Society & Culture

Head of Afghanistan’s Human Rights Commission, Dr. Sima Samar. She was appointed to the position in July. Previously she served as the country’s first Minister for Women’s Affairs appointed by the interim Afghan government. Dr. Samar is an internationally-renowned feminist and human rights activist. Samar defied the Taliban and continued to operate schools for girls and health clinics in Afghanistan’s provinces and refugee camps in Pakistan. Samar was born in Ghazani, Afghanistan and is a Hazara, one of the most persecuted of the ethnic minorities.

LaHaye, who died earlier this week, was a fundamentalist Christian and a longtime leader of the religious right. His Left Behind books sold more than 50 million copies. He spoke to Fresh Air in 2002.

Book Critic Maureen Corrigan reviews The Little Friend (Knopf) the second novel by Donna Tartt.

Filmmaker Burr Steers is making his feature film debut with Igby Goes Down which he wrote and directed. It's about a disaffected teenager from a well-heeled but financially strapped family.

Film critic John Powers reviews Punch Drunk Love, the new film from writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson. Anderson's previous films include Magnolia and Boogie Nights.

Paul Feig is the creator of the now-defunct TV comedy series Freaks and Geeks. He's just written a new book Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence (paperback, Three Rivers Press). Feig was an actor before moving on to writing for TV and film.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg talks about presidents and language, and the pronunciation of nuclear as "nucular," a mispronunciation that dates all the way back to the era of Eisenhower. The underlying cognitive causes and social implications are considered.

Film critic David Edelstein reviews Igby Goes Down.

Novelist Rohinton Mistry was born in Bombay and now lives in Canada. His new novel is Family Matters. The book is set in 1990s Bombay and is about an elderly professor with Parkinson's disease who is forced to move into the crowded apartment of his daughter and her family. Mistry is also the author of A Fine Balance and Such a Long Journey which were both short-listed for the Booker Prize.

Novelist Jeffrey Eugenides is the author of the novel The Virgin Suicides which was made into a movie. His new novel, Middlesex, is about a contemporary hermaphrodite. Eugenides' fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review and Best American Short Stories. He currently lives in Berlin, Germany.

Phil Patton, author of Bug: The Strange Mutations of the World's Most Famous Automobile. It's a cultural history of the Volkswagen Beetle, the most produced and best-known car of all time. Patton writes for The New York Times, Esquire, Wired and ID. He also wrote Dreamland: Travels inside the Secret World of Roswell and Area 51.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg on the use of the word 'regime.'

Novelist Pat Conroy is the author of several books including The Great Santini, and The Prince of Tides which were both made into feature films. Conroy's new book My Losing Season (Doubleday) is a memoir about how playing basketball for the Citadel Military College transformed his life. Conroy was point guard and captain of the Citadel Bulldogs.

Author Martha McPhee's new novel is called Gorgeous Lies and it's a follow-up to her critically acclaimed first novel, Bright Angel Time. Both books are about growing up in a communal blended household in the 70s run by a dictatorial patriarch. In Gorgeous Lies, the patriarch is dying. The eight children try to make peace with their father and each other. McPhee currently teaches at Hofstra University.

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.