Terry Gross

Kasi Lemmons' film Talk to Me, which opens this weekend, centers on the radio DJ, television personality and activist Ralph Waldo "Petey" Greene Jr. (played by Don Cheadle). Greene was a driving force in the black community of Washington D.C.; we talk with Lemmons and with Dewey Hughes, who first hired Greene at the D.C. radio station WOL-AM.

It's been a year since the start of last summer's war between Israel and Hezbollah. We'll discuss life in Lebanon, and the conflict's unintended consequences, with Timor Goksel, former spokesperson and senior adviser for the United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon. Goksel now teaches at the American University of Beirut.

Russian arms dealer Victor Bout has armed Islamic extremists and sold weapons to some of the Third World's most abusive and murderous dictators and warlords — and he's known for fueling both sides of conflicts.

His success is rooted in the legacy of the Cold War, whose messy unraveling left him with easy access to massive inventories of weapons and ammunition built up by the Soviets. We talk about Bout with journalists Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun, who've co-written a book about him: Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible.