Terry Gross

After co-starring in HBO's Watchmen, Smart is now in two series — HBO's Mare of Easttown and the HBO Max comedy series Hacks, about the clash in sensibility between women comics of two generations.

The son of a Jewish father and a Guatemalan mother, Goldman grew up mostly in working class suburbs of Boston. His new novel draws on his own experiences, including being physically abused by his dad

Director Barry Jenkin's new series is based on Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about an enslaved teenage girl who escapes from a brutal Georgia plantation. He says it was the most difficult undertakings of his career.

There is a 30-year gap in the life expectancies of Black and white Chicagoans depending on their ZIP code. Journalist Linda Villarosa says the disparity in life expectancies has its roots in government-sanctioned policies that systematically extracted wealth from Black neighborhoods — and eroded the health of generations of people. She writes about her family's own story in The New York Times Magazine article "Black Lives Are Shorter in Chicago. My Family's History Shows Why."

Bechdel's new graphic memoir is about her lifelong obsession with exercise. She says she has a "predisposition of being extremely self-conscious and very caught up in my head" — and exercise helps.

SUZANNE SIMARD says trees are "social creatures" that communicate with each other in cooperative ways that hold lessons for humans too. Simard grew up in Canadian forests as a descendant of loggers before becoming a forestry ecologist. She's now a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia. She explains her research on cooperation and symbiosis in the forest, and shares her personal story in the new memoir Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest.

When Nicole Lynn Lewis got pregnant in high school, she thought it might end her dream of going to college and having a career. She felt ashamed, in part because of how people regarded her as a pregnant Black teenager. Lewis, who is now in her 40s, was named a CNN Hero in 2014. Last year, she was named one of the inaugural awardees of the Black Voices for Black Justice Fund in recognition of her work addressing structural and systemic racism in America. Her new memoir is called Pregnant Girl: A Story of Teen Motherhood, College, and Creating a Better Future for Young Families.

Winslet stars in the new HBO series, Mare of Easttown. She spoke to Fresh Air in 2020 about her breakout turn in Titanic when she was in her 20s. "I was learning on the fly," she says.

Mbue's novel was inspired in part by her own experiences growing up in Cameroon. Set in a fictional African village in the 1980s, it follows a group of villagers who take on an American oil company.

ATC creator Bill Siemering and Susan Stamberg who co-anchored ATC from 1972 to 1986 reflect on the early days of All Things Considered. Siemering says he wanted that first broadcast — and the ones that would follow — to offer a different take on the news: "I wanted to hear voices that aren't heard generally on the air and to have first-person accounts of these things."