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After 35 years serving on the Supreme Court, Justice John Paul Stevens retired last year. Stevens, appointed by President Gerald Ford in 1975, was the third-longest-service justice in the court's history. Now 91, he spends his days playing tennis, lecturing and writing. But instead of legal briefs and opinions, Justice Stevens is now sharing personal stories from his time on the Supreme Court.

A zombie plague has wiped out 95 percent of America. Camps of survivors band together in pockets across the country, waiting for small squadrons of human "sweepers" to inch their way across major cities, destroying the remaining zombie-like creatures hiding out in office buildings and shopping malls.

But now the human sweepers have to tackle their biggest challenge yet: clearing the undead from Lower Manhattan.

A few years after her younger brother John died from AIDS-related complications in 1989, poet Marie Howe wrote him a poem in the form of a letter. Called "What the Living Do," the poem is an elegiac description of loss, and of living beyond loss.

"When he died, it was a terrible loss to all of us," she tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "As you know, as everybody knows, you think 'My life is changed so utterly I don't know how to live it anymore. And then you find a way.'"

The New Yorker once called virologist Nathan Wolfe "the world's most prominent virus hunter." Wolfe, the director of the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative, spends his days tracking emerging infectious diseases before they turn into deadly pandemics.

In The Viral Storm, Wolfe describes how most of those emerging infectious diseases originally start out in animals before making the jump to us.

This interview was originally broadcast on May 23, 2011.

When Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane was growing up, his parents exposed him to Broadway, movie musicals and the Great American Songbook. Meanwhile, his cousin Shep introduced him to Woody Allen.

Sometimes the stories that stay with us aren't the classics or even all that polished. They're what some critics call "good-bad" stories: the writing may be workmanlike and the characters barely developed, but something about them is so potent that they're unforgettable, so unforgettable they can attain the status of myth.

Fresh Air Weekend highlights some of the best interviews and reviews from past weeks, and new program elements specially paced for weekends. Our weekend show emphasizes interviews with writers, filmmakers, actors, and musicians, and often includes excerpts from live in-studio concerts. This week:

At festivals and in interviews, Pedro Almodovar is such a furry cuddle bear that it's possible to forget what a perverse filmmaker he can be — that is, until you watch something like his nasty new gender-bent Frankenstein picture, The Skin I Live In. It's a self-conscious, madly ambitious work, rife with allusions to countless other films. But does it have a soul? I couldn't detect one amid all its borrowed tropes.

This interview was originally broadcast on Nov. 9, 2006. Comedian Will Ferrell will receive the 14th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor later this month at the Kennedy Center.

Ferrell became famous as a cast member on Saturday Night Live from 1995 to 2002, and went on to star in movies such as Old School, Elf and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby.

This interview was originally broadcast on Sept. 7, 2009. Ted Danson is currently starring in Bored to Death on HBO and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation on CBS.

You've got to hand it to Russell Banks: He's certainly not writing with an eye to please readers or to be taken up by book clubs across the land. Lost Memory of Skin is not aiming to be a "crossover" literary stealth hit. If you're going to read it, you're the one who will have to "cross over" to Banks' world, and it ain't very pretty on his side of the social divide.

It's hard not to feel ambivalent about The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams. Yes, it does give us an opportunity to hear previously unreleased lyrics by one of the greatest songwriters country music has produced. But Williams didn't write the music that accompanies his words, and as sincere as these performers are, none of the words are framed the way Williams would have, had he completed the songwriting process.

Wilhelm Furtwangler's name may be hard for Americans to pronounce, but the reason this great conductor is not so well-remembered here is that he chose to remain in Germany during the Second World War, though he was never a member of the Nazi Party, and he was completely exonerated by a postwar tribunal.

Right after she graduated from high school in 2001, Jess Goodell enlisted in the Marine Corps as a mechanic. She was stationed in Okinawa, Japan — but she wanted to go to Iraq. "I felt a pressure both from my peers and from within that in order to be a real marine, I needed to go to Iraq," Goodell tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, in case you don't know them, are not only tuneful and hilarious, they're also very touching, and truly literate. The most popular and surely the funniest is The Mikado — a satire not so much of Japanese customs but of English customs filtered through a Japanese lens. Oddly, Hollywood didn't touch it until half a century after its premiere at London's Savoy Theater, in 1939, when it was also being jazzed up on stage, in such pieces as Michael Todd's The Hot Mikado, starring Bill "Bojangles" Robinson.

Author Jim Shepard writes what he knows, but also likes to write what he doesn't know. His novel Project X was about a Columbine-like school shooting from the perspective of one of the kids involved. His story Love and Hydrogen concerns a clandestine gay romance between two crew members of the Hindenburg.

Our therapeutic culture is lousy with stories of people struggling to spin childhood traumas into something positive, something that leaves the world a better place than the one that damaged them; but I've never seen a film in which the link between a trauma and its transmutation is as vivid as in Buck.

This interview was originally broadcast on April 28, 2008. Four of Nick Cave's studio albums — Murder Ballads, No More Shall We Part, Let Love In and The Boatman's Call — have just been reissued.

Democracy movements sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa have sparked dramatic changes in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya.

The West Bank has yet to see a movement on this level. If and when that does occur, it could be a "game changer" for Israel and the United States, says Robert Malley, an expert in conflict resolution and the program director for the Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group.

Romance comics — those sappy, dramatic serials from the 1940s and '50s — were designed for girls who grew up craving honeymoons and marital bliss in the years following World War II. Michael Barson, a middle-aged pop culture writer from New Jersey, certainly wasn't the target audience for romance comic books, but in the early 1980s he found himself amassing a sizable collection of them.

The first Dr. David Ansell went into the men's room at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, he immediately ran out. "It was so bad, I couldn't use it," he says. "I ran across the street and had to use the bathroom there. It was quite an introduction to my first day at County."

A few nights ago, I put on Warner Home Video's new Blu-ray of one of my favorite adventure films, The Man Who Would Be King. Based on a story by Rudyard Kipling, this 1975 tale stars Michael Caine and Sean Connery as two roguish British soldiers who scam their way into taking over the country of Kafiristan. It's a terrific movie, and as it unfolded, I was struck that Caine and Connery have been part of my life since I was a kid. I could recognize their voices in my sleep.

It's not often that a novel leaves me (temporarily) speechless. But Ann Patchett's new novel isn't called State of Wonder for nothing, because that's exactly the state I've been in ever since I first opened it. The numbness has worn off by now, but for days, all I could say to friends who asked me about it was the one-word review: "Wow."

This interview was originally broadcast on May 10, 2010. Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition is now available in paperback.

Between the years of 1920, when the 18th Amendment to the Constitution was passed, and 1933, when the 21st Amendment repealed the restriction, it was illegal to sell, transport or manufacture "intoxicating" beverages for consumption in the United States.

Comedian, writer and producer Steve Coogan, an icon of British comedy, is best known for playing his character Alan Partridge, the "nerdy radio DJ with a terrible taste in sweaters and an inflated ego."

As Partridge, Coogan was often compared to Garry Shandling in The Larry Sanders Show and Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm, for his ability to improvise and play with the tiny details of life.

Brad Paisley doesn't possess the most distinctive voice in country music, and his guitar solos exude a lot of arena-friendly rock 'n' roll flashiness. But he's become a huge country star on the basis of just this combination of aw-shucks ordinariness and ostentatious skill.

Two years ago, a man walked into the Gold & Silver Pawn Shop in Las Vegas with a pair of diamond earrings.

Pawn dealer Rick Harrison asked him the typical questions — Where did you get it? Where is the receipt? — and the man readily answered. Harrison filled out the required paperwork and paid the man $40,000 for his merchandise.

The very next day, Harrison found out the earrings were stolen. The victim got her earrings back and the criminal was prosecuted. Harrison, meanwhile, was out $40,000.

After abruptly departing MSNBC in January, Keith Olbermann returns to broadcasting on June 20 with a new version of Countdown on the Current TV network.

He tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that his new show resembles his old show on MSNBC but "with some additional bells and whistles and a little bit more commentary." And, he says, he's looking forward to being at a network where he can say things he wasn't able to say before.

Sugar Ray Leonard is considered to be one of the best boxers of all time. The first boxer to win more than $100 million in purses, Leonard won world titles in five weight divisions, received a gold medal at the 1976 Olympics and went on to become a successful motivational speaker, actor and commercial endorser.