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Fresh Air Weekend: Louis Armstrong as the first Black pop star; America's loneliness epidemic

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

How Louis Armstrong became the first Black pop star: Author Ricky Riccardi says Armstrong's innovations as a trumpeter and vocalist helped set the entire soundtrack of the 20th century. His new book about Armstrong's early life is Stomp Off, Let's Go.

A family endures a dictatorship in the Oscar-nominated 'I'm Still Here': A Brazilian family is rocked when the father disappears following a military coup. I'm Still Here tells the heroic true story of a wife and mother who steers her family through the rapids of tyranny.

The trouble with 'donating our dopamine' to our phones, not our friends: "Smartphones make our alone time feel more crowded than it used to be," says journalist Derek Thompson. His article in The Atlantic is called "The Anti-Social Century."

You can listen to the original interviews here:

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