In 2011, Emily Rapp's baby was diagnosed with Tay-Sachs disease, a genetic, degenerative condition with no cure. He died just shy of his third birthday. In her new memoir, The Still Point of the Turning World, Rapp writes about what it's like to care for a terminally ill child.
Jane Campion directs a new Sundance Channel miniseries, Top of the Lake, about a young New Zealand detective played by Mad Men's Elisabeth Moss. Meanwhile, producers from Lost and Friday Night Lights team up to create a prequel to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, called Bates Motel.
The director of Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood talks to Fresh Air's Terry Gross about The Master, a tense drama with indelible performances from Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams.
Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers, Sally Potter's Ginger & Rosa and Cristian Mungiu's Beyond the Hills are wildly different films, yet they share a common impulse: to demonstrate indelibly how for girls, behaving outrageously is still a political act.
Before he became the guitarist for ZZ Top, Billy Gibbons was in a band called the Moving Sidewalks that just missed its shot at stardom. The album the Moving Sidewalks never released in the late 1960s was released in late 2012 and is very much a period piece, albeit a very well-made one.
Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia explores life in the modern megalopolis and the growing scarcity of clean water. In search of his fortune, Hamid's protagonist lands on a scam to boil and sell tap water as bottled mineral water in a novel that takes inspiration from self-help books.
Science journalist Emily Anthes talks about how scientists are engineering mice with tumors and working to create pigs that can grow organs for human transplant and insects that could serve as drones for the military.
Enlightened's writer, Mike White, says the show's whistle-blowing plot line was inspired, in part, by his own father's experience. In a new memoir, the catcher opens up about feuding with Roger Clemens and retiring from the game. Bowie's new album plays like a collection of discreet singles.
Kevin Cullen and Shelley Murphy have a new book about the Boston gangster Whitey Bulger. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Moss' new book goes inside the world of processed, packaged goods. Geoff Nunberg says a historical novel or screenplay should give us a translation, not a transcription.
The Robert Zemeckis film, out now on DVD, stars Denzel Washington as a pilot with a secret substance-abuse problem who successfully crash-lands an airplane while high on drugs and alcohol. He must then ask himself tough questions about whether his heroism is undermined by his addiction.
In highlights from a 2008 interview, the Oscar-winner talks with Terry Gross about reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which he calls "one of the greatest books I've ever read," and his love for the songs from The Wizard of Oz. He even sings a bar or two of "Follow the Yellow Brick Road."
Marisa Silver's new novel imagines the meeting of a Depression-era photographer and her now-iconic subject. Giving the characters different names but similar stories to their real-life counterparts, Silver tackles big questions about the morality of art.
Director Dror Moreh interviews six former heads of the Israel's Shin Bet security service in his Oscar-nominated documentary. The men look back on their work and conclude that continued Israeli occupation of the Palestinians will not resolve the conflict.
Known for his work in New Klezmer Trio, clarinetist Ben Goldberg has just released two new albums for different quintets: Subatomic Particle Homesick Blues and Unfold Ordinary Mind.
The debut album from the New York trio Guards is big on atmospherics, but also features a grandness of intent that connects the group to acts as varied as U2, Arcade Fire and The Beach Boys.