Society & Culture

The James Beard award-winning chef says his flagship restaurant, Red Rooster, became his "haven" during the height of pandemic. Working with José Andrés' World Central Kitchen organization, Samuelsson converted the restaurant to a community kitchen. Over the course of six months, Red Rooster served more than 200,000 meals to first responders and others in need. he talks about that and his new book.

Nunez's latest novel, What Are You Going Through, is about facing the possible death of our planet from climate change — while also dealing with our mortality as individuals.

New York Times Magazine writer Emily Bazelon says false content moves through the Internet unchecked — undermining the political process along the way: "Lies often go viral faster than truth."

The second baseman, who died Oct. 11, played 22 years in the majors, mostly with the Houston Astros and the Cincinnati Reds. He later became a commentator for ESPN. Originally broadcast in 1993.

Serial reporter Chana Joffe-Walt says progressive white parents may say they want their kids to go to diverse schools — but the reality tells a different story. Her new podcast is Nice White Parents.

Rumaan Alam's latest novel, Leave the World Behind, centers on a white family and an older Black couple who find themselves together in a beautiful vacation house on Long Island while a power outage — and possibly something much worse — grips much of the East Coast. The novel, which is up for the National Book Award, explores class and race relations — and how we respond to crisis and fear

Kirsten Johnson's new Netflix documentary, Dick Johnson Is Dead, tells the story of moving her dad out of his home in Seattle and into her apartment in New York. It also enacts her father's death from imagined accidents, like getting hit in the head by a falling air conditioner or tripping on a crack in the sidewalk.

Johnson has worked as a cinematographer for over 50 documentaries, and has directed seven movies, including Cameraperson and the short film The Above. She says her father laughed when she pitched the idea to him.

Leave the World Behind is atmospheric and prescient: Its rhythms of comedy alternating with shock and despair mimic so much of the rhythms of life right now. That's more than enough to make it a signature novel for this blasted year.

Pollock worked in a paper mill and meatpacking plant for 32 years before becoming a writer. Netflix's film version of his novel, The Devil All the Time, drops Sept. 16. Originally broadcast in 2011.

"There's not a lot of heroic acts in middle school," Maya Erskine said in this 2019 interview. She and Anna Konkle play 13-year-old versions of themselves in the comedy series PEN15, now in season 2.

Race and belonging are the central themes of Yaa Gyasi's work. Her 2016 debut novel, Homegoing, about slavery, won a National Book critic's circle award, and the National Book Foundation's 5 under 35 honor.
Gyasi's new novel, Transcendent Kingdom, draws on Gyasi's life as the daughter of immigrants from Ghana.

In his new book, "Donald Trump v. The United States," New York Times journalist Michael Schmidt focuses on two figures in particular who stood up to the president: Former FBI Director James Comey and former White House counsel Don McGahn.

The HBO show uses sci-fi and superheroes to examine American racism. Cord Jefferson wrote the episode in which the main character goes back in time and to relive the trauma of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre.

In his book, The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., Peniel Joseph braids together the lives of the two civil rights leaders. He says that King and Malcolm X had "convergent visions" for Black America — but their strategies for how to reach the goal was informed by their different upbringings.

In her new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Wilkerson says that acknowledging America's caste system deepens our understanding of what Black people are up against in the U.S.

In his new book, White Too Long, Jones examines the legacy of white supremacy among Southern Baptists and other Christian denominations. Jones says the Southern Baptist Convention tends to focus on each individual's interior relationship with God — and "essentially screens out questions of social justice."

Natasha Trethewey has written before about the murder of her mother decades ago by her step father. She got a new window on her mother's life after getting access to the police files about her mother's case. Her new memoir is 'Memorial Drive.'

Mike Birbiglia explores his ambivalence about parenthood in the new book, The New One: Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad. Stein collaborated on the memoir, contributing her side of the story through poems, published under the name J. Hope Stein.