Government & Politics

In his new book, The Double V, Rawn James Jr. argues that to understand race in America one must understand the history of African-Americans in the military. While the turning point came between the world wars, the struggle began with the American Revolution.

Fresh off Sunday's Golden Globe Awards, where he won for best director and his film won for best motion picture/drama, the actor and director talks about his approach to the story of six diplomats who managed to escape a hostile Iran — and the CIA operative who helped them do so.

The nature writer has an essay in January's Harper's Magazine that details the four years of his childhood during which he says he was routinely raped and molested by a family friend.

In a new book, Civil War historian Bruce Levine says that from the destruction of the South emerged an entirely new country, making the Civil War equivalent to a second American Revolution. Integral to the Union's victory, he says, were the nearly 200,000 black soldiers who enlisted.

Adam Nossiter, the West Africa bureau chief for The New York Times, is one of the few reporters covering the situation in northern Mali, where Islamist extremists allied with al-Qaida have taken control after a coup destabilized the country in April.

Senior analyst for the Violence Policy Center Tom Diaz says one of the weapons found at the site of the Newtown, Conn. shooting was a variant of a type of gun developed for troops in Vietnam.

"Big Data" had just as much to do with President Obama's victory as phrases like "Etch A Sketch" and "47 percent," says linguist Geoff Nunberg. Big Data is also behind anxieties about intrusions on our privacy, whether from the government's anti-terrorist data sweeps or the ads that track us on the Web.

Kathryn Bigelow's film tells the story of the U.S. hunt for the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks. Critic David Edelstein says the film presents itself as a work of journalism, but that there's no doubting its perspective: It's the story of America's "brilliant, righteous revenge."

In his article for The New Yorker, journalist Raffia Khatchadourian tells the story of a secret program that tested nerve gas, LSD and other drugs on 5,000 American soldiers throughout the 1950s and '60s.

In her new series for The New York Times, reporter Louise Story traces the complicated relationship between localities and the corporations they want to lure to their states, counties and cities to help promote economic growth.

When it was released 32 years ago, Michael Cimino's revisionist Western was considered one of the most colossal flops in Hollywood history. Critic John Powers takes a second look at the film and concludes that it's clearly the work of one man --- he wanted you to remember it forever."

Robert Malley, a program director for the International Crisis Group, analyzes the complexity of the situation in the Middle East, a region where conflicts interconnect and expand upon one another. "These alliances," says Malley, "are not clear cut ... they are alliances of convenience."

In his new book, journalist Gregory Johnsen charts the rise of Yemen as a haven for al-Qaida and explores the recent history of radical Islam in the Arabian Peninsula. The death of Osama bin Laden, he says, had more of an effect on the U.S. psyche than it did on people in Yemen.

Tony Kushner wrote the screenplay for the film Lincoln, which focuses on the 16th president's tumultuous final months in office. Kushner read more than 20 books before writing about Lincoln, a man who had "an enormous capacity for grief that didn't deprive him of the ability to act."

On Election Day, voters in Colorado and Washington cast their ballots in favor of legalizing marijuana for recreational use. In his recent cover story for Newsweek, journalist Tony Dokoupil reported on the booming cannabis business in Colorado and its prospects for regulated expansion.

Andrew Solomon's book is about families with children who are profoundly different or likely to be stigmatized. "We all love flawed children," says Solomon, "and the general assumption that these more extreme flaws make ... children somehow unlovable — it wasn't true of most of my experience."

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum describes the tactics the Soviets used after World War II to take over and transform much of Eastern Europe. Her book Iron Curtain was recently nominated for the National Book Award.

President Obama has been re-elected. Democrats and Republicans have maintained their respective majorities in the Senate and in the House. So does this mean there will be more partisan gridlock? Fresh Air talks with political analyst Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute.

Thomas Ricks' new book, The Generals, is about what he sees as a decline of American military leadership and accountability. He says that in World War II, generals were held accountable for their lack of success — but that started to change with the Korean War.

The actress plays Gemma, the fierce matriarch of the biker gang in the FX series. She's best-known for playing the acerbic Peg Bundy on the long-running show Married With Children.