Radio Programs

Charlottesville, Virginia, hasn't fully recovered from a violent white supremacist rally more than a year ago.

The rise of opioid overdoses is prompting a group in Maine to take action - by handing out clean supplies to users. But is the group's work illegal?  The uncommon beliefs of The Church of Safe Injection on the Morning Edition.

Dr. Louise Aronson says the U.S. doesn't have nearly enough geriatricians — physicians devoted to the health and care of older people: "There may be maybe six or seven thousand geriatricians," she says.

President Trump said Wednesday that he would accept a foreign government's dirt on a 2020 rival. A look at foreign election interference — the focus of the Mueller report — and opposition research.

Terry Gross talks about Frederick Douglass with David Blight, a Douglass scholar and the author of a new biography.

On the next Fresh Air, a conversation about Nancy Pelosi, one of the most powerful Democrats in Washington, who is once again lobbying to become speaker of the house.

It was 75 years ago when thousands of allied paratroopers took to the air, boarded planes, and dropped behind enemy lines.

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. My guest Erin Lee Carr has written a memoir about being the daughter of David Carr, The New York Times' media columnist who had a large and devoted following, including me.

On the next Fresh Air, we continue our holiday series of favorite interviews of the year with British singer Tracey Thorn.

Russia is still holding former U-S Marine Paul Whelan in Moscow on espionage charges.

The title character in the coolly engrossing new movie Luceis a high school student who seems exemplary from every angle. Played in a remarkable performance by Kelvin Harrison Jr., Luce Edgar is handsome and popular, an academic and athletic star who gives inspiring speeches at school assemblies.

In a small town high up in the mountains of Puerto Rico, a cemetery devastated by Hurricane Maria is still closed - forcing some desperate residents to exhume the bodies of their deceased loved ones on their own.

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, editor of the website TV Worth Watching, sitting in for Terry Gross. This week marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Mario Puzo's "The Godfather.

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. One hundred years ago today, on October 5, jazz virtuoso Jimmy Blanton was born in Chattanooga, Tenn.

Last year, 33-year-old Walker Hughes — who has autism and is minimally verbal — was rushed to the hospital after he tried a new medication that made him agitated.

"We're driving at rush hour and my sweet guy is screaming and grabbing me and we're just scared to death," Walker's mom, Ellen Hughes, now 69, said in a StoryCorps interview recorded in February.

Growing up, neuroscientist Judith Grisel would take little sips of alcohol at family events, but it wasn't until she was 13 that she experienced being drunk for the first time. Everything changed.

Kelly O'Brien graduated from college six years ago with a political science degree and $28,000 in student loan debt.

"It was stressful, because coming out and having to have a payment of about $217 a month, it just seemed like a lot of money to pay back when you don't really know where you were going to be working, how much you're going to be making," she says.

Valeria Luiselli is on to readers like me, readers with a skeptical attitude toward novels ripped from today's headlines. I always wonder whether the social commentary in such fiction will be its big selling point, compensating for a thinly imagined, overly reportorial narrative.

One year after multiple sexual harassment allegations took down celebrity chef John Besh, his New Orleans restaurant empire is trying to rebuild its culture.

This year brought one of the worst attacks against the Jewish community in the U.S.

Even therapists need someone to talk to sometimes. Lori Gottlieb is a psychotherapist who started seeing a therapist herself five years ago, when the man she thought she would marry unexpectedly broke up with her, shattering her sense of the present and the future.

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. After pledging to never make an album of Christmas songs, my guest, roots and rockabilly musician JD McPherson, has broken that promise.

For many people in Venezuela suffering from shortages of food and medicine, a lifeline runs from Miami through companies like VKE Cargo. It's a storefront and a small warehouse located in Doral, a Miami suburb.

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. The new film "Monsters And Men" tells the stories of three Brooklyn men, played by Anthony Ramos, John David Washington and Kelvin Harrison Jr.

When Joshua Mezrich was a medical student on the first day of surgical rotation, he was called into the operating room to witness a kidney transplant.

What he saw that day changed him.

In many parts of Texas, the people love God, country, and football. One community has been facing the issue of football players protesting police brutality during the national anthem.

On the next Fresh Air – for Thanksgiving a performance by and conversations with songwriter and singer Robbie Fulks and singer and pianist Linda Gail Lewis, Jerry Lee Lewis’s younger sister.

A tide of plastic waste is contaminating the oceans. And in Southeast Asia, as companies dump new products and packaging on their shores, they're desperate to stop the flow.

After the NRA tweeted “self-important anti-gun doctors should stay in their lane”, trauma surgeon Joseph Sakran started the twitter handle This is our Lane, which has mobilized doctors around the issue of gun safety.

For trauma surgeon Joseph Sakran, gun violence is a very personal issue. He has treated hundreds of gun wound victims, comforted anxious loved ones and told mothers and fathers that their children would not be coming home.

The men and women from eight African countries packed into a rubber raft late last month and set off from the Libyan city of Sabratha in the hope of crossing the Mediterranean to reach Italy.

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Aaron Lee Tasjan is a singer-songwriter currently residing in Nashville, but he's not a country artist.

Former President Barack Obama released a video earlier this week urging people to hurry up and shop for health insurance on the Affordable Care Act exchange.

"This year I'm giving it to you straight," Obama says in the video.