Society & Culture

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist revisits the lives and deaths of his parents in his new memoir, Between Them. "As much as they loved me, an only child, they loved each other more," he says.

Comic W. Kamau Bell has spent much of his life feeling awkward. A self-described "tall, rangy black dude," Bell was often mistaken for a basketball player growing up — except that serious asthma and allergies meant he spent the bulk of his childhood indoors watching TV.

Emotions like lust and love serve as metaphors for social and political struggles on Lamar's new album. Critic Ken Tucker says the music on DAMN. signals the artist's bold refusal to back down.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the new memoir by Dani Shapiro; it's her third memoir and it's about marriage. Her first two were best sellers.

In 2017 alone, Merriam-Webster added more than 1,000 words to its dictionary. Noah Webster himself might have struggled to define these new English terms — such as binge-watch, humblebrag, photobomb, NSFW, truther, face-palm and listicle.

Sasheer Zamata has been a cast member of Saturday Night Live since 2014. Now she has new stand up special titled Pizza Mind.

Alec Baldwin has been keeping busy lately. The star of the animated film The Boss Baby has a new memoir out and also keeps popping up on Saturday Night Live to play President Trump.

Growing up, punk rocker Laura Jane Grace always felt conflicted about gender. She tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that she felt like two "twin souls" were warring inside of her, fighting for control. "I thought that I was quite possibly schizophrenic," she says.

Maureen Corrigan says 'One of the Boys', is a slim, deeply affecting and brutal story, about the fierce power of a father-son relationship.

Ron Powers has written a personal and historical book about the treatment of the mentally ill in the U.S. He watched his two sons be transformed by schizophrenia. His youngest son committed suicide after struggling with the disease; a few years later his oldest son was diagnosed with the same disease.

The new film, Get Out, defies easy classification. Though it has funny moments, it's primarily a horror film, with racial anxiety at its center. Writer-director Jordan Peele tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that he thinks of Get Out as a "social thriller."

Linguist Geoff Nunberg tracks the evolution of the word "protest."

Full Frontal host Samantha Bee makes no bones about the fact that she was caught off guard by Donald Trump's victory on election night.

In 2009, Maj. Mary Jennings Hegar was shot down by the Taliban in Afghanistan while co-piloting an Air National Guard medevac helicopter. Though she was wounded in her rifle arm, Hegar managed to return fire while hanging onto a moving helicopter, which saved the lives of her crew and her patients.

Geoff Nunberg on speaking with hands.

After working mostly as a behind-the-scenes guy on Chappelle's Show and Inside Amy Schumer, Neal Brennan is now stepping out as a performer.

Sheenan reviews In the Mood for Love the new film by Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, whose previous film was Chungking Express.

It's been almost 20 years since Barbara Ehrenreich published Fear of Falling, her brilliant book on the anxious "inner life" of the American middle class. The book's title, "fear of falling," has become a catchphrase to refer to the cosmic jitters that afflict anyone whose lifestyle and sense of identity can be wiped out by the loss of a job or a plunge in the stock market.

The late James Baldwin was one of the most influential African-American writers to emerge during the civil rights era. During the late 1950s and 1960s, he traveled through the South and addressed racial issues head on. Though Baldwin died in 1987 before that book could be written, the new Oscar-nominated documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, draws on his notes for the book, as well as from other of Baldwin's writings.

Consumers have grown accustomed to the idea of online retailers collecting information about them, but author Joseph Turow says that now physical stores are doing it too.