Government & Politics

Ryan Kules lost an arm and a leg in 2005 when an IED hit his vehicle in Iraq. Now the former Army captain works with the Wounded Warrior Project to help severely injured soldiers transition into the workforce.

Historian Douglas Brinkley considers Ronald Reagan one of the top five American presidents of the 20th century. Brinkley is the editor of The Reagan Diaries.

Journalist Will Bunch critiques the 40th president in his new book Tear Down This Myth: How The Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics And Haunts Our Future.

Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid says the Taliban is making advances in Pakistan. Rashid reports on Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia for The Daily Telegraph and The Far Eastern Economic Review.

Sarah Chayes has been living and working in Afghanistan since she covered the fall of the Taliban government for NPR. She joins Fresh Air to explain how the hard-line religious movement is using both fear and persuasion as it works to once again expand its power in Afghanistan.

Robot soldiers are no longer just the stuff of sci-fi fantasy. As technological warfare expert P.W. Singer explains in his new book, Wired For War, some military tasks previously assigned to humans are now being handled by machines.

Eric Foner, author of Our Lincoln, talks about the era following the Civil War in which former slaves were promised equal rights and citizenship. Foner is DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University.

Street artist Shepard Fairey created the iconic red, white and blue Obama illustration that became the unofficial poster of the campaign. Although his campaign poster never became official, Fairey has been commissioned to design the official poster for the inauguration.

Ta-Nehisi Coates grew up in the post-civil rights era, son of a publisher and former Black Panther; he's a contributing editor and blogger for The Atlantic magazine and author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, 2 Sons, and An Unlikely Road to Manhood.

Congressman John Lewis (D-Ga.) became part of the civil-rights movement while he was a teenager. From 1963 to 1966, he chaired the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. And he became a close associate of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Lewis has been a congressman since 1987.

Macroeconomist Dean Baker sees opportunity in the current economic crisis. In a recent editorial for The Guardian, Baker recommended that President-elect Barack Obama boost the economy by spending on national health insurance.

After 44 years as a newspaper man, former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. makes his debut as a fiction writer. His new novel, Rules Of The Game, features an investigative reporter on the beat of a hotly contested presidential election.

The seventh season of 24 premieres this Sunday. Critic David Bianculli assesses the four-hour, two-night return of counterterrorist Jack Bauer — who's got some new allies, and some new enemies.

NBC's newly appointed chief White House correspondent talks with Dave Davies about his new book, How Barack Obama Won: A State-by-State Guide to the Historic 2008 Presidential Election.

In his 2008 book, Torture Team, British lawyer Philippe Sands accuses the Bush administration of condoning harsh interrogation techniques.

A pioneering political leader in the fight against apartheid, for 13 years Suzman was the sole representative in South Africa's all-white Parliament to reject race discrimination. She died Thursday at 91.

The year in television started with a bust — or to be more precise, a writer's strike — but Fresh Air's TV critic says there were plenty of TiVo-worthy programs in 2008. Prominent among them: AMC's Mad Men.

Filmmaker Ari Folman was a 19-year-old Israeli soldier serving in Beirut at the time of the 1982 massacre of Palestinian refuges. Though he has no memory of the time, he revisits the mission in his new film, Waltz With Bashir, a surreal, animated documentary of the terror.

Activist Paul Weyrich, who died Dec. 18, helped turn social conservatives into a powerful force in the Republican party.

After appearing in supporting roles in more than 50 films, actor Richard Jenkins takes the lead in The Visitor, Tom McCarthy's film about a solitary economics professor whose world opens up when he discovers an apartment he rented in New York is already occupied.