Society & Culture

The brother-sister team of Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger has a new album called Bitter Tea, which they describe as "sissy psychedelic Satanism." Their other albums include Rehearsing My Choir, made with the participation of their 82-year-old grandmother.

Author and museum director James Cameron died last Sunday at the age of 92. In 1930, an organized mob of more than 10,000 white men and women dragged Cameron and two other black teenage men from a jail cell in Marion, Ind. The mob mercilessly beat the three young men and lynched two — Cameron was spared. He recounted this experience in his 1984 memoir A Time of Terror and later founded the Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, which he modeled after the Jewish Holocaust museum in Israel. This interview originally aired on March 8, 1994.

Our book critic reviews the critically acclaimed Stuart: A Life Backwards, by Alexander Masters. It's a British biography of a homeless man as told by his social worker.

Environmentalist William Powers' new book is Whispering in the Giant's Ear: A Frontline Chronicle From Bolivia's War on Globalization. Powers is also the author of Blue Clay People, about Liberia. He has worked for over a decade in development aid in Latin America, Africa and Washington DC.

Dick Cheney's daughter was a campaign aide for her father during the 2000 and 2004 elections. The fact that she is a lesbian put a distinctive spin on the experience. She has a new memoir: Now It's My Turn.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg comments on the recent controversy surrounding the Spanish-language version of "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Ann Fessler talks about her new book, The Girls Who Went Away. Using her own story of adoption as a basis for her book, Fessler tells the story of over a million women who surrendered children for adoption prior to legalized abortion. Fessler is a photography professor at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Our film critic reviews Down in the Valley, the new film by writer/director David Jacobson, starring Edward Norton, David Morse, and Bruce Dern.

There have been several waves of pop music in New Orleans since World War II, with each one subsiding as its celebrated musicians realize they can't make a living in the city they grew up in. In 1960, another of those waves crested, and with it came a pioneering effort for racial equality. Ed Ward has the story of AFO Records: All For One.

How many words are in the English language? 500,000? 1 million? Our linguist says there is no way to really count all the words. What's more, he wonders why people even care.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Elements of Style, the first and last novel by the late playwright Wendy Wasserstein.

National Guard Lt. Paul Rieckhoff is the founder and executive director of the organization Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (formerly Operation Truth). One of the group's aims is to see that troops in active duty and veterans are properly provided for.

He has written a memoir about his tour in Iraq shortly after the occupation: Chasing Ghosts: A Soldier's Fight for America from Baghdad to Washington.

Craig Ferguson hosts CBS's Late Late Show, which should give him a fairly good vantage point from which to poke fun at pop culture and the entertainment industry. He has pounced on the opportunity with his novel, Between the Bridge and the River.

When journalist Pete Earley's son was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, it sent him on an effort not only to get his son properly diagnosed and treated, but to understand the nation's mental health system. Earley's book about the experience is Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness.

The Notorious Bettie Page explores the life of the 1950s pin-up queen, who posed for under-the-counter men’s fetish magazines, and for photos and films for private collectors into the bondage scene.

Film critic David Edelstein reviews Friends with Money, the new film by writer/director Nicole Holofcener who wrote and directed Lovely & Amazing and Walking and Talking.

If a child's parents are of two races — particularly if the mother is a former Black Panther member and the father is white — growing up can be a unique experience. Writer Angela Nissel mines those experiences in her memoir, Mixed. Nissel is a writer and consulting producer for the NBC TV show Scrubs.

L'Enfant is a new feature film from Belgian filmmaking brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardennes.

Danielle Trussoni's just-published memoir is Falling Through the Earth. In the book, Trussoni explores the damaging legacy of her father's military service in Vietnam. Book critic Maureen Corrigan says the memoir is also an unusual testament to the father-daughter bond.