. Despite that uncertainty, they have investigated this fascinating interplay of technology, intelligence, commerce and freedom in brilliant style. Here’s their story: The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries. Follow their work in Russian or in English here.

To help us make sense of all of this we turned to Art Cyr of Carthage College, Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post, Daniel Halper of the Weekly Standard, and Michael Barone of the Washington Examiner. What a week it was, and what happened will surely lead to more reasons for ongoing discussion.

*listen for the real reason the Sox were called ‘The Black Sox’. It’s not what you think…

Harlow Giles Unger has written many fine books on stalwarts of American history, and has just published this work on Clay.

So as the France many of us loves prepares to be transformed forever with yet another influx of immigrants (and further outmigration of Jews–a tragedy for another day), we thought we should look back at the great philosophers and minds that helped shape our ideas of freedom, individuality, equality, and fraternity, not to mention film, music, love and lovers, and food!

Joining in studio are philosophy professor Rick Lee of DePaul and political science professor Marina Henke of Northwestern.

If you don’t think you’re a Francophile, start with the coming phrase. Perhaps you truly do appreciate the French outlook on life and just don’t know it yet:

To discuss, we bring to you three politically minded men from different backgrounds: Richard Baehr, chief political correspondent at American Thinker, Benjamin Epstein is an Associate Professor of Political Science at DePaul University, and Chris Robling is a political strategist and principal of his own consulting firm.

Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in the Digital Age is Turkle’s latest in a thirty year career of studying how the digital age is changing the way we talk, work, live and love.

Also joining is a longtime friend of the program Dick Simpson. A former Alderman, he’s now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and much published. His latest, Corrupt Illinois, is pertinent to this discussion and a good study of the seamy underbelly of Chicago and Illinois politics.

We bring to you guests who have been there and done it. Juliana Taimoorazy was forced from her native Iran and found asylum in Europe before coming to America and founding the Iraqi Christian Relief Council. Yousip Canon was a mathematics teacher in Iraq who ran afoul of the Hussein regime and imprisoned for participating in an Assyrian political party. Robert Nicholson heads the Philos Project in New York who are working to aid Assyrians and others. And Murad Ismael is Operations Manager for Yazda, a Yazidi relief agency.

To explore such a higher aim we turn to culture critic Michael A. Walsh, who traveled this road a bit in his book The Devil’s Pleasure Palace. Also joining are Mark Hemingway of the Weekly Standard, and Dr. Jeffrey A. Lieberman, who has studied mental illness in-depth as well as publishing a recent and influential critique of psychiatry. All have salient and sometimes poignant thoughts on the situation.

Karen Abbott, also a historian (and one who wrote an eyebrow-raising account of the Everleigh Club in Chicago), joins us in part two to talk about another group of strong women with her book, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy. As you may have gleaned from the title, Abbott chronicles the wartime lives of four very remarkable women, all of whom played important and fascinating roles on both sides of the conflict.

In the photograph that accompanies this entry is a rendering of the Tower of Babel. As the story goes, at some point in antiquity there was just one language, spoken and understood by all of mankind. Some academics say part of this story at least is true: there really was one language that gave birth to the rest of the tongues we have now. But from where did that language come? It’s a study that has fascinated linguists for years.

Here we bring you two linguists, both from the University of Chicago’s Department of Linguistics. Yaroslav Gorbachov is Assistant Professor of Slavic Linguistics and Salikoko Mufwene is a Distinguished Service Professor in Linguistics.

In this episode you will hear a number of languages including Basque, Finnish, Olde English, Romanian and–perhaps the father of all languages–Sanskrit.

So we have a bit of a standoff between Putin’s Russia and Obama’s America. Whatever the motives may be, some things remain certain: the Syrian people still suffer, ISIS still grows in power, influence, and ability to cause mayhem, and the Middle East is a shambles.

Where it goes from here is anyone’s guess, so we may as well make those guesses educated. To do just that, we assemble yet another panel of brilliant minds and informed brains. On this occasion we invited into the studio Brian Endless of Loyola University, David Farris of Roosevelt University, and Khalil Marrar of Governor’s State University. Their counterparts on the phone are the former ambassador to Saudi Arabia Robert W. Jordan (who recently published a fine memoir) and Frederick W. Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, an extremely well-connected and influential mind who is an expert of Russian and Soviet history as well as military capacity and tactics.

To discuss the current state of the State of Israel and the Jewish people, we brought in three experts; namely Roey Gilad, Israel’s Consul General to the Midwest, Spertus Director of Doctoral Programs, professor Joshua Shanes, and Alan Solow, a high-profile attorney, philanthropist and tireless advocate of many Jewish causes and organizations.

Whatever subject we address, we always aim to bring some of the most informed minds available. This program was no different, and we think you’ll find it a valuable entry into the discussion of the Middle East in general and Israel and American Jewry in particular.

Nordlinger has a curiosity that lends itself well to writing books. He recently asked himself what might have become of the children of some of history’s most devilish dictators. That question has produced great fruit in the form of his latest, Children of Monsters. Some of the offspring of these mass murderers turned their back on the family business, while others happily towed the line and became maniacal outliers in their own right.

This book is nothing short of brilliant. It’s a fascinating study into what makes the dictator tick, and how that ethos is manifested in their progeny.

His latest book, Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking, is yet another fine entry into the field of psychology and, as Milt himself is also a social psychologist, this meeting of two experts in their field was a revelation in scholarly discussion.

Our esteemed guest, Dr. Philip Kotler–the great economist from Northwestern–says that capitalism is still the best system, but that it has to “have a heart”. In his latest book, Confronting Capitalism, he highlights 14 shortcomings of our system while providing solutions to get us back on track.

So we gathered some of the best scholars in the area to discuss just that. There’s murder, intrigue, romance, betrayal and humor running through the thousand years’ reigns of the English monarchs (of course, there are queens to discuss, also), and to shed light on this fascinating peculiarity of British life, we were joined by Bruce Janacek of North Central College, John Leazer of Carthage Collage, and Scott Sowerby of Northwestern. All historians, they joined Milt in this great journey into history with plenty of tales from the throne.

We turned to several members of the Political A-Team, namely Richard Baehr of American Thinker, Dr. Charles Lipson of the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago, and Joseph Morris, former Assistant Attorney General under President Reagan.

As expected, this is top-shelf analysis, and a good stop for sober, informed analysis.

Rick Telander is a legend in his own right. A former college football player at Northwestern University, he is also an acclaimed sportswriter and senior sports columnist at the Chicago Sun Times. He, too, wrote a fine book about the business of college football in The Hundred Yard Lie.

These are three great minds that have come together to tackle an issue of terrific cultural importance. As the political season rolls into the fourth quarter, education is surely a great topic of debate. Perhaps the blurring of education and money, employment and amateurism is as much a mirror of where we are as a society as is the carnival that our political process has become.

On this program, we were pleased to be joined by two former commanders of the Chicago PD, namely former superintendent of police Matt Rodgriguez, the city’s first Hispanic top cop and head of the gambling unit, and David Boggs, former narcotics commander as well as commander of the 24th District (Rogers Park). On the docket were their memories of decades of service to this great city, as well as a look at the evolution of the criminal underworld, daily policing, community outreach and the recent erosion of relations between the boys in blue and many in our communities. There’s no shortage of ideas on how policing has changed, the challenges faced by law enforcement and the future of crime fighting and community building.

Tod Lindberg is a political expert, writer, thinker and professor and has written on the topic of heroes in his latest book. He answers many of these questions, visiting great heroes of history to show how the ancient and modern model of a hero has changed, and what qualities of those heroes persist throughout history.

Rich Rubino is a fine political reporter, pundit and author who has given us a great collection of odd and obscure political facts in a previous work. He has just published a collection of humorous political quotations that is great fun. He joined Milt to share some of his favorite.

To help us understand how we got here and where we should go next is a fine panel of analysts, historians, and scholars. Marina Henke, a German by birth and international relations professor at Northwestern, Erik Tillman, also a political scientist from DePaul, joined Milt in studio. Via phone, our old friend Richard Friedman and fellow DePaul professor, history, Tom Mockiatis.

Many are opposed to his mass migration. Many more support it, and even say it will be of great benefit to Europe. Wherever you stand on the issue, what is clear is that a great relocation will take place, and that war in the Middle East will continue into the near future.

We realized that we hadn’t yet delved into the mind of Dick Ciccone, and it was high time that we did it. What emerged was a truly remarkable look into the evolution of the newspaper business, journalism, and American politics.

We’re most grateful to have had Dick Ciccone as a resource for this program in its various iterations. He is a friend, and a great American.

They’ve recently published Seven Revolutions. Jim joins Milt in this entry to discuss church history, doctrine, and the future of Christianity in an increasingly secular world.

But he may be known most for his time working alongside President Lyndon B. Johnson as his top domestic aide. He wrote a magnificent account of his time with LBJ in his acclaimed book, The Triumph & Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson: The White House Years. This insider’s account goes a long way to dispelling many of the myths about Johnson, and casts light upon this giant of the American presidency. Johnson was a remarkable man in many ways. Much of the landscape of the federal government came from his presidency. This account with Milt was remarkable for its historical value and the portrait of the man Johnson at work.

To answer this question, we checked in with two esteemed historians, both well-versed in revolution. John Bushnell is a historian at Northwestern, and has studied the Russian Revolution extensively. We wanted to compare that revolution with our own, American Revolution, and to study that we were joined by professor Robert Elder of Valparaiso.

For these and many, many other topics, we turn to Richard Baehr, Chief Political Correspondent for American Thinker (one of our regular stops on the internet), Richard Ciccone, former editor of the Chicago Tribune and now adjunct professor of American Studies and Journalism at Notre Dame, and Scott Stantis, the immensely talented and highly-decorated cartoonist at the Chicago Tribune

But there was (and is) a lot more to Benny Binion than just savvy and business acumen and a penchant for cards. Douglas Swanson has just written a fine biography of Binion that is full of exactly what you’d expect from someone involved in the gambling world, plus a lot, lot more. There’s violence and mayhem, threats and action, and glitz. Lots of glitz. And, of course, the games. Binion’s legacy is larger than life, and Doug Swanson has done that image justice.

The drinks are not free while you read.

Barry was with the Washington Nationals day in and day out for their first season in the bigs and has written a great entry into the sports-literary genre with The Grind. How do baseball teams make certain they never approach their job with malaise? How do clubs manage multi-million dollar talent? What do pitchers do so that they are always ready, even when it looks like they’ll have the day off?

With the number of kids seeming to shun football, baseball has reemerged as a popular sport again with American youth. And to be sure, if the Cubs make a run deep into the playoffs, there will be no shortage of Chicago youth signing up at your local diamond.

Joining us in studio for this delightful task was Professor Robin Grey of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Professor David Michael Kaplan and Professor Keith Mikos from DePaul.

While not everyone may see a crisis as an opportunity, those in the business of managing image and rehabbing public opinion–pr experts–are an essential component of getting back in the good graces of the public when the politician or corporation makes a big mistake. Whether its an extramarital affair, a product liability, or the wrong thing said at the wrong time, there’s a legion of brilliant, media-savvy minds who scramble to work to repair the damage done.

We bring to you today three such experts, namely Mary Patrick of the highly regarded firm Jasculca Terman Strategic Communications, Jeff Leshay of Leshay Communications, and Michael Dockterman of Steptoe and Johnson, who is one of the nation’s leading attorneys and a counselor that you would very much like in your corner if your reputation and way of life were on the line.

Before the show we started naming scandals that came to mind and were quickly up to several pages’ worth of incidents. Many of those are discussed here. This is an intriguing study into the art and science of a public relations master, courtesy of three professionals in that field.

Mark Steyn is no stranger to lovers of talk radio. As a regular substitute for Rush Limbaugh, he is a remarkable journalist. He has recently turned his attentions to ‘The Hockey Stick‘, and has just published an excoriating criticism of much of the faulty science perpetrated to support Global Warming/Climate Change entitled A Disgrace to the Profession.

Both Canadians, Black and Steyn have keen eyes for political analysis. Along with Milt they covered a tremendous amount of ground in many fields beyond politics. Science, history, geography, energy, publishing and media, etc.

What would a healthier economy in our state entail? What can be done in Springfield to spur business? How can we cut the red tape of government to attract workers and industry and dissuade them from choosing Texas, Indiana, or a host of other states whose star is on the rise? How can we turn around schools in Chicago?

To discuss such matters, we turned to the Illinois Policy Institute–a remarkable organization that aims to present solutions to these very problems and much, much more.

Michael Lucci always has fantastic research into this, and we never miss it. Ted Dabrowski is also one of the top minds at IPI. They both joined Milt in studio to examine how to reverse the fortunes of our fine state.

Their latest work, Spinglish–with the fantastically fun full title How to Succeed in Business (and Politics and Everything Else) without Really Lying with Spinglish: The Definitive Dictionary of Deliberately Deceptive Language–is a collection of hilariously inaccurate and slightly (and oftentimes much more) disingenuous terms and vocabulary from all sectors of life, from politics, to education, to real estate, to the auto industry and well beyond. It’s a testament to how words can be manipulated, how they sound like one thing but mean a completely other thing altogether. Great fun!

A remarkable thing we noticed was just how perfectly these films play on radio, without the moving pictures. There are plenty of clips here. This was a fun show. Remember, hero: stay away from the enchanting woman! Only bad things can happen if you get involved…nothing but trouble.

So as we explore the office of the presidency and its power–implicit and otherwise, we also turn to the race for the presidency that culminates in November of 2016. It’s been entertaining, to say the least. We check in with Kyle Kondik of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, who has analyzed the polls for the GOP nomination, and gives his analyses of the race thus far.

Fred Barnes joined Milt early in the program–always a welcome commentator. Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball gave us solid analysis. We strongly recommend that you follow the work of both the Weekly Standard and the Center for Politics.

Finally, Victor Davis Hanson joined us. The political considerations were excellent as always. Even better was a comparison of figures from the Classical era with the participants from last night’s debate, which is good fun. And you should not miss the arresting psychological profile Hanson paints of President Obama as he considers his legacy.

You should share this with your friends and those seeking a deeper insight into American politics than what is more broadly available.

Dr. Sherlock Holmes is still alive and still working. Surely his body must have slowed a bit as he’s over 160 years old, but his mind is still as sharp as ever. Donald Terras, Janice Weiner and Al Shaw filled us in on the legacy and long life of the world’s greatest detectives, revisit some classic cases, and review many of the classic films and spinoff television shows based upon Holmes and the Doyle canon.

But long before America felt compelled to have a permanent armaments industry, many men were fast at work to ensure that we would be able to defend ourselves against the likes of Hitler, Stalin, and others who wanted to knock America from its perch as world leader. One such man was Ernest Lawrence. A Nobel Prize-Winning nuclear physicist, Lawrence was behind the Cyclotron–the fore-father of the Large Hadron Collider and myriad other amazing scientific inventions.

Michael Hiltzik is a Pulitzer Prize-Winning journalist, writer, blogger and author. He has written Big Science, a tremendously enjoyable and readable biography of Lawrence. We recommend it highly.

Two of our favorite people with whom to discuss the topic are Richard Baehr, the Chief Political Correspondent for American Thinker (simply one of the best), and Caroline Glick, Deputy Managing Editor for the Jerusalem Post, and former assistant Foreign Policy Advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

We thought it the right time to sit down with a brilliant young political scientist, Thomas Ogorzalek of Northwestern. Joining us on the phone were Genevieve Wood of the Heritage Foundation and Gabby Morrongielo of the Washington Examiner.

A quick moment of note is that we checked in with Natasha Korecki of the Sun Times as Rod Blagojevich had a win in the courtroom, if only a technicality. He still remains in prison.

Chuck Schaden is a legend in his own right. His long-running (still running!) show, “Speaking of Radio” is a treasure. Old time radio stars are interviewed, discussing their careers and the excitement of those early days of the still most popular medium.

Chuck came to see us at our studio, which just so happens to be the same building–but different call letters–where he got his start.

We enlisted three great Shakespeare scholars to try to undertake the task of summing of Shakespeare’s brilliance in two hours. It’s an impossible task, but a fun one, which Regina Buccola, Peter Kanelos and Michael Shapiro pulled off brilliantly.

Joining in on this conversation with Milt and Oren is our friend Dr. Charles Lipson of the University of Chicago.

An interesting anecdote from this interview: Oren conducted it entirely while on the floor of the Knesset, as they’d been called to vote beginning after midnight in Jerusalem.

For years, this brilliant American mind–tactician, patriot, warrior, and Virginian–has occupied a place of honor among revered historical figures for the grace and dignity with which he represented a defeated nation. There is no denying that the Confederate army he headed was on the wrong end of history and fought to continue the wicked institution of slavery, what Lee himself called “a moral and political evil.” There is also no doubt that Lee himself–a slave owner–was an embodiment of that evil: a man who owned other men. Can we separate those paradoxes within our historical figures–the great men and those faults they harbored? Maybe that’s another show altogether, one for the philosophers.

But Lee is certainly still worthy of our study, and Jonathan Horn has just written a brilliant biography of Lee, The Man Who Would Not Be Washington: Robert E. Lee’s Civil War and His Decision that Changed American History. Horn is no stranger to great men. He was a speechwriter and special assistant to President George W. Bush. We hope he’ll write about that experience in the future.

We welcome Dr. Mark Lococo, Director of Theatre at Loyola University. What followed was a fun conversation filled with some of our favorite numbers from the vast canon of musical theater.

We brought in Rachel Bronson of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Karim Pakravan, an Iranian who immigrated to the states who teaches finance at DePaul, Jeff Terry, Nuclear Physics expert and professor at IIT, and Lee Smith of the Weekly Standard.

We assembled a panel to discuss the breaking news, namely Chris Robling, Joseph Morris, Fred Kagan and Charles Hoskinson. This is the biggest story in the world at the moment, and we owe it to you to discuss.

Grey was the journalist who brought the CIA’s rendition program to light. Now he fills us in on how the game has changed to combat new threats and new technologies.

The great historian Frank McLynn has tacked this enigmatic figure of history in his latest book. It is well worth the read. McLynn did his book justice in this recent interview.

But many long for the days of the radio dramatization or comedy and, fortunately for us in Chicago, the SAG-AFTRA Radio Players have kept the golden era of radio alive. They joined Milt ahead of their show this month for a sampling of some of their (and Milt’s) favorites. This was a fun show!

Our friend Gary Saul Morson and his colleague (and Northwestern University President) Morton Schapiro have rebooted this concept for their new book, The Fabulous Future? America in 2040. Drawing on prognosticators of religion, technology, politics, medicine and more, this book paints a possible picture of what we may face in the next 25 years. A great effort by two fine minds.

Two of the leading scientists on cosmology and dark matter, in particular, are Drs. Michael Turner (who coined the term) and Don Lincoln, both affiliated with Fermilab. Turner has long been the head of Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. Lincoln is a guest professor of high energy physics at Notre Dame in addition to his regular post as a senior physicist at Fermilab and also work on the Large Hadron Collider at Cern, on which he’s written another fantastic book.

His newest work, By the People, is no less important and incredibly timely in its focus on the American political system.

Highlighting how we can use the leviathan nature of government against itself and, interestingly, by taking the approach of the Church of Scientology of using the courts against those that threaten liberty, Murray outlines a way to take the nation back to its founding principles. Also fascinating is his fresh look at how increases in immigration can also return us to those values of liberty. They appeal to new Americans, even if they’ve been lost on those here for generations.

As conservative media figures, Guy Benson and Mary Katharine Ham finds themselves at the nexus of good manners and heated rhetoric. So they’ve combated this insanity with their new book and with a healthy dose of humor. Timely and informative, this is the right conversation at the right time.

Interestingly, for this program, we found no takers who were willing to debate the case against anthropogenic global warming with two researchers at the Heartland Institute, namely James Taylor, VP of the Institute and Steve Goreham, author of Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and the author of a great book on the subject. So Milt took up the role of opposition. What followed was an illuminating study into just what, if anything, is happening to the Earth that should cause us fear.

E. D. Hirsch is a pioneer in the field of cultural literacy. Being literate on one’s cultural is as important as being literate in letters and the two are indeed married. When one’s ability to read and write at an appropriate level is below certain levels, of course their understanding of their environment and culture is retarded as well.

This is a heartbreaking conversation of critical importance to us all. Hirsch is still at it, now heading the Core Knowledge Foundation. For anyone who has ever cared about what their child is learning and why, this is an episode not to be missed.

With all of that in mind we welcomed show friends Bill Mellberg and Richard Easton, both sons of scientists who were influential in the beginning of the American space program. You’ve no doubt heard them on this show before. Joining them is Dr. Paul Spudis, an Astrogeologist and moon expert, who would like to see us return there, saying there’s still much to be learned and much to be gained from it.

Onward, to the Final Frontier….

You will find quite an array of opinions expressed on the Court’s ruling in this program from guests and listeners alike.

One of the foremost authorities on the life of Jesus is John Dominic Crossan. He just so happened to be back in town and we welcomed him to the studio for another in-depth discussion. He has a new book out, and was joined by our friend at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago‘s Ray Pickett. What a valuable and intriguing discussion!

In hour two we make a diversion, this time back to King Edward VIII and recount the amazing tale of his abdication of the throne, for love, and his marriage to Wallis Simpson. Andrew Morton has written an excellent book on it, 17 Carnations–The Royals, the Nazis, and the Biggest Cover-up in History.

Milt sat down with Matt Hauske of The University of Chicago Media and Film Studies Center, John Kupetz–a legendary lecturer who teaches a course on the Western, and the fine writer and author Scott Eyman, who recently wrote a bio of The Duke himself, John Wayne.

So….are you gonna pull them pistols or whistle ‘Dixie’?

PS–Happy Birthday, Milt!

One the show:

Professor Guity Nashat

Professor David Faris

Professor Khalil Marrar

Cons. Richard Friedman

One the show:

Professor Guity Nashat

Professor David Faris

Professor Khalil Marrar

Cons. Richard Friedman