Santa Clara Valley

Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Max Chafkin talks about the tech billionaire who broke with most of Silicon Valley in backing Trump. Thiel also secretly funded the lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker.

While researching his new book, Notes from an Apocalypse, about people who are preparing for doomsday, author Mark O'Connell undertook what he calls "a series of perverse pilgrimages."

The creator, the show-runner and the star of Silicon Valley talk about putting together the HBO comedy about the insular start-up tech world.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews The Bug by Ellen Ullman.

Journalist Jeffrey Rosen's article in this coming Sunday's New York Times Magazine is about the CIA's effort to partner with Silicon Valley to develop new anti-terrorist technologies. The CIA has founded a venture-capital firm that funds the development of cutting-edge technologies that may be useful for national security, in particular new techniques for finding terrorists. Rosen will talk about some of these technologies — and what civil libertarians think of them.

Writer Michael Lewis is the author of "The New New Thing" (Norton) about the Silicon Valley and the man behind the newest billion dollar-making venture. Lewis is also the author of the bestseller, "Liar's Poker" and has been the American editor of the British weekly, "The Spectator" and senior editor at The New Republic.

Writer Stuart Brand joins Fresh Air to talk about the technology-focused business culture that's developing in the Bay Area. He says it's turned San Francisco into a kind of global frontier town.