Society & Culture

The Southern actor discusses playing a white supremacist turned born-again Christian on the critically acclaimed FX series Justified — and how he gets into the mind-set to play one of TV's worst bad boys.

For 20 years, the Rev. Gregory Boyle has run Homeboy Industries, an anti-gang program that employs and is run by ex-gang members in Los Angeles. Boyle recently had to lay off most of his staff because of financial problems. He recounts the decades he's helped ex-gang members turn their lives around in a new memoir, Tattoos on the Heart.

The pianist, a member of one of the most remarkable families in jazz history, died Sunday. He was 91. Fresh Air remembers the jazz legend with highlights from an interview conducted in 2005.

Rodrigo Garcia's film Mother and Child is his most formally daring, says critic David Edelstein. Starring Annette Bening, Kerry Washington and Naomi Watts, the film centers around the bonds between a birth mother and her children, even after that child is placed up for adoption.

Writer John Seabrook was in the process of adopting a baby girl from Haitin when the country was hit by the massive earthquake in January. He writes about his own experience with international adoption -- and the history and perils of the practice -- in The New Yorker.

Filmmaker Rodrigo Garcia never intended to write and direct movies: He wanted to stay behind the camera. Garcia explains how he got the idea for the drama Mother and Child and details what it was like growing p as the son of novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tenn. For the next two months, the man who shot him, James Earl Ray, was able to evade the FBI during a massive worldwide manhunt. Writer Hampton Sides traces the movements of both King and Ray in his new book, Hellhound on His Trail.

Wilbert Rideau went to prison in 1961 at the age of 19 for killing a woman during a bungled bank robbery. Prison changed him. He became the editor of the award-winning prison magazine The Angolite and was released with time served in 2005. His new memoir, In the Place of Justice, describes his 44 years behind bars.

The former poet laureate reflects on his brother's passing in the new poem "August Notebook: A Death." The elegy is included in Hass' new collection, The Apple Trees at Olema, which includes material from his first five works — as well as new poems on the art of storytelling and personal relations in a violent world.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg says what makes the pledge important isn't the meaning of the words -- it's the way we've managed to keep the words from meaning much of anything at all.

Noah Baumbach's movie stars Ben Stiller as a 40-ish unemployed carpenter searching for meaning in his life. After seeing the film, critic David Edelstein wonders if there's a limit "to how self-centered, how small you can make a character before you're punishing the audience."

The latest novel from John Banville throws a handful of Greek gods into the household of a glum human family to explore sex, love, faith and mortality. Reviewer Maureen Corrigan says The Infinities puts Banville's literary gifts on prominent display.

Actress Chloe Sevigny is known for her fashion sense, but she doesn't mind wearing a prairie dress for her Golden Globe-winning role as a wife in a polygamous family on HBO's Big Love. Sevigny explains how she prepared to play second wife Nicki Grant -- and remembers her other film roles.

Ewan McGregor has played a heroin addict in Trainspotting, a young Obi-Wan Kenobi in three Star Wars films, and a poet in Moulin Rouge. In his latest film, Roman Polanski's Ghost Writer, McGregor plays an unnamed writer uncovering a political scandal. He recounts his favorite acting roles — and how he prepared for them.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg doesn't enjoy everything about the English language. There are phrases that get on his nerves and words that he prefers not to use. And Nunberg says he's not the first person to have linguistic pet peeves — nor will he be the last.

In California, lawyers are two weeks into a landmark federal court case challenging California's Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage in that state. Margaret Talbot has been blogging about the trial for The New Yorker's Web site, and she has written about it in this week's issue of the magazine. A veteran journalist and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, Talbot writes about family life, women's work, children's culture, and politics and moral debates as they intersect with science and law.

Attorney David Dow has spent his career representing inmates who have been sentenced to death. Despite his efforts, many of his clients have been executed — and most of them were guilty. In his new memoir, The Autobiography of an Execution, Dow details what it's like to become emotionally involved with the people living on death row.

Yesterday Colin Firth received a Best Actor nomination for his starring role in A Single Man, the Tom Ford adaptation of Christopher Isherwood's 1964 novel. Today Firth talks to Terry Gross about playing professor George Falconer, a gay professor navigating Southern California in 1962.

In 1951, Henrietta Lacks died after a long battle with cervical cancer. Doctors cultured her cells without permission from her family. The story of those cells — known as HeLa cells, in Lacks' honor — and of the medical advances that came from them, is told in Rebecca Skloot's book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

Mare's-urine cocktails? Do-it-yourself forceps? Randi Hutter Epstein's new book Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth From the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank is full of delightful — and sometimes disturbing — anecdotes about the history of pregnancy and childbirth.