Pedal steel guitar is a staple of country music, but Alcorn bends it around odd corners. Her quintet's new album is beyond category — roaming betwixt jazz and improvised music and rock and country.
Architecture and Design Critic Thomas Hine has written a new book, The Total Package: The Evolution and Secret Meanings of Boxes, Bottles, Cans and Tubes. He explores the effect packages have on consumer emotions and purchases.
Michela Wrong's new book is I Didn't Do It For You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation. She presents a case study of the nation of Eritrea, but the problems she writes about, including colonialism and border wars, are prevalent on the entire continent. Wrong is also the author of the PEN award-winning book, In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo. She has been a correspondent for Reuters news agency, the BBC and the Financial Times of London.
Fresh Air's movie critic does not think any masterpieces were made this year, but he does compare Daniel Day Lewis to Julius Caesar and have some choice thoughts on the movie version of Les Mis.
The East is a romantic activist outlaw fantasy in which Brit Marling plays an agent who poses as a radical activist to catch an eco-terrorist group. It's one of those melodramas in which someone on the morally wrong side has a spasm of conscience and maybe crosses over. Maybe.
TV critic David Bianculli reviews the new season of The Shield. The critically acclaimed show is adding actress Glen Close to its cast of burly, often violent alpha males.
Record producer Thomas Z. Shepard, one of the most imaginative and successful producers of Broadway and classical recordings. Shepard has produced the cast recordings for "Sweeney Todd," "Ain't Misbehavin'," "La Cage Aux Folles," and "Me and My Girl," which has just been nominated for a Grammy.
In Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis — and the People Who Pay the Price, author Jonathan Cohn looks at case studies of patients struggling with the U.S. health-care system to explain why a profit-based model means some people don't get the care they need. Cohn, a senior editor at The New Republic, advocates a government-regulated single-payer system.
Sun Studios founder Sam Phillips died today in Memphis at the age of 80. He was revered as one of the leading catalysts in post-World War II American music. As a record producer in the 1950s and 60s, his recordings launched the careers of Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis, to name a few. This interview first aired September 15, 1997.
Writer Jack Beatty has written a biography of four-time Boston Mayor James Michael Curley, called "The Rascal King." Curley, an Irish-Catholic, is a Massachusetts legend, having run in 32 elections, serving as governor, congressman, and mayor. While Curley could be dismissed as an old-fashioned machine politician, Beatty portrays him as a forerunner of the modern entrepreneurial politician.
Critic Maureen Corrigan reviews "The Adventures of Amos and Andy," writer Melvin Patrick Ely's look at the comedy series, and the controversy it caused.
Donna Williams. Her first book "Nobody Nowhere" offered a journey through the mysterious condition of autism; it was an international bestseller. Once her case was properly diagnosed, Williams began therapy which took her out of the "world under glass" and into the real world of speech and emotion. This treatment is the subject of her new book "Somebody, Somewhere: Breaking Free from the World of Autism" (Times Books).
Anton Corbijn's paranoid thriller stars George Clooney as an anonymous international assassin constantly on the run. Critic David Edelstein says the spare movie "cast a spell" over the audience -- as they entered the mind of a man with no past or future.
Oscar Award-winning actor Paul Newman died on Sept. 26 of complications from lung cancer. In this 2003 interview, the star of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Cool Hand Luke discusses his early work — both as an actor and as a salesman.
In 2014, the producers of This American Life presented a podcast called "Serial," examining the facts, and loose ends, involving a cold murder case. A year later, HBO followed with a TV equivalent: The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst. The Jinx – Part Two starts its behind-the-scenes narrative just as the original Jinx is days away from premiering on HBO. Events are captured in real time, revealing themselves like elements in a thriller.
Weddington is the lawyer who represented Jane Roe in the Supreme Court. Weddington was in her 20s when she argued the landmark abortion case. She has a new memoir called "A Question of Choice."
David Steinberg was big on the stand-up circuit back in the 1960s and '70s; he appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson over a hundred times. Now he's host of TV Land's Sit Down Comedy with David Steinberg, on which he interviews other comedians. Steinberg went on to a career in TV production, directing episodes of Seinfeld, Mad About You and Friends. His new memoir is called The Book of David.
John Perry Barlow is the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which defends civil liberties in cyberspace. Barlow is also a former cattle rancher in Wyoming, and a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is located at 1667 K St. NW, Suite 801, Washington, D.C. 20006-1605.
Set in the 1930s, a new six-part BritBox series tells of the infamously non-conformist Mitford sisters, whose involvement in various political causes roiled their aristocratic parents.
A couple of years back, the two-time Oscar nominee announced he was giving up acting to become a rapper. David Edelstein reviews Casey Affleck's film I'm Still Here, which tracks Phoenix's transformation -- and says there may be a real madness in Phoenix's method performance.
