Fresh Air

Monday through Friday, 11am - 12noon; Monday through Thursday, 7pm - 8pm

Terry Gross

Fresh Air opens the window on contemporary arts and issues with guests from worlds as diverse as literature and economics. Terry Gross hosts this multi-award-winning daily interview and features program. The veteran public radio interviewer is known for her extraordinary ability to engage guests of all dispositions. Every weekday she delights intelligent and curious listeners with revelations on contemporary societal concerns.

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News/Talk

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Remembering Monster-Maker Ray Harryhausen

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Credit Peter Macdiarmid / Getty Images

Medusa from 1981's Clash of the Titans is among legendary animator Ray Harryhausen's many creations.

Credit Robyn Beck/AFP / Getty Images

Harryhausen designed and animated the skeleton soldiers from 1963's Jason and the Argonauts.

Credit Hulton Archive / Getty Images

Harryhausen manipulates the figure of a serpent-like monster for a stop-motion film circa 1965.

By editor

Originally published on Thu May 9, 2013 1:19 pm

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Ray Harryhausen, who died Tuesday in London at age 92, became fascinated with animation after seeing King Kong in 1933. He went on to create some of the most memorable monsters of old Hollywood, from dinosaurs to mythological creatures.

His monsters, however, were never completely divorced from the real world.

1:33 pm

Wed May 8, 2013

Nearly Three Years After Dodd-Frank, Reforms Happen Slowly

Credit loveguli / iStockPhoto.com

By editor

Originally published on Wed May 8, 2013 2:06 pm

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On July 21, 2010, President Obama signed into law the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, commonly known as the Dodd-Frank bill. Reporter Gary Rivlin says "the passage of Dodd-Frank was something of a miracle." But to the chief lobbyist for the Financial Services Roundtable, a lobbying group that represents 100 of the country's largest financial institutions, it was just "halftime."

10:30 am

Wed May 8, 2013

Natalie Maines: A Country-Music Rebel Rocks On Her Own

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Credit Danny Clinch / Courtesy of the artist

Natalie Maines, former singer for the Dixie Chicks, placed the group at the center of controversy in 2003, when she publicly criticized George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq.

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Natalie Maines, known for her huge success with the Dixie Chicks, goes solo with Mother.

By Ken Tucker

Originally published on Wed May 8, 2013 2:06 pm

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Natalie Maines doesn't hesitate to make audacious moves, and wresting away "Mother" — Roger Waters' hymn to oppressive maternal authority figures from Pink Floyd — is the biggest one on her first solo album. Maines takes the "Mother" from Pink Floyd's The Wall and deconstructs it, emotional brick by emotional brick.

1:33 pm

Tue May 7, 2013

'Shocked': A Memoir About Beauty And Its Beholders

Credit Random House

Patricia Volk is an essayist, novelist and memoirist. She recounts her experiences growing up in a restaurant-owning family in New York City, in her memoir Stuffed.

By editor

Originally published on Tue May 7, 2013 2:18 pm

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Patricia Volk's mother was beautiful in a way that stopped people on the street. Strangers compared her to Lana Turner and Grace Kelly. She was stylish and vain: Her beauty and its preservation mattered to her. "She had an icy blond beauty, an imperious kind of beauty," Volk tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

12:20 pm

Tue May 7, 2013

Scorsese Talks 'The Language of Cinema'

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Credit NIcholas Kamm / AFP/Getty Images

Animated as ever when it comes to the topic of film, director Martin Scorsese delivers the 2013 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities at the Kennedy Center on April 1.

Credit Studiocanal Films Ltd.

The Magic Box (1951) made a lasting impression on Martin Scorsese when he first saw it in 1952. He says this is the film that made him think he could be a filmmaker. "The thing about that film was not just the moving image, but it was the obsession and the passion of the people at that time."

Credit Eadweard Muybridge / Public Domain

In 1878, landscape photographer Eadweard Muybridge set up a series of still cameras side by side at a racetrack, rigging them to be triggered by threads stretched across the course as the horse passed. Considered an intermediate stage in cinematography, Muybridge's photographic experiment captured the kinetic movement of a horse at full gallop.

Credit Public Domain

D.W. Griffith's The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) is thought to be the first gangster film.

Credit Public Domain

Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903) is a 12-minute film that employs one of the first known uses of the cinematic "cut."

By editor

Originally published on Tue May 7, 2013 1:34 pm

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Martin Scorsese is a legend of a director — and he's also a great film teacher, a man who balances a passion for the medium with a deep knowledge of its history. Delivering this year's installment of the National Endowment for the Humanities' prestigious Jefferson Lecture — a talk he titled "Persistence of Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema" — Scorsese demonstrated his speaking chops as well.

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11:20 am

Thu May 9, 2013