Society & Culture

Giamatti is nominated for an Oscar for his role as a pompous boarding school teacher who's assigned to supervise a student who has nowhere to go over winter break. Originally broadcast Jan. 10, 2024.

Sante, who was assigned male at birth, says changing genders was a strange and electric idea that lived in the recesses of her mind for years. Then, in 2021, she was playing around with a gender-swapping feature on a face-altering app and she had a breakthrough.

Wright is nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of a novelist who's frustrated with the publishing industry's expectations of Black authors. His first starring role was in the 1996 film Basquiat.

Reid's new book, Medgar and Myrlie, tells the stories of the civil rights leader from Mississippi and his wife, who became a civil rights activist after Medgar's 1963 assassination.

Norris wanted to see how Americans view race, so she asked people to share their thoughts in six words. Eventually, the project grew, garnering some 500,000 million entries from 100+ countries.

Journalist Antonia Hylton has written a new book, "Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum". And in it, Hylton traces one of the last segregated asylums in the nation - Crownsville Hospital in Maryland, built in 1911 from the ground up by 12 Black men who would later become patients there, some spending their entire lives in the hospital.

Tracee Ellis Ross co-stars in the Oscar-nominated movie American Fiction. For eight seasons, she starred in the ABC comedy series Black-ish. We talk about her new projects, her superstar mother, Diana Ross, and forging her own path outside of her mother's success. We also talk about how she's come to embrace, at 51, never having children or being married.

Home schooling is now America's fastest growing form of education, but Washington Post reporter Peter Jamison notes, "It's remarkable how little oversight there is of home-schooled children."

In his new book, "Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture," New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka writes about how we are fed algorithmic recommendations that dictate what music we like, how we interpret the news, what movies we consume, even what foods we eat, clothes we wear, the language we use and the places we go.

Director Ava DuVernay's new film "Origin" is based on the bestselling book "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents" by Isabel Wilkerson. In the film, DuVernay makes Wilkerson, played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, the center of her own story as she explores how understanding the caste system can deepen our understanding of what Black people experience in America.

Washington Post reporter Julian Mark talks about the resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay, and the broader movement to dismantle DEI practices in academia and corporate America.

Though more than one million Black Americans contributed to the war effort, historian Matthew Delmont says a military uniform offered no protection from racism. Originally broadcast Nov. 8, 2022.

Elliot Ackerman served five tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, during which time, he says, he witnessed the best and worst that human beings are capable of. Originally broadcast Nov. 11, 2021.

Sterling K. Brown co-stars in the new film "American Fiction."

Shields has worked as a model and an actor. A two-part Hulu documentary looks at her childhood roles and the toxic culture that perpetuates misogyny. Originally broadcast April 4, 2023.

Russell talks and sings about the physical and sexual abuse she endured from her racist adoptive father — and about how she learned she was worthy of being loved. Originally broadcast Sept. 27, 2023.

Roots cofounder Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson shares his Christmas playlist, which includes songs by DRAM, James Brown, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder. Originally broadcast Dec. 21, 2022.

Cord Jefferson's new film, "American Fiction." Jefferson is an award-winning screenwriter. He won an Emmy in 2020 for Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series for "Watchmen," along with Damon Lindelof. He's also written for "Succession," "The Good Place," "Master Of None," and Larry Wilmore's former late night series "The Nightly Show."

Ari Berman says both the Supreme Court and the lower courts are working to dismantle the '65 law that's considered one of the most effective pieces of civil rights legislation ever enacted in the U.S.

Larissa FastHorse is a playwright best known for her satirical play, "The Thanksgiving Play" which ran earlier this year on Broadway making FastHorse the first known Native American woman playwright to produce a Broadway production. Larissa FastHorse is of the Sicangu Lakota Nation. Her latest play, "For The People," ran earlier this month at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and centers around a Native community fighting for grant money to create a wellness center.