State and National News

Fiction and nonfiction releases from Denis Johnson, Tom Perrotta, Pete Hamill, Mark Adams, Melissa Coleman and Howard Means.

Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Mitt Romney's time at Bain Capital is back in the news this week.

Early Bothy Band, Kevin Burke, Paul Brady...it's all here in our nostalgic browse through Irish classics of the '70s and '80s.

Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

For the most part, we don't hear novel arguments in favor or against the controversial issue of immigration. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been one of the few to take a different view. Last year, he advocated opening the door to new immigrants if they all moved to Detroit.

At the time, it was derided as weird.

Patrick Fitzgerald, the federal prosecutor who obtained the conviction of Vice President Cheney's chief of staff for lying to authorities about the leaking of a CIA officer's name and who sent former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D) to jail on corruption charges, is stepping down from his post.

Surely you've noticed the proliferation of certifications advertising farmers' and food companies' virtuous commitments to fix the environment or promote health. These seals can reassure, but the sheer volume of them can also confound. How to choose between grass-fed, organic, hormone-free or free range?

Now imagine that you have to feed 50 million people a day in 80 countries around the world. And every day more of those people are demanding that the food you serve them be organic, gluten-free, or fair trade.

On my route home, there are a couple of stretches I tend to hit where, more often than not, there are a lot of people trying to cross the street at points where there are crosswalks but no stoplights.

And kids being kids, sometimes there's no crosswalk, but they're trying to cross anyway. Increasingly now, because there are new apartments going up, I also see more young working people marching across the street, carrying their take-out dinners, ear buds in place.

Could we distinguish ultra-advanced aliens from gods? I know; it sounds like a preposterous question, but hear me out.

Sci-fi classics, such as Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, explore precisely this idea, that highly advanced alien intelligences would be essentially indistinguishable from gods. This is not news, really, as it has already happened right here on Earth a few centuries ago.