Society & Culture

He's helped many people through painful passages in their lives. And he's faced his own: Since a near-fatal auto accident in 1979, he's been paralyzed from the chest down. Gottlieb has had nearly three decades to come to terms with the changed circumstances of his body — but now, he fears, that body may be growing tired.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the new memoir The Bridge Ladies by middle-aged baby boomer Betsy Lerner who invites herself into her mother's long-running bridge game as a way of trying to understand a generation that still seems to play its cards too close to its chest.

Comic Jerrod Carmichael is the creator and star of the NBC sitcom The Carmichael Show. On the show, he plays a character, also named Jerrod Carmichael, who debates with his family about complicated, often uncomfortable topics.

In an interview recorded onstage, Amir Questlove Thompson the cofounder and drummer of the Roots, the houseband for The Tonight Show talks with Terry Gross about music, his father doo wop singer Lee Andrews who died last month, and about Prince.

Actor Tom Hanks talks about his new film A Hologram for the King, his production company Playtone, playing courageous, tested men in Captain Phillips, Saving Private Ryan and Apollo 13, and growing up in a fractuous family.

The co-star of the X-Files discusses his novel, Bucky F*cking Dent, about a son reuniting with his absentee father. Duchovny earned a master's degree in literature before starting his TV career.

Comic W. Kamau Bell finds humor in the parts of America that make him uncomfortable. Speaking to Fresh Air's Terry Gross, Bell likens his new CNN series United Shades of America to a travel show that takes him "to all sorts of different places that I [am] either afraid to go, or you wouldn't expect me to go."

Growing up, comics Nadia Manzoor and Radhika Vaz never dreamed that they would one day co-star in a sketch-comedy series about two immigrant Muslim women in Brooklyn. But Manzoor who grew up in a Pakistani-Muslim community in London, and Vaz who grew up in India now star in the web series Shugs & Fats. The series won a Gotham Award for breakthru short form series.

At 46, former Daily Show correspondent Samantha Bee says she's not very concerned with what people think of her.

"Being in my late 40s has been absolutely freeing and liberating for me," Bee tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "I'm a married woman with kids. I'm a professional. People just can't [put me] me in a tiny box that makes sense to them, so now I just don't care that much what people think of me ... and now I do my own thing."

Point-of-view is passed like a baton among the tortured main characters in Joachim Trier's new film. Critic David Edelstein says Louder than Bombs is intimate, touching and "insistently alive."

Jacob Bernstein named his documentary about his mother after an Ephron family saying — "everything is copy," meaning that anything and everything that happens to you is fair game to write about.

Author Sarah Hepola has complained for years about the random hatred of the Internet. Then, with one careless post, she became part of the problem.

Author Peggy Orenstein says that when it comes to sexuality, girls hear that "they're supposed to be sexy, they're supposed to perform sexually for boys, but ... their sexual pleasure is unspoken."

"When I'm acting, I always imagine myself as looking totally different than the person that appears onscreen," Black says. The comedian writes about family, masculinity and vanity in his new memoir.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan says each of the "nouveau Gothic" stories in Helen Oyeyemi's new collection leaves a deep impression — like a scar that stubbornly refuses to fade.

King began acting professionally as a teen on the TV show 227. Now she co-stars in ABC's American Crime and HBO's The Leftovers. She also directs for television, but says "I absolutely love acting."

When his mother was turning 90, music critic Lloyd Schwartz wrote poems that put her memories into verse. Composer Mohammed Fairouz set three of the poems to music on the new recording, No Orpheus.

Writer-director Trey Edward Shults cast his own family in his home-for-Thanksgiving psychodrama. Reviewer David Edelstein says Krisha "marks the arrival of a truly adventurous, humanist filmmaker."

Dana Spiotta's new novel centers on a friendship between two female filmmakers. Critic Maureen Corrigan calls it an uncanny work, whose characters and ideas linger "long after the story is over."

Gillian Jacobs and Paul Rust play two people on the brink of becoming a couple in Love, the new comedy series co-created by Judd Apatow, Rust and Rust's wife, Lesley Arfin.