2. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> brown: at the signature theater in arlington, virginia, rob kapilow talked with jeffrey browns brahms' music so beautiful-- and enduring. >> brown: rob kapilow, welcome back. >> thanks so much for having me. >> brown: johannes brahms, a man and his music, right. you picked one of his famous piano pieces. >> i did. but you know, the thing is, to get at the heart of brahms' music is difficult because to get at the heart of who brahms was as a person is difficult. >> brown: brahms the man. >> brahms the man. i mean, according to all contemporary accounts, he was sarcastic, prickly, abrupt, utterly self-guarded, almost impossible to get to know. and the same thing is actually true of this piece. this is the second piece in a set of six pieces, but the first piece is, like brahms himself, dense, filled with swirling energy, complicated, dark, and he has to sort of wrestle it into submission to end the piece like this: ♪ ♪ and then one long chord. ♪ ♪ >> brown: that's the end of part one. >> end of part one. but in a way it's also the beginning of part two, because that last chord i

live at the 9:30 club in washington, d.c., i'm jeffrey brown for the pbs newshour. ♪ ♪ >> sreenivasanstations in june. check your local listings. online, seth hurwitz takes jeff to the basement of the 9:30 club to discuss the early days of the music scene there, plus we have five tips on how to take great photos at the next concert you attend. >> woodruff: finally, another installment in our "brief but spectacular" series, where we ask interesting people to describe their passions. tonight, we hear from performer tim heidecker, best known for his part in the absurdist comedy duo of tim & eric. his latest record, "in glendale," was released last week. here he lays out why we should pay for entertainment we get online. >> hello, friends. my name is tim heidecker. you may not know me but if you've seen "bridesmaids," i play the groom in the film. i think i have one line in the movie. ♪ ♪ ♪ your kids might know me from tim & eric austin show great job and a number of other tim & eric related projects. people describe our show as absurd, offensive, disgusting, anti-comedy, which is somethi

from los angeles, i'm jeffrey brown for the pbs newshour. >> sreenivasan: finally, another installment in our brief but spectacular series. tonight, we hear from 91-year- old flossie lewis. a former english teacher, she now lives at the piedmont gardens senior living community in the bay area. lewis keeps busy by writing fiction and offers us insight on what it feels like to grow old. getting old is a state of mind. now, i'm 91. i'm badly crippled, but i still think i'm 15. will this go viral? >> we hope so. ♪ >> there are several ways i keep myself stimulated. by dragging myself to piedmont avenue on my walker or in my wheelchair, and you should see me use my wheelchair. i write light verse for the crest which is our newspaper and every month you can find a sly little bit of verse from flossie lewis. the other way i keep being stimulated is just watching politics. and if that isn't enough to drive you crazy, i don't know what is. you do struggle to keep yourself neat and clean and fashionable and there is always the possibility that romance comes your way. just liking someone is a tre

jeffrey brown recently went to puerto rico to see how officials are grappling with the zika virus. >> brown: at the emergency operations center in san juan last week, it was day 90 in the island's battle with zika. >> the areas in red have from 26-50 cases. >> brown: this center is used to dealing with hurricanes and other emergencies. but priority number one now is the mosquito-borne virus that' been spreading here since last december, with some 785 cases so far. deputy director hector colon showed us how teams stay in touch with hospitals, and call individuals to offer counseling and information on how to protect their families. the most urgent focus is on pregnant women. >> we monitor especially the pregnant women that test positive for zika. we offer them to do a test. and the ones that test positive, we monitor them very closely once they give birth. >> brown: the fear is that puerto ricans will experience what was first seen in brazil: babies born with abnormally small heads and brain damage, a condition known as microcephaly. mysteries abound with zika, including why birth defe

jeffrey brown has that. >> brown: the sound lasted about a fifth of a second, but it represented gravitationales created by the collision of two black holes with the mass of about 62 of our suns, a billion light years away. "black hole blues and other songs from outer space" is a story of things extraordinarily small and hard-to-comprehend large, and of the human drama in discovering them. author janna levin is a physicist and astronomer at barnard college. she's also author of a novel, "a madman dreams of turing machines." so the blues were sort of in the realm of metaphor here, but the idea is to hear the universe as far as aspects that we can't see. >> yeah, really what we know from the universe really does come from us from light. we have telescopes that span the range of light to take pictures of the sky, this is utterly different this is not a form of light, so when the black holes collided they were like mallets on a drum, they rang space time itself. >> brown: but you have to be able to hear them. >> right so, you have to record the shape of the drum. that's what this experiment did it

jeffrey brown explores a new take on a classic novel. >> brown: there's a well off bachelor, a mr.gley, moving to town, and mrs. bennett would just love to marry off one of her five daughters, preferably the eldest, jane. may be you've heard this story. jane austinen "pride and prejudice yes. it has been read and played with in many forms including films since. now comes "eligible" part of the austen project which asks six contemporary novelists to rewrite austen's books. previous bestsellers include "prep" and "american wife." welcome to you. >> thank you. >> brown: was this scary or fun to take on? you're inevitably going to be compared to jane austen and a beloved book. >> i would say it was scary and fun. i mean, i always knew that i was writing this as an act of admiration and not as an attempt to improve upon "pride and prejudice" which, of course, we all know is perfect. >> brown: what was the mission? it was just supposed to be fun. i wanted to sort of show this admiration for "pride and prejudice" but also update it and not be so similar that you would know at every twist

jeffrey brown has this newest addition to the newshour bookshelf. brown the man and what shaped him? those questions are taken up by musician and writer james mcbride known for "the color of water" and his national book award winning novel. mcbride's new book is "kill 'emsprks and leave." we talked recentlyt howard theater in washington, d.c. and a historic hall where james brown. i asked about the power of prown's music. >> there's no music in america that you can listen to that doesn't have some james brown in it. the whole creation of the synthesizers and these guitar parts and the beat-- that was james brown. elvis presley shook america up, and james brown shook the world up because his whole persona was that of someone whose consumed by this music, this sound. so he was a phenomena-- he was really seen as a kind of scream at the end of the dial where black radio lived >> brown: a scream at the end of the dial? >> yeah, because he would go like, "ow," but musically he was very sophisticated; there is a lot of counter point in james brown's music.

jeffrey brown has our profile, and we should warn you, some viewers may find some of these images disturbing peter been lack can grew up amid security and post war economic boom of new jersey's suburban american life. he played football and worked as a stock boy in mat hath an, also became a reader and writer of poetry. >> the day comes in strips of yellow glass over trees. when i tell you the day is a poem, i'm only talking to you and only the sky is listening. >> it would lead to encounters with the likes of alan ginsburg and over the years, seven collections, the latest ozone journal, just won the pulitzer prize. but from his grandmother beginning at an early age, he heard occasional hints of a darker family history set in war armenia and he began to explore a past. the expulsion and killing of one and a half millioner meanians by the turks. many members of his family died, others like his grandmother and aunts survived after a horrific flight on foot. he would write about these events in history title the burning tigris" and in a family memoir, black dog of fate. >> one of the reasons fo

recently, jeffrey brown sat down with boilen, whose own band was the first to play that club 35 years his new book "your song changed my life" recounts the history of modern music through voices boilen has encountered. >> brown: your book, "your song changed my life," right. that's true, i mean a lot of people would say that, but why? have you figured out what it is about music that has that impact? >> i think it's so visceral. there is a-- music is so different than everything else. it's not tangible, you don't see it, you-- it hits you on a level that is deeper than what we do and see in everyday life. i think it's pure emotion and tone, and a lyric, somebody saying a lyric that repeats over and over can be a call to action for somebody. i tell stories of people whose lives were changed by a song, and often in those formative years, what some people call the reminiscence bump, where you're more likely to be susceptible to something with hormones raging, or the first time you ever like heard somebody go, "yeah," you know. those things are impactful because they're firsts. >> brown: y

in this latest addition to the newshour bookshelf, jeffrey brown explores the long, complicated taletwain's own life, and how one of america's greatest writers, was also a pioneering stand-up comic. >> brown: in 1894, at age 59, mark twain was the highest-paid writer in the land, a national celebrity, author of "the adventures of tom sawyer," "huckleberry finn," "the prince and the pauper," and a slew of other books that are still required reading more than 100 years after his death. but he was also nearly broke, after several investments and business projects went bust. a new book captures what happened next-- "chasing the last laugh: mark twain's raucous and redemptive round-the-world comedy tour" it tells of his travels and performances across the american west, to australia and new zealand, india and south africa. i joined author richard zacks recently at one of twain's favorite washington d.c. haunts, the historic willard hotel and its round robin bar. >> brown: so we know mark twain had a lot of talent. but what probably many of us, and i didn't know, was one of his greatest ta

jeffrey brown traveled to alabama for our report. >> brown: the "equal justice initiative" in montgomerynon-profit founded in 1989 by lawyer and civil rights activist bryan stevenson to represent death row prisoners and indigent and juvenile defendants, who he argues have been denied effective representation, often due to racial bias. in recent years, which included the publication of an acclaimed memoir, "just mercy: a story of justice and redemption," stevenson has become a leading voice nationally for criminal justice reform. i met him at his office in montgomery while reporting on alabama's overcrowded prisons and spike in prison violence. >> there were less than 5,000 people in alabama's prisons throughout most of the 1970s. and then you had politicians like you had all over the country get captivated, i'm going to say intoxicated, by the politics of fear. >> brown: intoxicated. >> yes, intoxicated by the politics of fear and anger. they began competing with each other over who could be the toughest on crime, and putting people in prison became the solution to virtually every proble

jeffrey brown has that. >> brown: hope jahren, welcome to you. >> thank you. >> brown: part memoir, part science. what were you after or are they both the same to you? >> yes, well, i wanted to write a book, and in my field that's what you do. you get your degree, you write a lot of papers and you get a broad view of the dispeeld you write a textbook-- >> brown: for other scientists. >> which changing the way the field is taught. when i sat down to do that i couldn't keep my own storyute of it. when i tried to explish plish what we accomplished i needed to talk about how we accomplished it and then i needed to talk about all the late nights and special people and strange experiences that went into that. i couldn't keep the two separate so now you have a book that's all entwined. >> brown: it begins for your first discovering or at least seeing science in your father's lab. you taught science at community college, right? >> yes. >> brown: what did you see? >> my very earliest memories as a small child were in the laboratory, what it smelled like, what the cement felt like, the hard angles