Society & Culture

How many words are in the English language? 500,000? 1 million? Our linguist says there is no way to really count all the words. What's more, he wonders why people even care.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Elements of Style, the first and last novel by the late playwright Wendy Wasserstein.

National Guard Lt. Paul Rieckhoff is the founder and executive director of the organization Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (formerly Operation Truth). One of the group's aims is to see that troops in active duty and veterans are properly provided for.

He has written a memoir about his tour in Iraq shortly after the occupation: Chasing Ghosts: A Soldier's Fight for America from Baghdad to Washington.

Craig Ferguson hosts CBS's Late Late Show, which should give him a fairly good vantage point from which to poke fun at pop culture and the entertainment industry. He has pounced on the opportunity with his novel, Between the Bridge and the River.

When journalist Pete Earley's son was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, it sent him on an effort not only to get his son properly diagnosed and treated, but to understand the nation's mental health system. Earley's book about the experience is Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness.

The Notorious Bettie Page explores the life of the 1950s pin-up queen, who posed for under-the-counter men’s fetish magazines, and for photos and films for private collectors into the bondage scene.

Film critic David Edelstein reviews Friends with Money, the new film by writer/director Nicole Holofcener who wrote and directed Lovely & Amazing and Walking and Talking.

If a child's parents are of two races — particularly if the mother is a former Black Panther member and the father is white — growing up can be a unique experience. Writer Angela Nissel mines those experiences in her memoir, Mixed. Nissel is a writer and consulting producer for the NBC TV show Scrubs.

L'Enfant is a new feature film from Belgian filmmaking brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes.

Danielle Trussoni's just-published memoir is Falling Through the Earth. In the book, Trussoni explores the damaging legacy of her father's military service in Vietnam. Book critic Maureen Corrigan says the memoir is also an unusual testament to the father-daughter bond.

Peter Dinklage plays a defense attorney in the new Sidney Lumet-directed film Find Me Guilty, starring Vin Diesel as a member of the Lucchese crime family who represents himself on trial. Dinklage, a person of short stature, is perhaps best known for his award-winning film The Station Agent.

Singer, musician and folklorist Mick Moloney's new album, McNally's Row of Flats, centers on theater songs by an Irish songwriting team from the late 1800s. In those days, Vaudeville and minstrelsy were giving way to American Musical Theater in New York City.

A middle-aged woman awakens one morning to a sense of dread, a malaise so deep that she studiously analyzes her life — both past and present — to uncover its source. So begins Hilma Wolitzer's new book, The Doctor's Daughter.

Allegra Goodman's new novel is Intuition.

Abortion has been a defining issue since 1973. But for Eyal Press, it was a defining element of his childhood. A colleague of Press's father was killed for performing abortions. And Dr. Press received threats. Eyal Press offers a front-row view in Absolute Convictions.

Race and politics add to the tension of a detective's search for a kidnapped child in Freedomland, starring Samuel L. Jackson and Julianne Moore. The film's screenplay was written by Richard Price; the story is based on his novel of the same name.

In Stem Cell Now, bioethics expert Christopher Thomas Scott explores the possibilities of what some consider the greatest discovery since nuclear fusion: the isolation of embryonic stem cells for research.

Girls of Tender Age is the new memoir by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith.

An infamous case of wrongful conviction — which took the efforts of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to resolve — is the subject of the new novel from Julian Barnes. Arthur and George vividly details how the lives of two utter strangers intersected in what was known as "the Great Wyrley Outrages."

Coleman is a senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan think tank. She's an expert on economic development, Afghanistan and women's initiatives in the Middle East.