Insane City is a dark comic masterpiece—the first solo adult novel in more than a decade from the Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times–bestselling author, Dave Barry. Later, satirist Paul Krassner talks about the state of political humor.

Prominent linguist, Geoffrey Nunberg talks about his new book, Ascent of the A-Word, which implicitly expresses our deepest values about class, relationships, authenticity, and fairness.

Maggie Nelson’s The Art of Cruelty looks at representations of violence in art by poets, playwrights and novelists with an eye to the question of whether or not focusing on depictions of cruelty actually makes us cruel.

Project Censored, under the leadership of Mickey Huff—has produced a list of under reported news stories and a book, Censored 2012, dedicated to the stories that ought to be top features on the nightly news, but that are missing because of media bias and self-censorship.

How free are students and teachers to express unpopular ideas in public schools and universities? Not free enough, Joan Del Fattore suggests in Knowledge in the Making. She investigates battles over a wide range of topics that have fractured school and university communities—homosexuality-themed children’s books, research on race-based intelligence, the teaching of evolution, the regulation of hate speech, and more.

When is it ever okay to use the “N” word?  Is it a mistake to remove it from Huck Finn? Stefan Kanfer, contributing editor at City Journal tells us what he thinks and later Dr. Barbara Bastien will discuss the first anniversary of the earthquake that hit Haiti. She is the author of A Day In January.

In January 2002, for the first time, the Olympic Torch Relay visited Alaska on its way to the Winter Games. When the relay runner and accompanying camera cars passed, high school senior Joseph Frederick and several friends unfurled a banner reading BONG HiTS 4 JESUS. The book by James Foster is an  in-depth look at student rights within a public high school. Then, JW Rinzler has collected the celebrated sounds from Star Wars and put them in a new book-and-audio collection, The Sounds of Star Wars.

Mark Feldstein’s book, Poisoning the Press recounts not only the disturbing story of an unprecedented White House conspiracy to assassinate a journalist, but also the larger tale of the bitter quarter-century battle between the postwar era’s most embattled politician, Richard Nixon and its most reviled newsman, Jack Anderson. Then, Politics According to the Bible with theologian and author Wayne Grudem.

In the twentieth century, free people faced a number of mortal threats, ranging from despotism, fascism, and communism to the looming menace of global terrorism. These new threats are quietly eroding our hard-won freedoms, often unchallenged and, in some cases, widely accepted as beneficial. In New Threats to Freedom, editor and author Adam Bellow has assembled an all-star line up of innovative thinkers to challenge these threats.

In 7 Dirty Words,  journalist and cultural critic James Sullivan chronicles George Carlin’s life and career, from his early days as a struggling comedian to his later years as the country’s chief counterculture cynic.