Government & Politics

Katz is the features editor at the Guardian in London. He traced and verified the identity of the Baghdad blogger, who created an Internet diary about life in Iraq a few months before the recent war began.

She got her start acting in 50s and 60s Westerns, appearing in Gunsmoke and Marlon Brando's One-Eyed Jacks. Though she is from Puerto Rico, she was often cast as a Mexican. Her films include Scarface and All the Pretty Horses. She's now starring in The Blue Diner, which will appear on PBS.

Before President Clinton appointed her to the Cabinet in 1996, she served as the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations. She also served on the National Security Council. Albright has a new memoir, Madam Secretary. The interview continues throughout the entire show.

TV critic David Bianculli looks at the new HBO drama, K Street. Produced by George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh, it premiered last night.

NPR's Senior Foreign Correspondent Anne Garrels was one of the few journalists still in Baghdad during the invasion of Iraq. Often she reported from her room at the Palestine Hotel as bombs flew overhead. In her new book, Naked in Baghdad, she writes about the war and its aftermath. The book also contains the e-mails that her husband Vint Lawrence sent to friends keeping them informed of her daily life in Baghdad. Garrels has also reported from the former Soviet republics, China, Saudi Arabia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Israel, and is the recipient of the Alfred I.

Krugman has collected the last three years of his New York Times op-ed columns in the new book, The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century. In the preface he writes that the book is "a chronicle of the years when it all went wrong again — when the heady optimisim of the late 1990s gave way to renewed gloom. It's also an attempt to explain the how and why: how it was possible for a country with so much going for it to go downhill so fast, and why our leaders made such bad decisions." Krugman teaches at Princeton University.

Peter Kornbluh is director of the National Security Archive's Chile Documentation Project.

Jack Devine was stationed in Chile during the coup as part of the agency's Chile task force. He is now a crisis management consultant in New York with the firm The Arkin Group.

Lahiri's new novel is The Namesake. Lahiri won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Interpreter of Maladies, her collection of short stories. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002. The Namesake is about being an Indian immigrant in America, when the Ganguli family leaves Calcutta and settles in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Enter MeFranken's new book is Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Franken recently made headlines when the Fox News Channel tried to sue him over the phrase "fair and balanced," which Fox claimed as its own. Fox lost, and Franken got lots of publicity for the book, which is now a bestseller. Al Franken is an alumnus of Saturday Night Live, where his most memorable character was the simpering self-help sap Stuart Smalley.

Writer Eric Dezenhall, a damage control expert, is president of the PR firm Nicholas-Dezenhall Communications Management Group based in Washington, D.C. He has in the past described his business as a response to "the culture of the attack." He appears regularly on Hardball and The O'Reilly Factor. Dezenhall worked for the Reagan administration.

Journalist Mike Stanton heads the investigative reporting team at The Providence Journal in Rhode Island. In 1994 he shared the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting that exposed widespread corruption at the Rhode Island Supreme Court. His new book is The Prince of Providence: The True Story of America's Most Notorious Mayor, Some Wiseguys, and the Feds. Vincent Cianci was a visionary mayor who presided over the city's renaissance, but he was also ruthless, corrupt and a rogue.

In the 1990s he covered Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda and the Congo for Reuters. Three of his colleagues were killed by a mob in Somolia during a rebellion against the presence of U.S. forces, and he witnessed the atrocities in Rwanda. Hartley grew up in Africa, the son of a British colonial officer. After the death of his father, Hartley found in a chest his father had given him the diaries of his father's best friend who had died mysteriously 50 years earlier. Hartley set out to find out what happened.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Jacqueline Winspear's debut novel, Maisie Dobbs.

Comic Bill Maher host of the HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher. Like his previous show, Politically Incorrect, Real Time features a roundtable of guests who make jokes and talk politics. This week's guests are actress Janeane Garofalo and California Gov. Gray Davis. Maher is also the author of When You Ride Alone, You Ride with Bin Laden.

Noah Feldman is a professor of the New York University School of Law with a doctorate in Islamic Thought from Oxford. Until recently he was head of the constitutional team with the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Iraq. He is serving as an adviser as Iraq seeks to draft a new constitution. Feldman is also the author of the new book, After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy. In the book he argues that it is time for Islamic democracies.

Nigerian-born actor Chiwetel Ejiofor stars in the new Stephen Frears film Dirty Pretty Things. Ejiofor plays an immigrant former doctor who now must make his living in London as a cab driver and hotel clerk. Ejiofor graduated from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, and was named Outstanding Newcomer in The London Evening Standard Awards 2000. He recently completed a sell-out run at London's National Theatre as Christopher in Blue/Orange. At the age of 19 he had a role in Steven Spielberg's film Amistad.

He's the author of the new book, All The Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. It's about the 1953 CIA coup in Iran that put an end to democratic rule, and in turn led the way for the Islamic Revolution of 1979. He writes, "It was the first time the United States overthrew a foreign government. It set a pattern for years to come and shaped the way millions of people view the United States."

Stothard is the author of the new book, Thirty Days: Tony Blair and the Test of History. Stothard chronicles the 30 days leading up to the Iraq war and the early days of the war. Stothard had unprecedented access to Blair during that time. Stothard is currently editor of The London Times Literary Supplement, and is former editor of The Times from 1992 to 2002.

Arn Chorn-Pond is the subject of the new documentary The Flute Player. As a child, Chorn-Pond was held in a Khmer Rouge labor camp where many children starved to death, many others were murdered, and those who survived were forced to work from 5 a.m. to midnight. He was taught to play the flute to play propaganda songs which helped assure his survival. Later at age 14, Chorn-Pond was forced into the Khmer Rouge army to fight the invading Vietnamese. After seeing his friends die, he fled into the jungle.