Fresh Air

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• 'America In Laos' Traces The Militarization Of The CIA
  NPR Fresh Air, 1/23/2017 In the '60s, the CIA began a secret program that aimed to curb Communism by arming and training local fighters in Laos. Dave Davies interviews Joshua Kurlantzick, author of "A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA", who characterizes the US campaign as "the largest covert operation in US history."
• 'Black Edge' Recounts The Biggest Insider-Trading Scandal In History (35 min)
  NPR, Fresh Air, Feb 7, 2017. Host Dave Davies. Sheelah Kolhatkar discusses the investigation of billionaire hedge-fund trader Steven A. Cohen. She says the ways Wall Street elites accumulate wealth often negatively affect the rest of the country.
• 'Boys & Sex' Reveals That Young Men Feel 'Cut Off From Their Hearts'
  Fresh Air, with Terry Gross, Jan 7, 2020
  Author Peggy Orenstein's new book, Boys & Sex, is based on extensive interviews with more than 100 college and college-bound boys and young men across the U.S. between the ages of 16 and 22 on intimacy, consent and navigating masculinity. They spanned a broad range of races, religions, classes and sexual orientations.
• 'Girls & Sex' And The Importance Of Talking To Young Women About Pleasure (37 min)
  Fresh Air, with Terry Gross, March 29, 2016
  While researching her new book, Girls & Sex, Peggy Orenstein spoke with more than 70 young women between the ages of 15 and 20 about their attitudes and early experiences with the full range of physical intimacy.
  She says that pop culture and pornography sexualize young women by creating undue pressure to look and act sexy. These pressures affect both the sexual expectations that girls put on themselves and the expectations boys project onto them.
• 'Glass House' Chronicles The Sharp Decline Of An All-American Factory Town (30 min)
  NPR Fresh Air, Feb 6, 2017 Lancaster native Brian Alexander chronicles the rise and fall of his hometown in his new book, Glass House. "People are genuinely struggling," he tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies. "The economy of the town is struggling, not because there's high unemployment, [but] because the employment that there is all minimum wage, or even lower than minimum wage." (Includes text of interview highlights.)
• 'One Nation Under Gold' Explores America's Obsession With One Precious Metal (37 min)
  Fresh Air, NPR, June 26, 2017. How One Precious Metal Has Dominated the American Imagination for Four Centuries. Host Dave Davies interviews James Ledbetter, author of One Nation Under Gold, who says many of the nation's worst economic catastrophes happened while on the gold standard. His new book traces the fascination with gold as a symbol of permanence and quality.
• 'Punishment Without Crime' Highlights The Injustice Of America's Misdemeanor System
  WHYY Fresh Air, Jan 2, 2019. Terry Gross speaks with former federal public defender Alexandra Natapoff says 13 million misdemeanors are filed each year in the U.S., trapping the innocent, punishing the poor and making society more unequal. Natapoff authored the new book Punishment Without Crime How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal. Includes transcript.
• 'Squeezed' Explores Why America Is Getting Too Expensive For The Middle Class (22 min)
  WFMY Fresh Air, 6/26/2018. Terry Gross interviews Alissa Quart, author of the new book, Squeezed: Why Our Families Can' t Afford America, that explains that the costs of housing, child care, health care and college are outpacing salaries and threatening the livelihoods of middle class Americans.
• *'Kochland': How The Koch Brothers Changed U.S. Corporate And Political Power (40 min)
  In his new book, Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America, Christopher Leonard chronicles how Koch Industries acquired huge businesses, limited its liability and created a political influence network to remake the GOP. Terry Gross interviews Leonard on Fresh Air.
• *Whistleblower Explains How Cambridge Analytica Helped Fuel U.S. 'Insurgency' (36 min)
  Fresh Air, with Terry Gross. October 8, 2019
  When Christopher Wylie first began working for the British behavioral research company SCL Group, the company used data drawn from a number of sources as a means of potentially altering outcomes for their, sometimes military, clients.
  But over time, Wylie's mission — and that of the company — expanded. Conservative strategist Steve Bannon, who later worked in President Trump's White House, became involved with the SCL subsidiary Cambridge Analytica. Wylie, who served as Cambridge Analytica's research director for a year and a half, watched as his group began to use of data from Facebook and other online sources to target users for disinformation campaigns. Transcript available.
• A Former Neo-Nazi Explains Why Hate Drew Him In — And How He Got Out (44 min)
  NPR WHYY Fresh Air, Jan. 18, 2018. Host Dave Davies interviews Christian Picciolini, who was 14 years old when he attended the first gathering of what would become the Hammerskin Nation, a violent, white-power skinhead group. Looking back, he describes his introduction to the group as receiving a "lifeline of acceptance." In 2011 co-founded Life After Hate, a nonprofit that counsels members of hate groups and helps them disengage. He has recently authored a book, White American Youth: My Descent into America's Most Violent Hate Movement - And How I Got Out
• A Trauma Surgeon Who Survived Gun Violence Is Taking On The NRA
  WFMY Fresh Air, November 28, 2018 Terry Gross talks with trauma surgeon Joseph Sakran, director of emergency general surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and a survivor of a gunshot to his throat when he was a high school student. Sakran has treated hundreds of gun wound victims and initiated a Twitter hashtag @ThisIsOurLane.
• Climate Change Journalist Warns: 'Mother Nature Is Playing By Different Rules Now' (37 min)
  NPR Fresh Air, Oct 24, 2017. Terry Gross interviews author Jeff Goodell, who writes that American cities are under threat from extreme weather, rising sea levels and lax enforcement of environmental regulations. His new book is The Water Will Come.
• Experts Suspect Russia Is Using Ukraine As A Cyberwar Testing Ground
  Fresh Air with Terry Gross. WFMY, NPR. June 22, 2017 Wired's Andy Greenberg says Ukraine has been the victim of a "cyber-assault unlike any the world has ever seen." Cybersecurity experts think Russia is perfecting attacks that could be used on the U.S. Article in Wired: https://www.wired.com/story/russian-hackers-attack-ukraine/
• Fresh Air: How One Man Brought Justices Roberts, Alito And Gorsuch To The Supreme Court (38 min)
  Fresh Air, with Terry Gross, April 12, 2017. New Yorker staff writer Jeffrey Toobin discusses Leonard Leo, the conservative lawyer who is responsible, to a considerable extent, for one third of the justices on the Supreme Court.
• Fresh Air: How U.S. Health Care Became Big Business (36 min)
  Terry Gross, Fresh Air, April 10, 2017 Health care is a trillion-dollar industry in America, but are we getting what we pay for? Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal, a medical journalist who formerly worked as a medical doctor, warns that the existing system too often focuses on financial incentives over health or science. Rosenthal's new book, An American Sickness, examines the deeply rooted problems of the existing health-care system and also offers suggestions for a way forward.
• Fresh Air - A Childhood Of Transcendental Meditation, Spent In The 'Shadow Of A Guru'
  June 13, 2016 Author Claire Hoffman estimates that she's spent at least 2,200 hours of her life meditating — but not because she became a devotee of the practice as an adult. Her mother was a follower of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and Hoffman spent most of her childhood in a community in Fairfield, Iowa that was devoted to Transcendental Meditation. Hoffman, who writes about her unusual upbringing in the new memoir Greetings from Utopia Park, tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies that moving to the utopian community from New York City when she was kindergarten-aged was idyllic — at least initially.
• Fresh Air - An Addict, Now Clean, Discusses Needle Exchanges And 'Hope After Heroin'
  An Addict, Now Clean, Discusses Needle Exchanges And 'Hope After Heroin' NPR, Fresh Air, March 8, 2016 "When she was 17, Tracey Helton Mitchell was prescribed an opioid pain killer after getting her wisdom teeth extracted. The medicine helped her deal with the pain related to the extraction, but when the prescription ran out, her desire for its euphoric high remained. That's when she turned to heroin. "As a teenager, Mitchell imagined heroin to be glamorous, but she found it wasn't once she became an addict. She tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that the drug ruined her health and her self-esteem. She lived in an alley, shot drugs into the bottom of her feet, sold her body for money and was jailed several times. She was also featured in a 1999 documentary about addicts called Black Tar Heroin."
• Fresh Air - Eating Yogurt Is Not Enough: Rebalancing The Ecosystem Of 'The Microbes Within Us' (37 min)
  NPR Fresh Air, August 18, 2016 Terry Gross interviews Ed Yong, author of "I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life" Includes transcript
• Fresh Air - How Free Web Content Traps People In An Abyss Of Ads And Clickbait
  Fresh Air, Oct 17, 2016 If you feel like Internet ads are more pervasive and invasive than ever before, you're not alone. Author Tim Wu tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that the Web has gotten worse over the years, not better — and unrelenting ads are to blame. "I think you spend 50 percent of your mental energy trying to defeat ad systems," Wu says. "It's amazing that we've got this great scientific invention, the Web and the Internet, and then it has come to the point where using it reminds me of swatting mosquitoes."
• Fresh Air - The 'Racial Cleansing' That Drove 1,100 Black Residents Out Of Forsyth County, Ga.
  Fresh Air, September 15, 2016 In 1912, white mobs set fire to black churches and black-owned businesses. Eventually the entire black population of Forsyth County was driven out, says Blood at the Root author Patrick Phillips.
• Fresh Air - Understanding Congressional Gerrymandering: 'It's Moneyball Applied To Politics'
  Fresh Air, with Dave Davies, June 15, 2016 "Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy" author David Daley says that Republicans targeted key state legislative races in 2010 in an effort to control state houses, and, eventually, Congressional redistricting. "So in Wisconsin, the operatives working on redistricting barricaded themselves into a law firm across the street from the Capitol and tried to claim attorney-client privilege for all of the negotiations and mapmaking that were going on. And they even made Republican members of the legislature there sign a nondisclosure agreement if they wanted access to the room. In North Carolina, they bring in a master mapmaker named Tom Hofeller, who is probably better at jiggering and rejiggering district lines than anybody. And they draw maps in North Carolina that give Republicans a 10-3 advantage on the congressional side." [From Transcript]
• Harassed On Twitter: 'People Need To Know The Reality Of What It's Like Out There'
  Terry Gross, Oct. 26, 2016 After he criticized Trump and the alt right, National Review writer David French was bombarded with hateful tweets — including an image of his child in a gas chamber. "It was unbelievable," he says. (Transcript available)
• How America's White Power Movement Coalesced After The Vietnam War (37 min)
  NPR WFMY Fresh Air, 4/25/2018. Host Terry Gross speaks with Kathleen Belew, who has spent more than 10 years studying America's White Power movement. Belew traces the movement's rise to the end of the Vietnam War and the feeling among some "white power" veterans that the country had betrayed them.
• How For-Profit Colleges Sell 'Risky Education' To The Most Vulnerable (43 min)
  NPR Fresh Air. For-profit colleges have faced federal and state investigations in recent years for their aggressive recruiting tactics — accusations that come as no surprise to author Tressie McMillan Cottom. Cottom worked as an enrollment officer at two different for-profit colleges, but quit because she felt uncomfortable selling students an education they couldn't afford. Her new book, Lower Ed, argues that for-profit colleges exploit racial, gender and economic inequality. Cottom tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that for-profit institutions tend to focus their recruiting on students who qualify for the maximum amount of student aid. "That happens to be the poorest among us," she says. "And because of how our society is set up, the poorest among us tend to be women and people of color."
• How San Francisco's D.A. Is Decreasing The Jail Population Amid COVID-19 (39 min)
  Fresh Air, with Terry Gross, April 9, 2020 (includes transcript)
  Chesa Boudin's radical leftist parents were imprisoned when he was a toddler. Now he's working to reduce the inmate population in San Francisco — and worrying about his dad, who remains in prison.
• How The Systemic Segregation Of Schools Is Maintained By 'Individual Choices'
  NPR Fresh Air, January 16, 2017 Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that when it comes to school segregation, separate is never truly equal. "There's never been a moment in the history of this country where black people who have been isolated from white people have gotten the same resources," Hannah-Jones says. "They often don't have the same level of instruction. They often don't have strong principals. They often don't have the same technology." Still, when it was time for Hannah-Jones' daughter, Najya, to attend kindergarten, the journalist chose the public school near their home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, even though its students were almost all poor and black or Latino. Hannah-Jones later wrote about that decision in The New York Times Magazine. Before she joined The New York Times to cover racial injustice, Nikole Hannah-Jones was an award-winning reporter at Propublica.
• In Many Ways, Author Says, Spanish Civil War Was 'The First Battle Of WWII'
  NPR Fresh Air, with Terry Gross, March 28, 2016 Nearly 80 years ago, about 2,800 Americans volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War. The war began in July 1936, when Gen. Francisco Franco led a fascist military coup against the the country's newly elected democratic government. It lasted until Franco's victory in 1939. Journalist Adam Hochschild tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that "it was by far the largest number of Americans before or since who've ever joined somebody else's civil war." Hochschild chronicles Americans' involvement in the war in his new book, Spain in Our Hearts. He says that the majority of Americans in Spain (including writer Ernest Hemingway, who reported on the conflict) were sympathetic to the Republican forces who fought against Franco's Nationalists. . . . But Hochschild points out that not all Americans opposed Franco's regime. For instance, Torkild Rieber, CEO of Texaco, helped Franco by providing his military with a steady and guaranteed supply of oil. "[Rieber] violated American law in a couple of ways," Hochschild says. "U.S. neutrality legislation was pretty strict and said that if you were selling anything to a country at war the oil couldn't travel on American ships, but he shipped it on Texaco tankers."
• In New Political Warfare, 'Armies Of Video Trackers' Swarm Candidates (37 min)
  In New Political Warfare, 'Armies Of Video Trackers' Swarm Candidates Heard on Fresh Air, May 26, 20161:16 PM ET Transcript available. New Yorker writer Jane Mayer discusses conservative activist James O'Keefe's latest botched sting operation, and the new kind of political opposition research O'Keefe pioneered.
• Is America Engaged In A 'Vicious Circle' Of Jailing The Poor?
  Fresh Air, May 11, 2016 According to a report by the Vera Institute for Justice, there are more than 3,000 local jails in America, holding more than 730,000 people on any given day. Nancy Fishman, a project director at the Vera Institute, tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that jails "have impacted a huge number of Americans ... many more than are impacted by state prisons."
• Journalist: As U.S. Retreats From World Stage, China Moves To Fill The Void (43 min)
  WHYY Fresh Air, with Terry Gross, January 3, 2018 (includes transcript) New Yorker journalist Evan Osnos says Chinese leaders think of President Trump as a "paper tiger" who makes promises he can't deliver and who can be "managed" with flattery.
• Journalist Charts The 'Bizarre Twists And Turns' Of The Trump-Russia Dossier
  Fresh Air, with Terry Gross. March 6, 2018 As the investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election continues, more and more attention has focused on the infamous Russia dossier on Donald Trump compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele. NPR has not detailed the contents of the dossier because it remains unverified, but journalist Jane Mayer has written a cover story about its origins for The New Yorker.
• Journalist Jane Mayer On The 'Many Mysteries' In The Accusations Against Al Franken (43 min)
  WFYY Fresh Air, with Terry Gross, 7/25/2019
  The New Yorker reporter recently did a deep dive into the accusations of sexual misconduct that led to Sen. Franken's 2017 resignation. Jane Mayer says the chief accuser's story is full of holes. Audio and transcript.
• Journalist says Republicans now have more reliable ways to overturn election results
  WFYY, Fresh Air, December 9, 20211
  Terry Gross interviews Atlantic journalist Bart Gellman, who writes that the Republican party is increasingly unwilling to accept defeat and, in fact, is "prepared to win by sacrificing the essential elements of democracy."
• LGBTQ Activist Cleve Jones: 'I'm Well Aware How Fragile Life Is'
  Fresh Air, Nov. 29, 2016 Longtime activist Cleve Jones has dedicated his life to working with members of the LGBTQ community, but growing up he felt like the only gay person in the world. He tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that he felt so isolated as a teenager that he considered suicide. Then he read about the gay liberation movement in Life magazine and his outlook changed.
• Memoirist: Evangelical Purity Movement Sees Women's Bodies As A 'Threat' (43 min)
  September 18, 2018. Heard on Fresh Air. Terry Gross interviews Linda Kay Klein, who is the founder of Break Free Together, an organization that tries to help people escape the sexual shame from their upbringing. Her new memoir is Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free. Includes transcript.
• Michael Lewis: Trump's Approach To Government Shows 'Neglect And Misunderstanding'
  WFMY Fresh Air, October 2, 2018. Terry Gross interviews journalist Michael Lewis about his new book, "The Fifth Risk" about the federal government under President Trump. Lewis wrote the best-sellers "Moneyball," and "The Big Short," and "The Undoing Project."
• New Muhammad Ali Biography Reveals A Flawed Rebel Who Loved Attention (37 min)
  Fresh Air, October 4, 2017, Host: Dave Davies interviews Jonathan Eig, who spent four years learning about Ali by interviewing the late boxer's associates and former wives, and poring over previously unreleased FBI and Justice Department files. His new book, Ali: A Life, chronicles Ali's remarkable boxing career, his role as a social critic and his colorful and often chaotic personal life.
• NPR Fresh Air - 'Narconomics': How The Drug Cartels Operate Like Wal-Mart And McDonald's (36 min)
  'Narconomics': How The Drug Cartels Operate Like Wal-Mart And McDonald's NPR Fresh Air, with Terry Gross. February 15, 2016 "When Tom Wainwright became the Mexico correspondent for The Economist in 2010, he found himself covering the country's biggest businesses, including the tequila trade, the oil industry and the commerce of illegal drugs."
• NRA-Backed Gun Laws Have Found Success In State Legislatures Across The U.S. (31 min)
  NPR Fresh Air, with Terry Gross, Oct. 5, 2017 Journalist Mike Spies says the NRA's push to allow guns on college campuses, daycare centers and bars is part of an effort to "normalize gun carrying as much as possible in American public life."
• Republican Voter Suppression Efforts Are Targeting Minorities, Journalist Says
  Fresh Air, NPR, October 23, 2018, with Terry Gross. Since the 2010 elections, 24 states have implemented new restrictions on voting. Alabama now requires a photo ID to cast a ballot. Other states such as Ohio and Georgia have enacted "use it or lose it" laws, which strike voters from registration rolls if they have not participated in an election within a prescribed period of time. Mother Jones journalist Ari Berman, author of Give Us the Ballot, says that many of the restrictions are part of a broader Republican strategy to tighten access to the ballot — an effort that was bolstered in 2013 by the Supreme Court's Shelby County v. Holder ruling.
• Terry Gross, Conversation Starter
  WAMU 1A, Nov. 23, 2018. Joshua Johnson, host of NPR's 1A, and Terry Gross, host of Fresh Air on NPR for 43 years and winner of the Peabody Award and Edward R. Murrow Award, recently sat down to talk about how they do what they do - a conversation between conversationalists.
• The 'Weaponization' Of Social Media — And Its Real-World Consequences (36 min)
  WHYY Fresh Air, October 9, 2018. Host Dave Davies speaks with P.W. Singer and Emerson Brooking about Like War: The Weaponization of Social Media, their new book in which they write that social media have been manipulated to fuel popular uprisings and affect the course of military and political campaigns through the use of deceptive messages disseminated by bots.
• The History Of American Imperialism, From Bloody Conquest To Bird Poop (37 min)
  WHYY, Fresh Air, with host Dave Davies, February 18, 2019. Includes transcript.
  Historian Daniel Immerwahr shares surprising stories of U.S. territorial expansion, including how the desire for bird guano compelled the seizure of remote islands. His book is How to Hide an Empire.
• The Twitter Paradox: How A Platform Designed For Free Speech Enables Internet Trolls
  Terry Gross, Oct 26, 2016 Charlie Warzel, who covers technology for BuzzFeed, has written a series of articles about Twitter's response to hate speech. He says the platform's community guidelines are enforced haphazardly. (Transcript available)
• The U.S. Has An 'Active Cyber War Underway' To Thwart The North Korean Nuclear Threat
  NPR, Fresh Air, March 29, 2017 Dave Davies interviews New York Times reporter David Sanger talks about North Korea's nuclear program and warns that the regime, which has been "fodder for late night comedians for many many years," is no joke.
• Voting Restrictions Are Further Politicizing U.S. Electoral System, Journalist Says
  May 27, 2021
  Terry Gross interviews NY Times reporter Nick Corasaniti says Republican-led state legislatures are restricting voting and seizing more power over how elections are run — making previously non-partisan jobs political (includes transcript).