Tom Waits.

Michael Shannon plays federal agent Nelson Van Alden on the HBO series Boardwalk Empire. "I think inside of Van Alden is a child — that arrested child — that never really got to develop its own identity," he says.

Rhys Ifans plays the Elizabethan aristocrat Edward de Vere in Roland Emmerich's Anonymous. The movie speculates that de Vere, not Shakespeare, was the real author of the bard's works.

Rainn Wilson, who plays Dwight on The Office, is featured in the new PBS miniseries America in Primetime, which examines the archetypes on television today.

"We are entering a golden age of journalism," says David Carr of The New York Times. "I look at my backpack ... and it contains more journalistic firepower than the entire newsroom that I walked into 30-40 years ago."

Screenshot from El Narco

A street vendor sells her wares by the light of a kerosene wick lamp in Lagos, Nigeria. The country claims ownership of one of the world's great energy reserves, but corruption and mismanagement leave Africa's oil giant chronically short of electricity. Businesses and walled residential compounds run costly diesel generators.