Views Reviews and Interviews

“Our Daily Bread: The Essential Norman Borlaug” is a multivolume biography that chronicles the microbiologist and his Nobel Prize-winning work to thwart starvation.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt can tell you why you feel so righteous about your politics, but will you listen?

The documentary "More Than a Month" asks: Does Black History Month still inspire reflection, or just Nike sales?

A PBS documentary follows a group of friends before, during, and after their time in Afghanistan.

PBS looks at the radical environmentalists whose turn to terrorism discredited their quixotic campaign in "If a Tree Falls."

A new book, "The Failure of Environmental Education," says schools are failing to teach kids how to save the planet.

Carl Cranor's book "Legally Poisoned" says lax, outdated law puts Americans at risk from untested industrial chemicals.

In the documentary film "Welcome to Shelbyville," a small Tennessee town deals with an influx of residents from Somalia.

Bucking a trend, a new book shows that group living can inoculate the homeless who are mentally ill against a return to the streets.

In this Miller-McCune Q&A, Los Angeles County's top cop Lee Baca explains why he wants to offer an education to tens of thousands of prisoners.

"Academically Adrift," a new book on the failures of higher education, finds that undergrads don't study, and professors don't make them.

Harvard University President Emeritus Derek Bok says college professors don't challenge their students because they don't know how.

David Onek works to bring together stakeholders in the criminal justice system who often agree — usually without knowing they do.

The PBS documentary "Me Facing Life: Cyntoia's Story" asks the question: Who is responsible when family and society so fail a promising child that she turns to prostitution and murder in her teens?

New books "Self Comes to Mind" and "On Second Thought" examine the origins of consciousness, and the unconscious pulls that influence our behavior.

Yale's Bruce Ackerman, a constitutional scholar, warns that unilateralism in the "most dangerous branch" of government is setting the stage for a tragic future.

"Stretched Thin," "Both Hands Tied," and "The War on Welfare" are three new books that highlight welfare reform's failure to address the enduring poverty of single mothers and their children.

PBS documentary "Deep Down" looks at a cordial, intense dispute over mountaintop-removal coal mining in Appalachia.

Ready for a close-up: The year in award-winning photojournalism presented by the World Press Photo Exhibition.

Social epidemiologist Paula Lantz reveals what actually leads to premature deaths among Americans. Obesity? No. Poverty? Yes.

A new book, "Just Give Money to the Poor," says the poor will spend the cash wisely and boost the economy, too.

A new book, "The Enemy In Our Hands," looks at how America has treated — and mistreated — prisoners of war through history resonates in the age of terror.

State courts should stand firm on equal school funding and make sure legislators and governors show kids the money, a law scholar writes.

Scouring "Avatar," "The X Files" and, yes, even "The Simpsons" for sociological subtext.