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Our weeklong retrospective of the year's most entertaining interviews continues with Nancy Cartwright. You've probably heard her work, but you may not have known it was her. She's the voice of Bart Simpson.

Politicians aren't the only ones doing a song and dance this election season. Iowa-born playwright Robert John Ford has written a musical comedy that pokes fun at the Iowa Caucuses and there's an adaptation in the works for the New Hampshire Primary.

Filmmaker Brian De Palma has been making movies and stirring controversy for more than 40 years. His films include Scarface and Casualties of War; his new Redacted retells a true story about a rape and murder committed in Iraq by U.S. soldiers.

Our cultural concierge, Jesse Kornbluth, urges revisiting the 1983 comedy, Local Hero. The soundtrack of this overlooked film – about Scottish villagers who thwart an American oil company's efforts to buy their land — is just as entertaining as the premise.

Matthew Diffee contributes regularly to the cartoonists' bible, The New Yorker. But that magazine gets more than 500 submissions a week — and publishes only 20 cartoons in each issue. Diffee's new book, featuring his work and that of other New Yorker regulars, is The Rejection Collection, Vol. 2: The Cream of the Crap.

Miss Navajo is a documentary about a pageant that honors not only beauty, but also knowledge of the language and culture of the Navajo Nation. The film is set to air within the PBS series Independent Lens. Billy Luther, who directed the film, and his mother Sarah Luther, who formerly held the Miss Navajo title, discuss what the pageant means within American Indian cultures.

Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, creators of Thirtysomething and executive producers of My So-Called Life, are making news again with a new series. It's called Quarterlife, and it's airing not on TV, but in short, six-to-an-hour episodes on the Web. Some pundits are touting it as an alternative for audiences during the ongoing Hollywood writers' strike. Critic David Bianculli, who's working on the Web himself now at TVWorthWatching.com, has a review.

Novelist Geraldine Brooks, poet Robert Hass, Western essayist William Kittredge: from critic Alan Cheuse, an array of books to keep winter's chill and the ever-earlier dark at bay — at least in the circle of light by the reader's chair.

Jerry Seinfeld's animated comedy centers on an amusing honeybee who talks a lot about nothing, then quits work — whereupon the world gets dreary until he starts up again. It's a fairly personal vision — and a bit of a drone.

The film, about an animated princess thrust unprepared into the gritty reality of New York City, is what happens when wised-up meets happily-ever-after. Amy Adams is the indispensable star.