Take 20 (3:02 p.m.): I’m making a meal out of drying my hands with the paper towel. I am drying them too vigorously, enjoying having a prop far too much. It has become a crutch.

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Greta Gerwig on “One Scene, 42 Takes and 2 Hours In A Bathroom Stall” in which she dissects the takes it took to get the right take in the movie Frances Ha that she co-wrote with director Noah Baumbach. Her thoughts on the other 42 takes are an interesting peek inside movie-making.

Gerwig and Baumbach are on the show today talking about the movie, that period in one’s twenties where growing pains are still palpable and Woody Allen.

Here’s a link to today’s interview with New York Times journalist C.J. Chivers about the situation in Syria. Chivers has spent much of the past year with rebels in the country and you can read his reports for the Times here.

Damascus from above by rajarajaraja via Flickr

Tomorrow on the show, Terry is talking to journalist C.J. Chivers about reporting he has been doing on Syria for The New York Times. Chivers is also the author of The Gun, that traces how the AK-47 spread around the world. Terry spoke with Chivers in 2010, when that book came out:

On why child soldiers favor AK-47s:

“It’s out there. And the weapon that’s out there is the weapon that tends to get used. But the other reason is the design. It’s very, very simple. It’s almost intuitive. You can take it apart very quickly and put it back together just as quickly. It’s simple to clean. It’s simple to maintain. Most of the Kalashnikovs out there are very well made for the actual conditions of war. It has an excellent protective finish. It’s chromed on the inside of its barrel and its chamber. All of these things mean that if you’re not particularly attentive in caring for it, it’s still going to last and it’s still going to work.”

The intention appears to be to create a list of “American Novelists” on Wikipedia that is made up almost entirely of men. The category lists 3,837 authors, and the first few hundred of them are mainly men. The explanation at the top of the page is that the list of “American Novelists” is too long, and therefore the novelists have to be put in subcategories whenever possible.

Too bad there isn’t a subcategory for “American Men Novelists.”

—  Amanda Filipacchi, “Wikipedia’s Sexism Towards Female Novelists” in the New York Times, April 24, 2013

More than two years later, the Raymond Davis episode has been largely forgotten in the United States. It was immediately overshadowed by the dramatic raid months later that killed Osama bin Laden — consigned to a footnote in the doleful narrative of America’s relationship with Pakistan. But dozens of interviews conducted over several months, with government officials and intelligence officers in Pakistan and in the United States, tell a different story: that the real unraveling of the relationship was set off by the flurry of bullets Davis unleashed on the afternoon of Jan. 27, 2011, and exacerbated by a series of misguided decisions in the days and weeks that followed. In Pakistan, it is the Davis affair, more than the Bin Laden raid, that is still discussed in the country’s crowded bazaars and corridors of power.

— “How A Single Spy Helped Turn Pakistan Against the United States.” Today’s guest Mark Mazzetti writing in The New York Times Magazine.

Hendrick Hertzberg on the late Anthony Lewis:

Tony Lewis knew more about the Constitution and the laws, their history and meaning, than the vast majority of Supreme Court Justices, let alone lawyers. In 1956, James Reston, the Times’s legendary Washington bureau chief, had sent Lewis back to Cambridge for a year’s study at Harvard Law School on a Nieman fellowship. He learned well. Justice Felix Frankfurter would tell Reston that “there are not two Justices of this Court who have such a grasp of these cases.” And Lewis, unlike all but a few Justices, could write. He was occasionally cited in the Court’s opinions, but think of the ones he might have written himself!

We paid tribute to Lewis, covered the Supreme Court for the New York Times in the 1950s and ’60s, on the show today by listening back to an interview Terry did with him in 1991. He died yesterday.

Image of the Supreme Court by aabernathy

We loved Connie Britton before but we love her even more now (we didn’t think it possible!) after having read Susan Dominus’s excellent profile of her.

The New York Times:

The actors on a show like “Nashville” — even one with a producer’s credit, like Britton — have only so much leeway for push-back, but Britton consistently dug in during the early episodes. No, she told the director of the pilot, she would rather not stare at her face in the mirror and pull it back aggressively to see what she would look like with a face-lift.

Here is the Fresh Air interview with Britton.

The very interesting question that has arisen as the U.S. has pioneered this technology is: What happens when the Russians, say, send an armed drone into Georgia to the south claiming that there’s a Chechen terrorist that’s hiding in Georgia? And they have no other way to kill him and so they’re going to kill him with a drone missile?

“It’s going to be a very interesting moment internationally and for the United States, because the Obama administration — if that’s who’s in power — is going to have to say, ‘We accept this because they’re doing exactly what we do,’ or they’ll have to somehow make a distinction between what the Chinese or Russians are doing and what we’ve done in the past.

— New York Times national security correspondent Scott Shane tells Terry Gross what would it mean if countries not allied with the United States had their own drone programs.

France carried out new airstrikes overnight against Islamist fighters in central Mali, as Paris pledged on Tuesday to commit more troops to a potentially protracted campaign against extremists pressing south from a jihadist state they have forged in the desert north of the country.

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The New York Times, “French Pledge More Troops for Mali As Air Strikes Continue” by Steven Erlanger, Alan Cowell and Adam Nossiter.

Our interview about the situation in Mali with Adam Nossiter from a couple weeks ago.

The New York Times:

Justice Clarence Thomas did something at a Supreme Court argument Monday for the first time in nearly seven years — he spoke.

But what Thomas said is not clear, other than he appears to have joked about Ivy League lawyers.

…

Thomas hasn’t asked a question in court since February 22, 2006.

Adam Nossiter on some of the steps Al Qaeda in Mali has taken to repress culture:

The Al Qaeda group, especially in Timbuktu … has set about the systematic destruction of the above-ground mausoleums, some of them centuries-old, that the local people … venerate because they contain the remains of people considered saints in the Sufi religion. And so they’ve systematically taken pickaxes and hammers to these monuments and leveled them, and this has been very, very shocking for the people in Timbuktu. They’ve expressed their horror to me over the phone shortly after having witnessed this. They’ve also banned any kind of music — and, of course, Mali has a very rich musical culture — but even so far as banning musical ring tones on cell phones. If they catch you with a cell phone that plays a tune, they’ll confiscate it and they’ll punish you. The only thing you can have on your cell phone is a verse from The Koran.

Image of Timbuktu by Emilio Labrador via Flickr Commons

Once more: Christoph Niemann’s tribute to Maurice Sendak. Because it is a wonderful way to start the new year.

Happy 2013.

This past weekend, as part of the New York Times’ end-of-year tribute to those who died in 2012, artist and illustrator Christoph Niemann made an extraordinary animation in honor of Maurice Sendak using a musical bed of Schubert and audio from Fresh Air’s 2011 interview with the late author and illustrator. Prepare to be undone.

The full interview is here.

image via lookintomysuns 

Your mid-afternoon, pre-Friday pick-me-up.

Check out that device under the counter… This photo ran in the New York Times on August 23, 1925 with the headline: “A Gas Attack in the Broadway Front Line Trenches: Sham Hold-Up in a Jeweler’s Store to Test a New Tear Gas Perfected by Captain Adrian St. John, Which Blinds a Person Temporarily After Its Release by a Touch of the Foot on a Device Under the Counter.” 

(Source: livelymorgue)

I don’t get that a lot. I’m very short, under five feet, and I often think of myself as smaller than life. Until I was on radio, I went through life being, as far as I was concerned, invisible, which of course I am on radio. But it’s one thing to be invisible on radio; it’s another thing to be invisible in real life.

— Terry Gross, reacting to the suggestion that listeners have “erotic associations” with her voice.  (via mattwilstein)