The vivacious alt-rapper Lizzo mixes rap, gospel and neo-soul on her new album. Critic Milo Miles says Big Grrrl Small World will win listeners over with its energy and hooks.
CNN's Peter Bergen describes how the Internet and social media have been used to radicalize and recruit Americans to jihad — and how some new jihadists then use those same tools to draw in others.
Paul Goldberg's debut novel is an ambitious historical fantasy about Stalin's 1953 plan to purge Jews from the Soviet Union. Critic Maureen Corrigan says The Yid is a wildly inventive "what if" story.
Journalist Mei Fong tells Fresh Air that China's one-child policy drastically reshaped the country's demographic make-up. "China has 30 million more men than women," she says. Her book is One Child.
FX resurrects the "trial of the century" in its new season of American Crime Story. Critic John Powers says every single episode "is an embarrassment of tawdry riches."
The Original Dixieland Jazz Band's first recording in Feb. 1917 is often cited as the first jazz record ever, but critic Kevin Whitehead says that the roots of jazz stretch a little further back.
New Yorker writer Steve Coll says that though Tillerson has conducted billion-dollar international deals as an oil executive, he has no government experience
Journalist, novelist and playwright Thulani Davis traces her roots in My Confederate Kinfolk: a Twenty-First Century Freedwoman Discovers Her Roots. Among the revelations Davis uncovered was that her ancestors include a Scots-Irish clan of cotton planters as well as Africans from Sierra Leone.
Comedian, writer, producer and actor Steve Coogan is an icon of British comedy. A trained actor, Coogan has emerged from playing his recurring media-buffoon character Alan Partridge to the title role in Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story.
"We think it's all a bit vulgar, you know, cashing in on Christmas," Lowe says of the British. He says he took it as a challenge: Quality Street tackles old classics and adds originals to the mix.
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The Iranian-born photographer told Fresh Air in 2015 that he was less interested in personal belief than in "what people do in the name of God." Abbas died in Paris on April 25.
Will Holshouser has played all kinds of music on the accordion, including Cajun, avant garde jazz and indie rock. He joins Fresh Air's Terry Gross in her studio to play features from his new album.
In Richard Ford's brilliant collection of four short stories, protagonist Frank Bascombe returns to be "frank" about touchy topics. His awareness, particularly of mortality, is profound and hilarious.
A performance with singer Iris Dement. Her song 'Let the Mystery Be' was used as a theme for the HBO series of 'The Leftovers.' She was born in Arkansas and her music is inspired by the sound of the delta, and the Pentecostal church.
Steve Silberman talks about how Nazi extermination plans and a discredited scientific paper about childhood vaccines shaped our current understanding of autism. Originally broadcast Sept. 2, 2015.
Crimmins, who died last week, mentored Bobcat Goldthwait when they were up-and-coming comics in the '80s. The two men spoke to Fresh Air in 2015 about their documentary Call Me Lucky.
