Terry Gross

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.

He won an Oscar this year for his role in Roman Polanski's The Pianist. Brody played Wladyslaw Szpilman, the Polish pianist and Holocaust survivor. Brody's other films include Summer of Sam, The Thin Red Line, Restaurant, and The Affair of the Necklace. He's now starring in Dummy.

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.

He originated the staccato, three-finger banjo technique that became known as the "Scruggs style." He got his start playing with Bill Monroe's band in the 1940s, and then teamed up with guitarist Lester Flatt (fronting The Foggy Mountain Boys). The two penned and recorded the tune "Foggy Mountain Breakdown," which was used on the Bonnie and Clyde film soundtrack and was one of the first crossover hits of the genre. They also recorded "The Ballad of Jed Clampett," the theme song for the sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies. It topped the charts in 1962.

She's the author of the new memoir, Brief Intervals of Horrible Sanity: One Season in a Progressive School. It's about her brief stint as a midyear replacement English teacher in Queens, N.Y. Gold teaches writing at several branches of the City University of New York.

Filmmakers Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey's new feature is Party Monster, starring Seth Green and Macaulay Culkin. It's about a murder that took place in the drug-saturated New York City club scene in the early 1990s. Michael Alig, a party promoter, was convicted of killing a young drug dealer known as Angel. This is Culkin's first film in nine years. He plays Michael Alig. Green plays author/celebutante James St. James. Barbato and Bailey also collaborated on a 1999 documentary of the same name and on the same topic.

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.

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.