Places & Travel

In the past 20 years, Great Britain has produced a huge quantity of popular music that's gotten very little attention in the U.S. The Brit Box is a four-CD collection of British rock and pop, including songs by The Smiths, Supergrass, and The Boo Radleys.

Fresh Air's world-music critic reviews The Mande Variations, the new CD from Malian kora player Toumani Diabate. Diabate says he descends from 71 generations of griots, or traditional song-storytellers.

On February 26, conductor Lorin Maazel led the New York Philharmonic in an unprecedented concert in Pyongyang, North Korea. It was the first time a major American orchestra performed in the communist country. The concert was broadcast nationwide.

David Simon, creator and executive producer of HBO's series The Wire, joins Fresh Air to talk about his career and the genesis of the show. Simon writes many of the episodes — and some story lines come from his former job as a police reporter for the Baltimore Sun.

The Library of America has published World War II Writings, a new collection of stories by A.J. Liebling. The volume, edited by Pete Hamill, includes three books, two dozen New Yorker pieces, maps and a chronology.

As the United Nations' former under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, Jan Egeland has tracked down violent guerrilla leaders, confronted warlords and addressed humanitarian crises around the world. His new memoir is A Billion Lives: An Eyewitness Report from the Frontlines of Humanity.

Repression in Vladimir Putin's Russia, journalist Edward Lucas writes, is matched by a new aggression abroad. It amounts to what Lucas calls "a new Cold War" fought with cash, natural resources, diplomacy and propaganda.

When British musician and record producer Martin Atkins visited Beijing in 2006, he wasn't sure what kind of music scene he'd find. As it turned out, the sounds emerging from the Chinese underground were surprisingly familiar. Milo Miles reports.

Former Russian master spy Sergei Tretyakov and journalist Pete Earley reveal secrets of espionage in America after the fall of the Soviet Union. Tretyakov ran Russia's post-Cold War spy program — but also worked as a double agent with the FBI before his defection in 2000.

Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, a regular Fresh Air analyst, joins Terry Gross for an update on Pakistani politics after the assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto.

On HBO's The Wire, actor Michael K. Williams plays Omar Little, a stick-up guy who robs only drug dealers. Omar has a scar running down his face. That's not a prosthetic scar; it's real. Williams tells Terry Gross the story behind his scar — and lots of other stories about himself and Omar.

Clark Johnson has worked as a director on several of TV's most memorable cop shows, including The Shield, Homicide: Life on the Street and the pilot episode of the critically acclaimed HBO series The Wire. This season, he's appearing on camera as well, as The Wire's City Editor Gus Haynes.

Fresh Air's film critic reviews Cloverfield, a disaster film featuring a monster that attacks Manhattan; the nightmare is captured by shaky Blair Witch-style camerawork.

Los Zafiros, or The Sapphires, was bigger than The Beatles — in Cuba, anyway. Fresh Air's rock historian reviews a new DVD about the band: Los Zafiros: Music from the Edge of Time.

In Paul Thomas Anderson's new film There Will Be Blood, the young actor Paul Dano plays a rural preacher at odds with the oilman (Daniel Day-Lewis) at the center of the story. Dano previously appeared in Little Miss Sunshine, playing the teen who was an elective mute.

Rock historian Ed Ward remembers the sound of San Francisco in the '60s, from the early days of countercultural upheaval through the Summer of Love in 1967. It's all lavishly documented in Love is the Song We Sing, a new four-disc set from Rhino Records.

The fifth and final season of the acclaimed HBO drama The Wire has its season premiere Jan. 6. Fresh Air's TV critic has a preview.

Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, a regular Fresh Air guest, joins us again to assess recent developments in his home country and to preview the upcoming election there. Born in Lahore and based in Pakistan, Rashid has written for The Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, London's Daily Telegraph and other publications. He's also the author of several best-selling books.

After former NPR reporter Sarah Chayes reported on the fall of the Taliban in 2001, she decided to stay in Afghanistan as the country was being rebuilt. In 2005, she established the Arghand Cooperative, a business that sells local products for use in perfumes, soaps and food. The author of The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban, Chayes wrote about her experiences starting the cooperative and selling beauty products in December's Atlantic Monthly.

Joel Hafvenstein spent a year in Afghanistan trying to convince opium-poppy farmers to give up what he calls "the perfect crop." Working for a private company funded by the United States Agency for International Development, Hafvenstein helped provide Afghan farmers with alternative jobs — like building canals and roads — in hopes that they'd give up their alliance with the Taliban.