Peter Singer's new book, Children at War, takes a look at the use of children as soldiers -- which happens much more than many of us would like to think. From Afghanistan, Thailand and Lebanon to Sudan, Kosovo and Sierra Leone, Singer examines how children are recruited and indoctrinated into warfare.
Director Jean Pierre Jeunet's new film A Very Long Engagement is set during the end of World War I and is based on the novel by Sebastien Japrisot. It stars Audrey Tautou, who also played the title role in Jeunet's previous film, Amelie.
Before he played guitar for Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page was a session musician in London studios. Rock historian Ed Ward looks back at Page's early career. Led Zeppelin will be honored with a Lifetime Achievement Grammy next month.
Temple Grandin is one of the nation's top designers of livestock facilities. She is also autistic. Grandin's new book is Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior.
The new film Are We There Yet? stars Ice Cube as a man so eager to get close to a woman that he offers to travel many miles to reunite her children with their mother. The film was made by his production company, Cube Vision, which also developed Friday, as well as Barbershop.
Anchorman, starring Will Ferrell, is now out on DVD. It's a spoof of local TV news shows. McKay was the head writer for Saturday Night Live from 1997 to 2001 and a founding member of the Upright Citizens Brigade comedy troupe. This interview was originally broadcast on July, 8, 2004.
Journalist Michael Dobbs is a staff writer for The Washington Post. When the tsunami hit South Asia last week, Dobbs and his brother Geoffrey were swimming near the small island Taprobane off the southernmost tip of Sri Lanka.
Sharad Devarajan is the CEO of Gotham Entertainment Group, which has licensed the Marvel Comics characters to be distributed in South Asia. Their first publication is Spider-Man India, featuring Pavitr Prabhakar as Peter Parker.
Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Rammer Jammer Yellowhammer: A Journey into the Heart of Fan Mania, by Warren St. John, a reporter for The New York Times. The book is about sports mania and the fan mania surrounding the University of Alabama's football team, The Crimson Tide.
We have the second part of an interview with renowned food writer Harold McGee (the first part was broadcast on Dec. 23). McGee's book, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, has been revised and updated. The book is an exposition of food and cooking techniques, technology and history.
We look at the business of making movie blockbusters with Dade Hayes, special reports editor at Variety, and Jonathon Bing, Variety's deputy managing editor. The two co-authored the new book Open Wide: How Hollywood Box Office Became a National Obsession.
We speak to labor economist Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the Living Standards Program at the Economic Policy Institute, about how working families are faring in the current U.S. economy. Bernstein co-authored the forthcoming report The State of Working America 2004-05.
Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz reviews the new three-DVD set More Treasures from American Film Archives. Distributed by The National Film Preservation Foundation, it's a collection of 50 American films made between 1894 and 1931.
Bandleader and clarinetist Artie Shaw died Dec. 29 at the age of 94, apparently of natural causes. In the 1930s and '40s, Shaw's band ranked with the Goodman, Dorsey and Miller bands in popularity. But he largely rejected pop tunes and stuck with music by composers like Porter, Gershwin and Berlin. We remember Shaw.
Filmmaker Robert Stone's new documentary tells the story of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the radical group that kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst in 1974. We speak with Stone and with reporter Tim Findley, who covered the kidnapping for the Hearst newspaper The San Francisco Chronicle.
We rebroadcast a tribute to the great vocalist and composer Thomas "Fats" Waller from May 19, 2004. Guitarist and singer Marty Grosz and cornet player Randy Reinhart join us for a special in-studio performance in honor of Waller's 100th birthday. Waller wrote many hit songs, appeared in films in the 1930s and '40s, and wrote Broadway musicals.
Writer Susan Sontag died Wednesday at age 71 of leukemia. We listen back to two interviews with her: a 1989 conversation about her book AIDS and Its Metaphors; and 1993 interview conducted shortly after Sontag returned from Sarajevo, where she directed a performance of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot in Serbo-Croatian.
