Jerry Williams, Jr. has been calling himself Swamp Dogg for close to 40 years, but his career goes back even longer than that. He's one of America's most eccentric musicians, and today rock historian Ed Ward tries to get a handle on the many faces of a songwriter, producer and performer who's made a career out of popping up where you least expect him.
Our guest, Father John Barkemeyer, left a parish on Chicago's South Side to become an Army chaplain in 2003, the year U.S. and coalition forces invaded Iraq. There's a shortage of Catholic priests in the Army, and for much of his current tour in Iraq, Barkemeyer has been the service's only Catholic chaplain in the province of Anbar.
Brian De Palma's films include the horror classic Carrie, the crime epics Scarface and The Untouchables, and the first Mission: Impossible film.
His latest release, Redacted, is a fictional take on a real incident — in which U.S. soldiers who raped and murdered a 14-year-old girl in Iraq. It has strong echoes of his Vietnam War drama Casualties of War.
Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, creators of Thirtysomething and executive producers of My So-Called Life, are making news again with a new series.
It's called Quarterlife, and it's airing not on TV, but in short, six-to-an-hour episodes on the Web. Some pundits are touting it as an alternative for audiences during the ongoing Hollywood writers' strike.
Critic David Bianculli, who's working on the Web himself now at TVWorthWatching.com, has a review.
In a new book, two British investigative journalists dig into the story of Pakistan's clandestine nuclear network — and America's role not just in condoning its ally's nuclear ambitions, but aiding them.
Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark are senior correspondents for the Guardian newspaper; both previously worked for the Sunday Times of London.
Their book is titled Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons.
Norman Mailer's work combined sweeping cultural criticism, erudition and obscenity.
Mailer's 60-year career was full of depth and controversy. The novelist, who died Nov. 10, was often deliberately provocative, says book critic Maureen Corrigan.
And though he made perhaps his strongest impact as an essayist and journalist, Mailer wanted to be remembered as a novelist.
Author Robert Kuttner writes in The Squandering of America that many of the economic policies and regulations established during the New Deal have since been replaced by a more business-friendly free market system. Kuttner is the founder and co-editor of The American Prospect.
Norman Mailer once wrote that before he was 17, he'd formed the desire to be a major writer. That wish certainly came true. One political campaign, two Pulitzer Prizes and an unprecedented level of controversy later, he became a literary grandee unlike any other. This interview originally aired on Oct. 8, 1991.
Big-screen adaptation of the blood-soaked Cormac McCarthy novel is the latest from the creators of Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and Barton Fink.
It stars Josh Brolin as a hunter who finds a stash of cash, Javier Bardem as the psychopath who wants it back, and Tommy Lee Jones as the sheriff who's trying to find out who's leaving bodies all over his jurisdiction.
Political columnist Katha Pollitt gets personal in a new collection of essays. Learning To Drive and Other Life Stories covers a range of topics, from Web-stalking a cheating boyfriend to what she learned about her parents using the Freedom of Information Act.
The Threepenny Opera revolutionized musical theater. Playwright and lyricist Bertolt Brecht, composer Kurt Weill and actress Lotte Lenya created a sensation when their show opened in Berlin in 1928.
Two years later, the great German director G.W. Pabst turned it into a movie, and it's just been released as a Criterion Collection DVD.
The rapper MF Grimm, whose real name is Percy Carey, has written a graphic memoir entitled Sentences: The Life of MF Grimm. He spoke to Terry Gross about his story.
Mary Lillian Ellison, better known as The Fabulous Moolah, died Friday at age 84. She was a wrestler, promoter and trainer on the so-called "lady wrestling" circuit for more than 50 years.
The latest from French filmmaker Barbet Schroeder (Single White Female, Reversal of Fortune) is titled L'Avocat de la Terreur — which is being released in the U.S. as Terror's Advocate.
Culture critic Susan Faludi writes about the gender wars in America; her books Backlash and Stiffed, in particular, have sparked admiration and controversy.
Faludi's latest book, The Terror Dream, is already generating much the same critical reaction. It's an investigation of America's response to Sept. 11, 2001, in terms of the myths and stories our society — in particular, the media — grasped hold of for reassurance after that day's terrorist attacks.
Arrests and protests have followed last week's declaration of martial law in Pakistan, where President Pervez Musharraf has ousted the chief justice and cracked down on dissent
Journalist Ahmed Rashid, a regular guest on Fresh Air, tells Terry Gross that Musharraf's latest gambit could encourage more civil strife — and greater territorial gains by the Taliban.
Rashid reports on Pakistan and Islamic fundamentalism for several Western newspapers. He's also the author of the best-selling book Taliban.
Aliens in America producers David Guarascio and Moses Port and writer Sameer Gardezi talk about their new sitcom. The story follows a young Muslim student from Pakistan on a foreign exchange program living with a Christian family in Wisconsin.
Guarascio and Port worked together previously on Just Shoot Me! and Mad About You.
In his effort to decode the human genome, scientist J. Craig Venter volunteered his own DNA to be analyzed and made publicly available. His autobiography, A Life Decoded — My Genome: My Life details his side of the complicated and bureaucratic race to sequence the human genome.
Venter's early work to decode the genome through private research company Celera Genomics earned him both praise and criticism. His team competed with the National Institutes of Health publicly funded effort, the Human Genome Project.
The expansive new mob drama American Gangster stars Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe. Fresh Air's film critic says it's a whopping overdose of perverse '70s nostalgia, a panoramic portrait of a nation disintegrating from moral rot.
