Society & Culture

In The Deadliest Lies, Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman responds to The Israel Lobby, arguing that Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer's work "serves merely as an attractive new package for disseminating a series of familiar but false beliefs" about Jews and Israel.

Fresh Air's resident linguist has had some thoughts lately on the language of the recent string of debates among the various presidential hopefuls. On today's show, he talks to Terry Gross about the signifiers he sees encoded in political language. Geoff Nunberg's most recent book is Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show. His primary reaction to the debates?

Our contributing linguist has some thoughts on the use of sarcasm in American English.

Min Jin Lee's debut novel, Free Food for Millionaires, tells the story of a young Korean-American woman whose Ivy League education exposes her to a glitzy, glamorous lifestyle — one she's drawn to, but can't afford to maintain.

Poet Sekou Sundiata died this week at age 58; the cause was heart failure. Sundiata, who taught literature at New York City's New School University for many years, was considered one of the fathers of the spoken-word movement. He wrote the plays Blessing the Boats, The Circle Unbroken is a Hard Bop, The Mystery of Love, Udu, and the 51st (dream) state. His albums include Longstoryshort and The Blue Oneness of Dreams. We remember him with excerpts from interviews that originally aired in May 1994, April 1997, and November 2002.

Natasha Trethewey was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Native Guard, her most recent collection of poetry. The title refers to a regiment of African- American soldiers who fought for the Union in the Civil War.

Trethewey grew up the child of a racially mixed marriage in Mississippi. Her mother was murdered by her stepfather; these, along with the South and its singular ways, are recurring themes in her poetry.

Trethewey teaches creative writing at Emory University. Native Guard is her third collection.

Kasi Lemmons' film Talk to Me, which opens this weekend, centers on the radio DJ, television personality and activist Ralph Waldo "Petey" Greene Jr. (played by Don Cheadle). Greene was a driving force in the black community of Washington D.C.; we talk with Lemmons and with Dewey Hughes, who first hired Greene at the D.C. radio station WOL-AM.

Lloyd Schwartz discusses Ruby Elzy.

Journalist Jeff Gammage and his wife Christine have adopted two daughters from China; now Gammage, a staff writer at The Philadelphia Inquirer, has written a book about the experience. It's called China Ghosts: My Daughter's Journey to America, My Passage to Fatherhood.

Former Navy petty officer Stephen Benjamin, trained as an Arabic translator, was headed to Iraq when he was dismissed from the Navy under the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. Benjamin is gay; his supervisors knew he was gay, and most of his peers also knew, and he says he was always accepted as a member of the team. Two other gay Arabic translators were also dismissed.

An appeals court ruled recently that the FCC couldn't fine the Fox network for indecency for broadcasting a "fleeting expletive" during an awards show. What does the ruling mean — and what qualifies as a "fleeting expletive" these days, anyway?

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, is designed to take advantage of "the wisdom of crowds," meaning anyone can edit (and re-edit) the entries. The open-source approach brings with it a unique set of strengths — and limitations.

Yanar Mohammed, an internationally renowned Iraqi activist, founded the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq to advocate for women's rights. It's an uphill fight: From the 1950s to the 1970s, Iraqi women could legally work, study, marry and divorce, and wear what they wanted, but the new constitution in Iraq, based on the Islamic Sharia law system, denies women the civil and social rights guaranteed to men.

In 1961, an integrated group of self-proclaimed "Freedom Riders" challenged segregation by riding together on segregated buses through the Deep South. They demanded unrestricted access to the buses — as well as to terminal restaurants and waiting rooms — but pledged nonviolence.

British writer Jon Savage wrote England's Dreaming, a landmark book on the punk era. Now, in Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture, he's chronicled what he calls the "prehistory of the teenager."

A new biography of Justice Clarence Thomas explores some of the paradoxes of his life and career; it's called Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas. Authors Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher, both reporters at The Washington Post, say the book grew out of a Post article exploring "both the racial vehemence that has hounded Thomas and the roots of his ascension to the judicial mountaintop."

The flap over Don Imus' characterization of the Rutgers women's basketball team and his subsequent firing has linguist Geoff Nunberg thinking about how we make distinctions in language. Is offensive speech always unacceptable, or are there shades of difference depending on the context?

As Time magazine reinvents itself for the Internet age, the editors announced they'd be dropping some old features of the magazine's distinctive verbal style. There was once an age when Time's style helped remake journalism — and the English language itself.