Dave Davies

The Irish actor plays a cynical, small-town cop who is thrust out of his comfort zone in the black comedy The Guard. "I've met men like [my character] quite a lot," Gleeson says. "People who are underused a little bit and have terribly sharp wit, but pretend to be a little bit stupid."

Entomologist Mark Moffett loves ants. He's devoted his career to studying the tiny insects: how they move, what they eat, when they attack their prey. Moffett's book, Adventures Among Ants, details his explorations around the world, tracking many a species through jungle forests and remote mountain passes.

This interview was originally broadcast on June 17, 2010.

In December 2009, an al-Qaida mole believed to be a CIA informant detonated a suicide bomb inside a fortified military base in Pakistan, killing seven CIA employees. Reporter Joby Warrick writes about the man who pulled off the attack — and explains how he did it — in The Triple Agent.

Peter Berg, executive producer of NBC's Friday Night Lights, talks about the virtues of shooting on location, using local performers, and what the series explores that the movie couldn't.

This interview was originally broadcast on April 11, 2007. Friday Night Lights will end its five-season run on Friday July 15, 2011 on NBC at 8 p.m. ET.

Linda Greenlaw took a decade off from commercial fishing, but the siren call of the deep blue water drew her back in. The only female swordfish boat captain in the United States recounts her latest adventure at sea in a memoir, Seaworthy.

This interview was originally broadcast on June 8, 2010. Seaworthy: A Swordboat Captain Returns to the Sea is now available in paperback. Greenlaw and her mother Martha have also recently released a cookbook, The Maine Summers Cookbook: Recipes for Delicious, Sun-Filled Days.

Jim Shepard writes what he knows, but he also likes to write what he doesn't know. "I think literature is, in some ways, about the exercise of the empathetic imagination," Shepard says. "I'm always interested in stretching that capacity." You Think That's Bad is his latest collection of short stories.

Bradley Cooper starred as a schoolteacher heading to Vegas for a wild bachelor party in the 2009 raunchy bromance The Hangover. He reprises his role for the sequel, alongside actors Zach Galifanakis and Ed Helms -- and a drug dealing money named Crystal.

ProPublica reporters Jake Bernstein and Jesse Eisinger recently won the Pulitzer Prize for their stories about the banks and hedge funds that realized what was happening to the U.S. economy while it was happening -- and then made vast fortunes by betting against the markets and creating fake demand.

Parasitic tapeworms, the world's largest hornet and a bug with overly aggressive mating habits are all featured in science writer Amy Stewart's book Wicked Bugs, which examines more than 100 of the strangest entomological creatures on the planet.

Science writer Susan Freinkel chronicles the rise of plastic in consumer culture — and its effects on the environment and our health — in Plastic: A Toxic Love Story. Freinkel says plastics leach potentially harmful chemicals into our bloodstream — and that scientists are now figuring out what that does to our bodies.