This week, Alec talks with Lena Dunham, whose hit show on HBO, "Girls," just started its second season. Three years ago, Dunham made a low-budget art house film called "Tiny Furniture." Last week "Girls" took home two Golden Globes. Dunham tells Alec she never imagined she’d encounter the success she has. She says she thought she’d be a “weird Gender and Women’s Studies teacher who occasionally showed movies at film festivals,” and instead she's trying to figure out what to wear to shoot the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.

In a preview of their upcoming interview, Lena Dunham talks with Alec Baldwin about the Golden Globes, the Oscars and other award ceremonies.

This week Alec talks with Judd Apatow, whose films include ‘The 40 Year Old Virgin,’ ‘Knocked Up,’ and ‘Funny People;’ all of which feature emotionally immature men forced to grow up after confronting, respectively -- sex, responsibility and death. Of all Apatow’s movies, his most recent, “This is 40”, which opened the weekend before Christmas, may be his most personal and stars his wife, Leslie Mann, and their two daughters.  

This week Alec sits down with Jamie and Alex Bernstein, to hear about growing up with the maestro, Leonard Bernstein.  Bernstein had three children: Jamie, Alexander and Nina.  And while they knew him in the tux and tails, they also knew him as the dad who loved games – he was a killer at anagrams – and always up for tennis or squash or skiing or touch football. 

This week Alec talks with Lewis Lapham, who's been refining his prose for over 50 years. Lapham says he still has to write “three or four or five, sometimes eight drafts of something,” but takes pleasure in “getting it right.”  Today, he’s at the helm of Lapham’s Quarterly. He was at Harper’s for many years – and he started out at The San Francisco Examiner before stints at The Saturday Evening Post and Life.  

This week on Here’s The Thing, Alec talks with writer Paula Pell – whose been making people laugh at Saturday Night Live for the last 17 years.  Pell landed her dream job as a writer at SNL after working at a Florida theme park. Her agent told her that Lorne Michaels wanted to meet her – “it is not an audition, but he wants to fly you up and talk to you.” Pell wasn’t sure what she was headed up for, but she got a job writing for the show.

This week Alec talks with Andrew McCarthy – about making movies, directing and what it’s like to reinvent oneself as a travel writer. Most people know McCarthy for his roles in "St. Elmo’s Fire" and "Pretty in Pink" – as a member of the “Brat Pack" -- but those movies were only one stop on Andrew McCarthy’s journey.

This week on Here’s the Thing, Alec talks with two men who have spent much of their lives living and working in Africa.  Photographer Peter Beard first set foot on the continent in 1955. Richard Ruggiero, of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, began his Peace Corps stint in 1981 in the northern Central African Republic.  

This week on Here’s The Thing, Alec talks with David Brooks on stage at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in Manhattan as part of the Public Forum series.  David Brooks has been a New York Times op-ed columnist since 2003.  He is known as a Conservative voice -- he was a senior editor at The Weekly Standard -- but former Obama advisor David Axelrod described him as a “true public thinker.”  

In a series of one-hour, on-air specials, award-winning actor Alec Baldwin gives the listener unique entrée into the lives of artists, policy makers and performers. Baldwin sidesteps the predictable by taking listeners inside the dressing rooms, apartments, and offices of people such as comedian Chris Rock and Oscar-winner Michael Douglas.

Baldwin pursues great conversations in unexpected places to find out what motivates his guests, how they feel about what they do and what keeps them up at night. Here’s The Thing: Listen to what happens when a man you think you know surprises you.