Fresh Air's TV critic finds his attention drawn this week to three lavish DVD box sets from three high-impact network TV shows: David Lynch's deliciously eccentric Twin Peaks, the legendary '90s comedy Seinfeld, and the cult-classic teen drama My So-Called Life.
Each is crammed with bonus materials, including lost and deleted scenes, documentaries, and other features.
Clive Stafford Smith is one of just a few people who've had independent access to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay. He's a human rights lawyer representing dozens of the prisoners held there, and he says countless innocent men have been held at Gitmo for years with no meaningful review of the accusations against them. Many of them, he says, have suffered terrible abuse.
In Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side: Seeking Justice in Guantanamo Bay, Smith details the abuses and absurdities of life inside the legal black hole of the prison camp.
Earlier on today's Fresh Air, we heard from Clive Stafford Smith. He's a defense attorney who charges in a new book that numerous innocent men have been held at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo for years with no meaningful review of the accusations against them.
For a different perspective, we're speaking with Capt. Pat McCarthy, the U.S. government's lead counsel in Guantanamo.
James Weinstein, M.D., chairs Dartmouth College's orthopedic-surgery department; he's considered one of the nation's leading experts on low-back pain.
Weinstein says a multi-year study examining different treatments for lumbar disk herniation shows that surgery isn't necessarily a better choice than non-operative treatments. He says that there is little difference in outcomes, and he's an advocate of conservative, non-invasive treatment.
Rock critic Ken Tucker reviews the new soundtrack album for the Bob Dylan biopic Iâm Not There. The movie does not open until November 21, but the 2-disc soundtrack is already available. It features 34 Dylan songs covered by artists including My Morning Jacket and Sonic Youth.
She works in a country where reporters have been harassed, deported, jailed, even tortured. She's subject to all these risks herself — but Peta Thornycroft surrendered her British citizenship and became a Zimbabwean so she could remain in the country and continue to report on the challenges it faces. She's one of the few independent journalists still working in Zimbabwe.
Comedian Jerry Seinfeld last sat down with Fresh Air in September 1987, before his TV series made him an international celebrity.
Now he's back, and in a big way: Bee Movie, the animated comedy he's written and produced for DreamWorks, opens this Friday. (Watch clips.) It's about Barry B. Benson, a bee who learns about life outside the hive — and eventually sues humanity for stealing honey.
Journalist James Fallows, a 25-year veteran of The Atlantic Monthly, is living in China and writing about it. He joins Dave Davies to discuss his recent article "China Makes, The World Takes" — and the booming Chinese factories that are its subject.
Gone Baby Gone, a new film based on the Dennis Lehane novel, stars actor Casey Affleck as a blue-collar private investigator drawn into a child-abduction case. The film is directed by Affleck's movie-star brother, Ben Affleck.
Casey Affleck has also appeared in the American Pie films, Ocean's 11 and its sequels, and Good Will Hunting.
Always politically minded, chess master Garry Kasparov is now running for president of Russia. He's the leader of an opposition coalition known as The Other Russia. He's also published a new book, called How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves, from the Board to the Boardroom.
In 1964, Motown, a black-owned record company in Detroit achieved the nearly impossible goal of dominating the American pop and soul charts. Ed Ward looks back on 1965 and Hip-O Select's "Complete Motown Singles" series.
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, a robbery thriller directed by Sidney Lumet, is perfectly weighted and expertly crafted.
It's a crime-and-punishment story starring Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman as brothers who are desperately in debt; when Hoffman's character talks Hawke's into a scheme to alleviate the cash crunch, events go from very bad to even worse — to as grotesquely awful as possible.
Under Lumet's sympathetic direction, the brothers' anguish gets into the viewer's bloodstream, and the movie transcends melodrama.
In The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea, veteran journalist Steve LeVine writes about the high-stakes political gamesmanship over control of the rich oil resources in that region.
The latest CD from New Orleans trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard is A Tale of God's Will, whose subtitle is "A Requiem for Katrina."
Parts of the recording were heard in Spike Lee's HBO documentary When the Levees Broke. Blanchard, who's scored many films, including Eve's Bayou and Malcolm X, got his start with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers.
He is artistic director for the Thelonious Monk Institute at the University of Southern California.
By the end of The 40 Year Old Virgin, the title character had lost his virginity — and actor Steve Carell had become a star.
The actor, who was a correspondent on Comedy Central's The Daily Show for several years, has gone on to films including Little Miss Sunshine and Evan Almighty, and next summer he'll star as hapless secret agent Maxwell Smart in a Hollywood adaptation of the vintage TV series Get Smart. And of course he's got a central role on NBC's The Office.
In July 2003, newspaper columnist Robert Novak published the name of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame — shortly after Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, wrote an op-ed piece contradicting President Bush's contention that Saddam Hussein had tried to procure yellowcake uranium from the West African nation of Niger.
Once the drummer for the grunge band Nirvana, Dave Grohl formed Foo Fighters after the death of Nirvana's Kurt Cobain in 1994.
Foo Fighters' sixth album, Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace, includes a song Grohl wrote for two miners who, trapped in an Australia mine collapse, asked rescuers to send down an iPod loaded with Foo Fighters songs. Grohl sent them a note, then met with one of the miners after they were rescued.
Fresh Air film critic David Edelstein reviews the clunky but stirring melodrama Rendition.
The film stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Reese Witherspoon, Omar Metwally and Meryl Streep. It's about an Egypt-born U.S. resident who gets detained by the CIA and shipped off to be tortured in an unnamed North African country.
The three-day March on the Pentagon in October 1967 inspired Norman Mailer to write Armies of the Night and stirred many to action. While the march 40 years ago cannot be considered a turning point in the anti-war movement in the 1960s, it did serve to galvanize opposition to the Vietnam War.
