Society & Culture

When Nicole Lynn Lewis got pregnant in high school, she thought it might end her dream of going to college and having a career. She felt ashamed, in part because of how people regarded her as a pregnant Black teenager. Lewis, who is now in her 40s, was named a CNN Hero in 2014. Last year, she was named one of the inaugural awardees of the Black Voices for Black Justice Fund in recognition of her work addressing structural and systemic racism in America. Her new memoir is called Pregnant Girl: A Story of Teen Motherhood, College, and Creating a Better Future for Young Families.

Winslet stars in the new HBO series, Mare of Easttown. She spoke to Fresh Air in 2020 about her breakout turn in Titanic when she was in her 20s. "I was learning on the fly," she says.

Stephen Colbert reflects on life and doing his show during the pandemic, and surviving the Trump presidency.

There's clearly a limit to what the former president will say —even on his own platform. Obama's conversation with the Boss is at its most fluid and introspective when the two discuss masculinity.

Writer Lauren Hough grew up in a nomadic doomsday Christian cult called the Children of God. She says she remembers being taught animals could talk to Noah — that's how he was able to get them on to the ark — and that heaven was located in a pyramid in the moon. Her new collection is 'Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing.'

Julie Lythcott-Haims's new book, Your Turn: How to Be an Adult, is a handbook on adulthood. Her 2017 memoir, Real American, is the story of her coming to terms with her biracial identity.

Saidu Tejan-Thomas Jr.'s "Resistance" podcast explores different aspects of the Black Lives Matter movement. The podcast has been mostly devoted to the protests that started last summer after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, but it also chronicles Tejan-Thomas Jr.'s personal history.

When he was 12, Gates made a bargain with Jesus in an attempt to save his mother's life. He talks about how that altered his own life, and his new book and PBS series, The Black Church.

Odom Jr. landed his first Broadway role at 16, and later starred as Aaron Burr in Hamilton. Now he's up for two Oscars, one for his role as Cooke in One Night in Miami.

Promising Young Woman marks the directing debut of Emerald Fennell. The movie has been nominated for five Academy Awards, including best director and best original screenplay. Fennell describes the film as "a kind of fantasy — with wish fulfillment" but also as something "much darker and, I hope, more honest than that."

What do Soul Train and Whitney Houston tell us about race in America? In his book, A Little Devil in America, the culture critic traces the history of Black performance through moments in pop culture.

Carlile traces her path to country stardom in the new memoir, Broken Horses. To date, she's won six Grammys, including back-to-back wins for best country song in 2020 and 2021.

Best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove, McMurtry wrote more than 30 books and screenplays, many set in the West. He died on March 25. Originally broadcast in 1995.

Hemingway, the latest PBS documentary series from Ken Burns and company, has several names attached who have become a sort of repertory group. Lynn Novick, Burns' frequent co-director, is back. So is writer Geoffrey C. Ward, who helped make Burns a PBS phenomenon with the landmark non-fiction mini-series The Civil War. And the narrator, who has lent his voice to so many past productions, is Peter Coyote.

Elizabeth Neumann resigned from the Department of Homeland Security in 2020. She says the Trump administration ignored the threat — and fanned the flames — of violent domestic extremism.

Lynn, who married when she was in her teens, later created controversy by singing about divorce and birth control. Her new album is Still Woman Enough.
Originally broadcast on Nov. 10, 2010.

David Zucchino says Wilmington, N.C., was once a mixed-race community with a thriving Black middle class. Then, in 1898, white supremacists staged a murderous coup. Originally broadcast Jan. 13, 2020.

Jon Batiste reflects on the past year and how music can help, and he plays and sings at the piano.

MIT professor Sherry Turkle was 27 when she learned that her estranged father had conducted psychological experiments on her when she was a child. She looks back on her childhood in a new memoir.