Health & Medicine

Dear Evan Hansen star Ben Platt suffers from anxiety, but not when he's on stage. Platt drew on his own anxiety to play Evan Hansen, a socially insecure high-school senior who lies about having been close friends with a classmate who dies by suicide. Platt originated the role and went on to win a Tony for his performance in the original Broadway production. Now, he's starring in a new film adaptation of the musical.

Ian Millhiser covers the Supreme Court for Vox. He says the Court's decision to uphold the law was a generational victory for abortion opponents: "They've spent many decades working for this moment."

Psychiatrist ANNA LEMBKE's new book Dopamine Nation is about the neuro transmitter - the chemical messenger released in the brain most involved in processing rewards.  It plays a big part in addictions.

Dr. Leana Wen is in favor of COVID-19 vaccine mandates. "I don't think that people should have the choice to infect others with a potentially fatal and extremely contagious virus," she says.

The six-time All Star pitched for the Yankees and the Indians during his 19-year career. He also struggled with alcoholism. Sabathia reflects on baseball and sobriety in the memoir, Till the End.

In her new book, The Man Who Hated Women, author Amy Sohn writes about Anthony Comstock, an anti-vice crusader who later became a special agent to the U.S. Post office, giving him the power to enforce the law. And she writes about the eight women charged with violating the Comstock Act.

President Biden has asked the intelligence community to investigate whether or not the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. Vanity Fair reporter Katherine Eban shares her findings.

The first time actor Antony Ramos saw In the Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda's Broadway production about a Latinx community in New York City's Washington Heights neighborhood, he was floored. Now Ramos is starring — and singing and dancing and rapping — in the film adaptation of In the Heights.

Chris Power's brooding literary novel A Lonely Man and Jean Hanff Korelitz's nightmare of a thriller The Plot explore the dangerous consequences of sticky fingers in the literary world.

In 1989, 15-year-old Yusef Salaam was one of five Black and Latino teenagers who were wrongly accused of assault and rape in the so-called Central Park jogger case. Long after he’d served a seven-year prison sentence, DNA evidence confirmed that a serial rapist and murderer had committed the crime, and acted alone. Salaam's new memoir is 'Better Not Bitter.'

Jeffrey Gettleman of the N.Y. Times says the air has been filled with smoke from crematories. Meanwhile, the health care system is collapsing and the black market for oxygen and medicine is thriving.

Rogen's film credits include Knocked Up, Superbad, Pineapple Express, Steve Jobs and Long Shot. In his new memoir, Yearbook, Rogen shares funny stories of his early years and his more recent life.

Adichie writes she "came undone" when she learned of her dad's death. Her new book is a charged account of his passing — and also a narrative of mourning in the time of pandemic.

Fresh Air celebrates Mother's Day with stories of mom from past interviews with Noah, Scorsese and filmmaker Albert Brooks. Plus, Lorna Luft remembers her mother, Judy Garland.

SUZANNE SIMARD says trees are "social creatures" that communicate with each other in cooperative ways that hold lessons for humans too. Simard grew up in Canadian forests as a descendant of loggers before becoming a forestry ecologist. She's now a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia. She explains her research on cooperation and symbiosis in the forest, and shares her personal story in the new memoir Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest.

Stephen Colbert reflects on life and doing his show during the pandemic, and surviving the Trump presidency.

Investigative journalist Michael Moss's 2013 book, Salt Sugar Fat, explored food companies' aggressive marketing of those products and their impact on our health. In his new book, Hooked, Moss updates the food giants' efforts to keep us eating what they serve — and how they're responding to complaints from consumers and health advocates.

Saidu Tejan-Thomas Jr.'s "Resistance" podcast explores different aspects of the Black Lives Matter movement. The podcast has been mostly devoted to the protests that started last summer after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, but it also chronicles Tejan-Thomas Jr.'s personal history.

The story of the Sackler dynasty--the family that owns Purdue Pharma, which created oxycontin, the drug marketed to relieve acute and chronic pain, that played a major role in creating the opioid epidemic. Patrick Radden Keefe's new book is Empire of Pain. It’s based in part on leaked documents and private emails that reveal the Sacklers knew about how addictive oxycontin is--before they admitted it, and they used deceptive practices to keep selling more of the drug.