Terry Gross

Writer, actor, director, comedian and host of Le Show, Harry Shearer. He's starring in the new folk music mockumentary A Mighty Wind, directed by Christopher Guest, who also directed Best in Show and Waiting for Guffman. Shearer also starred with Guest in the classic heavy metal parody This is Spinal Tap. Shearer's public radio show is now in its 19th year.

Friedman will discuss the post-Saddam Middle East. Friedman's best-selling book is Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes for his coverage of the Middle East.

Charles Sennott is foreign correspondent for The Boston Globe. He was recently in northern Iraq where he traveled independently with a group of journalists. He was in Kirkuk when allied forces took the city from Baathist control. In Afghanistan, in 2001 Sennott traveled with the Northern Alliance. He is also the author of the new book The Body and The Blood: The Holy Land's Christians At the Turn of a New Millennium. (PublicAffairs). Sennott was the Globe's Middle East bureau chief.

She is the author of Crescent, a new book about a single Arab-American woman chef in Los Angeles. Her previous novel Arabian Jazz won the Oregon Book Award. Abu-Jaber grew up in America in a traditional Jordanian household. Abu-Jaber is a writer-in-residence at Portland State University.

He is the editor of Newsweek International and a political analyst for ABC News. His new book is The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. In the book, he argues that the spread of democracy does not always produce a corresponding growth of liberty. He gives examples of democratic elections that resulted in the election of dictators and autocrats. And he argues for a restoration of balance between democracy and liberty.

They've collaborated on the new album A Wonderful World. It is a collection of Louis Armstrong songs and was produced by T-Bone Burnett. Last year the two completed a concert tour.

He is a professor of International Relations, International Law, and Middle Eastern Politics at Boston University. He's also the author of the best-selling book, A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East 1914-1922. The book details how the geography and the politics of the Middle East were shaped by decisions by the Allies during and after World War I.

This week he won his second Pulitzer Prize (the first was in 1999). He was cited for his "perceptive cartoons executed with a distinctive style and sense of humor." Many of the cartoons that earned him this recent prize poked fun at Bush administration policies. When he won the prize in 1999 many of his cartoons lampooned the Lewinsky-Clinton scandal. He has been the The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's editorial cartoonist since 1979. Horsey has four collections of his cartoons, the most recent is One Man Show.

We remember Cecile de Brunhoff, who died April 7 at the age of 99. It was the bedtime story she made up and told her sons in 1930 that became the basis for the world-famous Babar the Elephant stories. Her husband, Laurent de Brunhoff, wrote down the story and provided the illustrations. Terry talked with their son, author and illustrator Laurent de Brunhoff, who followed in his father's footsteps, and has written and drawn the continuing adventures of Babar the Elephant for the past 40 years. This interview first aired Feb. 28, 1990.

She is co-director of the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. She will discuss many of the questions surrounding reconstruction in Iraq, such as the role of the United Nations and Iraqi exiles, the distribution of construction contracts, and the cost of reconstruction.