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Host Lisa Simeone talks with Lucy Kaylin, author of For the Love of God: The Faith and Future of the American Nun. Kaylin interviews a wide range of women who live as nuns and chronicles their shift from cloistered to active communities within society. Although nuns are a mixed lot who work in most corners of the world, their numbers, in this country at least, are diminishing.

Gourmet guru Julia Child is saying goodbye to her Cambridge, Mass., home, where she has held court on good cooking for 40 years. She's headed for retirement in sunny California. Rachel Gotbaum from NPR member station WBUR sat down for an interview with Child in her pot-cluttered kitchen.

Novelist Chaim Potok died Tuesday at the age of 73. Potok was raised in the Orthodox Jewish tradition, was ordained as a rabbi, and later became a best-selling author of the novels The Chosen, The Promise and My Name is Asher Lev. Much of his writing explored the conflict between spiritual and secular worlds, a subject that earned him readers from all faiths. This interview first aired in 1986.

He is one of few western reporters to interview Osama bin Laden, which he did in 1998. Hes collaborated on the new book, The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It. (Hyperion). In the book they retrace the movements of al-Qaeda leading up to the September 11th attacks.

Songwriter Matt Dennis died Sunday at the age of 88. He wrote the songs "Angel Eyes," "Everything Happens to Me" and "Let's Get Away from It All." In the 1940s he worked with Tommy Dorsey as an arranger and vocal coach when he wrote his biggest hits. This interview first aired December 12, 1995.

Postwar interviews confirm that torture in Saddam Hussein's Iraq was commonplace and methodical, with doctors taking part and a reward system for inquisitors who could gain confessions from their subjects. Hear NPR's Linda Wertheimer and Susan Glasser of The Washington Post.

In the first part of a two-part interview, former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins guides us through the new spoken-word four-CD box set Poetry on Record: 98 Poets Read Their Work, 1888-2006.

Fred de Cordova is a former executive producer of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. We listen back to a 1988 interview with de Cordova. Johnny Carson, the host of The Tonight Show for 30 years died Sunday at the age of 79. The cause was emphysema.

We remember director Robert Wise, who won Oscars for West Side Story and The Sound of Music. Wise also worked as the editor of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. He died last week at 91. This interview first aired March 7, 1989.

Actor Clive Owen co-stars with Oscar winners Denzel Washington and Jodie Foster in the new Spike Lee film Inside Man. His previous films include Closer, Sin City, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead and Croupier. (This interview was originally broadcast July 12, 2004.)