Celebrated writer, director and actor Simon Pegg talks to Steve Paulson about his love of "Star Wars" and how it fired up his imagination and his career.
When is government surveillance appropriate? Shane Harris talks about the rise of American surveillance, cyber warfare and privacy.
One hundred years ago, Fritz Haber invented the first chemical weapon and convinced the German army to use it. His wife Clara, also a chemist, fiercely opposed her husband's project. When she couldn't stop it, she committed suicide. Judith Claire Mitchell tells the story in her tragic and yet funny novel "A Reunion of Ghosts."
Howard Axelrod was accidentally blinded in one eye in a freak accident when he was in college. Disoriented and depressed, he retreated to an off-the-grid cabin in the Vermont wilderness. He stayed there, alone, for 2 years. Now he's published a memoir about his period of renunciation, "The Point of Vanishing."
For Robert Farris Thompson, the most beautiful, intimate and passionate of dances is Argentine tango.
Ziauddin Sardar responds to the question "is there really a clash of civilizations?"
Tariq Ramadan is a Swiss-born philosopher who travels throughout the Islamic world trying to build bridges between European Muslim and conservative clerics.