In honor of Billie Holiday's 100th birthday this month, several artists are releasing out Holiday tribute albums. Fresh Air jazz critic Kevin Whitehead looks at a couple of these by other singers. One he rather likes; the other, not so much.
In 2013, three young women who had vanished years earlier escaped from a house where they had been held captive. Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus, along with writer Mary Jordan, discuss their new memoir.
Some 30 years ago, the Kronos Quartet created a sensation by releasing an album of chamber music that included an arrangement of Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze." Now Brooklyn Rider, another gifted string quartet, is again blurring the boundaries between classical and more popular kinds of chamber music. Fresh Air classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz says he admires that blur.
My Struggle is about Karl Ove Knausgaard's wrangle with his father, with death, with his muse and so on. The 46-year-old Norwegian's pointedly unliterary book has become a literary sensation.
The star of the FX series Louie talks about the pain of his first-ever open mic experience and the "massive gift" of taking care of others before himself.
Linguist Geoff Nunberg considers the roots and resonance of the latest tech buzzword to catapult into the mainstream. "Disrupt" may be ubiquitous now, but could the term be on the eve of a disruption?
To mark the release of his seventh album, the singer-songwriter brings his acoustic guitar to the Fresh Air studio to sing some new songs as well as some of his favorites from the 1920s and '30s.
Over the course of Sound & Color, Alabama Shakes messes with what had already, after its first album, become its signature sound. Fresh Air rock critic Ken Tucker has this review.
Recently released in the U.S., Asghar Farhadi's 2009 film follows a teacher invited on a beach trip by the mother of one of her students. David Edelstein calls the film "Hitchockian" in its suspense.
Reporter Gregory Johnsen talks with Fresh Air's Dave Davies about the humanitarian crisis in Yemen and how the chaos is impacting the U.S. fight against al-Qaida. Johnsen describes a country torn apart.
The strategy of going to the Supreme Court to challenge Proposition 8 was controversial within the gay-rights movement. Now, Jo Becker's new book is proving to be controversial as well.
Donald Palumbo is the Metropolitan Opera's chorus master. He tells Fresh Air about "stagger breathing," the ways singers protect their voices and his own lack of formal training.
A reissue of four of the detective writer's 1950s novels excavates the dark depths of California's suburban decay. Maureen Corrigan praises Macdonald's "psychological depth" and "penetrating vision."
"Your heart is pounding; your adrenaline is shooting out of your ears," Steve Osborne says. "And you got one second to get it right." He retired from the force in 2003. His memoir is called The Job.
"It's not profound regret," Morrison tells Fresh Air. "It's just a wiping up of tiny little messes that you didn't recognize as mess when they were going on." Her latest book is God Help the Child.
In 2001, Michael Finkel was fired for making up a story. Then he learns that a suspected murderer is posing as him, so he gets to know him. The best word for the drama is "dumb," says David Edelstein.
The producer says there was a moment when his co-writers thought, "Maybe this song wasn't meant to be." He also describes working with Amy Winehouse and Bruno Mars.
The video-sharing website is now 10 years old. YouTube estimates that each day 432,000 hours of video gets posted on the service: a stunning record of our current civilization.
