PR Watch's Lisa Graves says that states can overrule local laws, and that legislatures are increasingly using preemption to stop things like minimum wage increases and protections for LGBT people.
The raucous singer turns thoughtful on his new album. Critic Ken Tucker calls Upland Stories a "marvelous mongrel mixture" of bluegrass banjo-picking, honky-tonk pedal steel and stark folk phrasings.
A beautiful and harrowing novel about a young mother who is diagnosed with leukemia, which is based on the author's real life nightmare when his wife was diagnosed with the disease and died two and half years later.
Dan Lyons was in his 50s when he lost his job reporting on the tech industry. He took a job at a start-up, where he was the old guy. His new book is Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble.
Forget "enhanced interrogation techniques" — Eric Fair says what he did as an interrogator in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was torture.
"The idea that there's interrogation, and then enhanced interrogation, and then torture — there is no middle ground," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "Torture is an enhanced interrogation."
Reporter John Seabrook talks about the state of the live concert business, and how it got that way. His article on the topic, in this week's issue of The New Yorker, is "The Price of the Ticket."
The Food Network draws more viewers than any of the cable news channels, but Americans are actually cooking less than ever. Food-culture writer Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma) ponders the phenomenon.
Duke won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Helen Keller in 1962's The Miracle Worker. She died Tuesday at the age of 69. Originally broadcast in 1988.
The new Miles Davis biopic begins in the 1970s, at the end of Davis' five-year hiatus from the music scene. Critic David Edelstein calls Don Cheadle's portrayal of the musician "electrifying."
Jacob Bernstein named his documentary about his mother after an Ephron family saying — "everything is copy," meaning that anything and everything that happens to you is fair game to write about.
Ever since Everybody Loves Raymond, the actor says he has been trying to take on more dramatic roles. In the HBO drama Vinyl, he plays a record company executive who contemplates suicide.
Author Peggy Orenstein says that when it comes to sexuality, girls hear that "they're supposed to be sexy, they're supposed to perform sexually for boys, but ... their sexual pleasure is unspoken."
Arnaud Desplechin's new film centers on the memories of a middle-aged Frenchman who returns to Paris after years of living abroad. Critic John Powers says My Golden Days is "achingly romantic."
According to Adam Hochschild, about 2,800 Americans fought in the Spanish Civil War, and some were bombed by Nazis years before the U.S. entered World War II. His new book is Spain in Our Hearts.
Journalist Adam Hochschild tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that "it was by far the largest number of Americans before or since who've ever joined somebody else's civil war."
The comic, who died Thursday, told Fresh Air that it took him years to develop a style — and then he got dumped. "That was really the beginning of the Garry Shandling dating years in stand-up."
"When I'm acting, I always imagine myself as looking totally different than the person that appears onscreen," Black says. The comedian writes about family, masculinity and vanity in his new memoir.
Director Zack Snyder layers subplot on top of subplot in his film of battling superheroes. Critic David Edelstein says Batman v. Superman is full of fragments and teases, and overall, "just awful."
