Society & Culture

In a 1996 interview, the late memoirist shares richly detailed memories of his Limerick childhood and his adult life in the United States.

Seattle director Lynn Shelton's fabulously squirmy film Humpday centers on two seemingly straight men who decide to have sex with each other as part of an amateur porn video competition.

Sacha Baron Cohen's latest jaunt — as a flamboyantly gay Austrian fashionista — is funnier and riskier than Borat. Sure, he's a cheap-shot artist, but he's one who's often got a righteous point.

When it came out in 1961, Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad perplexed and excited audiences with its surrealistic storytelling. John Powers has a review of the film's Criterion Collection re-release.

Journalist and lawyer Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court for The New York Times. He gives us a roundup of this year's most important decisions — some of which were left for the final hours before summer recess.

Ta-Nehisi Coates' pays tribute to his father in his Memoir.

Chip Berlet has studied extremism, conspiracy theories and hate groups for more than 25 years. He says that the recent murders of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller and Holocaust Museum guard Stephen T. Johns exemplify the potential for violence that often lurks within extremist groups.

Seven years after being discharged from the U.S. Army under "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," openly gay veteran Alex Nicholson is the executive director of Servicemembers United, an advocacy organization he founded.

Intended as a productive if imperfect compromise, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" has resulted in thousands of discharges — many of them involving service members with critical skills. Historian Nathaniel Frank says it's time the ban was ended.

Academy Award-winning writer and director Woody Allen discusses his life and his films — and why audiences shouldn't confuse the two. His latest movie, Whatever Works, tells the story of a "genius" professor in New York who marries a much younger woman.

Author Larry Tye discusses Satchel Paige, a negro league pitcher who helped integrate baseball by touring the country and playing exhibition games with white players.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg has made a living out of parsing phrases. His new book, The Years of Talking Dangerously, analyzes the buzzwords, stock phrases and metaphors that were made popular during the Bush administration's tenure.

From FDR's "New Deal" and LBJ's "Great Society" to Barack Obama's effort to create a "New Foundation", politicians (and their speech writers) have long used words to brand their ideas. Geoff Nunberg reflects on the politics of political phrasing.

Wall Street Journal columnist Scott McCartney says summer travel will be cheaper this year. McCartney pens the Journal's weekly column "The Middle Seat."

Gay rights activist Rodger McFarlane was involved in the earliest efforts to combat the transmission of AIDS during the 1980s. McFarlane, who was 54, died May 15. According to his bother, the cause of death was suicide.

Masterpieces make their own rules — and David Edelstein says it's hard to think of a work comparable to Olivier Assayas's hauntingly beautiful film, about cultural tides and the people carried on them.

Camilla Taylor, lawyer for the gay-rights group Lambda Legal, was lead lawyer on Varnum v. Brien — the case that led to an Iowa Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage there.

Once, Dan Gurley oversaw anti-gay campaigns for the Republican National Committee. Now he works for Equality North Carolina, a statewide group dedicated to securing equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people.

In Outrage, the Oscar-nominated director looks into the hidden lives of some of America's most powerful policymakers — closeted gay legislators and executives with voting records that activists decry as virulently anti-gay. He says it's a film about hypocrisy.