Fresh Air

New Yorker writer David Kirkpatrick says anti-fascists are using extra judicial methods to do what the FBI can't, by infiltrating white nationalist groups to expose them and their planned attacks.

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Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson talks with Tonya Mosley about her teen years, her time as a public defender, and the poem she keeps in her office. Her new memoir is called Lovely One.

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Novelist Danzy Senna spoke with Terry Gross about racial identity, growing up with a Black father and white mother in an era when "mixed-race" wasn't a thing. "Just merely existing as a family was a radical statement at that time," she says. Her new book is Colored Television.

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To wrap up our series, we're closing with director Spike Lee and actor Samuel L. Jackson. Lee spoke with Terry Gross in 2017 about growing up in Brooklyn and his acting and directorial debut, the 1986 movie She's Gotta Have It. In 2000, Jackson talked about playing tough guys, watching movies in segregated theaters, and nearly dying on the New York subway.

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In 2022, E.T. and Jaws director Steven Spielberg talked about how he fell in love with film, and how he was afraid of everything as a kid. We'll also revisit our 2016 interview with actor Carrie Fisher about what it was really like to become a sex symbol as Princess Leia.

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The 1964 spaghetti Western A Fistful of Dollars turned Clint Eastwood into a star. He had a famous squint in his closeups, but he told Terry Gross in 1997, it wasn't necessarily character driven. "They bombed me with a bunch a lights, and you're outside and it's 90 degrees, and it's hard not to squint."

We'll also hear from Eastwood's co-star in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Eli Wallach, who went on to play a bandit in several Westerns. Cultural historian Christopher Frayling tells us how the Italian director Sergio Leone broke the conventions of the Hollywood Western, and...

We continue our Classic Films and Movie Icons series and feature archival interviews with Dennis Hopper and Isabella Rossellini. They co-starred in the movie Blue Velvet, and after it became a hit, both of their careers were redefined.

Later, on the centennial of singer Dinah Washington's birth, jazz historian Kevin Whitehead has appreciation.

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Our special series of archival interviews continues with two of the GOATs: Meryl Streep, the actor with the most Oscar nominations in history, spoke with Terry Gross in 2012 about playing Margaret Thatcher. And Sidney Poitier, the first Black man to win best actor, in 2000 talked about how the radio helped him learn an accent for auditions.

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We continue our Classic Films and Movie Icons series with two performers who gained fame as kids: Breakfast Club actor Molly Ringwald and Freaky Friday actor Jodie Foster. We'll also discuss Foster's Oscar-winning role as an FBI agent in The Silence of the Lambs and hear from her co-star who played serial killer Hannibal Lector, Anthony Hopkins.

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From now through Labor Day we're featuring interviews from our archive with great actors and directors.

Robert Duvall talks about his role in the Godfather films as Tom Hagen, the Corleone family lawyer — and about speaking the most famous line in Apocalypse Now. And we'll get some insights into acting from Michael Caine, including why you don't need to raise your voice to be intimidating, and why he hates doing love scenes.

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