Terry Gross

In 2006, Oregon successfully made pseudoephedrine, a key ingredient of meth, a prescription drug. Since then, Mother Jones' Jonah Engle reports, 24 states have tried to follow suit -- and 23 have failed. Engle attributes those failures to pharmaceutical companies' massive lobbying efforts.

Qassem Suleimani is the chief of a powerful branch of Iran's Revolutionary Guard. He is considered to be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American during the Iraq War, and now he is helping to prop up Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime.

In Men We Reaped, Jesmyn Ward recalls the deaths of five young men in her life, which she believes were all connected to being poor and black in the rural South. "It made me feel that I wasn't promised some long life. ...That's not a given for me."