The best scene in Disney's incredibly photo-realistic remake of The Lion King features a computer-generated beetle rolling a ball of computer-generated dung across a computer-generated African landscape. It might sound mundane, but this particular ball of dung is carrying a tuft of fur from the runaway lion Simba, and its eventual discovery will renew hope that the rightful king of the savanna is alive and well. It's a funny, touching reminder that in the circle of life, every little creature and every lump of waste has an important role to play.
Trump said he would hire 5,000 new border patrol agents, but has fallen short of that promise. Garrett Graff discusses the leadership vacuum that's plagued the agency and worsened the border crisis.
"I always considered song parody kind of cheap," the Emmy-nominated lyricist and performer says. "But ... I've gotten [such a] response from others ... that I'm appreciating it as an art form."
Mark Stryker covered jazz and its people for the Detroit Free Press for decades. He uses his reporter's eye and critic's ear to chronicle the musicians from the city who made their mark on the world.
Whitehead's new novel is based on a notorious Florida reform school where boys were beaten and sexually abused. "If there's one place like this, there are many," he says.
It's pretty rare for a writer to produce a novel that wins the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and, then, a scant three years later, bring out another novel that's even more extraordinary. But, that's what Colson Whitehead has done in following up his 2016 novel, The Underground Railroad, with The Nickel Boys. It's a masterpiece squared, rooted in history and American mythology and, yet, painfully topical in its visions of justice and mercy erratically denied.
When TV critic Emily Nussbaum was growing up in the '70s, she says television wasn't something to be analyzed, criticized and picked apart.
"Even people who loved to watch TV would put it down," she recalls. "It was considered, at best, a kind of delicious-but-bad-for-you treat, and, at worst, more like chain-smoking, like something you did by yourself that messed up your brain."
Acorn TV's new series follows a Scotland Yard team led by a detective whose wife has gone missing. London Kills combines the reassuring closure of a network cop series with a strong forward momentum.
Bouton, who died Wednesday, spoke to Fresh Air in 1986 about his 1970 tell-all memoir, in which he drew on his seven years with the New York Yankees to offer an insider's guide to baseball.
Torn, who died Tuesday, won an Emmy Award for playing the gruff producer Artie on The Larry Sanders Show. In 1994, he told Fresh Air that he based his character on Johnny Carson's long time producer.
NY Times reporter Caitlin Dickerson has been documenting the impact of the Trump administration's policies on migrants — and on the workers who deal with the large number of people held in detention.
Film critic Justin Chang reviews 'The Farewell' the second feature by the Chinese-American writer director Lulu Wang. It tells a story from her own family's experience about a young woman who travels to China to pay a final visit to her grandmother, who has no idea that she has only a few months to live.
A new, Yiddish language production of the musical is currently running off-Broadway. Steven Skybell, who plays Tevye, and Joel Grey, who directs the show, explain why the play still resonates.
Mother Jones journalist Ari Berman says recent Supreme Court decisions on redistricting and the 2020 census citizenship question will help determine which party is in power in the next decade.
Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the new novel 'Copperhead' by Alexi Zentner which was informed by a violent confrontation with racial hatred -- the firebombing of his parent's office when Zentner was 18 years old.
After a traumatic injury and multiple surgeries, medical bio-ethicist Travis Rieder was in great pain and prescribed opioids. It took him a month to wean himself off, with great difficulty. Now he is an advocate for opioid use reform, and he wants doctors to better understand how to prescribe and how to help their patients wean themselves off.
Sarah Jessica Parker has spent much of her acting career exploring what it means to be in a relationship — and to be single. In the HBO series Sex and the City, which ran from 1998 until 2004, she played Carrie Bradshaw, a single writer chronicling her experiences with the Manhattan dating scene. Now, in the HBO comedy series, Divorce, she stars as Frances, a mother of two navigating the dissolution of her marriage.
In the viscerally unnerving films of Ari Aster, there's nothing more horrific than the reality of human grief. His haunted-house thriller, Hereditary, followed a family rocked by traumas so devastating that the eventual scenes of devil-worshipping naked boogeymen almost came as a relief. Aster's new movie, Midsommar, doesn't pack quite as terrifying a knockout punch, but it casts its own weirdly hypnotic spell. This is a slow-burning and deeply absorbing piece of filmmaking, full of strikingly beautiful images and driven less by shocks than ideas.
Midnight In Chernobyl author Adam Higginbotham spent years investigating the 1986 explosion and its aftermath. He says design flaws, human hubris and Soviet secrecy all contributed to the disaster.
Cables, who's experienced severe health problems recently, makes a comeback on a new album with his trio. The pianist's solos on I'm All Smiles reveal a deep sense of groove — and a mind at work.
