Society & Culture

New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz spent years with far-right online extremists, embedding with them and watching them spread false news by exploiting social media. His new book is Antisocial.

As a black gay kid growing up in Texas in the 1990s, poet Saeed Jones remembers getting negative messages about his identity from every aspect of his life. It was around the time of Matthew Shepard's murder in Wyoming, and Jones felt alone and unsafe.

Our ears are complicated, delicate instruments that largely evolved in far quieter times than the age we currently inhabit — an early world without rock concerts, loud restaurants, power tools and earbuds.

Writer David Owen describes our current age as a "deafening" one, and in his new book, Volume Control, he explains how the loud noises we live with are harming our ears.

Kevin Wilson's new book 'Nothing To See Here' about a set of twins who burst into flame when angry or afraid, is inspired in part by the intrusive fearful images he has had since childhood.

Dan Piepenbring was selected by Prince to help him write his memoirs, but Prince died shortly after they began working together. Piepenbring edited the new book 'The Beautiful Ones' which includes writings by Prince about his childhood and adolescence, as well as photos, letters, and lyric sheets.

Perrotta's novel, Mrs. Fletcher, is now an HBO series. In 2017, he told Terry Gross that the book was inspired by the upheaval he experienced when his kids grew up and moved out of the house.

Locke says her new novel "was about place before it was about a character." The story follows a black ranger who patrols East Texas searching for the missing son of an Aryan Brotherhood leader.

The recent biopic Rocketman painted a Hollywood version of Elton John's life, but a new memoir, Me, comes straight from the artist himself. In it, he describes how, as a young man, he was determined to enter the music business, in spite of some misgivings about rock 'n' roll in his household. As he tells Fresh Air, "My dad, of course, hated it."

Twins, singer-songwriters, and LGBTQ icons Tegan and Sara talk about their tumultuous high school years. It's the subject of their new memoir and a new recording.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Eric Foner talks how the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments relate to current debates about voting rights, mass incarceration and reparations for slavery.

Tan France is the fashion expert on the Neflix series 'Queer Eye.' He grew up in a traditional Muslim family in England.

Stephen Kinzer's new book 'Poisoner in Chief' is about the CIA's secret experiments with LSD in the 50s and 60s in search of a drug that could be weaponized to control the minds of enemies. It's also about the man who who led it.

With all our texting, tweeting and social media posting, billions of people are using typed words for the kind everyday communication that used to happen more often in conversation. A new book argues that we’ve created a unique new language to reproduce the shades of meaning that we used to convey verbally. Our linguist Geoff Nunberg reflects on the new rules of language that he calls chat-speak.

Underwater explorer and photographer Jill Heinerth has dived into unmapped caves deep in the earth, and beneath a giant iceberg. She's seen hidden creatures old as dinosaurs, and witnessed scenes of surreal beauty. Her work is so dangerous, over a hundred of her friends and colleagues have died in caves. She talks about the risks and rewards of her work.

The same ball culture Janet Mock saw in Paris is Burning would come up again in her career, decades later. After launching a career in journalism, writing two memoirs and becoming a trans activist, Mock made history as the first trans woman of color to write and direct an episode of TV when she joined the production of Ryan Murphy's series Pose.

The Nobel laureate died Monday at 88. Terry Gross talked with Morrison in 1987 after she wrote Beloved, in 1992 after she authored Jazz and in 2015 when she published God Help the Child.

A new documentary explores how women in Hollywood are pushing for more representation in front of and behind the camera. Davis and director Maria Giese discuss the dramatic disparities on screen.