Terry Gross

The AMC show about a high school chemistry teacher turned meth dealer ended its fifth and final season on Sunday. Writers Peter Gould and Thomas Schnauz say there was "absolute sadness" in the writers' room as they put the last plot points into place.

In his new book Tip and the Gipper, MSNBC's Hardball host Chris Matthews reflects on his time as a top aide to Democratic House Speaker Tip O'Neill during Ronald Reagan's presidency. He compares O'Neill and Reagan's unlikely friendship to today's approach of "government by tantrum."

In The Story of the Human Body, evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman explains how our bodies haven't adapted to modern conditions. The result is "mismatch diseases" -- ailments that occur because our bodies weren't designed for the environments in which we now live.

A jazz pianist and bandleader, Iyer is one of the most critically acclaimed musicians of the past decade. He also has a masters in physics. Here, he explains why he decided to switch to a full-time career as a jazz musician, and describes what influenced his album Solo.

The pianists's latest album features some of the most difficult etudes ever written for solo piano by the Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti. "Ligeti took the piano to places it had never been before," he says," and makes demands of the pianist and the mind that had never been made before."

In 2006, Oregon successfully made pseudoephedrine, a key ingredient of meth, a prescription drug. Since then, Mother Jones' Jonah Engle reports, 24 states have tried to follow suit -- and 23 have failed. Engle attributes those failures to pharmaceutical companies' massive lobbying efforts.

Qassem Suleimani is the chief of a powerful branch of Iran's Revolutionary Guard. He is considered to be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American during the Iraq War, and now he is helping to prop up Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime.

In Men We Reaped, Jesmyn Ward recalls the deaths of five young men in her life, which she believes were all connected to being poor and black in the rural South. "It made me feel that I wasn't promised some long life. ...That's not a given for me."

The pop star has a flair for the extravagant, to say the least, but his new album is stripped down. He tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross about the "Elton John excess," his fear of sex as a young man, and how Liberace's example encouraged John to make the piano a star instrument.