Sean Penn, the Christiane Amanpour of celebrity journalists (and my new hero, thanks to his performance in "Milk"), has written a hard-hitting, insightful and surprisingly capable interview with Hugo Chavez and Raul "party-in-my-pants" Castro. It's Castro's first interview with a foreign actor journalist ever. Really. Revelations include: Raul Castro is old! There are rich Cubans in Miami! Christopher Hitchens and Fidel Castro are atheists! (Also we actually have normalized relations with Cuba and Castro wants a summit with Obama. Shh.) There is a video too, where Sean Penn has possibly-maybe been kidnapped by The Nation, or by Castro, or by an interior designer with very bad taste in sofas and paintings. Inspired by Penn's new new-journalism in The Nation this week, and by his traveling companions, (Penn went to Cuba and Venezuela, somewhat inexplicably, with the wise Douglas Brinkley, and the innane Christopher Hitchens in tow) media outlets are clamoring for exclusive investigative reporting conducted entirely by former Sean Penn co-stars. A few of the ideas in the works:  Dakota Fanning (I am Sam), traveling with Diablo Cody and Gayatri Spivak, go bar-hopping with Baruch Marzel in Hebron for The American Prospect. Judge Reinhold (Fast Times at Ridgemont High), traveling with bell hooks and Penn Gillette, expose the brutal working conditions in the Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen for Highlights. Tom Cruise (Taps), along with Rick Warren and this guy interview Moqtada Al-Sadr on his new solo album, "Kickin' the Shi'ite outta ya" for The Source. Emile Hirsch(Milk) and Vincent Schiavelli (Fast Times at Ridgemont High) trek into the Pakistani badlands to get their pulse on the real Taliban for Cook's Illustrated. and lastly, Susan Sarandon (Dead Man Walking), not to be outdone by her former beau, ventures into the Colombian jungle to do blow with Alfonso Cano of FARC, but runs into Michael Douglas (The Game), who has brought Alex de Waal and Michael "Mikaeel" Jackson for an expose of child soldier recruitment in South America. Her reflections appear, for subscribers only, at http://bananaguide.com Read the full Nation piece here.