Fresh Air

The Nobel Prize-winning novelist's new book, 'Klara and the Sun,' is set in the future and has an artificially intelligent narrator. "I wanted some of that childlike freshness and openness and naivety to survive all the way through the text in her," he says. We talk about his writing process, hitchhiking in the '60s, and his family history in Nagasaki.

Ken Tucker reviews Julien Baker's third studio album, 'Little Oblivions.'

'New York Times' tech columnist Kevin Roose says we've been approaching automation all wrong. "What we should be teaching people is to be more like humans, to do the things that machines can't do," he says. We talk about misconceptions about A.I, how algorithms decide who gets government assistance, and which jobs are less likely to be automated. His new book is 'Futureproof...

Deborah Feldman's memoir, 'Unorthodox,' about leaving the Satmar Hasidic community in Brooklyn inspired the Netflix series of the same name. Growing up, Feldman spoke Yiddish and was discouraged from speaking or reading English at home. She wasn't supposed to pursue an education or career, and, at 17, she entered into an arranged marriage with a man she'd barely met...

The bandleader of 'The Late Show with Stephen Colbert' joins us from his home piano where he plays music he wrote for the Pixar movie 'Soul' and songs from his new album 'We Are.' Batiste has been playing pop-up shows at Black Lives Matter protests, vaccination sites, and voter registration events.

Sleight-of-hand master Derek DelGaudio explores themes of identity, honesty and the emotional cost of keeping secrets in the memoir, 'AMORALMAN...

Journalist David Zucchino tells the forgotten story of a murderous coup that led to a white supremacist takeover of a Southern city. In the 1890s, Wilmington, N.C., was a mixed-race community with a thriving Black middle class, Black aldermen and police officers, and a Black newspaper. But white supremacists plotted a bloody purge around the 1898 election. They rampaged through the streets, killing 60 Black men, and banished prominent Black people and their white allies from the city...

The bandleader of 'The Late Show with Stephen Colbert' joins us from his home piano where he plays music he wrote for the Pixar movie 'Soul' and a stirring rendition of the national anthem. Batiste has been playing pop-up shows at Black Lives Matter protests, vaccination sites, and voter registration events. "I wanted to articulate through the music and through my presence there that we're all in this together," Batiste says. "Ultimately, this is our time. This is our world...

MIT professor and social scientist Sherry Turkle was 27 when she learned that her estranged father had conducted psychological experiments on her when she was a child. She looks back on her childhood in a new memoir, 'The Empathy Diaries.'

Also, Maureen Corrigan reviews 'Reality and Other Stories,' John Lanchester's collection of ghost stories about the digital era.

Journalist Katie Engelhart's new book, 'The Inevitable,' follows people who are planning to end their lives due to terminal illness or unbearable disability — either legally with physician-assisted death, or as part of the "euthanasia underground," outside of the law. "Most people who choose to end their lives at a preplanned moment are more concerned with things like dignity ... autonomy," she says. "They're worried less about the physical pain than the loss of themselves."

Biochemist Jennifer Doudna, the subject of Walter Isaacson's new biography 'The Code Breaker,' shared a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2020 for the part she played in developing the CRISPR gene editing technology. We discuss mRNA vaccines, how gene editing works, and some of the moral questions that these developments raise.

Also, Ken Tucker reviews 'Living The Dream,' an expanded album by Hailey Whitters.

Known for his novel 'The Things They Carried,' Tim O'Brien is now the subject of a new documentary, 'The War and Peace of Tim O'Brien.' When he became a father in his late 50s, he initially feared parenthood would curtail his writing. "Much as Vietnam did, [parenthood] gave me a body of material, that kind of context to write about," he says.

Also, TV critic David Bianculli reviews 'Behind Her Eyes,' a thriller series on Netflix with many twists and turns...