Linda Holmes

Medicare spent more than $30 million in 2012 on questionable HIV medication costs, the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said in an investigation published Wednesday.

The possible fraud schemes were all paid for by Medicare's prescription drug program known as Part D. Among the ...

Martha Woodroof, author of the upcoming Small Blessings, continues her series about the experience of publishing a first novel. Past posts can be found here.

Perhaps no part of the First Novel Experience is as confusing and overwhelming as figuring out how to balance the demands of social ...

I had an uncle who studied dendrochronology – tree rings, basically. It wasn't until years after he died that it occurred to me how much his perspective on living, and on dying, seemed to have been shaped by years of handling such palpable evidence of time passing. Not the spectacle ...

This week's show is a very special event for us: it's our visit to Comic-Con.

Because Maggie Thompson (mother to PCHH regular Stephen Thompson) was a special guest at San Diego Comic-Con this year, she invited us to do a panel discussion with her. So Stephen, Glen Weldon and I ...

The worst thing about making a post-Avengers Marvel movie is how far ahead of the game you are when you start. Your film will be marketed with brute force, treated as arguably the biggest opening of the summer, reviewed everywhere, and very likely to land among the most commercially successful ...

Perhaps signaling a widening of its offensive in Gaza, Israel called up 16,000 reservists on Thursday. That means Israel has activated 86,000 reservists since the conflict started.

USA Today reports that at the same time, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to destroy tunnels built by Hamas "with our ...

I personally was responsible for emotionally bullying at least two of my critic friends into attending the poolside screening of Sharknado 2 that took place at the hotel where press tour happened a couple of weeks ago. I make this confession because we must establish the basic understanding that I ...

The first time I took one of the online Myers-Briggs inventories and it spit out that I was an introvert, one of my friends questioned the results. Specifically, he said, "Are you sure you weren't holding the test upside-down?"

I wasn't, though. Crowds challenge me, as do bustling ...

After the fact that it's a blatant and ridiculous fraud (in that it almost never gets anybody married), the first thing you might notice about The Bachelor(ette) franchise is its prim, Victorian attitudes about sex. For a show that encourages 14-person dates and the temporary negotiation of a lifestyle that ...

If the Television Critics Association press tour of 2014, wrapping up Tuesday and Wednesday with presentations from PBS, has had a catchphrase, it's "audience measurement."

Critics heard an extended presentation from Nielsen on the very first day of tour about the company's plans to begin measuring viewership on mobile devices ...

The Television Critics Association is a funny animal. Its challenge, as well as its strength, is that it includes people with massively different jobs: longtime print critics (both nationally and locally oriented) who have been coming to the annual press tour for decades, reporters who cover the television industry, cultural ...

There's a widespread belief that critics hate everything, revel in hating everything, and cannot be pleased. It's widespread and wrong, though.

That fact has never been clearer to me than at this year's summer press tour, where — while I certainly can't speak for everyone — it seems like there's ...

One of the stranger aspects of press tour is the stuff. Labeled with names of shows and networks, it comes in two basic forms.

The first is the desk stuff. That's the stuff that is either at your desk when you come to a panel or handed out while you're ...

For the next couple of weeks, I'm out in California covering the Television Critics Association press tour. Not familiar? Here's an introduction.

Day 1 of summer press tour began with hammering and ended with a giant Christmas tree.

Let's back up.

We started Tuesday with a presentation from ...

Updated at 11:20 a.m. ET

Former New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was sentenced Wednesday to 10 years in prison for bribery, money laundering and other crimes.

He was convicted Feb. 12 of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes and kickbacks. The indictment included 21 counts.

As ...

It's that time again.

For the next couple of weeks, I'll be writing from the Television Critics Association Press Tour, where a couple hundred critics convene in a giant hotel ballroom to question producers, writers, network executives, actors, and sometimes other folks about what's coming up on TV. It can ...

Stephen Thompson and I are joined this week by our blog siblings Gene Demby and Kat Chow of NPR's Code Switch, which always puts us in an upbeat and playful mood. Fittingly, we take a couple of listener questions this week about youth and play.

First, is it ...

Making a documentary about Roger Ebert is, in some ways, a little like opening a new restaurant to honor the memory of Julia Child. It's likely to feel like a venture but also a ritual; part work and part wake; thoughtful and raucous; grieving and grateful.

So, as it happens, ...

I've always been the shrugging type when it comes to lots of things that Facebook does that make people crazy. They change the layout, they mess with the feed — even making you noodle with your privacy settings has always seemed to me like the craven doing of business, and ...

Writer-director David Wain is at the center of a loose comedy collective that's been working together (and cross-pollinating with other similar unofficial collectives) since The State, which was the name of both the original comedy troupe and the MTV sketch comedy show they held down from 1993 to 1995. The ...