Places & Travel

As a child, she had a crush on the 19-year-old preacher in her church. He was known as M-L, but later he became Martin Luther King, Jr.

In this week's New York Times Magazine cover story (Sunday, Jan. 11) he writes about Maj. John Nagl, a professor at West Point and a counterinsurgency expert who is putting into practice for the first time his theories about counterinsurgency. He is in Iraq with a tank battalion in the Sunni Triangle.

Rock historian Ed Ward tells us about the East LA band from the '60s, The Midniters.

Kushner adapted his epic Tony-award winning play Angels in America into a screenplay for HBO (broadcast this month in two three-hour parts). The play is set in New York in the mid-1980s during the midst of the AIDS epidemic. The HBO film is directed by Mike Nichols and stars Al Pacino, Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson. Kushner also has a new semi-autobiographical musical Caroline, or Change at the Public Theater in New York.

We catch up with him about the latest news from Iraq. He's in the United States for just one day, and then he goes back to Baghdad. Burns has won several Pulitzer Prizes for his overseas war reports.

His new novel is Screaming With the Cannibals. Maynard has been an assignment writer for Reader's Digest for over a decade. He's also written for many other magazines and newspapers. Screaming with the Cannibals is a sequel to his 1988 debut novel, Crum.

Rock critic Ken Tucker reviews Want One, the third album by Rufus Wainwright.

Horovitz is editor of The Jerusalem Report and author of the forthcoming book Still Life with Bombers: Israel in the Age of Terror.

She stars in the new film Wonderland. Set in 1980s Hollywood, it's about a mysterious mass murder that took place on Wonderland Avenue. Porn star John Holmes was involved somehow, but the crime was never solved. Kudrow plays Holmes' wife in the film. Kudrow is best known for her role on the popular NBC sitcom Friends, now in its 10th season. She also appeared in the films Romy and Michele's High School Reunion and Analyze This.

Film critic David Edelstein reviews The Station Agent, an independent film written and directed by Tom McCarthy.

Steinfels is a former senior religion correspondent for The New York Times. He now writes the Beliefs column for the paper. Steinfels is the author of the new book, A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America.

A talk with foreign correspondent Elizabeth Rubin. Rubin writes for The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic and The Atlantic Monthly. She has reported from Afghanistan, the Middle East and Iraq.

Milhollin is director the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, a non-profit research group in Washington, D.C. that has been tracking the spread of weapons of mass destruction since 1986. He will talk about who has nuclear weapons, who is developing them, who has intelligence about them and who poses the biggest threat. Milhollin is also professor Emeritus of the University of Wisconsin Law School. His op-ed pieces about nuclear weapons have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times.

Film critic David Edelstein reviews Mystic River, the new film directed by Clint Eastwood, based on the book by Dennis Lehane.

She stars in the new film Casa de Los Babys, by director John Sayles. She received a Golden Globe nomination for her starring role in the film Secretary. Her other films include Adaptation and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.

His new semi-autobiographical novel, The Fortress of Solitude, tells the story of Dylan Ebdus, a white kid growing up in an African-American and Latino neighborhood in New York. His last novel, Motherless Brooklyn, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. His other books include Girl in Landscape and Amnesia Moon.

His films include Welcome to Sarajevo, 24 Hour Party People and Wonderland. His new film, In This World, follows the arduous 4,000-mile journey of two Afghan refugees from Pakistan to Britain. The film was shot in Pakistan, Iran and Turkey. The two actors were "discovered" in Peshawar, Pakistan. Fifteen-year-old actor Jamal Udin Torabi has since applied for asylum in Britain. The interview continues into the second half of the show.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Triangle: The Fire That Changed America by David Von Drehle.

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.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan considers Lucky Girls (Ecco), the debut short story collection by Nell Freudenberger.