Society & Culture

Julie Lythcott-Haims's new book, Your Turn: How to Be an Adult, is a handbook on adulthood. Her 2017 memoir, Real American, is the story of her coming to terms with her biracial identity.

Saidu Tejan-Thomas Jr.'s "Resistance" podcast explores different aspects of the Black Lives Matter movement. The podcast has been mostly devoted to the protests that started last summer after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, but it also chronicles Tejan-Thomas Jr.'s personal history.

When he was 12, Gates made a bargain with Jesus in an attempt to save his mother's life. He talks about how that altered his own life, and his new book and PBS series, The Black Church.

Odom Jr. landed his first Broadway role at 16, and later starred as Aaron Burr in Hamilton. Now he's up for two Oscars, one for his role as Cooke in One Night in Miami.

Promising Young Woman marks the directing debut of Emerald Fennell. The movie has been nominated for five Academy Awards, including best director and best original screenplay. Fennell describes the film as "a kind of fantasy — with wish fulfillment" but also as something "much darker and, I hope, more honest than that."

What do Soul Train and Whitney Houston tell us about race in America? In his book, A Little Devil in America, the culture critic traces the history of Black performance through moments in pop culture.

Carlile traces her path to country stardom in the new memoir, Broken Horses. To date, she's won six Grammys, including back-to-back wins for best country song in 2020 and 2021.

Best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove, McMurtry wrote more than 30 books and screenplays, many set in the West. He died on March 25. Originally broadcast in 1995.

Hemingway, the latest PBS documentary series from Ken Burns and company, has several names attached who have become a sort of repertory group. Lynn Novick, Burns' frequent co-director, is back. So is writer Geoffrey C. Ward, who helped make Burns a PBS phenomenon with the landmark non-fiction mini-series The Civil War. And the narrator, who has lent his voice to so many past productions, is Peter Coyote.

Elizabeth Neumann resigned from the Department of Homeland Security in 2020. She says the Trump administration ignored the threat — and fanned the flames — of violent domestic extremism.

Lynn, who married when she was in her teens, later created controversy by singing about divorce and birth control. Her new album is Still Woman Enough.
Originally broadcast on Nov. 10, 2010.

David Zucchino says Wilmington, N.C., was once a mixed-race community with a thriving Black middle class. Then, in 1898, white supremacists staged a murderous coup. Originally broadcast Jan. 13, 2020.

Jon Batiste reflects on the past year and how music can help, and he plays and sings at the piano.

MIT professor Sherry Turkle was 27 when she learned that her estranged father had conducted psychological experiments on her when she was a child. She looks back on her childhood in a new memoir.

McBride's most recent novel, Deacon King Kong, is set in a Brooklyn housing project in 1969. "Time and place is really crucial to good storytelling," he says. Originally broadcast Feb. 29, 2020.

The Trump White House agreed to a May 1 troop withdrawal. New Yorker writer Dexter Filkins says Biden must now decide whether to honor a deal that included the Taliban but not the Afghan government.

Eliot Higgins is the founder of an online collective that picks apart conspiracy theories and investigates war crimes and hate crimes using clues from the Internet. His new book is We Are Bellingcat.

The sleight-of-hand master explores themes of identity, honesty and the emotional cost of keeping secrets in the memoir, AMORALMAN. DelGaudio's one-man show In & Of Itself is now available on Hulu.

The film One Night in Miami imagines a night in 1964 where Cooke, Clay, Malcolm X and Jim Brown meet. We listen back to interviews with biographers Peter Guralnick, Jonathan Eig and Alex Haley.