Government & Politics

Film critic David Edelstein reviews the new Quentin Tarantino film Kill Bill: Vol. 1.

Film critic David Edelstein reviews Mystic River, the new film directed by Clint Eastwood, based on the book by Dennis Lehane.

Her new book (with co-author Lou Dubose) is Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America. Her stories have appeared in Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine and The Nation. Her other books include Shrub, about presidential candidate Bush, and Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She?

In addition to heading the National Endowment for the Arts, Gioia (pronounced JOY-ah) is the author of several collections of poetry, including Interrogations at Noon. He has also translated the poetry of Italian Nobel Prize winner Eugenio Montale. Before he quit to become a poet, Gioia was a vice president at General Foods.

Norquist is president of Americans for Tax Reform. He's credited with helping President Bush formulate his administration's tax plan.

She is the widow of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped then killed by militant Islamists in 2002. Before Daniel was abducted, the Pearls were both foreign correspondents, reporting from Pakistan. She has a new memoir.

Journalist Joshua Hammer is Jerusalem bureau chief for Newsweek. His new book is called A Season in Bethlehem: Unholy War in a Sacred Place. Hammer stayed in Bethlehem for two years and writes about the Israelis and Palestinians living there. The book includes Hammer's account of the 2002 siege of the Church of the Nativity. The standoff between the Palestinians and Israeli military forces lasted over a month.

After the Russians denied her press access to Chechnya, she disguised herself as a peasant and snuck across the border. For six months she followed the war, traveling with the underground rebels and staying with families. Nivat, based in Moscow, is the author of Chienne de Guerre: A Woman Reporter Behind the Lines of the War In Chechnya.

His films include Welcome to Sarajevo, 24 Hour Party People and Wonderland. His new film, In This World, follows the arduous 4,000-mile journey of two Afghan refugees from Pakistan to Britain. The film was shot in Pakistan, Iran and Turkey. The two actors were "discovered" in Peshawar, Pakistan. Fifteen-year-old actor Jamal Udin Torabi has since applied for asylum in Britain. The interview continues into the second half of the show.

The name is a pseudonym, which combines the Arabic and Latin words for peace. Pax's web log is still going on today. Peter Maass of the online magazine Slate said Pax was "the Anne Frank of this war ... and its Elvis. Pax's diary entries have been collected in book form in the forthcoming The Baghdad Blog.

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.