Terry Gross

Actor Ted Danson has been captivating audiences for over 20 years. This fall, the actor appears in two TV series, playing an aging hotshot in need of a little spice on the HBO series Bored To Death and a forensic analyst on the CBS series, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.

This interview was originally broadcast on Sept. 7, 2009. Ted Danson is currently starring in Bored to Death on HBO and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation on CBS.

More soldiers are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with wounds that would have been fatal a decade ago. The injuries have led to advances in combat medicine but have challenged the health care systems meant to help veterans back home. War reporter David Wood talks with Fresh Air about the hurdles facing these troops and their families.

Long before the policy barring gays from serving openly in the military ended, Air Force 1st Lt. Josh Seefried started OutServe, a network of gay troops on Facebook. Seefried and his partner talk about what it's like being a gay couple in the military — and about new challenges facing gay troops.

Jeffrey Eugenides' third novel, The Marriage Plot, charts the lives of three young adults as they finish college, fall in love and navigate the real world after graduating from Brown University in 1982. Eugenides, also a Brown alum, based some of the novel on his own experiences directly after college.

Laura Dern is Amy Jellicoe, a health and beauty executive who returns from a post-meltdown retreat to pick up the pieces of her broken life in the new HBO series Enlightened. Dern and series creator Mike White talk about the tone of the show, and whether it's possible for people to really change.

Bell, the first tenured black professor at Harvard Law School, died this week at age 80. His 1973 book, Race, Racism and American Law, is a staple at law schools nationwide. He spoke with Terry Gross in 1992.

Writer David Rakoff's received the 2011 Thurber Prize for American Humor for his essay collection Half Empty. In the book, Rakoff explains the powers of pessimistic thought as he analyzes topics such as a pornography trade fair, his neurotic childhood and his recent cancer diagnosis.

This interview was originally broadcast on Sept. 21, 2010. This week, David Rakoff received the 2011 Thurber Prize for American Humor for his essay collection Half Empty, which is now available in paperback.

Businessman Art Pope poured millions of dollars into state legislative campaigns during the 2010 campaign. Republicans went on to win 18 of the 22 campaign seats Pope and his organizations targeted. New Yorker writer Jane Mayer talks about Pope's growing power — and how his money may influence the 2012 presidential election.

What motivates someone to become a terrorist? That's the question former prosecutor Ken Ballen set out to tackle when he traveled to Saudi Arabia and Indonesia to interview more than 100 Islamist extremists. "We've never sat back and said, 'Let's really understand our adversaries,' " he says.