Otsuka has recently been awarded the Carnegie Medal for Excellence for her novel about a Japanese American woman who's lost much of her memory to dementia. Originally broadcast Feb. 22, 2022.

Phone and electric car batteries are made with cobalt mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Cobalt Red author Siddharth Kara describes the conditions for workers as a "horror show."

The Cannes award-winner Close -- about two inseparable teen boys — is for anyone who thought their childhood friendship would last forever. It's a beautiful Belgian film, but takes the easy way out.

Caplan started out on Freaks and Geeks and now plays the narrator of Fleishman Is in Trouble. She says Fleishman seems like a story about a man going through a divorce, but it turns into much more.

Dr. Henry Marsh felt comfortable in hospitals — until he was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. "I was much less self-assured now that I was a patient myself," he says. His book is And Finally.

Jordan Harper's hardboiled plot centers on a "black-bag publicist" who works for a prestige crisis management firm, putting out fires and quieting scandals for Hollywood's elite.

Writer Jeff Guinn draws on new interviews with federal agents and surviving Branch Davidians in his account of the confrontation, which left scores of people dead, including more than 20 children.

The White Lotus star won the 1985 Best Actor Oscar for Amadeus. "I became full of myself," he says, and began turning down film roles — after a while, the phone stopped ringing.

After Hurricane Katrina in 2006, hundreds of workers from India were promised jobs in what labor organizer Saket Soni calls "one of the largest cases of forced labor in modern U.S. history."

The duo have a new album, I Love a Love Song. In 2020, Rachael & Vilray spoke to Fresh Air and played songs from their self-titled debut album, which drew on the music of the '30s and '40s.

Historian Matthew Connelly says government records are marked as classified three times every second — and many of them will never be declassified. His new book is The Declassification Engine.

Based on an actual criminal case in France in which a Senegalese woman killed her baby daughter, Alice Diop's film is rigorous, powerful and crackling with ideas about isolation and colonialism.

Roe author Mary Ziegler has chronicled the legal, political and cultural battles around abortion, and says the debate is far from over: "We're at the very beginning of something very confusing."

Imani Perry says the South can be seen as an "origin point" for the way the nation operates. Her book South to America traces the steps of an enslaved ancestor. Originally broadcast Jan. 25, 2022.

In 2010, Iranian the authorities charged Jafar Panahi with making anti-government propaganda. No Bears, which was filmed in secret, is a brilliant, layered drama — and an idiosyncratic self portrait.