Fresh Air’s 10 favorite Terry Gross interviews

Terry Gross is one of the greatest interviewers we’ve ever seen. Marc Maron has called her “the most effective and beautiful interviewer of people on the planet.” She’s been inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame, and was awarded the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama last year. Empathetic yet incisive, patient yet methodical, deeply personal yet wholly universal, Gross is also unnervingly prolific: She’s been doing interviews five days a week for three decades now.

This week marks 30 years since WHYY first took Fresh Air With Terry Gross national in the form we know today: a daily, hour-long interview show featuring an array of artists and newsmakers. The show now reaches over 6 million people weekly via public radio stations across the country, and many more as a podcast. (Fresh Air is said to be NPR’s most downloaded podcast, and Apple has listed the show as the top-downloaded podcast on its platform for two years in a row.)

To commemorate the occasion, I asked Gross for a list of her personal favorite interviews. She responded:

When I started in radio, I envied one of my co-workers who had a whole box of tapes of her show. I thought, someday, if I’m lucky, I’ll have a whole box my own! Now Fresh Air has an archive of thousands and thousands of interviews covering 30 years … I’d be so damn smart if I was capable of remembering everything I’ve learned from them. Now, when I’m asked to choose my favorite interviews, I can’t, it’s just too overwhelming. I’m grateful to our producers for choosing some of theirs.

And so, here are the Fresh Air team’s favorite Terry Gross interviews, as selected by executive producer Danny Miller (who started as an intern in 1978); director Roberta Shorrock; producers Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, and Sam Briger; engineer Audrey Bentham; and associate producers Therese Madden, Heidi Saman, Mooj Zadie; and associate web producer Molly Seavy-Nesper. I’ve rounded out their picks with some context about each episode.