Government & Politics

Actor Michael K. Williams has played powerful intimidating characters in The Wire, Boardwalk Empire, and in the new show The Night of, but says he's not at all like them.

Eric Adams joined the police department intent on reforming it. "If I was not a voice for change it would bother me," he says. He was on the force for 22 years. Now he is Brooklyn's borough president.

Tom Gibbons had to retire from the police force after being shot three times during a traffic stop in 1970. He then became a reporter and covered the police for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

David Mandel, the Emmy-nominated writer, director and executive producer of the HBO series Veep, discusses the current season of the show, his work on SNL and the 2016 presidential election.

As the wife of a Navy fighter pilot, memoirist Rachel Starnes has had much of her life — including where she lives and how often she gets to live with her husband — determined by his career.

Burger served as chief justice of the Supreme Court from 1969 until 1986. Linda Greenhouse, author of The Burger Court, says those years helped establish the court's conservative legal foundation.

Robert F. Kennedy is often remembered as a liberal icon who worked to heal racial strife, decrease poverty and end the war in Vietnam. But early in his career, biographer Larry Tye notes, Kennedy was a hard-edged anti-communist who worked for red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy, authorized the wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr. and supported American intervention in Vietnam. Tye chronicles Kennedy's transformation.

New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau discusses the FBI's investigation of shooter Omar Mateen prior to the Orlando attack, as well as the bureau's broader efforts to pinpoint suspected terrorists.

Journalist Evan Osnos who writes about the evolution of concealed carry in the current issue of The New Yorker, estimates that there are about 13 million people who are licensed to carry a concealed gun in the United States — more than 12 times the number of police officers and detectives in America. He says that gun manufacturers market a "concealed-carry lifestyle," which uses fear to sell guns.

A new documentary revisits Genovese's 1964 murder and the 38 bystanders who allegedly did nothing to stop it. Critic John Powers says the film is "a useful moral corrective" to the popular narrative.

Ratf**ked author David Daley says that Republicans targeted key state legislative races in 2010 in an effort to control state houses, and, eventually, Congressional redistricting.

TO BE ADDED

One hundred years ago, Brandeis became the first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court. Author Jeffrey Rosen says that Brandeis was also the most far-seeing progressive justice of the 20th century.

New Yorker writer Jane Mayer discusses conservative activist James O'Keefe's latest botched sting operation, and the new kind of political opposition research O'Keefe pioneered.

While serving as a State Department adviser in Iraq and Afghanistan, J. Kael Weston instigated a military mission that resulted the death of 31 service members. His memoir revisits the tragedy of war.

A 2015 report by the Vera Institute of Justice finds that local jails have become a warehouse for people too poor to pay even low bail and for the mentally ill, creating a downward spiral for those who are confined as well as for their families and communities. A talk with the co-author of the report Nancy Fishman.

Growing up in the tribal region of Pakistan, Maria Toorpakai pretended she was a boy in order to compete as a weightlifter. Later she became an internationally known squash player.

TO BE ADDED

Enter Me

A new film imagines what happened when Elvis Presley met President Nixon on Dec. 21, 1970. Film critic David Edelstein says Elvis & Nixon "shows the crazy-making insulation of celebrity."