Terry Gross

Comic Jerrod Carmichael is the creator and star of the NBC sitcom The Carmichael Show. On the show, he plays a character, also named Jerrod Carmichael, who debates with his family about complicated, often uncomfortable topics.

Journalist and author T.R. Reid, a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, set out on a global tour of hospitals and doctors' offices, all in the hopes of understanding how other industrialized nations provide affordable, effective universal health care. The result: his book The Healing of America.

Neurologist Alvaro Pascual-Leone, talks about the use of TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation to treat patients with autisim spectrum disorder. One of his patients, John Elder Robison Robison participated in a six-month-long study, in which he received weekly TMS treatments. He details the treatments — and the emotional awakening that resulted — in a new memoir, Switched On.