Terry Gross

Actor, writer and director George Clooney stars in the new legal thriller Michael Clayton. Clooney recently starred in Syriana and co-wrote, directed, and co-starred in Good Night, and Good Luck about the showdown between legendary journalist Edward R. Murrow and Senator Joseph McCarthy.

This interview originally aired on Oct. 18, 2005.

In a new book about the constitutional separation of church and state, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Garry Wills insists that that separation was meant as "the great protector of religion, not its enemy." That, as Wills tells guest host Dave Davies, hasn't stopped fervent believers from challenging the concept.

Wills, a translator of St. Augustine and author of What Jesus Meant, is an emeritus professor of history at Northwestern University; the new book is titled Head and Heart: American Christianities.

In The Secret History of the War on Cancer, environmental-health expert Devra Davis warns that we're ignoring dozens of cancer-causing chemicals, like asbestos, benzene, vinyl chloride, and dioxin.

She writes that, like the tobacco companies, the chemical industry has managed to obfuscate the carcinogenic dangers of chemical and other toxic waste.

Davis directs the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute and teaches epidemiology in the university's public-health graduate program.

Snacking on water beetles in Laos, dining on dog in Korea: Tom Parker Bowles, food writer for Britain's The Mail on Sunday, Night and Day, and Tatler (and son of Prince Charles' wife, Camilla Parker Bowles), has written what he's described as "a travel book about weird food."

It's called The Year of Eating Dangerously: A Global Adventure in Search of Culinary Extremes.

September 11, AIDS, the Holocaust — comic and actress Sarah Silverman has repeatedly proved that practically nothing need be off limits in a joke. Take the title of her Off-Broadway show, which later became a film: Jesus Is Magic. Or the music video, available on her Comedy Central show's blog, of "The Doodie Song."

Silverman has appeared in films including School of Rock and There's Something About Mary and she was a member of the Saturday Night Live ensemble in the early '90s.

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine. He has written in depth about the Bush administration. His article in this week’s edition (“Shifting Targets”) is about the administration’s shift in position on Iran, redefining the war in Iraq as a strategic battle between the U.S. and Iran. Hersh exposed the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in 2004, in a series of articles published in the magazine early in 2005. He has been the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, five George Polk Awards, two National Magazine Awards, and a dozen other prizes.

Writer and director Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums) and actor Jason Schwartzman (I Heart Huckabees) discuss their latest film, The Darjeeling Limited. The adventure comedy, also starring Owen Wilson and Adrien Brody, follows three estranged brothers on a spiritual quest to India.

Judd Apatow has been a writer for Larry Sanders and Ben Stiller, and he worked on the cult-favorite TV comedy Freaks and Geeks. But you'll know him as the writer-director of the hit film The 40-Year-Old Virgin — and the auteur behind this summer's Knocked Up. The film's out now on DVD.

Guest host David Bianculli talks to Apatow and to Knocked Up star Seth Rogen, who plays an oafish slacker confronted with the prospect of fatherhood after a one-night stand.

This interview first aired on May 31, 2007.

A foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Yaroslav Trofimov traces the beginning of the global jihad to Nov. 20, 1979.

It was the first morning of the new Muslim century, and hundreds of fundamentalist gunmen seized Islam's holiest shrine — the Grand Mosque in Mecca. The event and its ringleaders have since inspired militants, including al-Qaida.

Trofimov is also the author of Faith at War: A Journey on the Frontlines of Islam, from Baghdad to Timbuktu.

A new family memoir from the daughter of famed literary critic Anatole Broyard bears the subtitle My Father's Hidden Life — A Story of Race and Family Secrets. Bliss Broyard, raised as white in Connecticut, was 24 when she learned that her father had concealed his black heritage.