Radio Programs

Take Meg Wolitzer's novel (now also a film) called The Wife, about a brazen case of literary ghostwriting, and cross it with Patricia Highsmith's classic Ripley stories, about a suave psychopath, and you've got something of the crooked charisma of John Boyne's new novel, A Ladder to the Sky.

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

When you go to the hospital, your doctors and nurses can find out all about your medical conditions by reading through your electronic medical record.

The Supreme Court has struck down the conviction of an African American death-row inmate who was prosecuted six times for the same crime and by the same prosecutor, a man with a history of racial bias in jury selection.

Updated at 11:24 a.m. ET

The U.S. Supreme Court ruledThursday that a 40-foot World War I memorial cross can stay on public land at a Maryland intersection.

The cross "has become a prominent community landmark, and its removal or radical alteration at this date would be seen by many not as a neutral act but as the manifestation of a hostility toward religion that has no place in our Establishment Clause traditions," the court wrote.

In a Himalayan valley surrounded by military barracks, blasts of artillery fire often reverberate across the icy mountain peaks. This is one of the world's longest-running conflict zones. It's near where India and Pakistan recently traded airstrikes.

My taste doesn't naturally gravitate toward feminist dystopian fiction, but such stories are ubiquitous these days. Their influence seeps far beyond the classic novel and Hulu series of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, as well as the literary fiction it's inspired like Naomi Alderman's The Power and Leni Zumas' Red Clocks.

For decades, government officials in Switzerland stockpiled essential staples such as sugar, rice and coffee. The government now says coffee "is not essential for life."

On the next Fresh Air, writer Hillary Frank talks with Terry Gross about the childbirth injury she sustained, and the difficulty she had getting it treated.

Near the end of John Le Carré's great spy novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, one of the agents notices that his car's passenger door is unlocked. He instantly begins wondering how that happened.