Society & Culture

Linguist Geoff Nunberg comments on the increased usage of the adjective "gallic." He says it's like a shorthand for "the French are at it again."

He is the author of several books including How Proust Can Change Your Life, and The Consolations of Philosophy. His latest book, The Art of Travel, is a reflection on travel, the anticipation versus the reality, how one often travels to escape the familiar and mundane — but can't escape oneself, and an examination of the art and literature of travel.

Film critic David Edelstein reviews How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days.

Retired U.S. Navy flight surgeon and NASA astronaut Captain Jerry Linenger talks about the awe and peril of space travel. He spent five months on the Russian Space station Mir and wrote about the account in his book, Off the Planet: Surviving Five Perilous Months Aboard the Space Station Mir." He described the Mir as "six school buses all hooked together." During his time there, he says, he and fellow crew members had numerous brushes with death, lacked adequate supplies and battled constant system failures.

Book Critic Maureen Corrigan reviews “The Time of Our Singing” by Richard Powers.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg considers the phrase “class-warfare.”

He writes about the Five Points neighborhood in Lower Manhattan which is the setting of Martin Scorsese's new film. Anbinder's book is Five Points: The 19th-Century New York City Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum. Anbinder is an associate professor of history at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

She is on the steering committee of the group International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War & End Racism). The group organized last Saturday's peace rally in Washington, D.C.

He is a former congressman and now general secretary of the National Council of Churches, and a United Methodist minister. He is also co-chair of the Win Without War coalition. Last year he led a delegation of clergy and lay leaders to visit Iraq.

He was a leader of the peace movement in the 1960s. He is a former president of Students for a Democratic Society, and author of a number of books including The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, and Media Unlimited. Gitlin is also a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University.

He reviews the new film The Hours.

They have collaborated on the new book Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights. Patricia Due was a civil rights activist with CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and was part of the movement's landmark "jail-in." Protesters served time instead of paying a fine for the so-called crime of sitting at a Woolworth lunch counter. Patricia Due worked with many of the movement's great figures during the 1960s.

Writer Neil Baldwin is the author of the new book, Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass roduction of Hate (PublicAffairs books). Baldwin details Ford early obsession with moralistic writings condemning Jews for not accepting Christ. Shortly before World War I and continuing into the 1930s he wrote a series of venomous anti-semitic essays in the newspaper, The Dearborn Independent (which Ford owned). In 1928 he collected many of the essays published in 1920 under the title, The International Jew: The World Foremost Problem. He also published The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.

TV critic David Bianculli reviews Mark Twain the new two-part documentary series by Ken Burns which airs on PBS tonight and tomorrow night.

In her 40 years of public service she worked for civil rights, helped write the guidelines that are now established in the Sexual Harrassment Act, worked for reform in South Africa and has argued before the Supreme Court. She has been the Commissioner on Human Rights in New York, the first woman appointed to head the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and a law professor. Holmes Norton is the subject of the new biography Fire in My Soul, written by a long-time friend, Joan Steinau Lester.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg on the evolution of the meaning of the word "plastics."

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Marriage: A Duet. It's a book of two novellas by Anne Taylor Fleming.

The two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporters have written together since the 1970s for several major newspapers and magazines. Their latest piece covers Native American-owned casinos and appears in this month's Time magazine. This September, they also published The Great American Tax Dodge: How Spiraling Fraud and Avoidance Are Killing Fairness, Destroying the Income Tax, and Costing You.

Haynes is the writer and director of the new movie Far From Heaven, inspired by the 1950s Douglas Sirk movie All that Heaven Allows. Friedberg, as the movie's production designer, worked with Haynes to bring a 1950s look to the film. Haynes also directed the movies, Safe and Velvet Goldmine.

He is the author of the bestseller Boy Still Missing, which is now available in paperback. He relates the saga of getting his photograph taken.