JournalistShane Harristells Terry Gross about why the T.I.A (Total Information Awareness) program was shut down:

The name creeped people out. It was called ‘Total Information Awareness,’ it had this logo of the pyramid from the great seal of the United States with this floating eye on it casing a beam over the globe. It looked very menacing. And it did not help at all that they guy running it was John Poindexter, who was best known was the key architect of the Iran-Contra Affair. … And people looked at this and said, ‘This is exactly the kind of surveillance excess that we’ve been warning about since 9/11. This is the government going way too far, and being way too intrusive into people’s private lives, and they shouldn’t be allowed to collect this kind of information. So shut the program down.’

Andy Samberg of The Lonely Island talks to Terry Gross about getting older with hip-hop:

There’s a trend in hip hop of being more mature and getting older, for real right now, so it coincides really nicely for us, in terms of certain songs on our album like ‘YOLO’ and ‘Diaper Money’ that are more about being an adult and the joke of bragging about the responsibilities that come with being an adult.

46 people were shot and killed this past weekend on the streets of Chicago. Gang violence continues to be a serious issue that motivates communities to work at the source of the problem. Some of these people in the Chicago area work for a program called CeaseFire,which recruits former gang members to mediate conflicts and try to prevent — or interrupt — the cycle of violence. A 2011 documentary profiled their work and the film is a moving and intense depiction of their efforts. We spoke to its directors Alex Kotlowitz and Steve James.

image via OpenIDEO

Andy Samberg of The Lonely Island talks to Terry Gross about why the group parodies hip-hop:

We’re tiny little white dudes. We weren’t living the rap life at all. We just loved the music … [T]hat’s where our comedy comes from: It comes from a love for what that music is and what it represents, but also always drawing a clear line to let everyone know that we don’t believe that we’re part of it.

Charles Glass, author of The Deserters, tells Dave Davies about the Parisian black market run largely by deserters during WWII:

The Paris press was writing about it a lot at the time — that [there] was ‘Chicago-style vandalism and gangsterism’ in the streets of Paris, and the American military had to do something about it. There were shootouts between the Paris police and the American and British MPs on one side and the deserters on the other side. They would rob banks, they would rob cafes, they would stop people on the street and steal women’s jewelry, they were gangs of real, hardcore outlaws, and they were armed and trained.

Image of Paris in 1940 via the NEH

Charles Glass, author of The Deserters, talks to Dave Davies about how poor leadership contributing to desertion in WWII:

Some units had much higher rates [of desertion] than others. The 36thin the battles in France had the highest rate of any division in the American army. It can’t be accidental that there were junior officers … who were not interested in their men, and not talking to their men, and not looking after their men. [Private] Steve Weiss felt like his captain always led from behind, was never at the front lines, you could never find him, they couldn’t confide in him, they couldn’t ask him for anything, and they felt like they got a raw deal from him.

Image of Waldenburg, Germany, 1945 via Military History

If you haven’t read it yet, we highly recommend that you check out Patton Oswalt’s awesome essay about plagiarism in comedy, heckling, rape jokes, and the limitations of individual perception. It is brave and honest and oh-so-very-very-smart. Here’s a sampling from the section in which he grapples with the latest Internet controversy over a comedian’s rape joke:

In this past week of re-reading the blogs, going through the comment threads, and re-scrolling the Twitter arguments, I haven’t once found a single statement, feminist or otherwise, saying that rape shouldn’t be joked under any circumstance, regardless of context.  Not one example of this.

In fact, every viewpoint I’ve read on this, especially from feminists, is simply asking to kick upward, to think twice about who is the target of the punchline, and make sure it isn’t the victim.

And now you can go listen to an interview with Oswalt here.

Image via SubPop

John Oliver has taken over hosting duties for The Daily Show while Jon Stewart is on leave filming a movie. In honor of the temporary switch up, today on the show we aired an edited version of an interview Terry did with him in 2010. Enjoy!

The Daily Show | June 13th 2013

Two-time winner of the Man Booker prize Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall andBring Up the Bodies, speaks to Fresh Air about executions, 16th c. England, and feeling close to the past:

 I’m one of these children who grew up at the knee of my grandmother and her elder sister, listening to very old people talk about their memories. And as I say, in their conversation, everything was as if it happened yesterday. And the dead were discussed along with the living, and the difference didn’t really seem to matter. And I suppose this seeped into my viewpoint. Instead of thinking there was a wall between the living and the dead, I thought there was a very thin veil. It was almost as if they’d just gone into the next room.

Image via The Times

Novelist Carl Hiaasen discusses the Florida wildlife that the average tourist doesn’t see:

I have a small skiff, but I can get back into backcountry and the places where you may not see another boat for a whole day, and if you do, it’s just at a distance. And you’re just out there and there’s dolphins, sawfish and turtles everywhere, and you think, ‘This must be what it looked like when they first got here.’ And that’s a pretty cool thing. That’s not true everywhere, but it also gives you something to fight for. … You don’t give up despite all the madness and insanity and corruption that’s just multiplying with each generation of arrivals.

image via Florida Dolphin Tours

Jerry Seinfeld’s web series “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” is as hilarious and as simple as it sounds. It’s a fresh take on the celebrity interview. It also features a series of vintage cars, including a Don Draper-esque Jaguar, so that’s awesome. 

Here’s the Jerry Seinfeld interview from a while back. 

And for good measure, an interview with that guy sitting next to Jerry up top.

Image via Vulture

Today on the show we had a obituary of the outspoken Israeli writer Yoram Kaniuk, who died on June 8 at the age of 83.

If you aren’t familiar with his work, Nicole Krauss’s lovely and personal remembrance of him over at The New Yorker might make you want to rectify that:

And though he died as a painter in New York, he was reborn as a writer, and the books he came to write, in particular his masterpiece, “The Last Jew,” which offers an alternate history of Jewish existence that encompasses both the Diaspora and the Zionist state, could only have been written by an Israeli born again on the Lower East Side.

Image via Haaretz

Author Carl Hiaasen tells Dave Davies about the changes that have taken place in Florida since Hiaasen was growing up there in the 1950s:

I used the word tramped, stampeded. Try to imagine … the transformation you would watch if you lived here. It’s traumatic. … I’ve been writing for 40 years trying to scare people out of this place, and haven’t done a very good job of it. I get letters from people all the time saying, “I love your books. Please don’t hate me, but I’m moving to Florida anyway.”

Image of the Everglades via The New York Times

Merry Claytontalks to Terry Gross about the musicians who frequented her father’s New Orleans church when she was growing up:

Everybody that was anybody would come and hang in my dad’s church, because my dad was a singer also. My dad sung and played piano, but he was also a man of God. He was a minister. So when Sam Cooke would come in town with the Soul Stirrers — at that time he was singing gospel — [and] they would end up at my dad’s church. There would always be a guest singer for Sunday morning. … Or Lou Rawls would come in town, and he would come to dad’s church, and he would sing. Or Della Reese would come in town — who’s my godmother. … And many mornings I would find myself sitting on a pew with Mahalia Jackson. I would lean over on Mahalia Jackson to go to sleep on her arm, and I’d put my feet up on Linda Hopkins. … Everything that Mahalia Jackson would sing, I would just look at her in awe and just mimic everything. … And then they started calling me ‘Little Haley’ when I was about 6 or 7 years old.

Merry Clayton, one of the singers features in 20 Feet from Stardom, tells Terry Gross about singing backup on the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter”

The guys come out and stand next to me and say, ‘It’s just a shot away,’ as I’m saying, ‘Rape, murder.’ I mean it was a sight to behold, and we got through it, and then they went in the booth to listen, and I saw them hooting and hollering while I was singing, but I didn’t know what they were hooting and hollering about. And when I got back in the booth and listened, I said, ‘Ooo, that’s really nice.’

And they said, ‘You want to do another?’ and I said, ‘Well, I’ll do one more and then I’m going to have to say thank you and good night.’ I did one more, and then I did one more … and then I was gone. Next thing I know, that — that’s history.