In the past few years, general astronomical interest has concentrated on several objects and phenomena where white dwarf stars play a key role. Type Ia supernovae have been used as evidence to show that, in fact, Einstein did not make his greatest blunder when he allowed for the possibility of a cosmological constant. Improvements in our knowledge of the Hubble parameter have revived interest in the use of white dwarf stars as a different type of cosmochronometer to measure the age of the Galaxy and thus set constraints on the age of the Universe. In roughly the same time period, there have been considerable advances in our understanding of white dwarf stars, both as isolated stars in the field and as members of interacting binary systems. Much of this advance has come from the availability of spacecraft observations from missions like HST, IUE, ROSAT, EXOSAT, Chandra, ORFEUS, EUVE, HUT, and FUSE. The discovery of thousands of new white dwarfs from a number of large surveys and the potential of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have added impetus to the field.