Government & Politics

Trevor Noah talks about growing up in Apartheid-era South Africa. His mother was black; his father white, and at the time Noah was born it was illegal for such couples to have intimate relations. His memoir is titled Born a Crime.

Bloomberg's Joshua Green discusses Bannon's work in the far right wing of the Republican party. Trump's chief strategist, Green says, was "one of the major figures" in Clinton's defeat.

New Yorker writer Evan Osnos talks about the executive orders and other actions that Trump can use to undo existing agreements on climate change, immigration and foreign policy.

Author Ron Suskind's new book, The One Percent Doctrine, is an investigation into the guarded world of anti-terrorism policy. He also reveals that al-Qaida was planning an attack on the New York City subway system.

The Senate version of the immigration bill includes a clause proclaiming English the national language and calling on the federal government to preserve and enhance the role of English. Our linguist, Geoff Nunberg, isn't sure this is a good idea.

Film critic Stephen Schiff reviews the new movie "Reservoir Dogs," which he says is a contemporary take on the 1950s heist movie.

Fresh Air discusses the 2016 election with Atlantic Magazine correspondent James Fallows, who spent three years flying his own plane to small towns across the U.S., reporting on the people he met.

"Donald and I go all the way back to when his hair was dark brown," Garry Trudeau jokes. His new book, Yuge!, is a collection of 30 years of comic strips featuring Trump as a character.

New Yorker writer George Packer says years of neglect from the Democrats enabled Trump to exploit the biases of the white working class and turn them into a "self-conscious identity group."

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the third and final volume of renowned feminist historian Blanche Weisen Cook's biography of Eleanor Roosevelt.

After he criticized Trump and the alt right, National Review writer David French was bombarded with hateful tweets — including an image of his child in a gas chamber. "It was unbelievable," he says.

Charlie Warzel, who covers technology for BuzzFeed, has written a series of articles about Twitter's response to hate speech. He says the platform's community guidelines are enforced haphazardly.

How the media reports on crude language when a public figure is caught using it on tape. . . for instance Donald Trump.

Rick Hasen, founder of the Election Law Blog, discusses Donald Trump's claims of potential voter fraud. "He's threatening the bedrock of democracy, and doing it to claim he's not a loser," Hasen says.

Journalist Neil MacFarquhar is a veteran Middle East foreign correspondent and was Cairo bureau chief for The New York Times. Next, he will cover Islam in North America for the Times. His new novel The Sand Cafe is set in Saudi Arabia and examines the day-to-day reporting life of foreign correspondents in the Middle East during the Gulf War.

Alien, illegal, undocumentated, immigrant — the debate over immigration policy is also about the words used by the various sides. Linguist Geoff Nunberg says the language of immigration has been controversial for as long as immigration has been an issue in American life.

DVDs have enabled us to see movies from some unlikely places. Our critic at large says some of the best films he's seen come from South Korea: the crime drama Memories of Murder and the political thriller The President's Last Bang are two examples, based on true stories.

Barry Werth talks about the tumultuous transition between the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford chronicled in his book 31 Days. Among those who played roles were Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

Film director Barry Jenkins and playwright Tarell McCraney both grew up in the same housing project in Miami, and both were raised by mothers who were addicted to crack. Their new film Moonlight draws on their experiences.