Playlist

Bourdain, who died at 61, traveled the world, sampling local cuisine and meeting people along the way. He told Fresh Air in 2016: "I'm happiest experiencing food in the most purely emotional way."

We remember the comedian Richard Pryor, who died on Saturday. This interview originally aired on May 22, 1995.

Commentator Gayle Pemberton remembers the "Birmingham Bombing", which killed four young girls and galvanized support for the Civil Rights Movement.

When Frans de Waal started studying nonhuman primates, in the Netherlands more than 40 years ago, he was told not to consider the emotions of the animals he was observing.

As the son of a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Derek Black was once the heir apparent of the white nationalist movement.

Bill McKibben, who first warned of climate change 30 years ago, says its effects are now upon us: "The idea that anybody's going to be immune from this anywhere is untrue." His new book is Falter.

Climatologist Kerry Emanuel, professor at MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, was named one of the world's 100 most influential people last year by Time magazine — in part because of a study he published, a month before Hurricane Katrina, that looked at thousands of hurricanes over several decades and found that the average power of the storms had doubled.

For the last three years, comedian John Oliver has been telling some serious jokes as "Senior British Correspondent" on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. He won an Emmy for his work on the show in 2009, but his comedic career is not confined to the fake newsroom. On January 8, 2009, Oliver debuts his newest act: John Oliver's New York Stand-Up Show. The title, as he explains to Fresh Air host Terry Gross, pretty much says it all.

In a new book, Christopher Leonard chronicles how Koch Industries acquired huge businesses, limited its liability and created a political influence network to remake the GOP.

Science Fiction writer William Gibson. He's part of a small group of writers whose work is known as "cyberpunk" which combines the science of communication and control theory -- cybernetics -- with punk, an anti-social rebel or hoodlum. Gibson's first novel, "Neuromancer, was the first novel to win Science Fiction's triple crown: the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick awards.

Public intellectual George Scialabba contemplates the role of great — and not so great — thinkers in his new collection of essays, What Are Intellectuals Good For? Critic Maureen Corrigan calls it "a pleasure to read."

The comic whose Beyond the "Seven Dirty Words" routine that sparked a famous obscenity case in the 1970s, George Carlin has been an icon of American humor for decades. Now he has a new HBO special, Life is Worth Living — a parody on life, death and suicide. The show, Carlin's 13th HBO special, will air on Nov. 5.

Seeger believed songs were a way of binding people to a cause. He talks about fellow folk music icon Woody Guthrie and jumping railroad cars in an archival interview from 1985.

Bumble-ardy is a deeply imaginative tale about an orphaned pig who longs for a birthday party. Sendak, who is 83, wrote and illustrated the book while caring for his longtime partner, who died of cancer in 2007. "I did Bumble-ardy to save myself," Sendak says. "I did not want to die with him."

The comedian's latest special, Live at the Beacon Theater, was released earlier this week. C.K. talks about why he went with Web distribution this time, and reflects on his award-winning TV series, his relationship with other comedians and his USO appearances.