As host of the NPR news quiz Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me, Peter Sagal spends a lot of time reading the newspaper.
Lately, though, he's also spent many an hour going to strip joints, a swingers club, a porn-movie set and casinos — among other dens of what some call iniquity.
All research, of course, for his new project, The Book of Vice. He wanted to get a perspective on the indulgences of others, and report back to the rest of us.
Author Alice Sebold has produced difficult books before: Her novel The Lovely Bones, soon to be filmed by director Peter Jackson, centers on a 14-year-old looking down from heaven after her own rape and murder.
Now comes Sebold's latest fiction, The Almost Moon: Its narrative involves a middle-aged woman who murders her ailing elderly mother.
Magic, Bruce Springsteen's first studio album with the E Street Band in five years, came out earlier this month. The event has occasioned at least a pair of network-TV appearances — including a live morning concert on NBC's Today show and a mortifying 60 Minutes interview.
Fresh Air rock critic Ken Tucker says Springsteen's approach to promoting the album — and the way the news media are receiving it — says something about both the state of the media (precarious) and Springsteen's place in American pop culture.
Richard Russo's novel, Bridge of Sighs, is a story about unexceptional people in an unexceptional upstate New York town. But the novel, Maureen Corrigan says, is anything but unexceptional; it's pound-for-pound the best new fiction on shelves today. Russo won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Empire Falls, a story about the relationships between people in a small town in Maine.
We Own the Night is a crime drama starring Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg. They play two brothers — one a cop, the other a nightclub owner — who find themselves on opposite sides of the law. James Gray directed this thriller.
In Reservation Road Mark Ruffalo plays a divorced lawyer who accidentally kills a child and then speeds away. Based on a novel by the same name, the film is directed by Terry George (Hotel Rwanda). Ruffalo has appeared in Zodiac, 13 Going on 30 and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Rock historian Ed Ward reviews the new classic rock box set Rockin' Bones: 1950s Punk and Rockabilly. Hits from Elvis, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee light up this 101-track, four-disc collection produced by Rhino Records
Pulitzer Prize-winning business columnist Gretchen Morgenson talks about the subprime mortgage crisis and its effects on the markets and on the economy. Morgenson, an assistant business and financial editor for The New York Times, has covered the financial markets for The Times since 1998.
This year the Human Rights First Award for Excellence in Television will be given to a show that "depicts torture and interrogation in a nuanced, realistic fashion." According to interviews with military leaders, portrayal of torture on television shows has changed interrogation techniques in the field.
TV producer Adam Fierro (The Shield), intelligence expert Col. Stuart Herrington and human rights advocate David Danzig discuss TV violence.
Shows nominated for the award include Lost, Criminal Minds, The Closer and The Shield.
Stephen Colbert, host of Comedy Central's The Colbert Report talks about his book I Am America (And So Can You!) and his successful television show.
The former correspondent and contributor to The Daily Show created his own Emmy-nominated late-night show to parody Bill O'Reilly's The O'Reilly Factor.
In I Am America, Colbert targets race, religion, sports and the American family as well as more mundane topics like breakfast cereal.
He spent a year reading the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica and writing The Know-It-All, an account of what he learned.
Now author A.J. Jacobs has accomplished another annually retentive feat: Living life the way the Good Book says we should.
The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible chronicles Jacobs' attempts to follow every rule in the Bible — and considers the lessons he learned along the way.
In his memoir Foreskin's Lament, author Shalom Auslander writes about his attempt to break free from the strict, socially isolated Orthodox Jewish environment of his childhood.
Auslander is the author of the short-story collection Beware of God. He's contributed to The New Yorker, Esquire and The New York Times Magazine.
Film critic David Edelstein reviews Michael Clayton, the new corporate thriller starring George Clooney. Despite a routine outline, the film is sensationally well done, Edelstein says, and Clooney is as good as he's ever been.
Fresh Air's rock critic reviews Is It News, the new album from Texas blues musician Doyle Bramhall. He's had two previous discs, but this is the first collection where the songs are all his own.
The singer, songwriter and drummer has played in his own band, the Chessmen, and with a host of Texas music titans from Stevie Ray Vaughan to Marcia Ball.
In a new book about the constitutional separation of church and state, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills insists that that separation was meant as "the great protector of religion, not its enemy." That, as Wills tells guest host Dave Davies, hasn't stopped fervent believers from challenging the concept.
Wills, a translator of St. Augustine and author of What Jesus Meant, is an emeritus professor of history at Northwestern University; the new book is titled Head and Heart: American Christianities.
In The Secret History of the War on Cancer, environmental-health expert Devra Davis warns that we're ignoring dozens of cancer-causing chemicals, like asbestos, benzene, vinyl chloride, and dioxin.
She writes that, like the tobacco companies, the chemical industry has managed to obfuscate the carcinogenic dangers of chemical and other toxic waste.
Davis directs the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute and teaches epidemiology in the university's public-health graduate program.
Snacking on water beetles in Laos, dining on dog in Korea: Tom Parker Bowles, food writer for Britain's The Mail on Sunday, Night and Day, and Tatler (and son of Prince Charles' wife, Camilla Parker Bowles), has written what he's described as "a travel book about weird food."
It's called The Year of Eating Dangerously: A Global Adventure in Search of Culinary Extremes.
September 11, AIDS, the Holocaust — comic and actress Sarah Silverman has repeatedly proved that practically nothing need be off limits in a joke. Take the title of her Off-Broadway show, which later became a film: Jesus Is Magic. Or the music video, available on her Comedy Central show's blog, of "The Doodie Song."
Silverman has appeared in films including School of Rock and There's Something About Mary and she was a member of the Saturday Night Live ensemble in the early '90s.
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine. He has written in depth about the Bush administration. His article in this weekâs edition (âShifting Targetsâ) is about the administrationâs shift in position on Iran, redefining the war in Iraq as a strategic battle between the U.S. and Iran. Hersh exposed the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in 2004, in a series of articles published in the magazine early in 2005. He has been the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, five George Polk Awards, two National Magazine Awards, and a dozen other prizes.
