Society & Culture

Singer, musician and folklorist Mick Moloney's new album, McNally's Row of Flats, centers on theater songs by an Irish songwriting team from the late 1800s. In those days, Vaudeville and minstrelsy were giving way to American Musical Theater in New York City.

A middle-aged woman awakens one morning to a sense of dread, a malaise so deep that she studiously analyzes her life — both past and present — to uncover its source. So begins Hilma Wolitzer's new book, The Doctor's Daughter.

Allegra Goodman's new novel is Intuition.

Abortion has been a defining issue since 1973. But for Eyal Press, it was a defining element of his childhood. A colleague of Press's father was killed for performing abortions. And Dr. Press received threats. Eyal Press offers a front-row view in Absolute Convictions.

Race and politics add to the tension of a detective's search for a kidnapped child in Freedomland, starring Samuel L. Jackson and Julianne Moore. The film's screenplay was written by Richard Price; the story is based on his novel of the same name.

In Stem Cell Now, bioethics expert Christopher Thomas Scott explores the possibilities of what some consider the greatest discovery since nuclear fusion: the isolation of embryonic stem cells for research.

Girls of Tender Age is the new memoir by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith.

An infamous case of wrongful conviction — which took the efforts of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to resolve — is the subject of the new novel from Julian Barnes. Arthur and George vividly details how the lives of two utter strangers intersected in what was known as "the Great Wyrley Outrages."

Coleman is a senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan think tank. She's an expert on economic development, Afghanistan and women's initiatives in the Middle East.

The idea that priests, like all men, are not perfect might seem like a tame one. But NBC's effort to translate the premise into a TV series has brought protests that the show is anti-Christian. Jack Kenny is the creator and executive producer of The Book of Daniel.

Critic at large John Powers considers Katamari Damacy, a PlayStation game from Japan.

Terry Gross talks with author Taylor Branch, who has written the third in a trilogy of biographies on Martin Luther King Jr. The book is called At Canaan's Edge.

In 1961, the Freedom Riders set out for the Deep South to defy Jim Crow laws and call for change. Their efforts transformed the civil rights movement. Raymond Arsenault is the author of 'Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice'.

In the period after the Civil War, former slaves were made promises of equality and citizenship by the federal government. Historian Eric Foner analyzes the fate of those promises in Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction.

The new film Brokeback Mountain has won critical praise for its portrayal of a love affair in the rugged West.

Arnold Rampersad edited The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry. His two-volume biography of writer Langston Hughes is now out in a second edition. It was praised by critics as one of the best biographies of a black American writer. He's associate dean for the humanities at Stanford University.

Journalist Scott McCartney, who follows the airline industry, writes the weekly column "The Middle Seat" for the Wall Street Journal. McCartney is the journal's travel editor and deputy bureau chief in Dallas, Texas.

Leisure suits, big hair and the Bee Gees are just part of the draw of a new book, Bar Mitzvah Disco. With essays from Jonathan Safran Foer, Sarah Silverman and others, the book documents bar and bat mitzvahs from the 1970s through the '90s.

The new film Brokeback Mountain, directed by Ang Lee, stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger. Based on a short story by Annie Proulx, it describes the relationship between two young men in the West in the 1960s.

It's been a busy couple of years for the law, from the controversy over gay marriage to nominations to the Supreme Court. From a linguist's point of view, dictionaries are crucial in the world of jurisprudence.