NPR FOR THE DEAF: We Hear It Even When You Can’t

FRESH AIR Home Before Dark, the 46th album from singer-songwriter Neil Diamond, is No. 1 on the pop charts. It’s the first time Diamond has had a No. 1 debut in a career that’s spanned nearly five decades. For the new album, he enlisted producer Rick Rubin, who also worked on Diamond’s 2005 album 12 Songs — but who’s known more for his work with groundbreaking rap acts. Diamond’s guilty-pleasure hits include “Sweet Caroline,” “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon” and “Cherry Cherry.” Writer Michael Chabon won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for his novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier […]

HEAR YE: Clinic Memories

Now playing on Phawker Radio! Well, TURN IT UP! BY ED KING ROCK SNOB An appealing sense of revenge and antisocial impulses run through the music of Clinic, the surgical masked quartet from Liverpool that’s been making pretty much the same passively sinister album since their first long-player in 1999. On Do It! the band does it again, and why not? Every psychological horror movie is worth a sequel or four. Do fans of The Omen series bother complaining that the third installment was not as good as the first one? I think not. Such films work within a narrow […]

NPR 4 THE DEF: Giving Public Radio Edge Since 2006

FRESH AIR In 1964, Democrat Lyndon Johnson won the presidency in a landslide victory; eight years later, Republican president Richard Nixon was reelected in an equally lopsided race. In his new book, Nixonland, historian Rick Perlstein looks at the chaotic years between those elections, a time marked by protests, social upheaval, assassinations and an unpopular war. Perlstein is a senior fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future, where he writes the blog The Big Con. He has written for The New Republic Online, Slate, the Village Voice, Newsday and The Nation. Richard Nixon: Speeches, Writings, Documents, a Nixoniana collection compiled […]

GIMME SHELTER: Sheriffs Begin Dig At Manson Ranch

HELTER SKELTER: Police raid Spahn Ranch, Death Valley, California, 1969 LOS ANGELES TIMES: PANAMINT SPRINGS, Calif. — A posse of Inyo County sheriff’s investigators and forensic experts this morning began digging for human remains at a remote ranch in Death Valley National Park once used as a hangout for the notorious Charles Manson family. Armed with ground-penetrating radar, spades and a cadaver dog named Buster, the 20-member group’s mission was to wring every fact they could out of the sandy soil at the ranch where Manson and his followers holed up in 1969 after the massacre of pregnant actress Sharon […]

NPR 4 THE DEF: Giving Public Radio Edge Since 2006

FRESH AIR Reverend Carroll Pickett was the death-house chaplain at the Walls prison unit in Huntsville, Texas for 13 years. During his tenure, he ministered to 95 inmates executed by lethal injection. Because he was employed by the state, Pickett was unable to voice his disapproval of capitol punishment while performing his ministry. But he has become an opponent of the death penalty since leaving the prison system. Pickett co-authored a memoir with Carlton Stowers, titled Within These Walls. He is now the subject of a new documentary, At the Death House Door. RADIO TIMES Hour 1 is our country’s […]