Midday on WNYC

Psychiatrist Christine Montross discusses the gripping patient encounters that have challenged and deepened her practice. In Falling into the Fire: A Psychiatrist’s Encounters with the Mind in Crisis, she looks at the grave human costs of mental illness and the challenges of diagnosis and treatment, and she confronts the larger question of psychiatry: What is to be done when a patient’s experiences cannot be accounted for, or helped, by what contemporary medicine knows about the brain?

Sarah Nassauer, reporter for the Wall Street Journal, talks about her article “Where the Calories are Hiding,” which looks at calorie counts on menus and the surprising effect that posting calories has on people’s choices.

Director Tom Donahue talks about his documentary “Casting By,” which spotlights filmmaking’s unsung hero—the casting director. He looks at casting pioneers like Marion Dougherty and Lynn Stalmaster, who were iconoclasts whose taste and instincts helped change the old studio system and usher in New Hollywood through landmark movies like “Midnight Cowboy,” “The Graduate,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “Bonnie and Clyde.” “Casting By” debuts August 5 at 9 pm on HBO.

Director and screenwriter David Gordon Green and actors Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch talk about their new movie, “Prince Avalanche.” It’s the story of mild-mannered Alvin (Paul Rudd) and immature chatterbox Lance (Emile Hirsch), who are hired to spend the summer of 1988 repainting a highway in a remote fire-damaged Central Texas forest. An unlikely friendship emerges from the mutual annoyance. It opens August 9 at IFC Center and at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas.

Maggie O’Farrell discusses her new novel, Instructions for a Heatwave, about a family crisis set during the legendary British heatwave of 1976. Gretta Riordan wakes on a stultifying July morning to find that her husband of 40 years has vanished, cleaning out his bank account along the way, and Gretta’s three grown children converge at home for the first time in years.

This week we're following up on Please Explain: Pain to find out more about pain killers. Barry Meier, New York Times reporter and author of A World of Hurt: Fixing Pain Medicine’s Biggest Mistake, talks about how pain medications work, how over the counter analgesics compare to prescription pain killers, and the problems of pain killer addiction.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux is arguably the most influential publishing house of the modern era—home to 25 Nobel Prize winners and generation-defining authors like T. S. Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, Susan Sontag, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Philip Roth, and Jonathan Franzen. Boris Kachka reveals the era and the city that built FSG through the stories of two men: founder-owner Roger Straus and his utter opposite, the reticent, closeted editor Robert Giroux. In Hothouse: The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America’s Most Celebrated Publishing House, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Kachka pulls back the curtain to expose how elite publishing works today.

The Florida orange crop has been under attack by an incurable disease. New York Times reporter Amy Harmon looks at the pursuit of a genetically modified orange that will save the Florida crop. She wrote about it in her article "A Race to Save the Orange by Altering Its DNA," in the New York Times.

Last week the North Carolina legislature passed what Ari Berman calls “the country’s worst voter suppression law.” The bill mandates voter ID to cast a ballot and strictly limits the forms of ID accepted. It also cuts the number of early voting days and eliminates same-day voter registration. Berman, contributing writer for The Nation magazine and an Investigative Journalism Fellow at The Nation Institute, talks about these new regulations and looks at what other states have been doing to make it more difficult for citizens to vote.  

Jeremy Pope and Wallace Smith discuss their roles in “Choir Boy,” a new play with gospel music. Pharus (played by Jeremy Pope) wants nothing more than to take his rightful place as leader of the Charles R. Drew Prep School for Boys’ legendary gospel choir, but can he find his way at the institution if he sings in his own key? “Choir Boy” is playing at Manhattan Theatre Club through August 11.

Director Jack O’Brien talks about the history of American regional theater and how he became a director. In Jack Be Nimble: The Accidental Education of an Unintentional Director he explains that he didn’t intend to become a director, or to direct some of the most brilliant—and sometimes maddening—personalities of the age, but that’s what unexpectedly happened.

Orson Welles and his friend the director Henry Jaglom, recorded conversations they had over lunch in the years before Welles died. The tapes were thought to be lost, but they've recently been discovered. Film historian Peter Biskind talks about what the conversations reveal.  My Lunches with Orson, edited by Biskind, presents Welles talking intimately, disclosing personal secrets, reflecting on the highs and lows of his career, the people he knew—FDR, Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, Laurence Olivier, David Selznick, Rita Hayworth, and more—and the many disappointments of his last years.

The resorts of New York's Catskill Mountains—once known as the Borscht Belt—produced dozens of Jewish comics and entertainers, who still influence comedy today. Robert Klein and Lawrence Richards talk about the documentary “When Comedy Went to School,” a portrait of this country's greatest generation of comedians - the generation that includes the likes of Jerry Lewis, Sid Caesar, Robert Klein, Jackie Mason, Mort Sahl, Jerry Stiller, and others, all of whom got their start on Borscht Belt stages. “When Comedy Went to School” opens July 31 at IFC Center.

Last week armed men broke a member of the Pink Panther gang of jewel thieves out of a Swiss prison, according to police. Havana Marking tells the story of the Pink Panthers, the subject of  her new documentary, “Smash & Grab.” The Pink Panthers are believed to have stolen—in dramatic fashion—a  quarter-billion dollars in jewels in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East since 2002. “Smash and Grab” is playing at Film Forum.

Mason Williams tells how the New Deal—and two political titans—shaped New York. City of Ambition: FDR, LaGuardia and the Making of Modern New York gives an account of how Roosevelt and La Guardia, patrician president and immigrant mayor, fashioned a route to recovery from the Great Depression for the nation and the master plan for a great city.