Terry Gross

Actor David Duchovny stars in the new Showtime series Californication, which is basically about a lot of sex. (Duchovny plays a novelist with a taste for women.) The actor, who's best known for his role as Agent Fox Mulder on the TV's The X-Files, earned an undergraduate degree from Princeton University and a graduate degree in English Lit at Yale University.

Singer-songwriter Ben Vaughn talks with Fresh Air producer Amy Salit about Lee Hazlewood, who died Saturday at age 78. Hazlewood was best known for writing Nancy Sinatra's hit "These Boots are Made For Walkin'," and his songs were recorded by other pop stars including Elvis Presley, Nick Cave and Courtney Love. But he had a recording career of his own as well, and he influenced a generation of rockers. Vaughn is a singer, songwriter, producer and composer who's scored many network TV shows and films, in addition to recording 12 albums of his own.

Matt Weiner, a TV writer and producer who landed an Emmy and a Writers Guild Award for his work on HBO's The Sopranos, has created a new show. It's an AMC drama series called Mad Men, set in the fiercely competitive world of Madison Avenue ad execs in 1960s New York.

Ayub Nuri was working with foreign journalists in Iraq as a fixer — a war-zone interpreter, guide, source-finder and occasional life-saver. Nuri worked with increasing autonomy until he became a reporter with his own byline. He wrote about his experiences in The New York Times Magazine on July 29, 2007. Nuri is now based in New York City.

Zack Hample, an obsessive baseball fan, has by his own count snagged 3,123 baseballs at 42 different major league stadiums. And he's turned his obsession with the game into a career, giving tours of stadiums, appearing on TV and radio and writing books — including Watching Baseball Smarter: A Professional Fan's Guide for Beginners, Semi-Experts, and Deeply Serious Geeks.

Malcolm MacPherson's new novel is Hocus POTUS, a political farce about the shenanigans of White House loyalists in Baghdad's Green Zone, written from the point of view of an American journalist stationed there. The book draws on MacPherson's own experiences as a foreign correspondent for Time and Newsweek magazines, during which time he reported from Baghdad on Ambassador Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Jeffrey Blitz's new film Rocket Science is a partly autobiographical coming-of-age tale about a teenager who joins the high school debate team. Blitz won the Dramatic Directing Award at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival; he also directed 2002's Oscar-nominated documentary Spellbound, along with several episodes of the hit NBC television series The Office.

In The Center Cannot Hold, lawyer and psychiatry professor Elyn R. Saks chronicles her own struggle with schizophrenia. The battle began with early symptoms at age 8 and has continued throughout her life; she had her first full-blown episodes during her terms at Oxford and Yale. Saks, who has for years controlled her condition with daily medication and therapy, is an expert in the field of mental-health law, and teaches at the University of Southern California.

It's been a busy congressional season — contentious hearings with Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez in the hot seat, revisions to the nation's domestic-eavesdropping laws, major ethics-reform moves and, of course, debate about what to do about Iraq. Journalist Carl Hulse, who reports on Congress for The New York Times, reviews the legislative session.

Khaled Hosseini's second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, currently sits atop the New York Times best-seller list; his fiction debut, The Kite Runner, has been on the list for two years.

Hosseini, like his Kite Runner protagonist, left Afghanistan when he was boy, when his family fled before the Soviet invasion, and didn't return for decades. His father was a diplomat, and the family was granted political asylum in America.

Fellow novelist Isabel Allende calls The Kite Runner "one of those unforgettable stories that stays with you for years."