Terry Gross

Colbert is the senior correspondent on Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Colbert started his comic career with Second City in Chicago. He wrote and performed sketches on The Dana Carvey Show. He is also the voice of Ace for Saturday Night Lives's animated shorts Ace & Gary: The Ambiguously Gay Duo. This interview was originally broadcast on Jan. 24, 2005.

Lewis Black is a playwright, stand-up comic, actor, and a commentator on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He's been described as having the mouth of a shock-jock and the heart of a liberal. His new book is entitled Nothing's Sacred.

We talk with Brad Bird, who wrote and directed the Academy Award-winning film The Incredibles, about a suburban family with superpowers. The mix of average characters and extraordinary abilities has turned the animated characters into celebrities.

Poet Laureate Ted Kooser's American Life In Poetry is a free weekly column providing a brief poem and description as a way to bring verse to the masses. Monday, Kooser won a Pulitzer Prize.

Robert Sullivan is the author of the book Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants (now out in paperback). It's about what he learned when he set out to observe the life of New York's rats. This interview was originally broadcast on April 5, 2004.

Edward Conlon's memoir, Blue Blood (now out in paperback) begins with his first days on the street as a cop and goes back three generations. His great-grandfather was a an "officer of dubious integrity" during the Tammany-era NYPD. Conlon also wrote the Cop Diary columns in The New Yorker, and is a graduate of Harvard. This interview was originally broadcast on April 14, 2004.

Flynt Leverett is a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. As Syria is prodded to withdraw its troops — and influence — from neighboring Lebanon, the region faces potentially drastic changes.

State Department representative Elizabeth Dibble is the Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs. Dibble addresses the question of the U.S. State Department policy toward Syria and Lebanon.

Rami Khouri is Palestinian-Jordanian, with a U.S. citizenship. He is an internationally syndicated political columnist and the host of Encounter, a weekly current affairs talk show on Jordan Television. He also hosts a weekly radio program, and he spent the 2001 academic year at Harvard University as a Nieman Fellow. He was editor-in-chief for the Jordan Times newspaper for seven years. He often comments on Middle East issues for the BBC, NPR and CNN.