Joel Hafvenstein spent a year in Afghanistan trying to convince opium-poppy farmers to give up what he calls "the perfect crop." Working for a private company funded by the United States Agency for International Development, Hafvenstein helped provide Afghan farmers with alternative jobs — like building canals and roads — in hopes that they'd give up their alliance with the Taliban.
Tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman, who died last year, recorded as a sideman with Ornette Coleman, Keith Jarrett, Pat Metheny and Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra.
He also led and recorded with his own groups — and was the father of another tenor saxophonist, Joshua Redman. Fresh Air's jazz critic says Dewey Redman never quite got the acclaim he deserved — and that a just-reissued album from 1982 shows how good he really was.
In a recent New York Times Magazine cover story, reporter Andrea Elliott explained how the small Moroccan neighborhood of Jamaa Mezuak has bred terrorists responsible for a number of recent high-profile attacks. Some were involved in the Madrid train bombings; some went to Iraq. Elliott won a Pulitzer Prize this year for her series An Imam in America.
Britney Spears has had what you might call a busy year: A child-custody fight, a much-derided MTV Video Music Awards performance, a public meltdown involving an unexpected hairstyling choice.
But she's recently put out a new album — Blackout, her first studio disc since 2003 — and though there's been much comment about how much she's revealing in the seemingly personal songs, the music is what matters, right? Rock critic Ken Tucker has a review.
Sharon Jones, head of the old-school funk and soul band Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, is working it. She and her band have a new album, their third, called 100 Days, 100 Nights. They've been touring to support the album, and Jones was recently part of the cast of Berlin, along with Lou Reed. She also shot a part for the upcoming Denzel Washington film The Great Debaters.
The energetic lead singer for The Dap-Kings spoke to Fresh Air in '07 and again in '16, after she'd been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. "I want to perform," she said in July. Jones died on Nov. 18.
A MacArthur Fellow and co-founder of the Pacific Institute, Peter Gleick runs one of the nation's leading water-conservation assessment centers.
The institute's biennial report, The World's Water, surveys global water trends and issues, including the links between water and terrorism and the growing risk of flood and drought.
In Tamara Jenkins' new film The Savages, two 40-something siblings have to put their lives on hold while they learn how to deal with their elderly father, who's slipping slowly into dementia.
The film — it's a comedy — stars Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney, plus Broadway veteran Philip Bosco as their ailling dad. (Watch a clip.)
Jenkins' previous film work includes The Slums of Beverly Hills.
Investigative reporter Mark Schapiro explains in a new book that toxic chemicals exist in many of the products we handle every day — agents that can cause cancer, genetic damage and birth defects, lacing everything from our gadgets to our toys to our beauty products.
Writer Stewart O'Nan has nearly 20 works of fiction and nonfiction to his credit, but his name isn't too well known beyond a community of loyal readers and independent-bookstore prowlers.
But book critic Maureen Corrigan predicts that O'Nan's literary celebrity will grow in the wake of his latest book, Last Night at the Lobster. It's a little book, she says, that's making a big splash.
Fresh Air's critic at large tells us why he loves the high-fashion challenge Project Runway, a reality-TV staple now in its fourth season on cable's Bravo channel. Among other things, it's one reality show that's about something more interesting than forcing its contestants to eat bugs.
Obligatory Villagers, the new jazz- and cabaret-inflected album from singer-songwriter Nellie McKay, features sassy tracks that touch on topics as diverse as feminism and zombies.
McKay, a sometime actress and stand-up comedian, made a splash in 2004 with a debut CD called Get Away From Me — a play on the title of Norah Jones' album Come Away With Me.
Last year, she co-starred in a revival of Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera alongside Alan Cumming and Cyndi Lauper.
McKay joins Terry Gross for a Fresh Air concert and conversation.
Say "Christopher Plummer," and some people automatically think of The Sound of Music, in which he played the Baron von Trapp.
But that's just one of about 100 films Plummer has been in; recent highlights from his big-screen career include Syriana, The Insider, A Beautiful Mind, and Inside Man. He's also had long stage career, won two Tony Awards, and performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Washington Post correspondent Thomas Ricks has recently returned from Iraq — where senior military commanders now say that the key threat facing the U.S.effort isn't terrorists, it's the intransigence of the Shia-dominated government.
Ricks, a regular Fresh Air guest, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of the best-selling Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq.
Writer-director Todd Haynes is responsible for an eclectic array of films, from the elegantly bio-paranoia drama Safe to the glam-rock celebration Velvet Goldmine and the Douglas Sirk homage Far From Heaven.
His latest experiment: I'm Not There, a kind of fantasia on the public personas of Bob Dylan. Six different actors — including Cate Blanchett — play the famously protean singer.
Journalist Philip C. Winslow has worked for the Christian Science Monitor, the Toronto Star, ABC radio and CBC radio.
But he hasn't always been a journalist: His new memoir, Victory for Us Is to See You Suffer, chronicles the time he spent working with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in the West Bank. It was during the second Palestinian intifada, during which Winslow transported aid across checkpoints to villages and refugee camps.
Pro golfer John Daly has won tournaments on five continents, including two of the PGA tour's four majors. He's also gambled away a couple of fortunes, trashed various hotel rooms, houses and cars, married four times, and downed enough booze to land himself in a string of emergency rooms and rehab clinics. These days, he says, he lives on Diet Coke and Marlboro Lights. "I guess you could say," Daly writes in his recent memoir, that "I'm not exactly a poster boy for moderation."
Over the course of eight years, Matthew Diffee has had more than 100 of his illustrations published in the cartoonists' bible, The New Yorker.
But that magazine gets more than 500 submissions a week — and for each issue, the editors select only 20 cartoons, in a process that Diffee says may or may not involve the use of darts.
So even Diffee has had to deal with rejection. Happily, he's found a channel: His new book, featuring his own work and that of 37 other New Yorker regulars, is The Rejection Collection, Vol. 2: The Cream of the Crap.
