It's Been a Minute

After a year that offered many moments of reflection—from the coronavirus pandemic, to protests for racial justice, to the long election season—acclaimed poet Claudia Rankine's latest book offers a framework to process it all. That book is called Just Us: An American Conversation, and in this episode, we revisit her chat with NPR's Audie Cornish. In the book, Rankine has conversations about race with friends and strangers—and learns about herself in the process.

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Sam sits in the Fresh Air host chair to talk with writer and director Aaron Sorkin. His latest film The Trial of the Chicago 7 covers the events at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago when several prominent anti-war activists were accused of conspiring to start a riot.

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Sam shares holiday recommendations with Audie Cornish, co-host of All Things Considered and Consider This, and Bob Mondello, NPR's film critic. They discuss not only their holiday favorites, but also the holiday things they hate. And yes, they'll discuss Love Actually.

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This year has been hard for pretty much everyone, but that still hasn't stopped people from getting married, having babies, starting new jobs, and telling us all about those milestones and celebrations in voice memos on our show.

So in the spirit of the season, we picked a few of our favorite 'Best Things' from 2020 and called up the people who sent them: a listener who found the courage to make a new friend, a son who got the chance to reunite with his mom, and a woman who decided to donate her kidney... to a complete stranger.

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Without movies or TV shows to shoot or music to record, celebrities were restless in 2020 and eager to connect with a public that, at least for a while, couldn't care less about them. Sam wraps up the year in celebrity culture with Lindsey Weber and Bobby Finger, co-hosts of the podcast Who? Weekly, and breaks down how a pandemic changed our relationship with the rich and the famous. Stuck in quarantine, it turns out that stars really are just like us... and often a little worse.

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Songwriter Phoebe Bridgers has had a big year, but it's also been bittersweet. With four Grammy nominations for work on her acclaimed 2020 album Punisher, Bridgers, like most touring musicians, has been stuck at home. She talks to Sam about her love/hate relationship with touring, how she aims for the universal in the specificity of her lyrics, and her hopes for music—and everyone—in 2021... or whenever the pandemic ends.

Watch the extended video version of this interview: https://youtu.be/nTmW6jr_hd0

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Coronavirus has transformed pop culture and placed its creation in the hands of anyone who has social media. Sam chats with E. Alex Jung, a writer at New York Magazine, about pop culture's shift this year to the internet. Then, Sam talks to Alex Zaragoza, senior staff writer for culture at Vice, about her beef with the new Netflix series Selena: The Series and the exploitation of Selena.

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Are you sick of the friends and family you've been stuck with? Sam teams up with Anna Sale, host of the WNYC podcast Death, Sex & Money, to explore how our pandemic 'pods' are being tested by the coronavirus. In this episode, Sam digs into friendships under strain. Then, head on over to the Death, Sex & Money podcast feed for Anna's look at how two people stuck apart during the pandemic have fallen in love.
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"What has this pandemic been like for you?"

When we put that question to people, the answers we got depended a lot on where they were in life — if they were in school, if they had a job, if they had lost a loved one, if they were vulnerable to the virus. So in this special episode of It's Been a Minute, we'll hear from people of all ages, from all over the country — and world — about how their lives, from young to old, have changed forever.

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Cathy Park Hong talks with Sam about her book Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning. She discusses how watching comedian Richard Pryor influenced her to write honestly about Asian American identity, and how her Korean parents' experience of immigration has made their understanding of race different from her own. Hong is known globally for her award-winning poetry. She also serves as poetry editor for The New Republic and is a professor at Rutgers University–Newark.

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