In his new book One Nation Under Dog, Michael Schaffer investigates the booming pet-care industry. He discusses how the $43 billion business reflects our ideas about consumerism, family, politics and domesticity.
He's helped many people through painful passages in their lives. And he's faced his own: Since a near-fatal auto accident in 1979, he's been paralyzed from the chest down. Gottlieb has had nearly three decades to come to terms with the changed circumstances of his body — but now, he fears, that body may be growing tired.
A new film imagines what happened when Elvis Presley met President Nixon on Dec. 21, 1970. Film critic David Edelstein says Elvis & Nixon "shows the crazy-making insulation of celebrity."
A range of musicians, including Tom Waits and Sinéad O'Connor, cover gospel-blues performer Johnson on a new tribute album. Critic Milo Miles says the record's tracks are striking and inventive.
Music critic Lloyd Schwartz first met poet Elizabeth Bishop when she moved to Cambridge in the early 1970s after living in Brazil for nearly 20 years. Now Schwartz has co-edited a new collection of work by the former U.S. Poet Laureate.
Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the new memoir The Bridge Ladies by middle-aged baby boomer Betsy Lerner who invites herself into her mother's long-running bridge game as a way of trying to understand a generation that still seems to play its cards too close to its chest.
The 85-year-old saxophonist's new album features live recordings made between 1979 and 2012. Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead calls Holding The Stage a "mixed bag" with a few "real gems."
Comic Jerrod Carmichael is the creator and star of the NBC sitcom The Carmichael Show. On the show, he plays a character, also named Jerrod Carmichael, who debates with his family about complicated, often uncomfortable topics.
In an interview recorded onstage, Amir Questlove Thompson the cofounder and drummer of the Roots, the houseband for The Tonight Show talks with Terry Gross about music, his father doo wop singer Lee Andrews who died last month, and about Prince.
Actor Tom Hanks talks about his new film A Hologram for the King, his production company Playtone, playing courageous, tested men in Captain Phillips, Saving Private Ryan and Apollo 13, and growing up in a fractuous family.
Mark Landler of The New York Times discusses Clinton and Obama's contrasting views on America's role in the world. Clinton, Landler says, was often the hawk, more willing to intervene with force.
Journalist and author T.R. Reid, a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, set out on a global tour of hospitals and doctors' offices, all in the hopes of understanding how other industrialized nations provide affordable, effective universal health care. The result: his book The Healing of America.
Critic David Edelstein reviews The Huntsman: Winter's War, a sequel to the 2012 movie, Snow White and the Huntsman, and Tale of Tales, an adaptation of a group of 17th century Italian folk stories.
Rock critic Ken Tucker says Prince, the singer, songwriter and instrumentalist who died yesterday at his home in Minnesota, was "the most inventive and prolific pop musician of his generation."
Neurologist Alvaro Pascual-Leone, talks about the use of TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation to treat patients with autisim spectrum disorder. One of his patients, John Elder Robison Robison participated in a six-month-long study, in which he received weekly TMS treatments. He details the treatments — and the emotional awakening that resulted — in a new memoir, Switched On.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer doesn't play on his new jazz album, but critic Kevin Whitehead says Old Locks and Irregular Verbs is nevertheless a perfect introduction to Threadgill's voice.
Seventy-four-year-old author Arlene Heyman discusses her debut short-story collection, which focuses on the sex lives and intimate relationships of characters in their 60s and 70s.
