Terry Gross

He served on the front line in a U.S. Marine Corps Surveillance and Target Acquisition/Scout-Sniper platoon during the Gulf War. He's written the new memoir, Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles. Journalist Mark Bowden (author of Black Hawk Down) writes of the memoir, "Jarhead is some kind of classic, a bracing memoir of the 1991 Persian Gulf War that will go down with the best books ever written about military life." Swofford attended the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently a Michener-Copernicus Fellowship recipient.

He began studying violin at the age of four and later attended the Moscow Conservatory. Over the years he has won the most prestigious violinist prizes, including the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow and the Paganini Competition in Genoa. His repertoire is extensive, including the standard classical and Romantic violin works as well as works by Arvo Part, John Adams and Astor Piazzolla. He has more than 100 recordings to his credit, including Happy Birthday, his most recent.

Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for The New Yorker magazine. The design for the World Trade Center site has been chosen and architect Daniel Libeskind created the winning proposal. Goldberger will describe the selection process and comment on the winning design.

His bestselling book is Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News. He claims that nealy all the media put a liberal spin on the news. Goldberg worked for CBS for nearly 30 years and won seven Emmy awards. He now works for HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel.

His new book is What Liberal Media? The Truth about Bias and the News. While most critics of the media say reporters are too liberal, Alterman contends the opposite is true, and that the bulk of reporting is quite conservative. Alterman currently writes for The Nation and the Altercation weblog. He's been a contributing editor or writer for Worth, Rolling Stone, Elle, Mother Jones, World Policy Journal and The Sunday Express (London).

When she was 10 years old, her father, a doctor and advocate for democracy in Sierra Leone, was executed for treason. As an adult, Forna returned to Sierra Leone to investigate the circumstances surrounding her father's death. Her memoir is The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest. Forna is a broadcast journalist living in London.

With his writing partner, Fred Ebb, Kander wrote the music for the original Broadway musical Chicago. The movie version of Chicago is nominated for 13 Academy Awards this year. Kander and Ebb are nominated for their song "I Move On." Kander and Ebb also wrote the music for the shows Cabaret, The Act, Woman of the Year, and Flora the Red Meance, and the Martin Scorsese movie musical New York, New York. Both Chicago and Cabaret have recently been revived on Broadway.

He is a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis. His twice-weekly column on economic policy is published in The Washington Times and Detroit News and is nationally syndicated. He was deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Treasury Department, from September 1988 to January 1993. In 1987 and 1988, Bartlett was a senior policy analyst in the Office of Policy Development at the White House. Before that, he was a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.

He is a professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University. His research is mainly in the areas of international trade and finance. He is one of the founders of an economic postulation called the "new trade theory." Krugman has also written and edited many books. His most recent is Fuzzy Math, on the Bush tax cut.

The United Nations Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa talks about the current state of the AIDS crisis there. He recently returned from a tour of Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia, where he was investigating links between hunger and AIDS. He is the former Deputy Executive Director of UNICEF and was the Canadian ambassador to the U.N. from 1984-1988.