Terry Gross

Journalist Scott Shane writes for The New York Times about terrorism and the CIA's interrogation techniques. His article "Soviet-Style 'Torture' Becomes 'Interrogation'" describes how the United States has adopted interrogation techniques that it decried when they were used by the Soviet Union.

Author Tara McKelvey interviewed former prisoners from Abu Ghraib for her book Monstering: Inside America's Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War McKelvey is senior editor at The American Prospect and a research fellow at the NYU School of Law's Center on Law and Security.

Steven Bach's biography Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl examines the filmmaker who celebrated the Nazi ideal and created the Third Reich's iconic images in Triumph of the Will and Olympiad. Bach details Riefenstahl's ruthless, opportunistic ambition, analyzes her "self-righteous entitlement," and explores her relationships with Hitler, Goebbels and Albert Speer. What emerges is a compulsively readable and scrupulously crafted work.

Husband-and-wife team Win Butler and Regine Chassagne lead the band Arcade Fire, an art-rock outfit that hails from Montreal.

The seven-member band, which deploys everything from piano, sax and violin to dobro, harpsichord and hurdy-gurdy, has two albums to its credit: Neon Bible and 2004's Funeral.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Philip Roth's twenty-seventh book, Everyman, centers on a successful septuagenarian's response to his physical decline and approaching death.

The man, who's never named, has no religion or philosophy to cling to; reviewer Gail Caldwell of the Boston Globe writes that the book is a "swift, brutal novel about a heartbreakingly ordinary subject, and it is also testament to Roth that the book leaves you a little breathless and not at all bereft."

Judd Apatow has been a writer for Larry Sanders and Ben Stiller, and he worked on the cult-favorite TV comedy Freaks and Geeks. But you'll know him as the writer-director of the hit film The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

Now he's back with Knocked Up; guest host David Bianculli talks to Apatow and to Knocked Up star Seth Rogen, who plays an oafish slacker confronted with the prospect of fatherhood after a one-night stand.

Yanar Mohammed, an internationally renowned Iraqi activist, founded the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq to advocate for women's rights. It's an uphill fight: From the 1950s to the 1970s, Iraqi women could legally work, study, marry and divorce, and wear what they wanted, but the new constitution in Iraq, based on the Islamic Sharia law system, denies women the civil and social rights guaranteed to men.

Singer and songwriter Dion says that his latest project was inspired by a visit to Fresh Air. The acoustic CD, Bronx in Blue, has Dion exploring the blues music he heard during his youth.

In the late 1950s, Dion and his band the Belmonts topped the pop charts with hits like "I Wonder Why" and "A Teenager In Love," which earned the singer teen-idol status. Dion split amicably with the band in 1960 and continued to write Top 10 hits — "Runaround Sue," "The Wanderer" — until the British Invasion changed popular tastes.

Martha Raddatz, chief White House correspondent for ABC News, has been to Iraq 13 times since the war began. Her book The Long Road Home focuses on the battle for Sadr City in April 2004. That's when American troops realized they were facing an insurgency. (This interview was first broadcast on March 1, 2007.)