Edward Humes describes his new book as a "transportation detective story" that chronicles the hidden characters, locations and machinery driving our same-day-delivery, traffic-packed world.
Lage began playing guitar at the age of 5 and appeared on stage at the Grammys at 13. He talks to Fresh Air about growing up a guitar prodigy, his father's gentle coaching and his new trio album.
Growing up, comics Nadia Manzoor and Radhika Vaz never dreamed that they would one day co-star in a sketch-comedy series about two immigrant Muslim women in Brooklyn. But Manzoor who grew up in a Pakistani-Muslim community in London, and Vaz who grew up in India now star in the web series Shugs & Fats. The series won a Gotham Award for breakthru short form series.
At the age of 85, Edna O'Brien has just brought out one of her best and most ambitious novels yet. The Little Red Chairs is personal and political; charming and grotesque; a novel of manners and a novel of monsters.
At 46, former Daily Show correspondent Samantha Bee says she's not very concerned with what people think of her.
"Being in my late 40s has been absolutely freeing and liberating for me," Bee tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "I'm a married woman with kids. I'm a professional. People just can't [put me] me in a tiny box that makes sense to them, so now I just don't care that much what people think of me ... and now I do my own thing."
Point-of-view is passed like a baton among the tortured main characters in Joachim Trier's new film. Critic David Edelstein says Louder than Bombs is intimate, touching and "insistently alive."
The raucous singer turns thoughtful on his new album. Critic Ken Tucker calls Upland Stories a "marvelous mongrel mixture" of bluegrass banjo-picking, honky-tonk pedal steel and stark folk phrasings.
PR Watch's Lisa Graves says that states can overrule local laws, and that legislatures are increasingly using preemption to stop things like minimum wage increases and protections for LGBT people.
Dan Lyons was in his 50s when he lost his job reporting on the tech industry. He took a job at a start-up, where he was the old guy. His new book is Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble.
A beautiful and harrowing novel about a young mother who is diagnosed with leukemia, which is based on the author's real life nightmare when his wife was diagnosed with the disease and died two and half years later.
Forget "enhanced interrogation techniques" — Eric Fair says what he did as an interrogator in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was torture.
"The idea that there's interrogation, and then enhanced interrogation, and then torture — there is no middle ground," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "Torture is an enhanced interrogation."
The Food Network draws more viewers than any of the cable news channels, but Americans are actually cooking less than ever. Food-culture writer Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma) ponders the phenomenon.
Reporter John Seabrook talks about the state of the live concert business, and how it got that way. His article on the topic, in this week's issue of The New Yorker, is "The Price of the Ticket."
The new Miles Davis biopic begins in the 1970s, at the end of Davis' five-year hiatus from the music scene. Critic David Edelstein calls Don Cheadle's portrayal of the musician "electrifying."
Duke won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Helen Keller in 1962's The Miracle Worker. She died Tuesday at the age of 69. Originally broadcast in 1988.
Jacob Bernstein named his documentary about his mother after an Ephron family saying — "everything is copy," meaning that anything and everything that happens to you is fair game to write about.
Ever since Everybody Loves Raymond, the actor says he has been trying to take on more dramatic roles. In the HBO drama Vinyl, he plays a record company executive who contemplates suicide.
