All Things Considered on Wyoming Public Radio

Originally from Springfield, Mo., "the Ozarks area of Missouri," Ingrid Gerdes is a neo-soul performer out of Boston, but she considers herself a Southern singer. Her latest album is titled Shed.

In the small-town of Elko, ambition looks like high-heel suede booties on the floor of the auto shop at the local high school.

Brandi and Kaylee look like the Olsen twins. And they're the best auto-shop students at Elko High. The girls have a plan. Everyday out the school window, they see trucks heading up to the gold mines. Day and night. So, the girls figure, why not open a truck repair shop after they graduate?

"In Elko we've been really blessed and really lucky to actually have a good economy," Kaylee says. "We can actually have our hopes and dreams."

Seventy-five years ago Wednesday, two men, an ocean apart, stepped up to microphones. One man was a cello prodigy who had played for the queen of Spain. The other was the son of black sharecroppers, a regular in the juke joints of the Mississippi Delta. But on Nov. 23, 1936, Robert Johnson and Pablo Casals each walked into a room alone with their instruments. And on that day, each made recordings that would change music history.

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel is one of those small corners of the government with an important mission: It's supposed to help protect federal whistle-blowers and shield civil service workers from politics.

But during the Bush years, the office was engulfed in scandal. It was raided by FBI agents, and its chief was indicted for obstructing justice.

It's into that unsettled environment that the new leader, Carolyn Lerner, arrived five months ago. And good government groups say she's already taking the office in new directions.

The congressional supercommittee announced Monday that it failed to come to an agreement on reducing the deficit. After three months of negotiating, the Democrats and Republicans just couldn't agree on how much spending to cut or how high to raise taxes.

But this is not a story about how the left and right disagree with each other. In fact, they actually largely agree.

President Obama Monday put the blame for the supercommittee's failure squarely on congressional Republicans — and their unwillingness to consider higher taxes on the wealthy. Obama also threatened to veto any effort to escape from the automatic spending cuts agreed to in August without a balanced plan to reduce the deficit. Robert Siegel talks to NPR's Scott Horsley for more.

The bipartisan supercommittee says it failed to reach a deficit-reduction deal. NPR's Tamara Keith speaks to Robert Siegel with the latest from Capitol Hill.

With Thanksgiving hard upon us, now is a good time to think about our past. History writers can tell the best stories from centuries of human achievement and folly, yet too often they produce recitations of one damned thing after another. A few, though, combine a respect for accuracy with a deep understanding of the longings, fears and triumphs of the people of our past. Such books make magic.

A sense of humor comes through The Goat Rodeo Sessions, the latest Americana exploration for the world-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

One night last September, Roger Craig, a computer scientist from Newark, Del., was about to make history.

A second uprising seems to be developing in Cairo. Protesters in Tahrir Square, angry with the military-led transitional government, increased in number recently as police clashes with them have become more violent. Weekends on All Things Considered guest host Laura Sullivan talks with reporter Merrit Kennedy about the situation in Egypt.

It's been one month since Moammar Gadhafi's death. Libyans were celebrating within hours of his killing. A month later, the jubilance has waned and the violence continues. Weekends on All Things Considered guest host Laura Sullivan talks with New York Times correspondent Clifford Krauss from Tripoli.

Comedian Bill Maher wraps up every installment of his TV show, Real Time, with a segment called "New Rules." That's where he takes potshots at whatever's bothering him — from wrappers on ice cream cones, to red light cameras, to more serious subjects like war and economic ruin.

His new book, The New New Rules: A Funny Look at How Everybody But Me Has Their Head Up Their Ass, sports a title we can't say on the radio and a mix of rules both lighthearted and serious, some of which never appeared on television.

President Obama wrapped up a nine-day trip to Asia today, during which he announced a troop build up in Australia and a rare State Department visit to the isolationist country of Myanmar formerly known as Burma. Weekends on All Things Considered guest host host Laura Sullivan speaks with James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic, about the trip — as well as other stories from the past week.

The lab mouse is the most ubiquitous animal in biomedical research, but that doesn't mean it's always the best subject for researching disease.

In a series of articles for Slate magazine, Daniel Engber looked into why the mouse is such a mainstay of science — and whether that's a good thing.

Billy McCarthy lost his mother to suicide when he was a teenager. He cared for his schizophrenic brother as best he could after that, but his brother landed in solitary confinement in prison, where he eventually took his own life, too. Somehow, McCarthy found a way to rise above his anguish — as a songwriter. He began playing music while living in foster care in California.

Kurt Vonnegut was a counterculture hero, an American Mark Twain, an avuncular, jocular friend to the youth — until you got to know him.

"Kurt was actually rather flinty, rather irascible. He had something of a temper," author Charles Shields tells weekends on All Things Considered host Laura Sullivan. Shields is the author of a new biography of Vonnegut, called And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life.

"But as I also point out in the book," Shields adds, "he was a damaged person."

Scientists at the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics are now touting a successful second experiment that may challenge Albert Einstein's long-held theory of relativity. The results show that neutrinos could travel faster than the speed of light. Guy Raz talks to Brian Greene, professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, about the findings.

Melissa Block speaks with our regular political commentators, E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post and Brookings Institution and David Brooks of The New York Times.

Long-simmering tensions between Egypt's ruling military council and post-Mubarak political parties could burst into the open. Islamist and secular parties are both planning mass demonstrations in Tahrir Square to protest what they see as efforts by the military to enshrine its power at the expense of an elected government.

Melissa Block talks with John Seabrook, staff writer at The New Yorker. His latest article, "Crunch," delves into the world of the SweeTango — a new hybrid apple that is part Honeycrisp, part Zestar. It's sweet and tangy. There's a hint of cinnamon, a hint of pineapple and a whole lot of crunch.

When I was a kid, I assumed that in the future things would get better and better until we were all driving flying cars and playing badminton with space aliens on top of 500-story buildings. Frankly, I kind of counted on this happening. But now I don't assume that we'll just keep going up anymore.