Society & Culture

Director Brett Morgen joins Fresh Air's Terry Gross to discuss his new film, Chicago 10. The film mixes trial footage and animation to tell the story of the "Chicago 8" — protesters held accountable for violence that erupted with police outside the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968.

Drug addiction doesn't just affect the addict, it changes the whole family. Journalist David Sheff and his son Nic join Fresh Air to talk about Nic's addiction to methamphetamine and the separate memoirs they've written about the experience.

Pop-rock singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow joins Terry Gross in the Fresh Air studios for an interview and live performance. Detours, her new album, is the most politically and personally outspoken record of her career.

A bomb explodes in the campus office next door, and Lee, a math professor, becomes the primary suspect. Is he being targeted for revenge by someone in his past? Fresh Air book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews A Person of Interest, a new novel by Susan Choi.

Can there be a middle ground in the debate about the separation of church and state? John DiIulio, Jr, a Democrat who spent seven months as the White House "faith czar" under George W. Bush, believes so.

Movie-theater owner Ben Tanaka is having relationship issues; his girlfriend, Miko, suspects he's secretly attracted to white women. (She's right, but he won't admit it.) In Shortcomings, Asian-American graphic novelist Adrian Tomine (Scrapbook, Summer Blonde) has finally done what many fans and critics have suggested he should: addressed race in his work.

In 1960, presidential candidate John F. Kennedy asked the nation to disregard his religion; in 2000, George W. Bush stated Jesus was his favorite philosopher. How did faith become such an important criterion for the presidency? Religion professor and evangelical newspaper columnist Randall Balmer explains.

Slate magazine editor Jacob Weisberg has a few things to say about the presidency of George W. Bush. He's assembled his thoughts in a book called The Bush Tragedy, which Time magazine political columnist Joe Klein calls a "scorching, powerful and entirely plausible account" of an administration whose "epic collapse" Klein has lately been writing about.

It's January, the stock market is shaky, and the Hollywood writer's strike is still dragging on, but Fresh Air's book critic says there's at least one piece of good news this month: Sue Miller has a new novel out.

Clark Johnson has worked as a director on several of TV's most memorable cop shows, including The Shield, Homicide: Life on the Street and the pilot episode of the critically acclaimed HBO series The Wire. This season, he's appearing on camera as well, as The Wire's City Editor Gus Haynes.

Baghdad-born activist Yanar Mohammed directs the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq.

Hamburg-born Astrid Kirchherr met the Beatles in 1960, before they were famous. She took some of the earliest photographs of the group and was engaged to Stuart Sutcliffe, the Beatles' original bassist, before he died of a brain hemorrhage in 1962.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg offers up a few thoughts on the use of a certain C-word in current electoral rhetoric. That word is "change" and it's what all the candidates are promising. But what does it really mean?

David Kirkpatrick is a correspondent in the Washington bureau for The New York Times. He covered the politics of the conservative Christian movement in the 2004 election, and has been following the presidential campaign of former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee.

Diagnosed with cancer for the third time, Susan Sontag signed on for a harsh treatment regimen in hopes it would keep her alive. But it only added to her suffering. Her son, journalist David Rieff, has published a memoir about his mother's "revolt against death."

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.

Historian Allan Berube died this past Tuesday, at age 61. He wrote what's considered the definitive history of gay men and lesbians in the military. Coming Out Under Fire was published in 1990, and a documentary based on the book was released in 1994. The idea for the book sprang from a box of letters recovered from a Dumpster. The correspondence among gay soldiers led to dozens of interviews about homosexual life in the military. Berube himself came out in 1969 and went on to found the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project.

Jason Reitman's new teen comedy Juno, like Knocked Up, disguises its family-values stance with a liberal helping of four-letter words. Film critic David Edelstein says it's targeted firmly at the tweener crowd, and the relentless banter of Buffy the Vampire Slayer gets taken to a new level here. But every character's wisecracks, as in bad Neil Simon, come from the same place.

In A Slave No More, historian David W. Blight showcases the emancipation narratives of two men, one from Alabama and one from Virginia. Manuscripts written by Wallace Turnage and John Washington, and genealogical information compiled by Blight, combine to tell the stories of their lives as slaves and their harrowing flights to freedom.

We continue our conversation about A Slave No More and the men whose stories it tells with three of John Washington's descendants: granddaughter Ruth Washington, great-granddaughter Barbara Anne Hinksman, and great-great-granddaughter Maureen Ramos.