Allison Pearson follows up her 2002 best-seller, I Don't Know How She Does It, with I Think I Love You, a novel about a teenage girl's obsession with teen star David Cassidy. The book wasn't hard for Pearson to write. When she was growing up, she was madly in love with Cassidy too.
British singer-songwriter Teddy Thompson worked with David Kahne, who's helped acts ranging from The Strokes to Tony Bennett, to write and record his fifth album, Bella. Rock critic Ken Tucker says the result is a romantic album that spans a wide range of styles and moods.
You may know him from The Matrix, but the French actor portrays a Trappist monk in his latest film — inspired by the true story of seven monks who were kidnapped during the Algerian Civil War.
In 1942, the founders of Capitol Records were in urgent need of a hit. It came from a most unlikely place: a young woman named Ella Mae Morse, whose place in pop-music history has never really been given its due. Rock historian Ed Ward shares her story.
Liam Neeson plays a botanist-turned-action-star in Jaume Collet-Serra's thriller Unknown. Critic David Edelstein says the tricky thriller takes viewers on a hell of a ride while letting Neeson shine as an action star.
Aaron Katz's mumblecore flick Cold Weather is set in Portland, Ore.; Lee Chang-dong's Poetry is from South Korea. Critic John Powers says both films are wonderful, in part because the stories they tell are so unpredictable.
Journalist Charles Sennott recently returned from Tahrir Square, where he was filming a documentary on the revolution for PBS's Frontline. It focuses on the young members of the Muslim Brotherhood who played an important role in Egypt's revolution.
The co-founder of Twitter talks about how the service was used in Egypt to help organize the protests, and about the rumors that the popular microblogging service could be purchased by Google or Facebook.
Allison Pearson follows up I Don't Know How She Does It with I Think I Love You, a screwball comic novel about the lengths a girl will go to for her teen idol.
George Shearing, the jazz pianist who wrote the standard "Lullaby of Birdland" and amused audiences for decades on both sides of the Atlantic, died Monday. Fresh Air remembers Shearing with excerpts from a 1986 interview.
British singer-songwriter PJ Harvey watched hours of war footage before writing the songs for her eighth album, Let England Shake. Here, she describes how she translated what she saw into a mournful elegy about the bitter brutality of combat.
Matthew Alexander, a pseudonym for the author, was a military interrogator in Iraq who rejected previously used harsh techniques. He writes about how his team hunted down two key al-Qaida operatives in Kill or Capture.
Neurologist V.S. Ramachandran, a pioneer in the field of visual perception, explains how his simple experiments in behavioral neurology have changed the lives of patients suffering from a variety of neurological symptoms in The Tell-Tale Brain.
Packaged teen idol Justin Bieber is the star of a new concert documentary, Never Say Never, which follows him as he prepares for a show at Madison Square Garden. Film critic David Edelstein says the film is an "expertly engineered promo" that can make little girls — and Bieber's marketing team — scream with delight.
Ed Helms plays a paper pusher on The Office and an insurance salesman in the new comedy Cedar Rapids — but on Thursday's Fresh Air, he plays the banjo. With his band The Lonesome Trio, he joins Terry Gross for an in-studio performance and a chat about his latest film.
Country music singer and songwriter Rodney Crowell brings his guitar to play some songs that relate to his new memoir, "Chinaberry Sidewalks." Crowell has been successful in the worlds of country music and alternative music. His songs have been hits for many singers, including Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings and Tim McGraw.
Lawrence Wright talks about the history of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group banned in Egypt by the regime of President Hosni Mubarak that could play an important role in the future of the country.
New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright explains how he found a number of inconsistencies between documents the Church of Scientology says are official records of founder L. Ron Hubbard's war service and the actual official military records that Wright obtained.
Elvis Presley is constantly being discovered by new generations, and by older fans in new stages of life. Critic Milo Miles talks about the surprise rewards he found while listening to the new reissue Elvis Is Back! — and during his first visit to Graceland in Memphis.
