Radio Programs

This summer, musician Katie Sucha will be touring England. And she's scared.

"It really is a serious mental challenge to walk through those doors and get on the plane," she explains. Sucha's fear of flying is so bad that when she was a teacher in Mississippi and wanted to visit her family in Michigan, she'd take a 14-hour bus ride rather than spend two hours in the air.

With new enforcement priorities under the Trump administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are taking aim at employers that knowingly hire unauthorized immigrants. The most recent — and largest — bust happened at a trailer manufacturing plant in northeast Texas.

Temple Rodef Shalom in Falls Church, Va., is one of many Jewish congregations across the country that have been helping to resettle refugees in America.

Three years ago, its members agreed to sponsor a Muslim refugee — a single mother named Tilko who fled Iraq with her children and who was originally brought to this country by a Christian charity.

In February, Pope Francis acknowledged a longstanding dirty secret in the Roman Catholic Church — the sexual abuse of nuns by priests.

It's an issue that had long been kept under wraps, but in the #MeToo era, a #NunsToo movement has emerged, and now sexual abuse is more widely discussed.

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. My guest Mary Pipher has written a new book about women in their 60s and early 70s who, like her, are transitioning from middle age to old age.

Aidy Bryant mourns the time she lost in her teens and early 20s feeling self-conscious about her body. The Emmy-nominated comic and actor says she lived in fear of judgments about her weight.

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. On Sunday, Alan Alda will receive the life achievement award from the Screen Actors Guild.

NOEL KING, HOST:

Financier Jeffrey Epstein has a bail hearing today in Manhattan federal court. He faces allegations that he sexually exploited and abused dozens of minor girls and that he paid some of them to recruit other girls for him to abuse.

On the next Fresh Air, Terry talks with Alex Kotlowitz, who followed the lives of two boys in a Chicago housing project for his 1991 book There Are No Children Here.

Algorithms were around for a very long time before the public paid them any notice. The word itself is derived from the name of a 9th-century Persian mathematician, and the notion is simple enough: an algorithm is just any step-by-step procedure for accomplishing some task, from making the morning coffee to performing cardiac surgery.

A federal judge in Texas has ruled the all-male military draft is unconstitutional because women now serve in combat roles. The judge called the male-only draft discriminatory.

Same day delivery? Some online shoppers want their goods within an hour. And now they can get a package delivered just that quickly - thanks, in part, to robots.

Venezuelans have been suffering one calamity to the next, but in recent weeks, much of the country has had to go long stretches without electricity.

New York Times journalist Nicholas Casey was in Maracaibo, Venezuela, in March when a six-day blackout hit, considered at the time the worst in the country's history.

I've been waiting for Tony Horwitz to write another big on-the-road book that crisscrosses the American cultural divide ever since his bestseller, Confederates in the Attic, came out in 1998.

For those who haven't read it, Confederates in the Attic is a revelatory and very funny first person travelogue in which Horwitz roams the South, talking to battlefield reenactors and members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, in order to grasp what he calls America's "unfinished" Civil War.

Here's an SAT word for you: "aptronym." An aptronym is a proper name that's especially "apt" for describing the person who bears it. Take Usain Bolt, the bolt-of-lighting Jamaican sprinter, or the poet William Wordsworth.