Health & Medicine

Perhaps best known for his work on the Fox TV show Arrested Development, Jason Bateman discusses his upcoming role as the boss at a vanilla extract company in Mike Judge's new the workplace comedy Extract.

Rafael Yglesias' novel is inspired by his wife, Margaret, who died in 2004. A Happy Marriage spans their three-decade relationship, from their courtship to her battle with cancer.

Lisa Sanders' monthly "Diagnosis" column in The New York Times Magazine was an inspiration for the TV series House. Sanders, an internist on the faculty of the Yale University School of Medicine, is the show's technical advisor; her new book is Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis.

Puppies Behind Bars is a canine training program that enlists prison inmates to train puppies as bomb-sniffing dogs or as service animals. Many of the dogs are then paired with wounded or disabled veterans.

With a national health-care conversation in high gear, linguist Geoff Nunberg notes that "government" (as in "government-run plan") wasn't always such a dirty word. From "G-men" to "government bureaucrats," on this edition of Fresh Air.

Writer-director Max Mayer's latest film is a romantic comedy in which — what else? — boy meets girl. In Adam, boy has Asperger's syndrome; it's a high-functioning variant of autism that can cause social awkwardness. The film won the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize at Sundance.

Washington Post military correspondent Ann Scott Tyson was recently embedded with Marines in Afghanistan fighting in Helmand Province, a stronghold of the Taliban.

Leidy Bonanno had just graduated nursing school when she was killed by an ex-boyfriend in 2003. Slamming Open the Door is Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno's way of remembering.

Journalist Maggie Mahar, author of Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Healthcare Costs So Much, has studied the economics of U.S. health care and drawn a few conclusions. She weighs in on the current debate on a health-care system overhaul.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman argues that free markets alone can't fix the health care system. Heritage Foundation Vice President Stuart Butler advocates a restructured system based on consumer choice.

Writer-director Judd Apatow's new film Funny People is a vaguely autobiographical comedy starring Apatow's former roommate Adam Sandler as a comic mentoring a younger colleague (Seth Rogen).

The New Republic senior editor Jonathan Cohn discusses power players of health care reform, including the insurance lobby, the pharmaceutical lobby, the American Medical Association and Congress.

Journalist — and former hostage — Chris Cramer talks about how his experience as a captive during the 1980 London Iranian Embassy siege evolved into an effort to protect journalists in hostile conditions.

With such a high-stakes, high-stress lifestyle, many journalists return from war zones with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Dr. Anthony Feinstein is one of those working to help them overcome the emotional aftereffects of covering conflict.

In "The Cost Conundrum," his latest article for The New Yorker, staff writer Dr. Atul Gawande reports from McAllen, Texas, a border-town with the dubious distinction of spending more per person on health care than almost any other market in America.

In 2008, Dr. Maria Siemionow and a team of doctors made history when they performed the first near-total face transplant in the United States. Siemionow writes about the procedure in the memoir Face to Face.

Gay rights activist Rodger McFarlane was involved in the earliest efforts to combat the transmission of AIDS during the 1980s. McFarlane, who was 54, died May 15. According to his bother, the cause of death was suicide.

Reinhardt, who died on Monday, helped shape the debate about health care by advocating for individual mandates and universal health care. Originally broadcast in 2009.

Army Major General Mark Graham lost two sons who were serving in the military, one by suicide, and the other died when a roadside bomb exploded in Iraq. Graham was struck by the different ways his sons' deaths were regarded. He has since enacted measures to ensure that all soldiers from the base he commands in Fort Carson, Colo. receive full military funerals and memorial services, regardless of whether they died in combat or by their own hand.

Actor Gabriel Byrne is so convincing and sympathetic in his role as a psychoanalyst on the HBO series In Treatment that people have started telling him their problems.