The Danish film In a Better World won the 2011 Oscar and Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film. Director Susanne Bier explains how stories from her family's escape from the Holocaust inform her work.
Pastor Jennifer Knust says that the Bible shouldn't be used as a guidebook for marriage or sexuality because passages related to sex, monogamy, homosexuality and gender roles are more complex and nuanced than popular culture has led us to believe.
Sam Chwat, a dialect specialist who worked closeley with people in business, politics and the film industry who wanted to lose their regional accents, died last Thursday. in 1994, Chwat explained how he helped clients like Robert DeNiro and Julia Roberts lose their famous accents.
In There is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America, journalist Philip Dray follows the labor movement as it grew out of 19th century uprisings in textile mills. There are several parallels between those historical battles and what is currently going on in Wisconsin, he says.
Marcus Printup isn't the first trumpeter to combined the trumpet and the harp. It's long been an instrument where jazz women could make their mark. A Time for Love is a quiet and cozy album with Printup's wife, harpist Riza Hequibal, but it's never dull.
The classic 1957 film about the gossip industry has been remastered and rereleased on DVD and Blu-Ray. Critic John Powers says the movie's Manhattan is a "seamy, deglamorized world in which small men destroy lives to make themselves big."
Former CIA operatives Robert and Dayna Baer met on the job and fell in love. They talk about their relationship and some of their assignments in The Company We Keep: A Husband-and-Wife True-Life Spy Story.
Xavier Beauivois' Of Gods and Men is inspired by the true story of seven French monks working in Algeria, who were kidnapped in 1996 during the Algerian Civil War and later executed. Film critic David Edelstein says the stark drama is both powerful and perceptive.
February sweeps ended Wednesday, so most broadcast networks are back to reruns and reality shows. TV critic David Bianculli says that one of the reality shows, NBC's America's Next Great Restaurant, is much better than the rest -- and makes him hungry for more.
Two years after opening his award-winning Chicago restaurant Alinea, chef Grant Achatz was diagnosed with tongue cancer. He describes losing and regaining his taste in Life, on the Line. "My palate developed just as a newborn," Achatz says. "i don't recommend it, but I think it made me a better chef."
The worldwide lion population has declined a staggering 90 percent in the past 50 years. In their documentary The Last Lions, conservationists Beverly and Dereck Joubert track the giant hunters across Botswana and warn that without intervention, lions may soon go extinct.
In his new book, Pam, fiction writer Mat Johnson plays with the premise of Edgar Allan Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Poe's novel was a "master text of anxious white fright," says Maureen Corrigan, and Johnson's clever book shines new light on the material.
Suze Rotolo, who strongly influenced Bob Dylan's songwriting and walked beside him on the album cover for The Freewheeling Bob Dylan, died of lung cancer on Friday. She was 67. Fresh Air remembers Dylan's muse with excerpts from a 2008 interview.
New York Times labor and workplace reporter Steve Greenhouse explains why other states with large budget deficits are now also considering taking on public unions -- and how the standoff between organized labor and Republican governors is likely to play out.
Dirk Vandewalle, an associate professor of government at Dartmouth College, gives an inside look at Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi and his 42-year rule. Vandewalle has studied and written about Libya since the 1980s. In 1986 he lived in Libya for 14 months, the only Western scholar there at the time.
The Farrelly brothers' latest comedy stars Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis as sexually frustrated men given a week off from marriage by their spouses. Movie critic David Edelstein says the movie's premise — while creepy — leaves viewers "with a sad and wise view of adulthood."
Frank Loesser wrote the musicals Guys and Dolls and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying — in addition to over 700 other songs. On today's Fresh Air, we discuss Loesser's musical legacy.
After the Civil War, the United States seemed poised to grant equal rights to blacks. But the Supreme Court's rulings in the late 19th century kept blacks segregated for decades, says constitutional scholar Lawrence Goldstone.
Dolorean is an Oregon-based band that started out playing country-rock but then slowly moved into pop-music territory. Rock critic Ken Tucker says the group's new album Unfazed is deliberate, but not maudlin.
In the 1940s, Charlie Parker, nicknamed "Bird," was a prime mover behind the new style of bebop, with its refined harmonies, offbeat rhythms and abstract melodies played at breakneck speed. On Bird Songs, Joe Lovano looks for new ways into Parker's material.
