Health & Medicine

Unitarian minister Forrest Church believed that the knowledge that we must die makes us question what life means. Church, who died Sept. 24, 2009 after a long battle with cancer of the esophagus, was the author of Love and Death: My Journey through the Valley of the Shadow.

When coping with cancer, sometimes laughter is the best medicine. Kairol Rosenthal and Iva Skoch explain the phenomenon of "cancertainment."

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy died Tuesday night of complications related to a cancerous brain tumor. In this archival interview from 2006, Kennedy spoke with guest host Dave Davies about the problem of — and possible solutions to — America's burgeoning health care costs.

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.