"It took me a long time to find my audience ... but I always knew they were out there," says Morgan, who started doing stand-up as a mom in her mid-30s. Her new Netflix special is I'm Every Woman.
Jay Wellons has operated on kids' brains and spinal cords. He writes about the anguish of losing a patient and the exhilaration of saving a life in All That Moves Us. Originally broadcast July 2022.
Two films take on the horror of grief: While Disney's live-action comedy is neither funny nor frightening, the Australian horror-thriller about teenagers dabbling in the occult is terrifically creepy.
Set in New Mexico in the 1970s, Dark Winds stars, is written by, and is largely directed by Native Americans. The resulting series treats Navajo culture not as sociology but as lived experience.
The legendary crooner, who died July 21, told Terry Gross in 1991 he never got tired of singing "I Left My Heart in San Francisco": "I'm very grateful for that song."
Cosby's novel All the Sinners Bleed centers on a Black sheriff in a small Southeast Virginia county. The novel was inspired by his own experiences growing up in the shadow of the Confederacy.
Maureen Corrigan recalls playing with the iconic doll on the sidewalk in Queens in the 1960s. She says Barbie didn't teach girls to be of service; she taught the giddy pleasures of a seeming autonomy.
"My early '70s New York is dingy and grimy," the Pulitzer Prize-winning author says. Whitehead's sequel to Harlem Shuffle centers on crime at every level, from small-time crooks to Harlem's elite.
Lindsay Lynch's luscious debut, Do Tell, is set in Hollywood's Golden Age. Dwyer Murphy's The Stolen Coast is a moody tale of a lawyer who makes his money ferrying people on the run into new lives.
It's not every day that an exuberant comedy about a Mattel doll goes head-to-head with a brooding drama about the father of the atomic bomb, but critic Justin Chang says both films deliver.
Author Jeff Goodell warns a new climate regime is coming: "We don't really know what we're heading into and how chaotic this can get." His new book is The Heat Will Kill You First.
"My father was not a good person, but he was a great character," Sedaris says. The humorist reflected on his late father in the memoir Happy-Go-Lucky. Originally broadcast May 31, 2022.
"We won't heal until we make sense of the crack epidemic," Donovan X. Ramsey says. His book, When Crack Was King, examines the drug's destructive path through the Black community.
Film critic Justin Chang doesn't know if Cruise can save the movies but he never gets tired of watching him try. Cruise does his own outrageous stunts in Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Hull grew up in the rural interior of Central Florida during the 1960s and '70s. Her memoir evokes a land of perfect citrus, and the cruel costs of its harvest.