Government & Politics

Former CIA operatives Robert and Dayna Baer met on the job and fell in love. They talk about their relationship and some of their assignments in The Company We Keep: A Husband-and-Wife True-Life Spy Story.

New York Times labor and workplace reporter Steve Greenhouse explains why other states with large budget deficits are now also considering taking on public unions -- and how the standoff between organized labor and Republican governors is likely to play out.

Dirk Vandewalle, an associate professor of government at Dartmouth College, gives an inside look at Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi and his 42-year rule. Vandewalle has studied and written about Libya since the 1980s. In 1986 he lived in Libya for 14 months, the only Western scholar there at the time.

After the Civil War, the United States seemed poised to grant equal rights to blacks. But the Supreme Court's rulings in the late 19th century kept blacks segregated for decades, says constitutional scholar Lawrence Goldstone.

Journalist Charles Sennott recently returned from Tahrir Square, where he was filming a documentary on the revolution for PBS's Frontline. It focuses on the young members of the Muslim Brotherhood who played an important role in Egypt's revolution.

Aaron Katz's mumblecore flick Cold Weather is set in Portland, Ore.; Lee Chang-dong's Poetry is from South Korea. Critic John Powers says both films are wonderful, in part because the stories they tell are so unpredictable.

Matthew Alexander, a pseudonym for the author, was a military interrogator in Iraq who rejected previously used harsh techniques. He writes about how his team hunted down two key al-Qaida operatives in Kill or Capture.

Country music singer and songwriter Rodney Crowell brings his guitar to play some songs that relate to his new memoir, "Chinaberry Sidewalks." Crowell has been successful in the worlds of country music and alternative music. His songs have been hits for many singers, including Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings and Tim McGraw.

Lawrence Wright talks about the history of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group banned in Egypt by the regime of President Hosni Mubarak that could play an important role in the future of the country.

Journalist Thanassis Cambanis puts what has been going on in Egypt in a historical context — and explains what the popularity of other political parties, like Hezbollah, could mean for relations with Israel and the United States.

New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller explains why the paper decided to publish the classified dispatches and cables from WikiLeaks, the effect those documents had in Tunisia and Egypt, and why he came to regard WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as indifferent to the people whose lives were at risk.

The shootings put gun control back on the political radar screen. But political scientist Robert Spitzer says legislative changes are unlikely because of the relationship Congress has with the NRA.

Using a shared currency has made it difficult for Europe to recover from its economic crisis, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman says. He explains why the euro experiment may fail — and what that would mean for the global trading system.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg reflects on the recent shooting in Tucson, Arizona, arguing that traumatic events make people self-conscious about their language — and perhaps, rightfully so.

Sargent Shriver, the founding director of the Peace Corps and the architect of President Johnson's War on Poverty, died on Tuesday. He was 95. Shriver spoke to Terry Gross in 1995 about his role in the War on Poverty.

Debut author Siobhan Fallon writes about the lives of soldiers and their families in her new short story collection, You Know When the Men Are Gone. Families, she says, take the strangeness of deployment and learn how to create a new normal.

Clarence Jones helped draft Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech and was a close personal adviser and lawyer to the civil rights leader. But he almost turned down the chance to work with King. He explains what changed his mind in his memoir, Behind the Dream.

Arizona's gun laws, among the most lenient in the country, allowed Jared Lee Loughner to conceal and carry his firearm without a permit, explains Washington Post reporter James Grimaldi, who wrote a piece Sunday about Arizona's lax gun laws and Saturday's Tuscon shooting rampage.

Since 2006, more than 60,000 of the weapons used in Mexican crimes have been traced back to the United States. Washington Post investigative reporter James Grimaldi explains how a team of reporters uncovered the names of the top 12 U.S. dealers of guns traced to Mexico.

A new book by journalists Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins alleges that the CIA was so obsessed with getting information from nuclear trafficker A.Q. Khan's network, it waited too long to shut it down — and stood by while Khan and his associates spread dangerous nuclear technology around the globe.