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Chinua Achebe, the prominent Nigerian novelist and essayist who died on Thursday, said in a 1994 interview with the Paris Review, "There is that great proverb — that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter."

Achebe's books are elegant, musical, and — most significantly — they'll live on as African rebuttals to the colonial narratives of Joseph Conrad and other European writers.

Achebe's influence is most visible in the extraordinary output of a handful of prominent young Nigerian writers and other African literary elite. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a MacArthur Fellow and perhaps the most famous young Nigerian writer, said in a 2009 Ted talk that "[B]ecause of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye...I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature."

For many years, across the world, the extraordinarily powerful noses of dogs have been successfully used to help detect crime.

Now, in Britain, moves are underway to recruit humans to perform the same subtle work.

Police are encouraging the British to step out of their homes, raise their nostrils aloft, and see if these catch the whiff of wrongdoing wafting from the next-door neighbors.

Visitors to these crowded islands are often charmed by the small red-brick terraced houses that feature in every town and city.

But law enforcement agencies here say the attics and back rooms of some of these homes conceal illegal urban micro-farms in which criminal gangs are cultivating marijuana for commercial sale.

They want the British public to sniff these out.

Scratch And Sniff Cards

To perform this task, humans - like dogs - first need a little training. So a crime-fighting charity, called Crimestoppers, and police are this week sending out more than 200,000 "scratch and sniff" cards to households around the country.

They want to educate the national nose.

The British generally need little assistance detecting the presence of a smouldering joint. Millions of them use, or have used, marijuana. They know very well what it smells like, once alight.

These scratch cards are intended to teach them how to recognize living cannabis plants. Scratch, sniff ...and there it is: the strong sweet smell of cannabis while it's actually growing.

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As a deadline on Cyprus to come up with a financial bailout plan nears, a possible rescue from Russia looks to have fallen apart, leaving the island nation few options for staving off default.

Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said as far as Moscow was concerned "the talks have ended," but Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev left the door open, saying aid from Moscow would be contingent on Cyprus gaining European Union backing for its other money raising ideas.

Cyprus had hoped to woo the Russians by promising stakes in natural gas reserves recently discovered off the island's cost. Although the prospects of a deal looked shaky, Medvedev said that Russia "hasn't closed the door, hasn't said 'no'" to Cyprus."

Cyprus has been a favorite tax haven of Russia's oligarchs, who have an estimated $30 billion or more in the country's banks. Cypriot officials had hoped for an extension on the terms of a $3 billion Russian loan and for an additional line of credit from Moscow.

NPR's Joanna Kakissis reports that Cypriot lawmakers were set to vote on Friday on a new bailout plan to keep the country solvent and in the euro zone. She says that the plan includes radically restructuring the country's biggest banks and creating an investment fund to issue bonds.

Earlier this week, Cyprus rejected a bailout plan from international lenders that would have required the Mediterranean country to levy a one-time tax on the nation's domestic and foreign depositors to raise $7.5 billion toward a $13 billion bailout. On Thursday, the European Central Bank gave Cyprus four days to come up with a 'Plan B' or face a cut off in credit to its banking sector.

The prospect of heavily-indebted Cyprus defaulting on its EU bond payments and being forced out of the euro zone sent ripples through the financial markets. But The New York Times points out that:

" ... the broader financial system in Europe, the losses resulting from a Cypriot banking collapse and the country's return to its former currency would be minimal compared with the havoc that Greece would have created had it not been bailed out.

...

Greece may well have been too big to fail last year, but Cyprus, which creates less than one-half percent of the euro zone's gross domestic product, is certainly not."

Google's executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, who went to North Korea in January, is making a short visit Friday to Myanmar, also known as Burma.

Why is the senior executive of a U.S. technology powerhouse visiting some of the poorest and least wired countries in Asia?

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"I have two daughters, and we live here in Manhattan, and having gone through the Manhattan kindergarten application process, nothing will ever rival the stress of that.

"They'll go somewhere [for college]; we'll find somewhere."

On why Fey's films have tended to lean toward romantic comedies

"When they put up the sign-up sheet of who wants to star in what movie, a lot of times I get there late. I was like, 'Oh, I want to sign up for Catwoman, and then Anne Hathaway had already signed up for it."

On temporarily giving up her writer-director chair

"This is [director] Paul Weitz's movie; this is Karen Croner, the screenwriter's, movie. To have such a lovely role in such a beautifully written script offered to me, it's like elves made the shoes.

"The idea of being in control for the sake of control is not really important to me. If everyone is sharp and doing what they're doing well, you don't really need to be in control all the time."

On why Tina Fey is not about to become a "movie star"

"I think the philosophy will continue to be what it always was, which was, 'Let's keep throwing a bunch of things at a wall and see what sticks.' This movie was made possible by the fact that someone else wrote it and we could shoot it on my last hiatus last summer, between seasons of 30 Rock. And now 30 Rock is over, so I definitely aspire to write another movie again. Eventually I will try to pitch something for television again."

On the manic appeal of shooting a TV show

"Television is a runaway train that you have to get on for nine months of the year, but at the same time it has a wonderful immediacy. And since you seem to be in the market for control, Linda, I recommend it — because it is a great medium for writers. Because there's just no time for a studio to interfere very long. You write, you shoot it, it's on TV."

On realistic euphemisms for unemployment

"There should be a new, more honest euphemism. 'I'm leaving office because I plan to solicit more anonymous sex in bathrooms.' 'I am going to dedicate myself full time to my day-drinking.' Yeah, I am actually spending more time with my family, which is nice."

On the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, NPR is catching up with some of the people we encountered during the war. In 2006, at the height of the violence, we brought you the story of a woman who performed the Muslim ritual of washing and preparing the dead for burial. Kelly McEvers has this update on Um Abbas, who is now living in southern Iraq.

What's interesting about this story, and about many of the stories we did from Iraq during the most violent years, is how we got the story.

Back in 2006, hundreds of people were dying every day. Anti-American sentiment was high. Many times, Western journalists didn't go out unless they were embedded with the U.S. military. To talk to Iraqis, journalists often had to rely on Iraqi colleagues.

For the story seven years ago, Isra' did all the legwork. She remembers first meeting the body washer, Um Abbas:

"She was reading the newspaper, and I asked her what are you reading. And she said, 'Oh about the benefits to the health of apples.' She seemed a very life-loving person — she still wanted a better life although she lived in the midst of death," Isra' says.

Isra' told Um Abbas we wanted to interview her and record her while she washed a body. Um Abbas said fine, but Isra' should keep a low profile so she wouldn't disturb the relatives of the dead. They agreed Isra' would pose as a woman who couldn't have children.

Related NPR Stories

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Letters To My Dead Father

Neander-girl meets Sapien-boy, and never the twain would meet again, except that the very next day, Guy's prediction starts to come true. A landslide destroys the cave while the family is out, and beyond the rubble they find a new world of bizarre creatures. Think The Flintstones on James Cameron's Pandora, with the Croods nearly becoming crudites for critters ranging from saber-toothed housecats to a flock of tiny razor-toothed birds that look like piranha-keets.

For a while, I thought there might be a political parable intended here — Cage's conservative dad competing with his daughter's progressive boyfriend for the right to chart a path forward for the family of man — but it's pretty quickly clear that the filmmakers don't actually have much on their mind besides jokes.

Most of these jokes are based on stereotypes nearly as ancient as the cave drawings the characters occasionally reference — not just overprotective dads and girls who love shoes, but savage toddlers, annoying in-laws, and subservient moms.

If the digital 3-D gorgeousness owes a lot to Cameron's world-creating work in Avatar, the plot of The Croods is structurally crude — just a paleolithic road trip with detours for slapstick and sentiment. It's less about breaking new ground, or even breaking in new characters, than about creating an Ice Age-style franchise.

Still, as family viewing, it's pleasant enough: primitive, yes, but in a digitally sophisticated way that's boisterous, funny and will no doubt sell a lot of toys.

As the Roadside King Crew, a group of younger taggers from Queens, encroaches on their territory, defacing their defacements, the partners vow to seek the ultimate revenge at Shea Stadium. Malcolm claims to have an inside connection who wants $500 to slip them into the stadium after hours, but they don't have that kind of paper — and spend a long day trying to get it.

Sofia has $80 coming from some deadbeat on a "custom job," and Malcolm has been known to sell a little weed here and there, but they're both tilting at windmills. For his part, Malcolm hijacks a few bags to sell to a stoner (Zoe Lescaze) from an upscale neighborhood, but gets so caught up in flirting with her that he nearly forgets why he's there in the first place.

Sofia isn't as easily distracted, but her combative nature, likely essential for operating in a boy's world, makes her a target for leering kids and small-time crooks.

To say that Gimme the Loot goes nowhere fast isn't an insult, but an apt description of how agreeably Leon and his cast spin their wheels. It's fitting that the film won the Grand Jury Prize at South by Southwest, in Richard Linklater's Austin, because its strongest passages have the hangout quality of Linklater's Slacker, surveying the neighborhood and encountering some eccentric souls along the way.

At the same time, Malcolm and Sofia's romantic uncertainty recalls the lovely 2002 indie Raising Victor Vargas, only with the Bronx subbing in for the Lower East Side. They're confused about their feelings for each other, and too inexperienced to figure out how to express them the right way.

Leon isn't a flashy director, but he has an excellent sense of proportion. Gimme the Loot unfolds in a series of loose, funny, naturalistic scenes, but they never trail off into improvisational vapors.

Malcolm and Sofia have to get that money, after all, and that need enforces the discipline necessary to keep the film from dithering too much. In Leon's generous view, they may fail consistently, but at least they're failing together — and sharing a camaraderie that's its own kind of triumph. (Recommended)

Twenty years after multiple blasts ripped through India's commercial capital, Mumbai, killing more than 200 people, the country's Supreme Court has upheld the conviction of a leading Bollywood actor for his role in the attacks.

Sanjay Dutt was charged with possessing an AK-56 assault rifle and a pistol that were given to him by men who were later convicted for their role in the serial blasts in 1993. Dutt has already served 18 months of his original six-year prison sentence, but was released in 2007 pending an appeal. The Indian Supreme Court on Thursday reduced his sentence by a year, but ordered him to report to prison within the next month to serve out the remainder of his 3 1/2-year term.

Dutt has maintained that he'd asked for the guns for protection for his family. In a statement Thursday, he said he was "heartbroken."

"I have already suffered for 20 years and been in jail for 18 months," he said. "If they want me to suffer more, I have to be strong. I believe in the judicial system of India."

Here's more from The Associated Press about other rulings Thursday:

"A total of 100 people were convicted of involvement in the blasts.

"The court upheld the death sentence given to Yakub Memon, who is a brother of Ibrahim 'Tiger' Memon, a suspected mastermind of the bombings who remains at large. However, the court commuted to life in prison the death sentences given to 10 other men convicted of carrying out the blasts. Some of the men have been in prison for nearly two decades."

Kurdish rebels have been fighting for nearly three decades against Turkish forces in the southeast corner of that nation. But the most prominent rebel leader said from prison Thursday that it was time for a "new era" that includes an immediate cease-fire.

Abdullah Ocalan heads the Kurdistan Workers Party, the PKK. He was captured by Turkey in 1999 and has been imprisoned on an island off Istanbul.

"We have reached the point where the guns are not at the forefront," Ocalan said in a message relayed by his supporters in Diyarbakir, the main city in Turkey's southeast, The Associated Press reported.

"A door is opening from the armed struggle toward the democratic struggle," he added. "This is not the end. This is a new start."

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As Turkey Rises, 'A Real Problem' With Censorship

Banks on Cyprus remain closed today. The Cypriot Parliament has rejected the terms of a bailout from the European Union. The finance minister is in Moscow looking for financial help from the Russians.

Cyprus has about as many residents as the Bronx. When you add up all the country's banks, they don't even match the 30th largest bank in the U.S. But people all over the world have good reason to be freaked out over what's happened there this week.

The House voted overwhelmingly Thursday to approve a temporary measure to keep the government funded through the end of September. Government shutdown averted.

But it turns out the continuing resolution didn't just address spending. It contains six measures that limit how federal agencies deal with guns.

These are the first gun-related provisions members of Congress have passed since 20 first-graders were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. And while all of the public discussion is about new gun controls, these so-called policy riders very quietly do the opposite.

"There was very little discussion," says Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Ky. Rogers is chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, which produced the bill that contains these riders. One of them dates back to the mid-1990s; the others have been around for seven or eight years, regularly included in spending bills like this one, without any debate.

"These are not new. These are general provisions that we've carried for a long time," Rogers says.

What is new is that the continuing resolution makes four of these riders permanent.

The National Rifle Association didn't respond to a request for comment, but the group is the driving force behind these provisions.

One rider prevents the Department of Justice from requiring gun dealers to conduct an inventory to see if guns are lost or stolen. Another requires the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco ,Firearms and Explosives to make it clear that any data from criminal traces on guns can't be used to draw broad conclusions about firearms-related crime. A couple deal with curios and relics — collectible guns.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., says the provisions "restrict inventorying, information gathering, other practices that combat gun violence."

Blumenthal is pushing for new gun controls and changes to make it easier to enforce current laws. He's no fan of these riders. But he voted for the continuing resolution anyway.

"We were told that there was really no practical hope of changing the law this time, but next time, we will certainly be more aggressive than we have been this time," he says.

On the House side, Democratic Rep. Carolyn McCarthy of New York has been fighting these provisions for years, but she, too, voted for the spending bill.

"What's tough on this particular vote is do we shut the government down?" she says.

Lawmakers like McCarthy who oppose these riders are up against a powerful lobby, as well as congressional inertia — the riders have functionally been the law of the land for years, and it would take an active effort to remove them.

And in the case of the continuing resolution, negotiators had agreed to the riders before the Newtown shooting more than three months ago.

Inevitably, No Place on Earth looks and feels a bit like In Darkness, Agnieszka Holland's real-life 2011 drama about a group of Jews who found refuge in the sewers of a then-Polish, now-Ukrainian city. Like Holland, Tobias emphasizes the darkness. She even gives a subterranean look to the direct interviews, placing the survivors before black backdrops illuminated by a single light. Among those who testify are Sonia and Sima Dodyk, who were little girls when their families went underground.

Although the story is told with narration rather than dialogue, Tobias relies too much on reconstruction. A more inventive melding of documentary and docudrama would have benefited the film, whose most moving scenes all involve real members of the families. A bit more historical and geographic context would also be useful.

Still, it's an unforgettable story. It's also one that remains raw, as is demonstrated not just by the area residents' reluctance to discuss it with Nicola 20 years ago. The movie's credits reveal that the reconstructed scenes were shot elsewhere in Eastern Europe — not in the region where caves preserved just a few of the millions marked for extermination.

The tiny dynamo asking the U.S. Supreme Court to turn the world upside down looks nothing like a fearless pioneer. At age 83, Edith Windsor dresses in classic, tailored clothes, usually with a long string of pearls, and she sports a well-coiffed, shoulder-length flip. She looks, for all the world, like a proper New York City lady.

Proper she may be, and a lady, but Windsor, who likes to be called Edie, is making history, challenging the federal Defense of Marriage Act, known as DOMA. The law bans federal recognition and benefits for legally married same-sex couples.

The crux of her lawsuit is that after living with Thea Spyer for more than four decades, and having a marriage recognized as legal in the state of New York, Windsor had to pay $363,000 in estate taxes when Spyer died because the federal government did not recognize their marriage as valid.

"If Thea was Theo," she says, "I would not have had to pay" those taxes. "It's heartbreaking," she adds. "It's just a terrible injustice, and I don't expect that from my country. I think it's a mistake that has to get corrected."

'I Need Something Else'

Windsor was born in 1929, shortly before her parents lost their home and business in the Depression. As a teenager she was, by her own account, very popular with boys, and after graduating from Temple University, Windsor got married.

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Supreme Court Takes Up Same-Sex-Marriage Cases

In director Antoine Fuqua's new action thriller, Olympus Has Fallen, the White House — code-named "Olympus" — is invaded by North Korean terrorists. The president and his staff are held hostage in an underground bunker, and their only hope of coming out alive is a disgraced Secret Service agent.

In theaters March 22, the film opens at a politically sensitive time, perhaps by coincidence. North Korea is much in the news for its nuclear threats and its rocky relationship with South Korea.

"We have the opportunity to put on the screen our worst nightmares, and then we can look at that and say, 'Let's not let that happen in reality,' " says Fuqua, who's known for the gritty, action-packed Training Day, Tears of the Sun and Brooklyn's Finest.

The idea of making an attack on the White House look real was appealing, Fuqua tells host Michel Martin, and he wanted to take the audience on a roller-coaster ride.

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The responsibility for counterterrorism operations involving unmanned drones could soon begin shifting from the CIA to the Pentagon as part of Obama administration efforts to mollify critics who say the program lacks transparency, NPR's Tom Gjelten.

A senior U.S. official tells NPR that while no decision has been made, the change is a "distinct possibility." The Daily Beast broke the story on Wednesday.

The move would come in response to a bruising confirmation fight for John O. Brennan to become the new head of the Central Intelligence Agency. Republicans and Democrats alike used Brennan's confirmation hearings to criticize the administration for not being more open about the drone program, especially when it has, on rare occasions, targeted U.S. citizens.

"The Obama Administration basically had to promise to come clean on the drone program in order to get Brennan approved," Gjelten says.

Also, last week the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the CIA could no longer deny the existence of the program, because so much had come out about it already.

For years, the CIA has been using unmanned aircraft to target suspected terrorists – first under President George W. Bush and then President Obama. A CIA drone was used in Yemen to kill an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, after he became a key operative in the al-Qaida network.

Under the aegis of the CIA, the program has enjoyed a considerable degree of secrecy and flexibility because under U.S. law is not subject to the same restrictions as a traditional military operation carried out by the Pentagon, Gjelten says. The president can authorize the CIA to carry out the operation outside the normal military chain of command, where it can remain covert and deniable.

From the administration's standpoint, such a shift would occur at a time when the drone program is not quite as high of a priority as it once was, Gjelten says.

"To be brutal, they've killed most of the really bad guys they've been after," he says. "They lately have been going after second or third tier al-Qaida operatives."

Gjelten says that in his new post, Brennan also wants to demilitarize the CIA.

If a decision is made, shifting responsibility for the program would occur gradually as "a phased approach" of operations in individual countries.

"It would be easiest to do it in Yemen, because the drone strikes there are already being carried out jointly by the Pentagon and the CIA," he says. "Pakistan would be the big change. The drone strikes there have been almost entirely directed by the CIA."

In an interview with NBC last month, outgoing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta hinted at the change and suggested that even if most of the drone operations were moved to the military, some of them might remain covert.

"I think a lot more of this can be put under Title 10 [military operations] and that on Title 50 [intelligence operations] we always ought to have that capability to use a covert effort if we have to," he said. "But I would limit that."

As the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to weigh two cases dealing with gay marriage, here's a look at how the debate has touched American life over the last four decades:

1972

In Baker v. Nelson, the U.S. Supreme Court dismisses a challenge of a ruling from Minnesota that gay couples have no constitutional right to marry, saying the appeal fails to raise a "substantial federal question."

It's hard to believe but seven years ago no one had every heard of a tweet. Thursday is the anniversary of the first tweet from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. It wasn't profound. He wrote:

just setting up my twttr

— Jack Dorsey (@jack) March 21, 2006

Switzerland has an entrenched gun culture that is embraced by most of its 8 million citizens, some of them as young as 10 years old.

Every Swiss community has a shooting range and depending on who is counting, the alpine country ranks third or fourth in the number of guns per capita.

"You can walk into a cafe in a town where there is a shooting festival and you'll see rifles hanging on the hat rack. It's just incredible. It's just proliferation all over the place, but it's all for a peaceful purpose," says Stephen Halbrook, a Virginia-based lawyer who has argued cases for the NRA.

Halbrook, who has written books on Swiss history, is a frequent visitor to Switzerland and takes part in shooting contests there.

At a shooting range in the town of Dielsdorf outside Zurich, school-aged children like 11-year-old Greta Wolff are introduced to target shooting, which is a popular Swiss sport.

The sixth-grader — who immigrated to Switzerland with her family from Germany, where guns are far more restricted — is one of the best shots at a recent practice session. She and the other children use air guns to learn proper handling and technique before graduating to real guns.

Firing a gun was easier to learn than playing the piano, says Greta, who is also an accomplished swimmer: "You have to be sure you stand still and breathe properly before you release the trigger."

Her father, Markus Wolff, who also shoots for sport, says his daughter first learned to shoot more than 18 months ago after seeing her older brother do it.

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You should read Aleksandar Hemon's memoir for the same reason you should read his fiction: He is not only a remarkably talented writer but also one of the great social observers, a cultural anthropologist who seems at home everywhere and nowhere and who balances despair with hope, anger with humor.

And it's not all sad. Eventually, by walking the streets of his new city, by playing soccer and chess with international misfits, by falling in and out of love, by marrying and having children, he finds in the U.S. what he got from Sarajevo: "a geography of the soul."

Benjamin Percy's latest book, Red Moon, will come out in May.

Read an excerpt of The Book of My Lives

Abu Dhabi, the most oil-rich of the United Arab Emirates, is now home to the world's single-largest concentrated solar power plant.

The 100-megawatt Shams 1 plant cost an estimated $750 million and is expected to provide electricity to 20,000 homes, according to the BBC.

Why, you might ask?

Bloomberg says the less oil Abu Dhabi uses for local consumption, the more it can export.

Sultan Ahmed al Jaber, head of Abu Dhabi Future Energy Co., speaking at a news conference for the plant's opening over the weekend, said it is part of a "strategic plan to diversify energy sources in Abu Dhabi."

"Together, with clean energy and nuclear energy, it will make up 7 percent of Abu Dhabi's energy sources from renewable energy sources," he said.

Shams 1 uses 768 adjustable parabolic "trough mirrors" to focus sunlight onto a water boiler that produces steam, activates turbines and finally generates electricity, reports the website Clean Technica. The middle step in the process, it says, is to use natural gas to superheat the water.

The plant, located about 75 miles southwest of Abu Dhabi, is similar in design to Solar Energy Generating Systems (SEGS) located in California's Mojave Desert. Although Shams 1 claims to be the single-largest plant, the nine SEGS plants taken together generate more than three times as much energy and serve more than 10 times as many households at peak output.

Officials in Abu Dhabi hope Shams 1 will save 175,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually, the equivalent of taking 15,000 cars off the road. The plant is the first of several more on the drawing board.

The UAE's neighbor, Saudi Arabia, is on a similar tack with the most extensive renewable-energy program in the Middle East, Bloomberg reports:

"The country is seeking about $100 billion in investments to generate about 41,000 megawatts, or a third of its power, from solar by 2032. That compares with about 3 megawatts now, which puts it behind Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and the United Arab Emirates in capacity, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance."

Sometimes the whole country wants to forget.

Tuesday marks the 10th anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq. The last U.S. troops didn't leave that country until the end of 2011.

But Iraq, which dominated much of the nation's political discourse over the past decade, already seems largely forgotten.

"The Iraq War casts a shadow, but not a very large one," says Richard Kohn, a military historian at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Iraq still matters in policymaking circles. Its lessons help explain why President Obama waves off calls for a military intervention in Syria.

"There does seem to be an Iraq syndrome, at least in the foreign policy establishment, in showing virtually no commitment for something that might morph into an Iraq or an Afghanistan," says William Wohlforth, a government professor at Dartmouth College.

But Iraq has not led to a wholesale restructuring of the U.S. military, as the Vietnam War did. And as controversial as it was at the time, Iraq did not trigger the sort of political and cultural convulsions that Vietnam did.

Vietnam remained a difficult subject for years, if not decades, after the fighting stopped, while Iraq has already just about disappeared from political discourse.

"When a bad war ends, the inclination is not to think about it and move on," says William Schneider, a public policy professor at George Mason University.

Political Consequences

Iraq was a leading political issue throughout the presidency of George W. Bush, especially after the lightning attack and quick march to Baghdad gave way to a violent insurgency.

The course of the war went a long way toward explaining why Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress in 2006.

“ Very few are going to come forward and claim Iraq as a victory, but it doesn't seem as unambiguous a defeat as Vietnam.

With less silk, lace and gold than many of his predecessors displayed, Pope Francis on Tuesday was inaugurated at a Holy Mass in St. Peter's Square during which he appealed to world leaders to be protectors of the poor and the environment, NPR's Sylvia Poggioli tells our Newscast Desk.

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On how writing about the experience turned into a book

"I never actually wrote this intending it to be a book. I wrote it as a series of blog posts in most of 2011 — at least January to the end of the summer — in a sort of fugue of grief and hysteria, essentially. I did it because it gave me something to do and I desperately needed that, and I just felt like ... my only lifeline to some kind of hope was putting words on paper, trying to make meaning from chaos and then putting it out in the world. Initially the readers were my friends — my girlfriends, basically. [They] were like, 'Make sure we know what's happening with you. Post things on the blog so we know what's happening with Ronan,' because I didn't want to talk on the phone all the time.

"So the audience was sort of intended at the beginning just to be people who knew me and wanted to know what was happening, and then later I had a good friend — my friend the writer Lisa Glatt — said, 'You know, I think this is a book and I think you should think about it as a book,' and I just thought, 'That's totally not on my radar,' but then, you know, I set it down for a bit, some of the blogs, and I thought, 'Well, maybe, maybe it is,' and I think it was really the only thing that gave me peace in that first year of Ronan's diagnosis. [The] thing I wanted to do every day was to write. I was compelled to do it in a way I never was before."

On grieving her son's death

"This is such a hard thing to explain to someone who hasn't been through it, but when Ronan got his terminal diagnosis, that was the day for me that he died. That was the day of his death for me was Jan. 10, 2011. Not to say that I didn't enjoy being with him through his life, but I felt — I think — the full weight of that loss on the day that he was diagnosed, and when he did die I was relieved that he was released from his suffering, and so that grief is different than it was. It's just, it's qualitatively different, and not that it's not still devastating. It was devastating to watch somebody deteriorating, too, and to know that you couldn't stop it and to worry that there would be more suffering and wanting so deeply to spare him that. ... For me that first year was really the worst, because watching him change and all the hopes kind of dashed and sprinting to the end at the beginning was how I grieved."

Read an excerpt of The Still Point of the Turning World

For the last couple of weeks, Vulture has been running a "Sitcom Smackdown," a contest between 16 sitcoms of the last 30 years to determine an eventual champion.

From the beginning, it was fairly openly a nonserious exercise in terms of determining actual quality: Murphy Brown was booted for being too topical, Everybody Loves Raymond for not "mov[ing] the sitcom needle" (quality and innovation are different questions, perhaps in sitcoms more than anywhere), and so forth. Furthermore, the bracket structure didn't really make any sense — different writers judged each matchup, meaning that a writer faced with, say, Friends versus Roseanne in the second round might never have picked Friends over The Golden Girls in the first round, and might have picked The Golden Girls over either Friends or Roseanne. So these were nobody's picks from all the choices; they're a series of picks dependent on other picks.

Also, it's a bracket making television shows compete with each other, so.

Suffice it to say, it would be a mistake to take it terribly seriously as a contest — it's much more interesting as a series of conversations about, for instance, how 30 Rock managed to lose to Sex And The City. (!!!) That does not, however, change how quickly my jaw hit the floor when the finals went live today and Vulture's TV writer, Matt Zoller Seitz, crowned The Simpsons as the best sitcom of the last 30 years over Cheers. THIS IS ANARCHY! (Not really.)

I remember sitting on the upper level of a New York bar with a gaggle of friends about seven years ago — some who knew each other, some who were just getting to know each other. Two dudes who had, before that night, never met wound up slumped drunkenly on the couch, getting to know each other the way I have seen dudes get to know each other over and over again in the last 20 years or so: they were reciting Simpsons lines to each other.

"You remember ... yourememember ... 'member where Homer'z all ... Homer'z ... 18 to 49 GUM ha ha ha ha ... " It went on like this for ... I want to say about two hours. It was like watching people platonically fall in love while drunk. Well, no, it was watching people platonically fall in love drunk.

Speaking Simpsons is a lot like being a birding enthusiast or following NASCAR. It gives people something to talk about and quote back and forth to each other. It's an absorbing, complete universe with a very long history. (It must be said, as with Monty Python And The Holy Grail and The Princess Bride, quotability on The Simpsons is a mixed blessing, since there are people for whom quoting lines from movies takes the place of having an actual sense of humor. Not for my two drunk friends, but for some.) In the first round of the Sitcom Smackdown, when Keith Phipps picked The Simpsons over The Cosby Show, he relied heavily on its ubiquity: "It's crept into our collective consciousness, changed the way we watch TV, rewired our brains."

Similarly, in the final smackdown, Seitz explained that he picked The Simpsons over Cheers in part because his kids know so many Simpsons references — in part because his son knows lots of other parts of culture through Simpsons parodies.

For me, though, that's why The Simpsons has always seemed like less than it appears to others. It's plenty funny, and I get (and agree with) what others have often said about the lovely marriage at its center, Homer's relationship with God, and so forth. I do not in any way deny the show its flashes of brilliance — I enjoy it, and I've found something entertaining in it every one of the hundred thousand times I've seen it at either my best friend's house or my sister's house. But it also contains something I don't always care for, which is a reference that's supposed to be a joke. Picking The Simpsons over Cheers because a kid knows the Simpsons' Cheers parody better than the Cheers song is so odd to me; if you're making your bones on referring to stuff that already exists, you are dependent on that stuff already having been created, and you can't logically be its better.

Moreover — and here is where the controversy is hottest, I think — The Simpsons very rarely moves me. There are some nice parent-child scenes, and there are some nice husband-wife scenes, but for the most part, I find it sort of slick and ... well, cartoonish. Which is fine! It's very funny! It's fun! It contains many good/great jokes! I like that in a comedy!

But for me, personally, it doesn't resonate anywhere near the way The Cosby Show often did, or Roseanne often did, or Cheers often did. For me, quotability and ubiquity are admirable and say something about a show's mastery of its own universe, but they cannot overcome what are, to me, the limitations of the show's universe to the point where I'd elevate it to this level. For me, the half-hour comedy at its best is a funny story — both funny and a story. I often find The Simpsons satisfying as to the first part; rarely as to the second. Cheers told such satisfying stories for me, not just with Sam and Diane, but with everyone.

Note, by the way, that Seitz and Phipps closed their arguments in favor of The Simpsons with exactly the same reference to exactly the same Simpsons joke: the word "unpossible." It's admirable to create an entire language that fans speak that reliably. It's like Esperanto: the fact that I don't run around speaking it doesn't mean I don't admire the creation of it or the speaking of it.

But when we speak of cultural saturation, we get into tricky questions of saturation where, and for whom, and in what slices of the world. The Simpsons is not, in fact, known and loved by everyone. There are people for whom The Cosby Show and Roseanne were just as formative and important as The Simpsons is for people who love it the most. There's nothing wrong with recognizing the impact a show has had on your own family, but that's not the same thing as the impact it has had across some massive swath of the universe.

My two drunk-faced pals might seem like an example of The Simpsons being something that strangers of all sorts can get together on, something that unites us across ... something. But in fact, both of those guys were very close in age, watch a lot of the same other kinds of shows, and, after all, knew me really well. They were already members of many shared cultural tribes. Within those tribes, in the minds of many, The Simpsons is indeed the most important shared cultural artifact of the last 30 years, not just the greatest sitcom.

But not for me. Just ... not for me. If they'd asked me, The Simpsons would never have made it past The Cosby Show in the first round. (It would still, as it did under Steve Almond, have beaten Community, and it well might, as it did under David Lipsky, have beaten Seinfeld.) (But of course, I would have knocked it out early, meaning it would have been Cosby versus Community and then Cosby versus Seinfeld.) (So either they seeded poorly or I am an outlier.) (End parens.)

Cheers, to me, was such a lovely and grounded piece of work, especially in the first half of its run — and if we're demanding consistency over time, both of these shows will struggle — that it just isn't outweighed by, as Seitz puts it, "overall impact." He claims it's probably quoted "as widely and frequently as The Bible," which I frankly doubt and which is awfully difficult to get one's arms around without making allowances for the kind of people one knows best. But even if that's true, many things are quoted. People sang "Call Me Maybe" last year more than anything anyone probably considered the year's greatest musical performance. While that's worth considering, would I personally make that the tip-over consideration? Probably not.

For people who speak Simpsons, all day every day, of course, yes. Greatest. Sitcom. Ever. (See what I did there?) But for me? Not by a mile.

A decade ago, there were only one or two documentary films screening at CPAC, the annual meeting of conservative activists. This year, there were more than 20.

As independent financing and filmmaking becomes more accessible, conservatives are turning to movies to get their message out to a larger, younger audience.

In the main CPAC auditorium Saturday, headliners such as Texas Sen. Ted Cruz filled the seats, but it was standing-room only in a smaller room down the hall, too. The conference room had become the convention's theater.

Lights dimmed and a quote from Thomas Jefferson flashed onto the screen: "Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper."

The film is called Hating Breitbart. It's a documentary about the polarizing conservative media mogul Andrew Breitbart, who died last year, not long after appearing at the 2012 CPAC.

"You need to tell a story," says the film's director, Andrew Marcus. "You need to have a protagonist and an antagonist, just basic storytelling stuff."

Marcus says that films like his are the way to get the conservative story out to a broader demographic.

Documentary film has long been dominated by directors who lean liberal. Think Michael Moore and Oliver Stone. That's changing, though.

Just last year, the conservative documentary 2016: Obama's America got wide distribution and made money. The theme of the film is that President Obama's politics are rooted in 20th century anti-colonialism.

"Film offers an opportunity to reach a much wider audience," says Dinesh D'Souza, the writer and director of 2016. He's also the author of Obama's America and The Roots of Obama's Rage.

Watch The Trailers

For the last couple of weeks, Vulture has been running a "Sitcom Smackdown," a contest between 16 sitcoms of the last 30 years to determine an eventual champion.

From the beginning, it was fairly openly a nonserious exercise in terms of determining actual quality: Murphy Brown was booted for being too topical, Everybody Loves Raymond for not "mov[ing] the sitcom needle" (quality and innovation are different questions, perhaps in sitcoms more than anywhere), and so forth. Furthermore, the bracket structure didn't really make any sense — different writers judged each matchup, meaning that a writer faced with, say, Friends versus Roseanne in the second round might never have picked Friends over The Golden Girls in the first round, and might have picked The Golden Girls over either Friends or Roseanne. So these were nobody's picks from all the choices; they're a series of picks dependent on other picks.

Also, it's a bracket making television shows compete with each other, so.

Suffice it to say, it would be a mistake to take it terribly seriously as a contest — it's much more interesting as a series of conversations about, for instance, how 30 Rock managed to lose to Sex And The City. (!!!) That does not, however, change how quickly my jaw hit the floor when the finals went live today and Vulture's TV writer, Matt Zoller Seitz, crowned The Simpsons as the best sitcom of the last 30 years over Cheers. THIS IS ANARCHY! (Not really.)

I remember sitting on the upper level of a New York bar with a gaggle of friends about seven years ago — some who knew each other, some who were just getting to know each other. Two dudes who had, before that night, never met wound up slumped drunkenly on the couch, getting to know each other the way I have seen dudes get to know each other over and over again in the last 20 years or so: they were reciting Simpsons lines to each other.

"You remember ... yourememember ... 'member where Homer'z all ... Homer'z ... 18 to 49 GUM ha ha ha ha ... " It went on like this for ... I want to say about two hours. It was like watching people platonically fall in love while drunk. Well, no, it was watching people platonically fall in love drunk.

Speaking Simpsons is a lot like being a birding enthusiast or following NASCAR. It gives people something to talk about and quote back and forth to each other. It's an absorbing, complete universe with a very long history. (It must be said, as with Monty Python And The Holy Grail and The Princess Bride, quotability on The Simpsons is a mixed blessing, since there are people for whom quoting lines from movies takes the place of having an actual sense of humor. Not for my two drunk friends, but for some.) In the first round of the Sitcom Smackdown, when Keith Phipps picked The Simpsons over The Cosby Show, he relied heavily on its ubiquity: "It's crept into our collective consciousness, changed the way we watch TV, rewired our brains."

Similarly, in the final smackdown, Seitz explained that he picked The Simpsons over Cheers in part because his kids know so many Simpsons references — in part because his son knows lots of other parts of culture through Simpsons parodies.

For me, though, that's why The Simpsons has always seemed like less than it appears to others. It's plenty funny, and I get (and agree with) what others have often said about the lovely marriage at its center, Homer's relationship with God, and so forth. I do not in any way deny the show its flashes of brilliance — I enjoy it, and I've found something entertaining in it every one of the hundred thousand times I've seen it at either my best friend's house or my sister's house. But it also contains something I don't always care for, which is a reference that's supposed to be a joke. Picking The Simpsons over Cheers because a kid knows the Simpsons' Cheers parody better than the Cheers song is so odd to me; if you're making your bones on referring to stuff that already exists, you are dependent on that stuff already having been created, and you can't logically be its better.

Moreover — and here is where the controversy is hottest, I think — The Simpsons very rarely moves me. There are some nice parent-child scenes, and there are some nice husband-wife scenes, but for the most part, I find it sort of slick and ... well, cartoonish. Which is fine! It's very funny! It's fun! It contains many good/great jokes! I like that in a comedy!

But for me, personally, it doesn't resonate anywhere near the way The Cosby Show often did, or Roseanne often did, or Cheers often did. For me, quotability and ubiquity are admirable and say something about a show's mastery of its own universe, but they cannot overcome what are, to me, the limitations of the show's universe to the point where I'd elevate it to this level. For me, the half-hour comedy at its best is a funny story — both funny and a story. I often find The Simpsons satisfying as to the first part; rarely as to the second. Cheers told such satisfying stories for me, not just with Sam and Diane, but with everyone.

Note, by the way, that Seitz and Phipps closed their arguments in favor of The Simpsons with exactly the same reference to exactly the same Simpsons joke: the word "unpossible." It's admirable to create an entire language that fans speak that reliably. It's like Esperanto: the fact that I don't run around speaking it doesn't mean I don't admire the creation of it or the speaking of it.

But when we speak of cultural saturation, we get into tricky questions of saturation where, and for whom, and in what slices of the world. The Simpsons is not, in fact, known and loved by everyone. There are people for whom The Cosby Show and Roseanne were just as formative and important as The Simpsons is for people who love it the most. There's nothing wrong with recognizing the impact a show has had on your own family, but that's not the same thing as the impact it has had across some massive swath of the universe.

My two drunk-faced pals might seem like an example of The Simpsons being something that strangers of all sorts can get together on, something that unites us across ... something. But in fact, both of those guys were very close in age, watch a lot of the same other kinds of shows, and, after all, knew me really well. They were already members of many shared cultural tribes. Within those tribes, in the minds of many, The Simpsons is indeed the most important shared cultural artifact of the last 30 years, not just the greatest sitcom.

But not for me. Just ... not for me. If they'd asked me, The Simpsons would never have made it past The Cosby Show in the first round. (It would still, as it did under Steve Almond, have beaten Community, and it well might, as it did under David Lipsky, have beaten Seinfeld.) (But of course, I would have knocked it out early, meaning it would have been Cosby versus Community and then Cosby versus Seinfeld.) (So either they seeded poorly or I am an outlier.) (End parens.)

Cheers, to me, was such a lovely and grounded piece of work, especially in the first half of its run — and if we're demanding consistency over time, both of these shows will struggle — that it just isn't outweighed by, as Seitz puts it, "overall impact." He claims it's probably quoted "as widely and frequently as The Bible," which I frankly doubt and which is awfully difficult to get one's arms around without making allowances for the kind of people one knows best. But even if that's true, many things are quoted. People sang "Call Me Maybe" last year more than anything anyone probably considered the year's greatest musical performance. While that's worth considering, would I personally make that the tip-over consideration? Probably not.

For people who speak Simpsons, all day every day, of course, yes. Greatest. Sitcom. Ever. (See what I did there?) But for me? Not by a mile.

A decade ago, there were only one or two documentary films screening at CPAC, the annual meeting of conservative activists. This year, there were more than 20.

As independent financing and filmmaking becomes more accessible, conservatives are turning to movies to get their message out to a larger, younger audience.

In the main CPAC auditorium Saturday, headliners such as Texas Sen. Ted Cruz filled the seats, but it was standing-room only in a smaller room down the hall, too. The conference room had become the convention's theater.

Lights dimmed and a quote from Thomas Jefferson flashed onto the screen: "Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper."

The film is called Hating Breitbart. It's a documentary about the polarizing conservative media mogul Andrew Breitbart, who died last year, not long after appearing at the 2012 CPAC.

"You need to tell a story," says the film's director, Andrew Marcus. "You need to have a protagonist and an antagonist, just basic storytelling stuff."

Marcus says that films like his are the way to get the conservative story out to a broader demographic.

Documentary film has long been dominated by directors who lean liberal. Think Michael Moore and Oliver Stone. That's changing, though.

Just last year, the conservative documentary 2016: Obama's America got wide distribution and made money. The theme of the film is that President Obama's politics are rooted in 20th century anti-colonialism.

"Film offers an opportunity to reach a much wider audience," says Dinesh D'Souza, the writer and director of 2016. He's also the author of Obama's America and The Roots of Obama's Rage.

Watch The Trailers

On the faulty memories of couples

"I think one of the most interesting things about memory in relation to couples getting together is that there's this sense, this kind of pressure to agree on a shared representation of the past. You know, husbands and wives tend not to disagree about the past wholesale. They tend to come to a shared representation of what happened in the past. When people split up or couples get separated or divorced or whatever, those tensions about memory can come back to the surface, and you find out that people start to disagree and actually start to say, 'It never happened that way; it actually happened this way.' "

On quantity vs. quality

"Thinking about this book made me realize that remembering more stuff isn't necessarily better. Being able to recall every card in a pack of playing cards or recall pi to the thousandth decimal place — why? Why would you want to do that? It's no use to me. For some people it might be important, but it's no use at all for me. What I would like to do is remember the stuff that I remember better, in more detail, more vividly."

Read an excerpt of Pieces of Light

On the phone from his offices in Tokyo — the most densely populated city in the world — Ito says "air and wind and water," are the forces that drive him aesthetically. "These metaphors that I find in nature, that's always the inspiration for my architecture," he explains.

Ito's architecture creates fluidity between nature and humanity. When people enter his completely solar-powered stadium in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, for example, he wants them to be able to feel the wind and feel the air. Too often, he believes, urban environments feel intended to keep us apart. He wants to redesign them to bring us together.

"Because there are a lot of big cities in the world, people who live in cities have become more isolated than ever," he says. "I would like to use architecture to create bonds between people who live in cities, and even use it to recover the communities that used to exist in every single city."

To that end, Toyo Ito built a mediatheque — a kind of cutting-edge public library — in Sendai, Japan, back in 2001. It's a transparent cube, composed of tubes and platforms. University of California, Berkley, architecture professor Dana Buntrock says the latticed design is incredibly light and open.

Enlarge image i

On the faulty memories of couples

"I think one of the most interesting things about memory in relation to couples getting together is that there's this sense, this kind of pressure to agree on a shared representation of the past. You know, husbands and wives tend not to disagree about the past wholesale. They tend to come to a shared representation of what happened in the past. When people split up or couples get separated or divorced or whatever, those tensions about memory can come back to the surface, and you find out that people start to disagree and actually start to say, 'It never happened that way; it actually happened this way.' "

On quantity vs. quality

"Thinking about this book made me realize that remembering more stuff isn't necessarily better. Being able to recall every card in a pack of playing cards or recall pi to the thousandth decimal place — why? Why would you want to do that? It's no use to me. For some people it might be important, but it's no use at all for me. What I would like to do is remember the stuff that I remember better, in more detail, more vividly."

Read an excerpt of Pieces of Light

The desert is a metaphor, of course, but forget that for now, because there are so many other characters in this novel, and all of them are having wicked fun. Like Annabel's father, Carter, and his dead wife, Ginger, an angry specter who refuses to go gently into that good night — not when she can sit around and torture her closet case of a husband from the ineffable beyond.

Then there's Sherwin, a dinner-party pianist, lazy existentialist and self-proclaimed parasuicide, who tries to find salvation in a sexless affair with Alice. Williams' masterful, roving point of view dips in and out of each character's troubled mind, weaving together these parables of doom and merry rapture.

Animals and objects are granted the same measure of narrative dignity as are men, women and children. Saguaros, highway off-ramps, the atrophied feet of a man determined to die with perfect awareness — all these things get a voice, so to speak. Dogs are integral characters in several plot lines — they live and die and disappoint like everything else under the sun.

Williams creates a grim and sunny cosmos where anything is possible — anything, that is, except sentimentality and self-deception. The best characters in The Quick and the Dead are on the brink of understanding something fundamental — that human beings are God's greatest mistake. Our world is so baffling, unfair and ineluctable. Like the friendship among the three teenage girls who steer this grand cast of characters toward the end of the book, perhaps toward the end of the world.

What are you supposed to do with a message like that? Dry your eyes and rejoice! Risk everything! Or, in my case, ditch your job so you can go home and read.

You Must Read This is produced and edited by the team at NPR Books.

Read an excerpt of The Quick and the Dead

Ten years after the U.S. invaded Iraq, NPR is taking a look back, revisiting people and places first encountered during the war. In 2006, NPR aired a story about a 9-year-old girl who loved her father so much, she wrote him letters to take to work with him. Even after he died, in a carjacking that appeared to have a sectarian motive, she still wrote to him.

We expected to find the angry, grief-stricken girl who had pounded her fists and thrown herself into the mud when she first heard her father was killed, back in 2006.

Instead we found a poised, tall, gazelle of a young lady. Now 16, Guffran says she spends most of her time studying.

Her father had hoped she would become a doctor. But the teenage Guffran has a different plan.

"I like science, I like physics, but I don't like chemistry," she says. "And medical [school], it's all about chemistry, and I don't like it."

Guffran says she wants to be another kind of doctor, a Ph.D. in English, which she insists on speaking with us. Her dream is to teach English language and literature at a university — and maybe to be a writer.

"I like to write, I love to write. And when I feel bad or feel sadness, I catch my paper and my pen and write what I feel," she says.

Moving To A New City

About a year after her father's death, Guffran and her mother and brother moved to the southern Iraqi city of Kerbala. They now live with an uncle and his family. They have exactly one room for studying, eating, receiving guests and sleeping.

The uncle controls everything they do.

"When we want to rent a house, my uncle doesn't allow us," Guffran says.

“ When my mother and aunt start crying, I move to another room and start writing letters, and cry deep inside as I write. ... I feel my heart will break when I remember him.