NPR Programs: Fresh Air Podcast

Kristen Iversen spent her childhood in the 1960s in Colorado near the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons factory, playing in fields that now appear to have been contaminated with plutonium. In Full Body Burden, she investigates the environmental scandal involving nuclear contamination around her childhood home.

Summer is a trying time for introverts, what with the barbecues and the graduations and the picnics by the pool. If you'd always choose a good book over a good party, critic Maureen Corrigan has a list for you.

Comedian Joan Rivers hates a lot of things. Her new book, I Hate Everyone, Starting With Me, details the things Rivers can't stand, from her appearance to obituaries to younger comedians who steal her gigs.

Neil Young talks about his newest album Americana. And Tom Philpott, who covers food and the agricultural industry for Mother Jones, joins Fresh Air's Terry Gross for a wide-ranging discussion about health and other issues affecting the meat industry.

Todd Solondz's newest film is Dark Horse, starring newcomer Jordan Gelber along with Christopher Walken, Mia Farrow and Selma Blair. Critic David Edelstein says the uncomfortable film is a sublime work of art. (Recommended)

"I'm never going to go to Mars but I've helped inspire ... the people who built the rockets and sent our photographic equipment off to Mars," Bradbury told Terry Gross in 1988. The science-fiction writer died Tuesday at the age of 91.

This week, the Library of Congress announced that Natasha Trethewey, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Native Guard, will be the next poet laureate of the United States. Trethewey, a native of Mississippi, is the first Southern poet laureate since 1986.

For decades, San Francisco DJ Cheb i Sabbah has explored numerous fusions and reconfigurations of North African, Middle Eastern and Indian music styles. He's now in the midst of a health crisis, and many of his musician friends are lending support through a benefit album.

Tom Philpott, who covers food and the agricultural industry for Mother Jones, joins Fresh Air's Terry Gross for a wide-ranging discussion about health and other issues affecting the meat industry.

A dark and stormy night, an isolated manor house and a knock at the door all play a part in Sadie Jones' delicious romp of a novel. Set in Edwardian England, it tracks a noble but cash-strapped family whose lavish dinner plans go awry when they're asked to shelter a crowd of refugees.

Kin: Songs By Mary Karr and Rodney Crowell is a new collaboration between Karr, the bestselling author and poet, and the maverick singer-songwriter. Together, they've written 10 songs, which are performed on the album by a variety of singers, including Norah Jones, Rosanne Cash and Emmylou Harris.

Young's latest album with Crazy Horse, Americana, features songs many of us learned as children, like "Oh Susannah" and "Clementine."

Drummer Mike Reed's quartet People, Places and Things was put together to spotlight music written in Chicago in a fertile period between 1954 and 1960. The group has since expanded its mission to include later works, which are included on a new album titled Clean on the Corner.

Louisiana imprisons more people per capita than any other state or country in the world. One out of every 86 adults in the state is behind bars. Times-Picayune reporter Cindy Chang says the state's correctional system has created financial incentives for local sheriffs to keep prisons full.

In The Price of Inequality, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz argues that widely unequal societies don't function effectively or have stable economies. Even the rich will pay a steep price if economic inequalities continue to worsen, he says.