Society & Culture

Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple are expanding rapidly into finance, advertising, media and retail. Tech writer Farad Manjoo outlines how the four companies are heading in new directions -- and encroaching on each other's territory -- as they try to expand their customer base.

Two years after the death of her husband, Joan Didion suffered the untimely loss of her only daughter. She pieces together her memories of Quintana Roo in her new memoir, Blue Nights.

Criminologist David M. Kennedy's strategy for reducing gang violence has dramatically reduced youth homicide rates nationwide. In his new memoir, Don't Shoot, Kennedy outlines his community meetings and interventions have worked to curb youth violence in more than 70 cities.

Since 2006, 40,000 people have been murdered in Mexico as drug cartels battle each other and the Mexican military. Journalist Ioan Grillo traces how Mexico came to control drug trafficking in El Narco.

The "i" prefix began as an abbreviation for the word "Internet," but ended up being much more than that. "By the time i- was fleshed out, Apple had transformed itself from a culty computer-maker to a major religion," says linguist Geoff Nunberg.

In a new book, medical ethicist Harriet Washington details how genes and tissues are increasingly being patented by pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Those firms, she argues, are focused more on their profits than on the medical needs of patients.

"Poetry holds the knowledge that we are alive and that we know we're going to die," poet Marie Howe tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. One of Howe's most famous poems, "What the Living Do," was recently included in The Penguin Anthology of 20th-Century American Poetry.

Colson Whitehead's new novel Zone One is a post-apocalyptic tale of a Manhattan crippled by a plague and overrun with zombies. He explains that he created the novel, in part, to pay homage to the grimy 1970s New York of his childhood.

Long before the policy barring gays from serving openly in the military ended, Air Force 1st Lt. Josh Seefried started OutServe, a network of gay troops on Facebook. Seefried and his partner talk about what it's like being a gay couple in the military — and about new challenges facing gay troops.

Jeffrey Eugenides' third novel, The Marriage Plot, charts the lives of three young adults as they finish college, fall in love and navigate the real world after graduating from Brown University in 1982. Eugenides, also a Brown alum, based some of the novel on his own experiences directly after college.

Bell, the first tenured black professor at Harvard Law School, died this week at age 80. His 1973 book, Race, Racism and American Law, is a staple at law schools nationwide. He spoke with Terry Gross in 1992.

Words like "proletariat" and "masses" have largely left the lexicon, but linguist Geoff Nunberg says "class warfare" is a specter that haunts the English language — whenever there are appeals for making the rich pay more.

Dana Spiotta's third novel, Stone Arabia, is about an aging musician who never achieved the type of success he'd have liked. Rather than giving up, he chronicles an imaginary version of his life — as a successful rock star recording his career in a series of journals.

Bumble-ardy is a deeply imaginative tale about an orphaned pig who longs for a birthday party. Sendak, who is 83, wrote and illustrated the book while caring for his longtime partner, who died of cancer in 2007. "I did Bumble-ardy to save myself," Sendak says. "I did not want to die with him."

Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz just attended two productions of Porgy and Bess: an operatic performance at Tanglewood and a musical-theater version in Cambridge, Mass. He says it can work either way, "as long as Gershwin's great score remains its heart and soul."

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, linger in our thoughts, but not so much in our speech. Linguist Geoff Nunberg says "it's striking that 9/11 and its aftereffects have left almost no traces in the language of everyday life."

Leiber, the lyricist behind "Jailhouse Rock," "Yakety Yak" and "Stand By Me," died Monday. He was 78. Fresh Air remembers the songwriter with excerpts from a 1991 interview with Leiber and his songwriting partner Mike Stoller.

In 1983, critic John Powers panned the Pacino film, saying it was trashy and shallow. But he recently watched the film again, and says that in retrospect, he can see how the film burned its way into the national psyche.

Raoul Ruiz's 4 1/2 hour Portuguese/French melodrama -- a puppet theater of the upper class -- won't be everybody's cup of tea. But critic David Edelstein says the film's haunting mix of distance and intimacy makes the hours fly by.