Pop Culture

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.

Magic, Bruce Springsteen's first studio album with the E Street Band in five years, came out earlier this month. The event has occasioned at least a pair of network-TV appearances — including a live morning concert on NBC's Today show and a mortifying 60 Minutes interview.

Fresh Air rock critic Ken Tucker says Springsteen's approach to promoting the album — and the way the news media are receiving it — says something about both the state of the media (precarious) and Springsteen's place in American pop culture.

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, is designed to take advantage of "the wisdom of crowds," meaning anyone can edit (and re-edit) the entries. The open-source approach brings with it a unique set of strengths — and limitations.

The famous, or perhaps notorious, model Anna Nicole Smith died last week, prompting a tsunami of media coverage. Here's a look at the reasons for all the hoopla. One shouldn't be embarrassed about finding her story fascinating.

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.

Critic at large John Powers considers the 100th birthday of Peter Pan and our cultural obsession with youth.

Critic-at-large John Powers comments on the verdict handed down on the Martha Stewart securities case.

LaHaye, who died earlier this week, was a fundamentalist Christian and a longtime leader of the religious right. His Left Behind books sold more than 50 million copies. He spoke to Fresh Air in 2002.