The new live album from Andy Bey shows off his extraordinary range as a singer. There's plenty of Ellington, risk-taking, and evidence of his virtuosity—even if he didn't become famous until his ongoing revival in the '90s.
Clark Johnson has worked as a director on several of TV's most memorable cop shows, including The Shield, Homicide: Life on the Street and the pilot episode of the critically acclaimed HBO series The Wire. This season, he's appearing on camera as well, as The Wire's City Editor Gus Haynes.
Fresh Air's TV critic previews the new series Breaking Bad, about a cancer-stricken chemistry teacher who decides that cooking crystal meth is the best way to support his family after he's gone. The show premieres on the AMC cable channel on Jan. 20.
Fresh Air's film critic reviews Cloverfield, a disaster film featuring a monster that attacks Manhattan; the nightmare is captured by shaky Blair Witch-style camerawork.
Editor and cofounder of the conservative Washington-based political magazine, The Weekly Standard, and an opinion columnist for The New York Times, William Kristol is a neoconservative voice on the Iraq war; he was among those who advocated for the U.S. to remove Saddam Hussein from power before Sept. 11, 2001.
Carl Conetta co-directs the Project on Defense Alternatives, a defense-policy think tank. Earlier, he was a research fellow at the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies; he served for three years as editor of their journal, Defense and Disarmament Alternatives, and of the Arms Control Reporter.
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson was chief of staff for former Secretary of State Colin Powell; he became an outspoken critic of the Bush administration after leaving the State Department in January 2005.
Lawrence Wright is an author, screenwriter, playwright and a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. He sits on the Council on Foreign Relations, and he won a Pulitzer Prize for his book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.
Iraqi-born professor Kanan Makiya teaches Islamic and Middle Eastern studies at Brandeis University, outside Boston. He is one of the leading Arab intellectuals who called for the removal of Saddam Hussein; he also advised the Bush administration before the invasion of Iraq.
Lt. Col. John Nagl commands the 1st Battalion, 34th Armor at Fort Riley, Kan. He served in Operation Desert Storm and was the operations officer of a tank battalion task force in Operation Iraqi Freedom. He helped author the Army's Counterinsurgency Field Manual.
Ali Allawi served as minister of trade and minister of defense under the Interim Iraqi Governing Council from 2003 to '04, then was minister of finance in the Iraqi Transitional Government between 2005 and '06.
Gen. Sir Michael Rose was best known as the commander of the U.N. Protection Force in Bosnia in the 1990s. In 2006, he called for the impeachment of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair for leading England into war in Iraq under false pretenses.
A former U.S. ambassador to Croatia and a senior diplomatic fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, Peter Galbraith is author of The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created A War Without End.
Hamburg-born Astrid Kirchherr met the Beatles in 1960, before they were famous. She took some of the earliest photographs of the group and was engaged to Stuart Sutcliffe, the Beatles' original bassist, before he died of a brain hemorrhage in 1962.
It's not often that you hear of a record company being destroyed by success, but that was the fate of one of America's most prominent soul labels, Vee-Jay Records. They recorded John Lee Hooker, the Four Seasons and Betty Everett, but the music has been unavailable for decades. A new box set ends the wait.
Linguist Geoff Nunberg offers up a few thoughts on the use of a certain C-word in current electoral rhetoric. That word is "change" and it's what all the candidates are promising. But what does it really mean?
Julia Preston, national immigration correspondent for The New York Times, discusses the unintended consequences of the U.S. border crackdown — and how the battle over immigration is affecting communities across the country.
