Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, has written a new novel that Publishers Weekly describes as a "murder-mystery speculative-history Jewish-identity noir chess thriller."
The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a private-eye novel that takes place in a fictional community of Jewish exiles — "the frozen chosen" — displaced to a temporary settlement in Alaska by World War II.
With his famous "slam dunk" comment about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction, George Tenet helped shape the arguments that led the United States into the Iraq war. A holdover from the Clinton administration, he was director of the CIA when the White House made the decision to invade, and in 2004 President Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his service.
John Ridley's comic-book series The American Way has just been collected into a graphic novel. The series takes place in 1961, when the government has created a team of super-heroes to battle foreign super-villains. But it's all just a sham — a diversion created to pacify the public.
Ridley, who co-created The American Way with Georges Jeanty and Karl Story, previously wrote the screenplay for Three Kings and the novel A Conversation with the Mann.
A new biography of Justice Clarence Thomas explores some of the paradoxes of his life and career; it's called Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas. Authors Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher, both reporters at The Washington Post, say the book grew out of a Post article exploring "both the racial vehemence that has hounded Thomas and the roots of his ascension to the judicial mountaintop."
Best known for the landmark Stanford Prison Experiment — in which student volunteers in a mock prison transformed with startling speed into sadistic guards or emotionally broken prisoners — Philip Zimbardo has written a book on the psychology of the unspeakable. It's called The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.
Canadian actress Sarah Polley, who's perhaps best known in the United States as the injured Nicole in Atom Egoyan's wrenching The Sweet Hereafter and the drug-dealing Ronna in Doug Liman's Go, makes her directorial debut with the intimate indie drama Away from Her.
The new movie is based on a short story by Alice Munro; it stars Julie Christie as a woman with Alzheimer's, and features Olympia Dukakis, Michael Murphy and Gordon Pinsent. The movie has generated buzz on the film-festival circuit, and opens in the U.S. on May 4.
The star of Friends and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is featured in the new film Numb; he plays a screenwriter plagued by feelings of anxiety, detachment and panic. The story is based on an autobiographical script by Harris Goldberg (Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo), who also made his directing debut with the film.
Actress Bea Arthur may be best known for her starring roles in the TV sitcom Maude (in the '70s) and The Golden Girls (in the '80s and '90s) — but did you know she also played Yente the Matchmaker in the 1964 Broadway premiere of Fiddler on the Roof? The first season of Maude is now out on DVD.
Carlo Bonini, investigative reporter for the Rome newspaper La Repubblica, broke the story about an Italian intelligence agency's involvement in forging documents saying that Iraq secured uranium from Niger. Those documents helped the White House make the case for invading Iraq. Bonini's new book is Collusion: International Espionage and the War on Terror.
Presidential historian Robert Dallek has written about LBJ, JFK, FDR and Ronald Reagan. Now, in his book Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, he tackles two political titans he describes as "self-serving characters with grandiose dreams of recasting world affairs."
About 10 years ago, a new variation on hip-hop became popular in San Francisco's Bay Area. It's called "hyphy" (pronounced "hi-fee"), slang for hyper-active, and it's gaining in national popularity. Hyphy Hitz, a new anthology of tracks from Bay Area acts, suggests that's partly because hyphy presents a more playful, energetic attitude than most contemporary hip-hop.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Halberstam died yesterday from injuries sustained in a car crash. He was 73. We revisit his Fresh Air interviews from 1985, from 1993, and from 1999.
Koko Taylor long ago earned her title of "Queen of the Blues." In the mid-sixties, she came to Chicago from a sharecropper farm in Tennessee. There, she was discovered by the celebrated songwriter and performer Willie Dixon, who provided her with her crossover hit, "Wang Dang Doodle".
In 1975, after her record company went out of business, she signed with Alligator Records — and critic Milo Miles says Old School, her new album on that label, embodies Alligator's straightforward, hard-rocking blues style.
Novelist Joshua Ferris makes his debut with Then We Came to the End, a satire about life in a Chicago advertising agency just as the dot-com boom went bust.
Journalist Bill Moyers returns to PBS April 25 with Bill Moyers Journal; the first episode "Buying the War," a 90-minute examination of the role of the press in the run-up to the Iraq War.
For many veteran AfroPop performers, the end of the LP era meant their back catalogs were suddenly unavailable. And for many of those musicians, there's no prospect of a CD being produced locally. So it's good news, according to music critic Milo Miles, that the music of one performer who made a splash in the West — Nigerian juju superstar King Sunny Ade — is being smartly preserved in the digital age. Miles reviews three new collections: Gems From the Classic Years and The Best of the Classic Years, both on the Shanachie label, and King of Juju, from Wrasse.
Jimmy Wales helped create Wikipedia, the interactive online encyclopedia founded in 2001. Users write and edit Wikipedia entries themselves; the site also has a dedicated corps of editors. There are often "edit wars" over entries — some, including the one headlined "2006 Lebanon War," have been edited and then re-edited thousands of times — and Wikipedia's accuracy has been questioned by some professors and colleges, who forbid students to cite it as a source. But Wikipedia, with versions in 250 languages, is one of the top 10 sites on the Internet.
MTV's new Thursday-night sketch-comedy series Human Giant got its start as a collection of Web shorts, and the rise of MySpace and the viral-video explosion helped it develop a big following online. Terry talks with Aziz Ansari, Rob Heubel and Paul Scheer, three of the comics who power the show's alterna-comedy antics.
