In 1999, Jhumpa Lahiri won a Pulitzer Prize for her very first book, Interpreter of Maladies. Her 2003 novel, Namesake, was turned into a movie, and she went on to publish Unaccustomed Earth and The Lowland.

But Lahiri wasn't satisfied. "I've always been searching to arrive at a certain voice that will probably elude me forever," she tells NPR's Ari Shapiro. So Lahiri is trying something new — very new.

She wrote her new memoir, In Other Words, in Italian. "One week after moving to Rome I started writing in my diary in Italian. That was the first step I took on this road, and I haven't really stopped yet," she says.

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New York Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi is known for her in-depth reporting on terrorism and the Islamic State. Her recent jailhouse interview with Harry Sarfo, a German citizen who joined ISIS and trained in Syria before disavowing the group, revealed the organization's particular interest in recruits from Europe. "[Harry] was very much a desirable target for them, given his German passport and his experience living in London — two countries that they're still trying to infiltrate," Callimachi tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

In addition to her on-the-ground reporting, Callimachi follows ISIS' encrypted social media channels and communicates through social media with people connected to the terror group. She says that the group's recruiting efforts are widespread and focus on both the "mentally unwell" and those who have been "radicalized since birth."

Callimachi says the individual motivations of the recruits don't really matter as long as they contribute to the Islamic State's primary objective. "The purpose of this group is to spread terror, to spread it all over the world, to make the kaffir, the infidel — which is us — feel as if they're not safe anywhere," she says. "That's their end goal."

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