The future of Libya has become a key part in the rapidly changing transformation of the Arab world. On today's Fresh Air, political scientist Marc Lynch explains why the United States and its allies decided to intervene -- and what's at stake for each side.
It's hard to believe that Nick Lowe's second album, Labour of Lust, was out of print for over 20 years. But a new reissue by Yep Roc has remedied that situation. Rock historian Ed Ward says that it's good to have the album -- featuring the tracks "Without Love" and "Cruel to Be Kind" -- back on the shelves.
Mark Olsen and Will Scheffer, who wrote and produced the HBO drama, explain the show's surprise ending -- and why it's going to be hard for them to let their fictive polygamous family go after five seasons.
Tom McCarthy's new comedy stars Paul Giamatti as a suburban lawyer who moonlights as a high school wrestling coach. Critic David Edelstein says the film is "a symphony of marvelous voices" reminiscent of Little Miss Sunshine.
Before he was famous for popularizing bossa nova with "The Girl from Ipanema" in the early 1960s, saxophonist Stan Getz recorded with small jazz groups all through the '50s. Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead says a new reissue shows Getz was one of the best a playing pretty.
Google, Forest Laboratories and other companies shave billions off their taxes by shifting their revenue through countries with lower income tax rates, Bloomberg News reporter Jesse Drucker says.
The director's new sci-fi comedy stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as two guys who hit the highway after Comic-Con -- and pick up an ET on the side of the road. The character-driven laughs depend on your buying into a main character who's entirely computer-generated.
Are doctors rationing health care? Health policy analyst Gregg Bloche says doctors routinely compromise the principles of the Hippocratic Oath when they decided which expensive tests and treatments they can and can't provide, in order to please lawmakers, lawyers and insurance companies.
The master of country soul, Percy Sledge crooned some of the genre's greatest hits, like "When a Man Loves a Woman." Rock historian Ed Ward says a new box set featuring all of Sledge's Atlantic recordings is certainly worth a listen.
Baseball's official historian, John Thorn, sets the record straight on the game's earliest days ...in the 1700s. Yes, that's right, baseball started decades before Abner Doubleday supposedly created the game at Cooperstown -- and it only became popular when professional gamblers took an interest.
Songwriter Hugh Martin, who co-wrote the classic song "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" for Judy Garland's 1944 movie, Meet Me in St. Louis died on Friday. He was 96. Fresh Air remembers Martin with highlights from a 1989 interview.
In Art and Madness, her memoir of the literary 1950s, writer Anne Roiphe describes going into labor by herself in a snowdrift, unable to waker her sleeping playwright husband. Over the years, she learns her own power, charting her course through feminism and a life in art.
Director and screenwriter Tom McCarthy's film Win-Win stars Paul Giamatti as a high school wrestling coach struggling with a moral dilemma. McCarthy, a former wrestler himself, explains why he left the mats in high school and turned to improv comedy.
Frank Calabrese Jr. has written a memoir about brining down his father's murderous Chicago crime family. In Operation Family Secrets, Frank details how he helped the FBI convict his father of several murders by wearing a hidden wire and taping his father's conversations.
Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy appears to tell a simple story -- two people, played by Juliette Binoche and William Shimell, are mistaken for a long-married couple. But there are plot twists that will "ping-pong around your mind for days," says critic David Edelstein.
Pastor Jennifer Knust says that the Bible shouldn't be used as a guidebook for marriage or sexuality because passages related to sex, monogamy, homosexuality and gender roles are more complex and nuanced than popular culture has led us to believe.
The Danish film In a Better World won the 2011 Oscar and Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film. Director Susanne Bier explains how stories from her family's escape from the Holocaust inform her work.
Sam Chwat, a dialect specialist who worked closeley with people in business, politics and the film industry who wanted to lose their regional accents, died last Thursday. in 1994, Chwat explained how he helped clients like Robert DeNiro and Julia Roberts lose their famous accents.
In There is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America, journalist Philip Dray follows the labor movement as it grew out of 19th century uprisings in textile mills. There are several parallels between those historical battles and what is currently going on in Wisconsin, he says.
Marcus Printup isn't the first trumpeter to combined the trumpet and the harp. It's long been an instrument where jazz women could make their mark. A Time for Love is a quiet and cozy album with Printup's wife, harpist Riza Hequibal, but it's never dull.
