Actress Olivia Wilde talks about growing up with parents who worked as journalists in conflict zones and how that inspired her role in the new PBS series, "Half the Sky."

There are 165 schools in the United States that are so rigorous and desired that you have to pass an exam to get in. Is this a model that could eventually trickle down to all sorts of schools?

The presidential campaigns only have 41 days left to get to every corner of every battle ground state and get out the vote. That effort includes Virginia, where Obama holds a slight lead. The Takeaway's Washington correspondent Todd Zwillich took a political road trip through the state to find out what locals are saying about the race.

David Simon and Eric Overmeyer, co-creators of "Treme," have been working for years now to figure out how to tell the story of New Orleans in a way that isn't voyeuristic or cliched. The HBO series begins its third season this Sunday, and the show is evolving in its portrayal of post-Katrina New Orleans.

Since the drawdown of troops began last summer, the American mission in Afghanistan has been clear: train Afghan troops. But after a string of deadly attacks on NATO personnel by rogue Afghan security forces, that mission, at least temporarily, has changed.

Vulnerability: it's when we feel fragile, uncertain, and isolated. But there's a power hidden within vulnerability. Embracing those emotions can radically change our lives, says Brené Brown.

Eleven years after September 11th, the relationship between the United States and the Islamic world is, in many ways, fraught with tension. The recent attack on the U.S. embassy in Libya left four Americans dead, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. Nicholas Kristof, columnist for The New York Times, helps put this latest moment of protest and religious furor into historical context.

We remember many things about that surreal, traumatic day. Many of us think back to the crisp, blue September sky. We recall where we were and what we were doing as the planes hit the towers, the Pentagon, and the field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Arctic sea ice continues to shrink at record levels because of climate change. With polar ice melting at record rates, there is a strong desire to document the vanishing icebergs before they are lost forever. The Takeaway speaks with iceberg and storm photographer Camille Seaman about her painstaking efforts to capture the loss.

According to a new book, the minstrel's influence reverberates through popular culture today. The authors trace the tradition to the present day, from rapper Lil Wayne’s music to comedy sketches from Dave Chappelle.

Bob Garfield talks about how the digital revolution is changing our collective experience of the viewing of the Olympics, and how it might give a sense of the future of network broadcasting.

In his first national broadcast interview since arriving in the United States, Chen Guangcheng talks about the intersection between human rights and disability rights in the United States and in his native China.

Thousands of internet users in this country and around the world could lose their connection on Monday, the result of the so-called DNS Changer virus. The malware has been around for several years and last year, the FBI charged those responsible for creating the virus.

In cases of extreme grief, the American Psychiatric Association is putting forth a recommendation that would, for the first time, give guidelines for a diagnosis of bereavement-related depression. The change would appear in the DSM-5 — the APA’s diagnostic manual — which is set to come out in 2013. Journalist Jerry Adler wrote about this subject in connection with the death of his son for New York Magazine. Jerome C. Wakefield, is a professor in the School of Social Work at New York University.

Just as our views of war in general have changed, so has our relationship with our soldiers and our veterans. James Wright is a former marine, the former president of Dartmouth College, and the author of “Those Who Have Borne The Battle: A History of America’s Wars and Those Who Fought Them.”

It’s been 50 years since women started walking out of the kitchen and into the workplace en-mass. Yet yesterday we heard about another study that shows women aren’t making themselves heard when men are present in the office. That's true even when those woman have the same level of power at work as the men. We asked you to weigh-in and tell us about the gender divide at your work place. Haley Mitchell, from Augusta, Georgia, says the men in her office still expect her to get the mail and coffee, even though she is a marketing and communications manager.

Malaria kills about 780,000 people a year, and most of them are children in Africa. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has made eradication of the disease a top priority. On Tuesday, the organization touted the results of a study that showed a vaccine developed by GlaxoSmithKline protected nearly 50 percent children from severe malaria. As far a success rates for vaccines go, those are not the best odds, but even that amount of protection would save millions of lives over a even just a decade of use. And the news does indicate that scientists are on the right path toward eventually preventing malaria.

By most accounts, the history of AIDS begins sometime in the late 1970s, before the first official cases were diagnosed in 1981 among a handful of gay men. But a striking new book by Dr. Jacques Pépin, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, upends medical history. In "The Origins of AIDS," Pépin traces the roots of the disease back to 1921 when a handful of bush-meat hunters in Africa may have been the first to be exposed to infected chimpanzee blood.

A great deal of anger has been directed at the profits of the banking industry since the onset of the recession. One of the focal points of Occupy Wall Street, and of the like-minded protests that have emerged throughout the country, is precisely this discontent with the earnings of banks, particularly during a period of such economic duress for the rest of the country. But the quarterly reports from the banks have been showing that they've taken considerable losses over the past three months.

Todaymarks ten years since the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan began — a milestone many people may not have imagined the U.S. would reach. For soldiers, the anniversary is cause for reflection. Special Forces Major Fernando M. Luján made his reflections public last week, in an op-ed in The New York Times called "This War Can Still Be Won." Luján, who was stationed in Afghanistan for 14 months, and is now a member of the Afghan Hands program, says "the Afghans have the will to win, with or without us."