Pop Culture

Vogue Magazine film critic John Powers talks about the year in media: the major events, the trending topics and the evolution of social networking.

The actor and director shares memories and discusses the work of his late father, journalist and novelist Dominick Dunne, who became famous for covering the lives and trials of celebrities. He died in August at the age of 83.

John Powers, Fresh Air critic at large, weighs in on the trends of '07: political campaigns, Iraq movies failing at the box office, HBO's The Sopranos, stories about hitting the road, the TMZing of America, jocks gone wild, hip sentimentality, the nightly ideological news, atheist chic and the writers strike.

Novelist Robert Stone has written a new memoir that begins with a stint in the Navy in the late 1950s, continues through his work as a journalist in Vietnam and then includes his counterculture years in the 1970s, taking hallucinogenic drugs, cross-country road trips, and hanging out with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. His memoir is, Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties. Stone's novels include Dog Soldiers (which was adapted into the film Who'll Stop the Rain), and Outerbridge Reach.

Fresh Air critic at-large John Powers will talk about the events that defined American culture this year. Highlights include the Borat movie, Stephen Colbert's speech at the White House correspondent's dinner, George Allen's use of a racial slur during the 2006 U.S. Senate race in Virginia, and the rise of YouTube.com as a mechanism for rapid dissemination of information. John Powers is also a critic for Vogue magazine.

The Fresh Air critic has written a new book, Sore Winners (And The Rest of Us) in George Bush's America. Powers is critic-at-large for Fresh Air, and deputy editor for L.A. Weekly, where he writes a media/culture column called On. He's also an international correspondent for Gourmet magazine.

Journalist Orville Schell talks about his new book Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangri-La from the Himalayas to Hollywood (Metropolitan Books). For centuries now, the mountainous and remote nation of Tibet has been the object of Western fascination. Today, Tibet is the subject of movies and Hollywood celebrities have taken on Tibetan Freedom as their cause. Schell talks about Tibet, real and imagined, and takes us through the history of the West’s infatuation. Schell has covered China and Tibet for many years.

Pokemon (POH-kay-mahn) is the latest kid craze and worldwide phenomenon. It hails from Japan, and began as an Nintendo game, featuring the superpowered animals called Pokemons. There are 150 characters in all. After the game came the trading cards, comic book series, and weekly cartoon. Now there's the Pokemon movie. We meet the American translator of the Pokemon characters, Gerard Jones.

We feature excerpts from a panel of Hollywood screenwriters discussing violence in movies. This was held 6/4/99 in Santa Monica, California. The seminar was title "Guns Don't Kill People." Among the panelists were Callie Khouri who wrote "Thelma and Louis," William Mastrosimone who penned "Extremities, and The Burning Season," Steven De Souza who wrote the first two Die Hard movies, and Miguel Tejada-Flores, who wrote "Revenge of the Nerds:" and Jack Valenti, a Washington lobbyist for the top Hollywood studios.

Azeezaly Jaffer is Executive Director of Stamp Services for the U.S. Postal Service. This branch has introduced the popular stamp collecting program which features pop-culture icons on the stamps. Some of the Post Office’s most popular stamps include: Elvis Presely, Marilyn Monroe, and Bugs Bunny.