Terry Gross

Pianist Harry Connick, Jr. makes his final appearance as Fresh Air's performer-in-residence. Today he examines the style of Thelonious Monk.

Paleontologist Jack Horner discovered some of the most significant fossil records of dinosaurs, which suggest that the animals cared for their young and traveled in herds.

Former Monkees member Michael Nesmith helped pioneer the music video and created the blueprint for MTV. He now runs the home video production company, Pacific Arts Video, which he financed with an inheritance from his mother, who invented Liquid Paper.

The new film, a thriller about drug smuggling, was written by Robert Towne, who is considered by many to be the best screenwriter in Hollywood. Film critic Stephen Schiff says the movie is a sensual feast.

Hamilton says he'll always be pigeonholed as a New Yorker cartoonist; his work regularly appears in that magazine. His new novel, The Lap of Luxury, is about marrying into a rich family.

Jan Harold Brunvand explores the urban legend about a jilted lover who fills her partner's car with cement. Brunvand says the origin of the story is untraceable.

Peter Sichrovsky's lives in Austria, and is the child of Holocaust survivors who grew up alongside the children of former Nazis. He is interested in how the generation after World War II dealt with their parents' experiences during this time, either as perpetrators or victims of violence. Sichrovsky's books include Strangers in Their Own Land and Born Guilty.

Smith is host of a popular PBS television program and author of the best-sellers The Money Game, Supermoney and Paper Money. His new book, titled The Roaring 80s, looks at the previous decade, which he says has been characterized by easy debt, easy spending and an amiable hands-off attitude by Washington. Smith says a camparison with another era of high living - the roaring 20s - is unavoidable.

The British journalist reports on Washington politics for The Nation, Spectator, and Harper's. He's frustrated by the tendency of news outlets to avoid reporting facts about political figures that may seem partisan or outwardly critical. A collection of his columns, titled Prepared for the Worst, has just been published.

Accomplished stage and screen actor Simon Callow wrote a biography of Charles Laughton, from whom he drew tremendous inspiration. Callow says Laughton's skill in part stemmed from the late actor's self-hatred and closeted homosexuality.