David Remnick profiles the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, and speaks with Barack Obama about the breadth of her enduring influence:

“Nobody embodies more fully the connection between the African-American spiritual, the blues, R.&B., rock and roll—the way that hardship and sorrow were transformed into something full of beauty and vitality and hope,” Obama tells Remnick. “American history wells up when Aretha sings.” 

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Meet the Indian doctor transforming thousands of lives. Dr Devi Shetty’s pioneering methods are bringing world-class heart surgery to the masses.

In 1996, Reginald Dwayne Betts — a 16-year-old honor student with braces — used a pistol to carjack a man who had been sleeping in his vehicle. Shortly thereafter, he was caught, sentenced as an adult and sent to an adult prison, where he served more than eight years, including one year in solitary at a supermax facility.

“I was 5 feet, 5 inches and 120 pounds. I went to prison with grown men, and I went into what people readily acknowledge as a treacherous and a wild place,” Betts tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “My judge, when he sentenced me, he said, ‘I am under no illusion that sending you to prison will help, but you could get something out of it if you choose to.’ ”

As it turns out, the time he spent behind bars helped shape Betts’ future as a poet. He had always loved to read, but in prison, books — and writing — became a mental escape. One day, when he was in solitary confinement, a fellow prisoner slipped an anthology called The Black Poets under his cell door.

“That’s the book that changed my life,” Betts says. “It introduced me to Etheridge Knight, to Rob Hayden, Lucille Clifton, Sonia Sanchez and so many countless black writers and black poets that really shaped who it is that I wanted to be in the world.”

Betts completed his GED while in prison. After his release in 2005, he continued his education and is now a law student at Yale University. He is also a poet and author. His most recent book is a collection of poems called Bastards of the Reagan Era.

Betts says the name of the book holds double meaning: “First is that it’s this idea of being fatherless, but the other idea is … this notion that whole sort of generation of young people were bastards of an era, of the Reagan era. I think about my own life, I think about the life of people that’s close to me, and I just recognize that we were … we were just lost — lost in time, we were lost in space, and we were struggling to find, I think, a sense of who we were.”