White Teeth, a television adaptation of the best-selling book, "captures a more complicated and satisfying aspect of the novel: the poignancy and redemptive sweetness of the losers who populate [Zadie] Smith's comic vision," writes a New York Times reviewer. The two-part Masterpiece Theatre mini-series debuts on PBS May 11.

David Isay will unveil StoryCorps, a national oral history project, later this year. As he tells the New York Times, "This is our beachhead against 'The Bachelor.'"