Terry Gross

In the 1960s, Janis Joplin was an icon of the counterculture, a female rock star at a time when rock was an all-boys' club.

Ronan Farrow's 2017 exposé of the sexual misconduct allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein in The New Yorker earned him a Pulitzer Prize and helped usher in the #MeToo movement. Now, in his new book, Catch and Kill, Farrow writes about the extreme tactics Weinstein allegedly took in an attempt to keep him from reporting the story.

The recent biopic Rocketman painted a Hollywood version of Elton John's life, but a new memoir, Me, comes straight from the artist himself. In it, he describes how, as a young man, he was determined to enter the music business, in spite of some misgivings about rock 'n' roll in his household. As he tells Fresh Air, "My dad, of course, hated it."

Growing up as a member of the Westboro Baptist Church, Megan Phelps-Roper was taught that God hated gay people. The church, which was founded by Phelps-Roper's grandfather, Fred Phelps Sr., became infamous for picketing the funerals of U.S. soldiers — whose deaths it believed were a punishment for America's sins and its tolerance of homosexuality.

Christopher Wylie was a research director at Cambridge Analytica. When he joined the company its goal was countering extremists who were using social media to recruit followers. But then the company began collecting personal data from Facebook users, and used it to target people susceptible to conspiracy theories and disinformation during the 2016 presidential campaign. Wylie left the company and became a whistleblower.

Counter tenor Anthony Ross Costanzo sings in what's considered a woman's range - in the range of the castrati, men who maintained their high voices by being castrated before puberty. He's about to star in the Philip Glass opera 'Akhenaten.'

President Trump made building a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico a cornerstone of his 2016 presidential campaign. But when, after the election, efforts to build the wall stalled, he turned to other possible options — including constructing a trench filled with snakes and alligators — according to a forthcoming book.

The late-night host says that hosting a podcast allows him to "mind meld" with guests in a way he can't on TV: "We can just go down a deep, deep, deep well." Originally broadcast Oct. 2, 2019.