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As famous for its commercials as the big game itself, this year the Super Bowl premiered an ad starring New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and Boston mayor Tom Menino. The thirty-second spot promoted Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a coalition group of 600 mayors organized to promote urban safety by preventing the flow of illegal weapons into cities across the United States. While the ad may have seemed out of place alongside ads for cars, websites, and beers, the message it promoted was, in many ways, as uncontroversial as the aforementioned products.

Dan Baum went to New Orleans to cover Hurricane Katrina, but he ended up writing about the colorful people and the outsized culture of the city. The story became a book and now it’s a musical with songs by composer Paul Sanchez. They both join us to talk about the strange journey of the piece called "Nine Lives." Plus: stage and TV actor Michael Cerveris is helping to produce the upcoming musical. He joins us with a live performance.

Much has been made of Tucson shooting suspect Jared Loughner’s troubled state of mind by police and former classmates. But if Loughner’s mental issues were a factor in Saturday’s attacks, does it follow that we should screen people for mental illness before allowing them to purchase guns? Is this even possible? And more importantly, do these kind of gun restrictions save lives or are they merely knee-jerk responses that only give us the impression of added safety?

Dan Baum, a contributor to Harper's Magazine, talks about his cover story in the August issue, "Happiness is a Worn Gun: My Concealed Weapon and Me."

After Hurricane Katrina, Dan Baum moved to New Orleans to write about the city’s response to the disaster for The New Yorker. He quickly realized that Katrina was not the most interesting thing about New Orleans, not by a long shot. His book Nine Lives is a multi-voiced biography ...