Society & Culture

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews The Lives of the Muses (HarperCollins) the new novel by Francine Prose.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg considers the effect of Sept. 11 on our language.

Film critic David Edelstein reviews City by the Sea the new film starring Robert DeNiro and Frances McDormand.

It's been more than 40 years since David Bowie created the gender-bending Ziggy Stardust and released the now-classic album The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars. With it, Bowie helped invent glam-rock. In conversation with Fresh Air's Terry Gross from 2002, Bowie was in the midst of making the following year's Reality, and here talks about leaving characters in his songs, his love of Tibetan horns, and his childhood desire to write musicals and play saxophone in Little Richard's band.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg considers recent claims about the relation between vocabulary size and social class.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg considers the word greed.

Actress Cynthia Nixon is one of the stars of HBO's Sex and the City. She plays Miranda Hobbes, a corporate lawyer who is also a new mother in the current season of the show. Nixon recently starred in the Broadway production of the classic 1930 Clare Boothe Luce play, The Women. She also appeared at the age of 18 in the broadway plays Hurlyburly, and The Real Thing. She's a founding member of the Drama Dept., an Off-Broadway theater company. Her film roles inclue, Amadeus, Prince of the City, The Pelican Brief, and The Out-of-Towners.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg on language purists and post modernism.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the new memoir, Teacher: The One Who Made the Difference (Random House) by Mark Edmundson.

David Edelstein is movie critic for the online magazine Slate. He reviews the new Clint Eastwood film, Blood Work.

Writer Joelle Fraser. She's written a new memoir about growing up in mid-60s San Francisco, the daughter of a flower child and a surfer: The Territory of Men.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg reflects on the words –hero— and –legend.

Writer Max Allan Collins. His graphic novel Road to Perdition is the basis for the film. Mickey Spillane said of the novel, "I know mysteries, and I know comics and Road to Perdition is one great ride!" Collins twice won the Private Eye Writers of Americas Shamus award for his Nathaniel Heller historical thrillers, True Detective and Stolen Away. His comics credits include Dick Tracy, Batman, Ms Tree and Mike Danger.

Director Sam Mendes. He made his feature film debut in 1999 with American Beauty which won an Academy Award for Best Picture. Mendes also won an Oscar for directing. Prior to that Mendes made his mark directing theatre productions in London (revival of Cabaret and The Rise and Fall of Little Voice)and on Broadway (The Blue Room). He directed the new film Road to Perdition starring Tom Hanks, Paul Newman and Jude Law.

Shawn Levy is the author of the new book Ready Steady, Go!: The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London. It's about London from 1961-1969. He writes, "for those few evanescent years it all came together: youth, pop music, fashion, celebrity, satire, crime, fine art, sexuality, scandal, theater, cinema, drugs, media: the whole mad modern stew." Levy is also the author of Rat Pack Confidential: Frank, Dean, Sammy, Peter, Joey & the Last Great Showbiz Party and the biography, King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis.

The HBO hit series Sex and the City, begins a new season July 21. We'll hear from two people involved with the show: Actress Sarah Jessica Parker was just nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series. She's been acting for most of her life, including playing Annie on Broadway, the young bimbo in L.A. Story, and a fed-up fiancee in Honeymoon in Vegas. This is her fifth season starring in Sex and the City, as Carrie, a columnist who writes about the sexual mores of New Yorkers.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg considers the obscurity of the Pledge of Allegiance.

Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg discusses the word "clarity."

Linguist Geoff Nunberg considers "journalese".

Linguist Geoff Nunberg considers obscure legal language and the word 'prurient' used in the landmark 1973 Supreme court ruling on obscenity.