Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, creators of Thirtysomething and executive producers of My So-Called Life, are making news again with a new series.
It's called Quarterlife, and it's airing not on TV, but in short, six-to-an-hour episodes on the Web. Some pundits are touting it as an alternative for audiences during the ongoing Hollywood writers' strike.
Critic David Bianculli, who's working on the Web himself now at TVWorthWatching.com, has a review.
In a new book, two British investigative journalists dig into the story of Pakistan's clandestine nuclear network — and America's role not just in condoning its ally's nuclear ambitions, but aiding them.
Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark are senior correspondents for the Guardian newspaper; both previously worked for the Sunday Times of London.
Their book is titled Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons.
Norman Mailer's work combined sweeping cultural criticism, erudition and obscenity.
Mailer's 60-year career was full of depth and controversy. The novelist, who died Nov. 10, was often deliberately provocative, says book critic Maureen Corrigan.
And though he made perhaps his strongest impact as an essayist and journalist, Mailer wanted to be remembered as a novelist.
Author Robert Kuttner writes in The Squandering of America that many of the economic policies and regulations established during the New Deal have since been replaced by a more business-friendly free market system. Kuttner is the founder and co-editor of The American Prospect.
Norman Mailer once wrote that before he was 17, he'd formed the desire to be a major writer. That wish certainly came true. One political campaign, two Pulitzer Prizes and an unprecedented level of controversy later, he became a literary grandee unlike any other. This interview originally aired on Oct. 8, 1991.
Big-screen adaptation of the blood-soaked Cormac McCarthy novel is the latest from the creators of Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and Barton Fink.
It stars Josh Brolin as a hunter who finds a stash of cash, Javier Bardem as the psychopath who wants it back, and Tommy Lee Jones as the sheriff who's trying to find out who's leaving bodies all over his jurisdiction.
Political columnist Katha Pollitt gets personal in a new collection of essays. Learning To Drive and Other Life Stories covers a range of topics, from Web-stalking a cheating boyfriend to what she learned about her parents using the Freedom of Information Act.
The Threepenny Opera revolutionized musical theater. Playwright and lyricist Bertolt Brecht, composer Kurt Weill and actress Lotte Lenya created a sensation when their show opened in Berlin in 1928.
Two years later, the great German director G.W. Pabst turned it into a movie, and it's just been released as a Criterion Collection DVD.
The rapper MF Grimm, whose real name is Percy Carey, has written a graphic memoir entitled Sentences: The Life of MF Grimm. He spoke to Terry Gross about his story.
Mary Lillian Ellison, better known as The Fabulous Moolah, died Friday at age 84. She was a wrestler, promoter and trainer on the so-called "lady wrestling" circuit for more than 50 years.
The latest from French filmmaker Barbet Schroeder (Single White Female, Reversal of Fortune) is titled L'Avocat de la Terreur — which is being released in the U.S. as Terror's Advocate.
Culture critic Susan Faludi writes about the gender wars in America; her books Backlash and Stiffed, in particular, have sparked admiration and controversy.
Faludi's latest book, The Terror Dream, is already generating much the same critical reaction. It's an investigation of America's response to Sept. 11, 2001, in terms of the myths and stories our society — in particular, the media — grasped hold of for reassurance after that day's terrorist attacks.
Arrests and protests have followed last week's declaration of martial law in Pakistan, where President Pervez Musharraf has ousted the chief justice and cracked down on dissent
Journalist Ahmed Rashid, a regular guest on Fresh Air, tells Terry Gross that Musharraf's latest gambit could encourage more civil strife — and greater territorial gains by the Taliban.
Rashid reports on Pakistan and Islamic fundamentalism for several Western newspapers. He's also the author of the best-selling book Taliban.
Aliens in America producers David Guarascio and Moses Port and writer Sameer Gardezi talk about their new sitcom. The story follows a young Muslim student from Pakistan on a foreign exchange program living with a Christian family in Wisconsin.
Guarascio and Port worked together previously on Just Shoot Me! and Mad About You.
In his effort to decode the human genome, scientist J. Craig Venter volunteered his own DNA to be analyzed and made publicly available. His autobiography, A Life Decoded — My Genome: My Life details his side of the complicated and bureaucratic race to sequence the human genome.
Venter's early work to decode the genome through private research company Celera Genomics earned him both praise and criticism. His team competed with the National Institutes of Health publicly funded effort, the Human Genome Project.
The expansive new mob drama American Gangster stars Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe. Fresh Air's film critic says it's a whopping overdose of perverse '70s nostalgia, a panoramic portrait of a nation disintegrating from moral rot.
Fresh Air's TV critic finds his attention drawn this week to three lavish DVD box sets from three high-impact network TV shows: David Lynch's deliciously eccentric Twin Peaks, the legendary '90s comedy Seinfeld, and the cult-classic teen drama My So-Called Life.
Each is crammed with bonus materials, including lost and deleted scenes, documentaries, and other features.
Clive Stafford Smith is one of just a few people who've had independent access to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay. He's a human rights lawyer representing dozens of the prisoners held there, and he says countless innocent men have been held at Gitmo for years with no meaningful review of the accusations against them. Many of them, he says, have suffered terrible abuse.
In Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side: Seeking Justice in Guantanamo Bay, Smith details the abuses and absurdities of life inside the legal black hole of the prison camp.
Earlier on today's Fresh Air, we heard from Clive Stafford Smith. He's a defense attorney who charges in a new book that numerous innocent men have been held at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo for years with no meaningful review of the accusations against them.
For a different perspective, we're speaking with Capt. Pat McCarthy, the U.S. government's lead counsel in Guantanamo.
James Weinstein, M.D., chairs Dartmouth College's orthopedic-surgery department; he's considered one of the nation's leading experts on low-back pain.
Weinstein says a multi-year study examining different treatments for lumbar disk herniation shows that surgery isn't necessarily a better choice than non-operative treatments. He says that there is little difference in outcomes, and he's an advocate of conservative, non-invasive treatment.
