On his new album, The 3dom Factor, Altschul is great at mixing opposites: abstract melodic concepts with parade beats, open improvising and percolating swing. The album is the sort of comeback that reminds you how much good music the artist made the first time around.
Shereen El Feki spent five years traveling across the Arab region asking people about sex: what they do, what they don't, what they think and why. Her ambition was to learn about the intimate lives of people in the Middle East, and how the sexual aspects of their lives reflect larger shifts.
The celebration of Philip Roth's career reaches its peak in a new documentary — Philip Roth Unmasked — that will screen on PBS next week as part of the American Masters series. There's no doubt that Roth is a master, and not just an American one, but the film tiptoes around the novelist's dark ferocity.
On his first album since 2006, The 20/20 Experience, Justin Timberlake explores his range, from soul-man groove to falsetto croon, taking inspiration from neo-soul and the expansiveness of '60s and '70s rock song formats.
On the 10-year anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, journalist Aaron Glantz talks about the challenges American service members face in accessing disability and other benefits. Glantz says there is a backlog of 900,000 claims and that the average waiting period is 273 days.
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.
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.
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.
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."