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As President Obama boarded Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House on Friday, he didn't return the salute of the Marine standing at the base of the stairs.

Obama realized it once he got into the helicopter, so he turned around and shook the Marine's hand. Here's video of the moment:

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That doesn't really work to the film's detriment, though: Even a skin-deep biography of Plimpton is more fascinating than a deep dive about most people. Indeed, just hearing Plimpton lecture or read from his own work — which happens throughout the film, hence the subtitle — is engaging enough for a documentary of its own.

The directors spend much of the film's first half running chronologically through Plimpton's impressive CV: founding editor of the Paris Review; author of popular books and articles on his misadventures in the sporting life; friend to the Kennedys and one of the men who tackled shooter Sirhan Sirhan at the scene of RFK's assassination; star of an eponymous series of TV specials; advertising spokesman for everything from video game consoles to microwave popcorn.

It's these latter ventures that cause some consternation among Plimpton's colleagues and contemporaries. Despite the loving tone of the film as a whole, the directors do address the question of how much damage the prime-time specials and the corporate shilling may have done to his reputation. In an interview, novelist James Salter goes even further, confessing that though he may have been unfair to label Plimpton a dilettante in his younger days, "he was writing in a genre that really doesn't permit greatness."

If Plimpton's chosen genre didn't permit greatness, Bean and Poling make the case that the totality of his unique career and legacy certainly did. Whether it's the importance of the Paris Review in tapping talented new writers, the explorations into the creative mind that he navigated in his interview series for the magazine, or his role as one of the early pioneers of participatory journalism, the film portrays Plimpton as someone devoted to illuminating how talent and creativity work — both for himself, and for the rest of us.

High school students in Moore, Okla., will graduate on schedule Saturday, 6 p.m. at the convention center. Even more than usual, high school graduates in Moore may feel that this is a week in which they have, as the phrase from Corinthians says it, "put away childish things."

A tornado struck their town and left much of it in ruins. "Just sticks and bricks, basically," said Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin.

Twenty-four people — family, friends, neighbors, people they grew up with — were killed. The students have seen life, death and loss swirl around them.

We asked some noted Oklahoma writers what they might say to local high school graduates today.

Michael Wallis, a historian and biographer of the American West, calls Oklahoma "the progeny of an oil-field whore wed to a deacon ... a stampede, a pie supper, a revival. It is a wildcat gusher coming in. It is a million-dollar deal cemented with a handshake."

This week he told us, "Storms are a way of life in Oklahoma. We see them wreaking havoc, but also inspiring us, teaching us that out of adversity can come some good.

"It's our little bit of martyrdom, maybe. We know we live squarely in Tornado Alley, and we deal with it because it's part of our sense of place."

He said many youngsters who graduate in Moore today will one day tell grandchildren how they once heard a tornado, loud as a hundred freight trains, and held on tightly to a sibling, a friend or a stranger and looked at each other in the eyes until they knew they had come out alive.

"Now is the time to cry, weep and recall your lost pals, or family, or a pet, or other loved ones," said Wallis. "But it's also a time to just be glad you're here."

Rilla Askew, whose most recent novel is Kind Of Kin, told us she'd tell today's graduates that "it's hard to have to learn so young that terrible things happen in the world, and no human power could have prevented it.

"But along with sorrow and loss comes a sense of our own endurance. ... You've seen firsthand how many people are good at heart, and that's an understanding that will give shape to the rest of your lives.

"Oklahoma's state motto is Labor Omnia Vincit: Labor conquers all. And work we will."

Askew continues: "The task is not just the hard physical labor of rebuilding, but also the work of the soul to hold on to what the forces of destruction have shown us about ourselves, about the essential decency of human beings, about the need for community. This is part of our challenge: to work hard, to never give up and to own, deeply, without cynicism or sentiment, who we are."

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Will teaching English in France's universities undermine the French language? That's up for debate in the country now, and the arguments are heated.

The lower house of the French Parliament approved a measure Thursday that would allow courses to be taught in English, something that is currently against the law.

Those in favor of the proposal say it will attract more international students and improve English language skills of French students. But opponents say the move will only impoverish and marginalize the country's tongue.

In the National Assembly this week, Genevieve Fioraso, the minister for higher education, explained why she believes universities need to start teaching English.

"We need to be able to welcome students from emerging countries like Korea, India and Brazil, to study science, economics and technology," she said. "And they don't come to France now because of the language barrier."

On the other side of the fight, parliamentarian Daniel Fasquelle tried to shock his colleagues.

"And my question is clearly, shall we speak English in this French Parliament one day?" he asked.

Fasquelle and other opponents of the measure say if science and technology are taught in English, the French language will lose vocabulary and gradually cease to be a modern, living language.

His colleague, Pouria Amirshahi, who represents the 150,000 French citizens who live in North and West Africa, says France should not strive to be a second-rate copy of English and American universities. France should work to attract the world's Francophone students.

"It makes no sense. You have in Ivory Coast, in Morocco, in Algeria, in a lot of countries, many people who speak French and who you want to come in France to learn in French — sciences, history," he says.

Once the language of diplomacy and the world's elite, French now ranks as the world's eighth-most-spoken language. The Academie Francaise, set up in 1635 as the official guardian of the language, regularly comes up with French alternatives to English tech words. But words like mot diez and ordimobile rarely catch on with a younger generation that prefers to stick with "hashtag" and "smartphone." Even French newspaper Liberation had a front-page headline in English endorsing the measure this week: "Let's do it!"

While a 1994 law bars classes being taught in English from nursery school to university, elite private business schools and French Grandes Ecoles, the equivalent of American Ivy Leagues, have long been teaching in the language of Shakespeare.

Students take a break outside Sciences Po, a grande ecole in the center of Paris. The school offers one-third of its classes in English, and 40 percent of its student body is from abroad.

Briton Peter Gumbel, who teaches here, says the real problem is not English, but a two-tier system.

"You have the best and the brightest get the full immersion in an international education, including studying abroad," he says, "and then you have the 95 percent who are stuck in a French-ossified system."

Gumbel says he understands French concern over losing its language, but the important thing, he says, is to spread French thinking and ideas. France already attracts many different people, including international students, he says. And even if they're taking classes in English, they're also learning French.

"So it's not that just by teaching in English you completely cut off French as a language. On the contrary, you get more people interested in France, more people interested in the ideas that French intellectuals have," he says. "They get passionate about the place. And so France carries on living in their imaginations when they've left France again."

That, says Gumbel, is the very definition of soft power.

Los Angeles is the world leader in the most American of clothing items — blue jeans. High-end, hand-stitched blue jeans, very expensive designer jeans that will you run well over $100 a pair.

As the U.S. apparel industry continues to shrink, L.A.'s blue jeans business faces a threat.

The European Union has imposed a nearly 40 percent tariff which could cripple the city's jean business.

When people talk about Ilse Metchek they use phrases like "she's a piece of work," "a force of nature," "she's something else." If you want to talk fashion, she's your lady.

Metchek is president of the California Fashion Association. I went to her office in downtown Los Angeles to talk about jeans and fashion. Metchek has more than 40 years experience as a fashion designer.

No sooner than I could sit down, she scrutinized every piece of clothing I was wearing — especially the fabric on my jeans.

"You see the pix, the pixel? That's treatment," Metchek says. "The fabric doesn't come like that. Some machine is streaking them that way. That's expensive. And they fit. There's a different fit. You didn't buy Levi's, you didn't buy a Gap jean. You bought those."

Seventy-five percent of the designer jeans sold in the world are made in California. Over the last 20 years, an industry cluster was created in Los Angeles. While much of clothing manufacturing has been shipped offshore, high-end or more sophisticated manufacturing stayed here.

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A lot of things about grilling can ignite a fight, including the meaning of "barbecue." If you have a charcoal grill, the type of fuel you use is no exception, as many people are likely to discover this weekend.

To a newbie, the world of charcoal can be overwhelming, especially since the charcoal aisle of big box and hardware stores seems to be getting more crowded, with alluring chips and lumps of apple, cherry, and even coconut wood. But the first hurdle is navigating the question: Do you use charcoal briquettes or lump charcoal, also known as "natural" hardwood charcoal?

Most polemicists on the matter can agree that there are advantages and disadvantages to each one: Briquettes burn more consistently, but they contain additives and generate more ash. Lump charcoal can burn hotter (handy if you're searing meat), and can be made with specific woods that leave a trace of their scent on food. But the lumps come in a jumble of different sizes, some of which may not be evenly charred. And its bags can contain more dust that may block the flow of oxygen in a grill.

If sales figures settle a debate, then briquettes and instant light charcoal are still the favorites by far (they made up 94 percent of the charcoal shipped in 2012, according to the Hearth, Patio and Barbeque Association).

Still, lump charcoal is attracting fans, especially among backyard cooks easily sold on the word "natural," which adorns nearly all of the dark brown bags filled with lump charcoal for sale. There are now more than 75 brands on the market. And there's even a small community for DIY lump charcoal.

According to Craig Goldwyn (a.k.a. Meathead), who runs the authoritative Amazingribs.com: The Science of BBQ & Grilling, "I see lump charcoal as just an extension of the organic movement. It's still a tiny sliver of the market, but it reflects on the public's desire to have less stuff in their food and their cooking."

All charcoal is essentially the same thing: wood burned with little oxygen so that all that's left is essentially carbon. But makers of lump charcoal claim it's superior because of its purity – it contains no additives like regular briquettes or lighter fluid like instant-light ones.

Indeed, while lump charcoal and briquettes both originate as scrap lumber, the uniform round shape of the briquette is a result of an industrial process that depends on other materials, too. (Kingsford, the biggest maker of charcoal in the U.S., is a little vague about what exactly is in its briquets, but its website mentions coal, limestone, borax and cornstarch.)

While breathing in too much smoke may cause adverse health effects, there isn't much evidence that the additives in the briquettes have any impact on food. What they do impact, says Meathead, is control over the cooking process.

"I'm trying to teach people how to cook, and so I preach temperature. That means controlling heat is really vital, and briquettes are just a rock-solid heat source," he says.

And when it comes to flavor with smoke, Meathead writes that adding small amounts of hardwood in the form of chips, chunks, pellets, logs, or sawdust on top of the charcoal matters more than the charcoal itself. In other words, mesquite or hickory wood will add much more smoke flavor than mesquite or hickory charcoal.

Some serious grillers actually prefer cooking with logs instead of charcoal, but it's a far more challenging undertaking. That's because raw, burning wood still gives off a lot of volatile gases (that are gone once it has been reduced to charcoal).

"You have a lot of die-hards who prefer the hardwood, and the thing about hardwood is that it can have a regional, cultural aspect," Jeff Allen, executive director of the National Barbecue Association, tells The Salt.

Allen notes that people from Georgia or Alabama are likely to prefer pecan wood, because that's one of the best hardwoods they've got. Over in Kansas City, another motherland of barbeque, the forests are rich with hickory, as well as oak and apple.

"When you look at the famous iconic restaurants, they're all using wood," says Allen. For example, Black's Barbecue in Lockhart, Texas, slow-cooks its meat over 60-year-old-pits, using local oak wood.

Grillers with access to good local wood may also be intrigued by the nascent DIY charcoal movement. Virginia Tech and the Virginia Cooperative Extension Office have been promoting homemade charcoal made with small kilns as a way to add value to wood scraps or firewood. The "local fuel for local food" idea has caught on at a few farmers' markets in the state. (Check out this YouTube video series to see how its done.)

According to Adam Downing, a Virginia extension officer, it's important to choose the right wood for the kind of cooking you want to do.

"If you use pine, that would burn fast and hot — good for searing a steak," he says. "But if you want a slower cook, you'll want charcoal made from a higher density wood like oak or hickory."

Downing makes his charcoal out of Ailanthus altissima, a non-native weed tree that has invaded his property in Madison, Va. "It's the bane of people who have it on their property, but it makes great charcoal," he says.

For the lump charcoal-obsessed who prefer to buy it, there's The Naked Whiz's Lump Charcoal Database, which features detailed reviews of dozens of lump charcoal products.

Armando Christian Perez — better known as Pitbull or Mr. Worldwide — has sold five million albums and had No. 1 hits in more than 15 countries. He's worked with artists like Usher, Enrique Iglesias and Jennifer Lopez. Now, he brings the party to the big screen in the new animated feature film Epic, which also features the voices of Christoph Waltz, Colin Farrell, Steven Tyler and Beyonce.

Pitbull's reach is worldwide — and to him, it's an opportunity to get a message across. Here, he tells NPR's Michel Martin about using music as an escape from the drug trade, how he's the only "pitbull with papers" in Miami, and his Epic role as a well-dressed toad.

Seriously, with E.W. Jackson in Virginia and Anthony Weiner in New York, what more do NPR's Ron Elving and Ken Rudin need for their podcast? OK, maybe throw in the ongoing IRS controversy, Lois Lerner pleading the Fifth Amendment, an immigration deal coming out of Senate Judiciary and a new mayor in Los Angeles.

As Myanmar's leaders push a series of political and economic changes, they are also having to deal with recent strife between the majority Buddhists and minority Muslims, or Rohingya.

Many countries making the transition from authoritarian rule to democracy have faced similar ethnic and sectarian conflicts, from Iraq to the former Yugoslavia.

But for Myanmar, perhaps the most compelling case study is also the closest.

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(Most recent update: 1:30 p.m. ET.)

One day after a British soldier was hacked to death on a busy southeast London street by two men who were heard claiming that they wanted to avenge the deaths of Muslims killed during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Prime Minister David Cameron declared Thursday that "we will never give in to terror or terrorism in any of its forms."

Reuters adds that Cameron also said, "this country will be absolutely resolute in its stand against violent extremism and terror."

Armando Christian Perez — better known as Pitbull or Mr. Worldwide — has sold five million albums and had No. 1 hits in more than 15 countries. He's worked with artists like Usher, Enrique Iglesias and Jennifer Lopez. Now, he brings the party to the big screen in the new animated feature film Epic, which also features the voices of Christoph Waltz, Colin Farrell, Steven Tyler and Beyonce.

Pitbull's reach is worldwide — and to him, it's an opportunity to get a message across. Here, he tells NPR's Michel Martin about using music as an escape from the drug trade, how he's the only "pitbull with papers" in Miami, and his Epic role as a well-dressed toad.

Denise Mauzerall arrived in Beijing this year at a time that was both horrifying and illuminating. The capital was facing some of its worst pollution in recent memory and Mauzerall, a Princeton environmental engineering professor, was passing through on her way to a university forum on the future of cities.

"I took the fast train from Beijing to Shanghai, and looking out the window for large sections of that trip you couldn't see more than 20 feet," Mauzerall recalled.

To Mauzerall, the lesson was both surprising and inescapable.

"This air pollution problem is on the scale of eastern China," she said. "It's definitely not just a Beijing problem. It's a national problem and it needs a national solution."

Earlier this week, state-run China Daily called most of China's major cities "barely suitable for living." Such unusually blunt language from the Chinese government's English-language mouthpiece is a sign of just how bad conditions have become.

'As Long As There Is Political Willingness..."

Tong Zhu, a top air pollution specialist who teaches at both Princeton and Beijing universities, says the solutions to the problem are no secret, and ultimately depend on political leadership.

"There is technology available," Zhu told me earlier this year over dinner at the Princeton-Fung Global Forum in Shanghai. "I think as long as there is political willingness, the environmental situation can be drastically improved."

This is may be the best news I've heard about air pollution since I first lived in China 16 years ago. The nation's air problem is profoundly depressing. There were times, even a dozen years back, when I would land at the airport in Beijing, only able to make out the runway 50 feet before we touched down.

Inevitably, I would wonder: Why am I coming back?

As air quality deteriorated, with the exception of the efforts led in part by Zhu during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, I joined most Chinese in viewing air pollution as an insoluble problem, an inevitable result of the nation's relentless economic growth.

Although he knows it sounds incredible, Zhu says Beijing has actually done a lot to control pollution over the years. In the 1990s, officials pushed industry out of the city and replaced most coal-burning heating with natural gas.

"The newest fuel emission standards are even higher than some European cities," Zhu says.

Resistant Provinces

The problem is that air doesn't respect borders. Neighboring Hebei province, which rings most of Beijing, is much poorer and less developed. It has lower fuel quality standards and has emphasized the sort of dirty factories Beijing exiled. As a result, when the winds are right, pollution from Hebei's factories, cars and coal-fired power plants can blow into Beijing and help choke the capital.

Since the Communist Party is an authoritarian regime, you might expect it could just force Hebei to change its economic model and clean up its act. In reality, China is highly decentralized politically and provinces often ignore policies from the center.

"We have the impression that the central government controls everything," says Zhu, "but the regional and local governments have a lot of say in how to develop their own economies."

Industrial provinces aren't the only vested interests standing in the way of solving China's air problem. The country's powerful state-owned oil companies have resisted pressure to produce cleaner-burning fuel for years.

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That doesn't really work to the film's detriment, though: Even a skin-deep biography of Plimpton is more fascinating than a deep dive about most people. Indeed, just hearing Plimpton lecture or read from his own work — which happens throughout the film, hence the subtitle — is engaging enough for a documentary of its own.

The directors spend much of the film's first half running chronologically through Plimpton's impressive C.V.: founding editor of the Paris Review; author of popular books and articles on his misadventures in the sporting life; friend to the Kennedys and one of the men who tackled shooter Sirhan Sirhan at the scene of RFK's assassination; star of an eponymous series of TV specials; advertising spokesman for everything from video-game consoles to microwave popcorn.

It's these latter ventures that cause some consternation among Plimpton's colleagues and contemporaries. Despite the loving tone of the film as a whole, the directors do address the question of how much damage the prime-time specials and the corporate shilling may have done to his reputation. In an interview, novelist James Salter goes even further, confessing that though he may have been unfair to label Plimpton a dilettante in his younger days, "he was writing in a genre that really doesn't permit greatness."

If Plimpton's chosen genre didn't permit greatness, Bean and Poling make the case that the totality of his unique career and legacy certainly did. Whether it's the importance of the Paris Review in tapping talented new writers, the explorations into the creative mind that he navigated in his interview series for the magazine, or his role as one of the early pioneers of participatory journalism, the film portrays Plimpton as someone devoted to illuminating how talent and creativity work — both for himself, and for the rest of us.

For the first time in seven years, the U.S. Senate has confirmed a judge to sit on the important federal appeals court for the District of Columbia. The Senate unanimously confirmed Deputy Solicitor General Sri Srinivasan on Thursday for the seat previously held by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

Srinivasan was confirmed because he had huge bipartisan support in the legal community and because he served in both the Bush and Obama administrations, while having no record in partisan politics. But the federal appeals court for the District of Columbia still has three vacancies.

Two previous Obama appointees, Goodwin Liu and Caitlin Halligan, also had stellar legal credentials but were filibustered by Republicans who portrayed them as judicial activists. Halligan was opposed primarily because as New York solicitor general, she represented the state's pro-gun control positions in court. After Liu's nomination was blocked, California Gov. Jerry Brown quickly nominated him to the California Supreme Court, where he now serves.

The partisan war over judicial nominees has accelerated in recent years as Republicans have stalled and, in some cases, filibustered record numbers of appeals court and trial court nominees. It took nearly a year to win confirmation for Srinivasan, who had no formal opposition.

At the same time, the Obama administration has been slow to fill vacancies.

There are three vacancies on the D.C. Circuit, out of 11 seats. The last D.C. Circuit judicial nominee to win confirmation was Brett Kavanaugh in 2006. He had previously served in the Bush White House counsel's office and as a top assistant to then-special prosecutor Kenneth Starr during the investigation of President Clinton and his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

In the current politically polarized atmosphere, nominees to the D.C. Circuit face particular scrutiny because so many of them go on to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Four of the current Supreme Court Justices — Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas — all served on that court first. And a fifth justice, Elena Kagan, was nominated to the circuit court by President Clinton but never got a vote.

Srinivasan, 46, is the first South Asian ever to serve on an appellate court. Born in India and raised in Lawrence, Kan., he likely would be high on the short list for a Supreme Court vacancy should one occur.

It's not everyday that a 9-year-old girl chastises the CEO of one of the world's biggest fast-food chain.

Yet that's exactly what young Hannah Robertson did Thursday morning at McDonald's annual shareholders meeting in Chicago. When the meeting opened up to questions, Hannah was first up at the mic with a pointed criticism.

"It would be nice if you stopped trying to trick kids into wanting to eat your food all the time," she told McDonald's CEO Don Thompson.

Ouch.

Hannah, a native of Kelowna, British Columbia, didn't get to Chicago on her own, of course. She and her mother, Kia Robertson, who blogs about how parents can help kids make healthful food choices, showed up as part of a contingent from the watchdog group Corporate Accountability International.

"We want them to stop their predatory marketing to kids," says Sriram Madhusoodanan, a national campaign organizer with the group.

Corporate Accountability has been pushing McDonald's to change its ways for years. Two years ago, it launched a so-far-unsuccessful bid urging McDonald's to retire Ronald, its famous clown mascot. Its latest social media campaign involves harnessing the power of mpm bloggers like Robertson to tell McDonald's that they're "not lovin'" the company's efforts targeting kids, such as including toys in Happy Meals.

Ironically, as we previously reported on The Salt, mom bloggers are a demographic that McDonald's actively courted as it revamped its Happy Meals — downsizing french fries and adding apples to every meal — in response to pressure from parents and public health officials.

CEO Thompson pointed to those efforts in defending his company's marketing practices. "We sell a lot of fruits and veggies and are trying to sell even more," he said in his reply to Hannah.

But Madhusoodanan wants to see the company do far more. His group put forth a shareholders' proposal to get McDonald's to assess its nutritional initiatives and their impact on childhood obesity to prevent eroding sales, in the face of growing public concern about the health impacts of fast food. It failed, attracting just 6.3 percent of shareholders' votes.

Thompson — who Hannah says called her "brave" in a brief exchange after the meeting — challenged her mother Kia's assertion that McDonald's does an end run around parents. "We're not marketing to schools," he said point blank. "We don't do that."

"We are not the cause of obesity," Thompson said. "We are not marketing unjustly to kids. Ronald is not a bad guy. ... He's about fun." (Unless, of course, you've got a fear of clowns.)

And just as the question period began with a young opponent for Thompson, it wrapped up with another child rushing to the mic in the CEO's defense.

The young boy listed the many ways he thinks McDonald's helps kids. He cited the Ronald McDonald House Charities and events like McCare Nights, in which McDonald's donates a portion of sales at a particular franchise to a school it has partnered with. Schools often urge parents and students to eat at McDonald's on these nights to raise money for school activities. But that sort of soft marketing, says Madhusoodanan, is part of the problem.

"That's exactly," he says, "how they build brand loyalty."

1. Newton's Laws Of Motion

2. The Reluctance Of Brilliant Criminal Masterminds To Freely Confess

3. The Inability Of Two Things To Coexist In The Same Physical Space

4. The Integrity Of Vending Machines

5. Gravity

6. Gina Carano's Ability To Snap Most Of These People Like Twigs Pretty Quickly, If We're Being Honest

7. The Hardness Of Cars, Which Are Actually Kind Of Uncomfortable To Land On From Great Heights

8. The Assumption That Even Innocent Bystanders Who Do Not Have Speaking Parts Have To Not Die In Order For The Good Guys To Be Considered Entirely Successful

9. The Conservation Of Mass

10. The Concern That Former Models Are Often Not That Funny In Movies

11. The Tendency Of People To Be A Little Down After Witnessing Devastating Car Crashes

12. The Fact That In Most Circumstances, A Truck Is Unlikely To Contain A Tank

13. How Much It Hurts To Be On Fire, To The Point Where Strutting May Become Difficult

14. Amnesia ... Something Something Something

15. The Loss Of Velocity Of An Enormous Object Traveling At High Speed That Collides with Another Enormous Object

16. The Difficulty Of Completing A Fistfight While You're In One Moving Car And The Other Guy Is In Another Moving Car

17. The Likelihood That Even Conventionally Trained, Rule-Following Law Enforcement Officers Occasionally Learn Something Of Value They Can Successfully Use Against Criminals

18. That Guy Reminds Me Of Somebody, But I Really Don't Think It Can Be "Luke Evans," Because I Don't Know Who That Is ... Wait, Who's The One Who's Not Tom Hardy?

19. Relativity

20. Indemnification

After years of trying to conceive, novelist Jennifer Gilmore and her husband decided to pursue a domestic open adoption. They were told they'd be matched within a year; it took four. And along the way they faced complicated decisions and heartbreak.

Gilmore, who has channeled those decisions and heartbreaks into personal essays and articles for outlets such as The New York Times and The Atlantic, has now turned to fiction, her native genre, to explore the experience. Her latest novel, The Mothers, chronicles the struggles of Jesse and Ramon, a fictional couple trying to adopt who face many of the same challenges Gilmore and her husband faced in real life.

"While my husband and I were going through all this, issues started coming up, ideas about race and class and what motherhood was for us and what it was in America," Gilmore tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross, "and I thought, 'This would be great for a novel.' I'm sure that I could've written a memoir about it. I've read many elegant and beautiful memoirs that have affected me greatly, but I really think like a novelist, and I wanted to be harder on my character than I probably could be on myself."

The heartbreaks and difficult decisions she and the novel's protagonists share involve babies born too early and with developmental disorders, and women claiming to be pregnant seeking adoptive parents, but who are really just out to extort money from vulnerable couples.

“ There are laws for the birth mothers, as there should be. There are laws for the child, as there should be. But there are no laws to protect these prospective adoptive parents.

The man ArtReview magazine named the most powerful artist in the world is trying his hand at rock stardom. In 2011, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei spent 81 days in detention. He was later let go and charged with tax evasion. Now, he has released his first heavy metal song, based on his time in police detention.

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The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

A never-before-seen novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl Buck that was discovered in a Texas storage unit will be published in October. Publisher Open Road Integrated Media describes the book, titled The Eternal Wonder, as "the coming-of-age story of Randolph Colfax, an extraordinarily gifted young man whose search for meaning and purpose leads him to New York, England, Paris and on a mission patrolling the DMZ in Korea," according to The New York Times. The newspaper reports that Buck "is believed to have completed the manuscript for the book ... shortly before she died of cancer in 1973, said her son Edgar S. Walsh, who manages her literary estate."

Mark Ford writes about Vladimir Nabokov and his greatest creation, Humbert Humbert, for The New York Review of Books: "The golden-tongued Humbert, one must always remember, is possibly the greatest rhetorician since Milton's equally persuasive and dangerous Satan."

At first glance, you might think that The Washington Post actually liked Martin Amis' widely-detested novel Lionel Asbo. The front cover boasts a Post blurb stating: "Amis is a force unto himself. ... There is, quite simply, no one else like him." But as Ron Charles points out, the newspaper eviscerated Lionel Asbo, and the blurb comes from a review of another Amis book that The Post reviewed 23 years ago. There's something almost impressive about that level of shamelessness.

Ayad Akhtar, who won the Pulitzer Prize for drama this year, is publishing three new plays with Little Brown, publisher Reagan Arthur announced Monday. (Check out Akhtar's essay for NPR Books about the literature of faith in America.)

The Paris Review excerpts from Martin McLaughlin's new translation of the letters of Italo Calvino: "Although I am small, ugly and dirty, I am highly ambitious and at the slightest flattery I immediately start to strut like a turkey."

A first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone hand-annotated and illustrated by J.K. Rowling sold for a spectacular $227,421 at Sotheby's on Tuesday, in an auction to benefit the free-speech group English PEN. As we noted Monday, Rowling's marginalia explain the origins of Quidditch (a fight with her boyfriend) and reveal the original mascot of Hufflepuff House (a bear, instead of a decidedly non-menacing badger).

A Japanese mountaineer has become the oldest person to climb to the summit of Mount Everest, as Yuichiro Miura, 80, reached the 29,035-foot peak Thursday morning. The feat marks Miura's third time atop Mount Everest; he previously climbed the mountain at ages 70 and 75.

As in 2008, Miura's accomplishment is in danger of being surpassed by his main rival, Nepalese climber Min Bahadur Sherchan, 81. But that possibility didn't seem to bother Miura Thursday, who was joined by his son, Gota, on the climb.

"I'm feeling on top of the world," Miura said by satellite phone, according to the Kyodo news agency. "Even at the age of 80, I can go on and on."

While Miura celebrated at the top of Everest, his rival, Sherchan, was already at the mountain's basecamp, preparing for his own attempt.

"Sherchan, now 81, was preparing to scale the peak next week despite digestive problems he suffered several days ago," the AP reports. "On Wednesday, Sherchan said by telephone from the base camp that he was in good health and 'ready to take up the challenge.'"

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One day after a British soldier was hacked to death on a busy southeast London street by two men who were heard claiming that they wanted to avenge the deaths of Muslims killed during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Prime Minister David Cameron declared Thursday that "we will never give in to terror or terrorism in any of its forms."

Reuters adds that Cameron also said, "this country will be absolutely resolute in its stand against violent extremism and terror."

We're also learning more about the horrific incident near an army barracks in Woolwich and the heroism of some witnesses.

It began, authorities say, when the attackers apparently used a car to run down the soldier. Witnesses say the two men then got out of the vehicle and began stabbing and cutting the victim. When they finished the attack, the men then stayed nearby and started telling bystanders that they were avenging the deaths of Muslims killed by British soldiers.

The Telegraph interviewed Ingrid Loyau-Kennett, a 48-year-old Cub Scout leader and mother-of-two who "put her own life on the line by trying to persuade the soldier's murderers to hand over their weapons."

She tells the Telegraph that she was in a bus that passed by the scene and got off because she thought the soldier had been injured in a car accident and might need her help.

"And then when I went up, there was this black guy with a revolver and a kitchen knife," Loyau-Kennett told the newspaper. The man, she says, "had what looked like butcher's tools and he had a little axe, to cut the bones, and two large knives and he said 'move off the body.' "

According to Loyau-Kennett, she told the man that, "right now it is only you versus many people, you are going to lose, what would you like to do?" She says he responded that he would like to stay and fight.

When armed police arrived — 15 to 20 minutes after the attack — they ended up shooting and wounding the two men.

Hosseini is particularly interested in puzzling out the ways in which more privileged people decide what they can and can't do for those who live in misery. Whether the miserable are members of one's own family is relevant, and yet not the most reliable guideline, since sometimes it's most difficult psychologically to reach out to family members — and since we sometimes don't even know who our family members are. When the Kabul home that belonged to Pari's adoptive parents is abandoned and turned into a hospital, we meet a Greek doctor who has given his life to helping the wretched of Afghanistan, yet is unable to be near his own lonely mother. We also follow the story of two well-off Afghan brothers who grow up near the Kabul house. When they later emigrate to America, each has to decide how heroic a role to play in the never-ending suffering of their native country — and just how much luxury he can stomach in his own life, given the contrast to life back home.

But it's the plight of Abdullah and Pari, living apart yet tied together permanently by the tender, brotherly care he took of her as a child, that holds the novel together. In the tale their father tells, the little boy taken by the giant had always worn a bell around his neck. In old age the father in the story has forgotten the boy, but still sometimes thinks he hears the sound of a bell, and doesn't understand "why a wave of something, something like the tail end of a sad dream, always swept through him whenever he heard the jingling."

You may find, as I did, that Abdullah and Pari's story lingers with an effect not unlike that "wave of something." It's a reminder that much of what both connects us and makes us individuals is invisible, but no less real for that.

Maria Russo, a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review, is a former editor and writer at the Los Angeles Times, The New York Observer, and Salon. She is the editor in chief of Pasadena Magazine.

Read an excerpt of And the Mountains Echoed

Apple was criticized in a Senate committee hearing Tuesday for using complex accounting to minimize the corporate taxes it pays. One key piece of the company's tax strategy: It funnels lots of its profits through subsidiaries in Ireland.

Offering low corporate tax rates has been a fundamental part of Ireland's economic strategy for decades — a way to get foreign companies to set up operations in the country.

In the hearing, Apple CEO Tim Cook mentioned that Apple has had a subsidiary in Ireland since 1980, when the country was recruiting international tech companies and offering tax deals.

As it happens, the idea of using taxes to lure foreign companies goes back even further than that, according to Frank Barry, an Irish economist who has studied the country's tax history.

After World War II, the Irish government used rebuilding funds provided by the U.S. government to, among other things, hire U.S. consultants, Barry says. The consultants produced a 100-page report that was a broad look at the Irish economy. (First line: "In the Irish economy, cattle is king.")

On one page, the report noted that Puerto Rico — another small island economy — had done well by lowering its corporate tax rate, which attracted multinational corporations.

"The U.S. consultants downplayed it," Barry says. "But our bureaucrats here spotted it and said, 'This has the makings of a very good idea.' "

The next mayor of Los Angeles will be City Councilman Eric Garcetti.

In a race in which the two top contenders were both Democrats, the 42-year-old Garcetti has opened a 7- to 8-percentage-point lead over City Controller Wendy Greuel as Tuesday's votes are being counted.

Early Wednesday, according to the Los Angeles Times, Greuel called Garcetti to concede the race. Soon after, Garcetti tweeted this message:

"Thank you Los Angeles — the hard work begins but I am honored to lead this city for the next four years. Let's make this a great city again."

The man ArtReview magazine named the most powerful artist in the world is trying his hand at rock stardom. In 2011, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei spent 81 days in detention. He was later let go and charged with tax evasion. Now, he has released his first heavy metal song, based on his time in police detention.

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Chuck used to sell marijuana in California. But the legalization of medical marijuana in the state meant he was suddenly competing against hundreds of marijuana dispensaries. So he moved to New York, where marijuana is still 100 percent illegal. Since making the move, he says, he's quadrupled his income. (For the record: His name isn't really Chuck.)

He spends pretty much every day dealing what he calls "farm-to-table" marijuana. On a recent afternoon in his dimly lit New York apartment, he was just about to complete a daily ritual: loading about 50 baggies of marijuana, worth a total of about $3,000 into his backpack, before heading out to make deliveries. "We're helping keep people stoned on a Friday night in New York City," he said.

Eighteen states and the District of Columbia have now legalized marijuana, either for medical use or for fun. And, it turns out, when one state brings an underground market into the mainstream and another doesn't, there are economic consequences in both places.

Dealers aren't the only ones with an incentive to move marijuana out of California. The legalization of medical marijuana led to a rush of pot farmers with permits to grow marijuana legally. That in turn led to a supply glut — and plummeting wholesale prices. Some growers haven't been able to unload all their crops at the price they want on the local, legal market. So they break the law and send it out of state.

Special Agent Roy Giorgi, with the California Department of Justice, is supposed to stop the illegal flow of marijuana in California. That can mean crouching in the brush in some remote part of the mountains — or it can mean heading to a FedEx or UPS in California's pot country to take a look at all the outgoing parcels and try to detect marijuana inside.

He estimates that 1 in 15 packages he examines has marijuana in it. "Right now, Northern California bud, that trademark, that stamp, is really some of the best in the world," he says.

Of course, all of Giorgi's efforts to catch marijuana growers and dealers tend to drive people out of the illegal marijuana business. That, in turn, means Chuck has less competition — and can charge higher prices.

Chuck sells marijuana for about $60 for an eighth of an ounce; in California, it would be anywhere from $30 to $45. With his New York customers, Chuck talks about marijuana like it's a rare California wine. When he pours out the contents of his backpack to reveal strains with names like Girl Scout Cookies and AK47, his clients are wowed.

Because Chuck is working in an illegal market, his customers have a hard time finding other marijuana retailers. "There's plenty of weed in New York; there's just an illusion of scarcity, which is part of what I'm capitalizing on," he says. "This is a black market business. There's insufficient information for customers."

This is what economists call information asymmetry — Chuck knows more about the market than his customers do. If weed were legal, his customers could comparison shop — they could look at menus and price lists and choose their dealer. As it is, once they find Chuck, they're likely to stick with him.

Note: A version of this story originally aired as part of the WNYC series The Weed Next Door. The headline on this post was inspired by @MichaelMontCW

After a long bumpy ride that started five years ago, the domestic airline industry seems to be pulling up and smoothing out.

The number of passengers planning to fly this summer will tick up 1 percent from 2012, climbing back to the highest level since 2008, an industry group said Thursday.

Billionaire investment legend Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. has had its credit rating lowered from AA+ to AA by Standard & Poor's Ratings Services.

In a statement, S&P says that even though Berkshire Hathaway has an "excellent business profile," the lower credit rating "better reflects our view of BRK's dependence on its core insurance operations for most of its dividend income." (S&P's statement is posted on its website, but you have to register to view it.)

S&P also notes that "management succession" factors into its thinking. As The Financial Times (registration required) notes:

"Mr. Buffett has said he and Berkshire's board have decided who will follow him as chief executive, but they have chosen not to make it public. The company intends to split the chairman and chief executive role that Mr Buffett plays, with his son serving as non-executive chairman."

Poverty has grown everywhere in the U.S. in recent years, but mostly in the suburbs. During the 2000s, it grew twice as fast in suburban areas as in cities, with more than 16 million poor people now living in the nation's suburbs — more than in urban or rural areas.

Elizabeth Kneebone, a fellow with the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, says this shift in poverty can be seen in Montgomery County, Md., right outside the nation's capital.

"Montgomery County is one of the wealthiest counties in the country," she says, noting the streets lined with luxury apartments, big homes and crowded restaurants. "But it also has a rapidly growing poor population."

Kneebone, co-author with Alan Berube of a new book from Brookings, Confronting Suburban Poverty in America, says poverty in Montgomery County has grown by two-thirds since the recent recession. That means 30,000 more residents living below the federal poverty line — about $23,000 for a family of four.

That doesn't buy much in a suburban area with a high cost of living. By some estimates, a family of four in Montgomery County needs more than $80,000 a year to meet basic needs.

Suburban Poverty On The Rise

In the nearly impenetrable language that comes with his job, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress on Wednesday that even though the economy is doing better, the central bank needs to keep giving it a boost.

The key passage from his prepared testimony:

"Recognizing the drawbacks of persistently low rates, the FOMC actively seeks economic conditions consistent with sustainably higher interest rates. Unfortunately, withdrawing policy accommodation at this juncture would be highly unlikely to produce such conditions. A premature tightening of monetary policy could lead interest rates to rise temporarily but would also carry a substantial risk of slowing or ending the economic recovery and causing inflation to fall further. Such outcomes tend to be associated with extended periods of lower, not higher, interest rates, as well as poor returns on other assets. Moreover, renewed economic weakness would pose its own risks to financial stability."

Get recipes for Butterscotch Budino With Caramel Sauce And Salt, Butterscotch Breadcrumb Cake and Butterscotch Cream Pie.

Shanghai did something last fall that few other cities on the planet could have even considered. It opened two massive art museums right across the river from one another on the same day.

The grand openings put an exclamation point on China's staggering museum building boom. In recent years, about 100 museums have opened annually here, peaking at nearly 400 in 2011, according to the Chinese Society of Museums.

“ New York City and Paris are financial centers. They are also indisputably cultural centers of the world. Shanghai is now in that process but hasn't yet reached that level.

Iran's powerful Guardian Council has disqualified two key candidates — a former president and a top aide to the current president — from running in the June 14 presidential election.

The Guardian Council, which vets all candidates, approved eight names Tuesday but left out former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, who was handpicked by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Mashaei said he would appeal the decision to the country's supreme leader; Rafsanjani did not comment.

The Associated Press has compiled a list of the eight approved candidates and their backgrounds. The two big names on the list are Saeed Jalili, Iran's top nuclear negotiator, who assumes the mantle of favorite, and former Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Velayati. Al-Jazeera reports:

"There have been wide speculations that Mashaei would be excluded from the list. But not Rafsanjani, a two-term president and current head of the Expediency Council, a position appointed by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader.

"Their exclusion from the June 14 presidential ballot gives establishment-friendly candidates a clear path to succeed Ahmadinejad, who has lost favour with the ruling clerics after years of power struggles.

"It also pushes moderate and opposition voices further to the margins as Iran's leadership faces critical challenges such as international sanctions and talks with world powers over Tehran's nuclear programme."

Arrested Development returning via Netflix? Just another old-media brand reviving itself on new media.

The TV show, which originally ran on Fox from 2003 to 2006 and unveils new episodes on Netflix next weekend, finds itself in splendid company. Radiohead, Louis C.K., Veronica Mars — all found their audiences with promotion and distribution from big studios and networks. Radiohead was signed to a major music label. Louis C.K. enjoyed HBO specials and TV shows. And Veronica Mars ran on two TV networks for three years.

But Radiohead defied industry norms in 2006 by selling its album In Rainbows directly to fans for whatever price they chose — and the band made millions. Louis C.K. took a similarly successful route with a comedy special in 2011, charging viewers five dollars to download the special online. And Veronica Mars fans contributed more than $5.7 million on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter — almost three times the stated goal — to pay for a movie adaptation.

Author Grady Hendrix says these models aren't exactly replicable. These are mid-list, old-media artists, not blockbuster celebrities. But their fan bases and name recognition furnishes them with a new-media edge that won't be shared, he says, "[by] some band from Cleveland that has a small following looking for Kickstarter funds for their album."

Inevitably, some old-media brands still manage to do it wrong. The blandly impersonal Kickstarter page of actress Melissa Joan Hart might as well have been written by a publicist's intern. The former star of Sabrina The Teenage Witch is soliciting funds for a new romantic comedy, but as Hendrix points out, with the slightest of smirks, "It's raised $50,000, and it's doing really badly."

On the other hand, a Kickstarter campaign from actor Zach Braff simply oozes kinship with fans. And they've rallied, giving more than $2.7 million to support a follow-up to his 2004 movie Garden State and surpassing his goal by hundreds of thousands of dollars. "There are shots of him and his brother and all these behind-the-scenes things," Hendrix notes," And you feel like, 'Hey, Zach Braff is going to answer my emails!'"

A sense of ownership and connection leads people to donate money to movies ultimately benefiting the major studios that make them. But it's important to recognize that Warner Brothers will still invest many millions in producing, distributing and promoting a Veronica Mars movie, even with Kickstarter's help.

And there could be more to come. Michael Pachter of Wedbush Securities points out that rumors have swirled that late show Heroes might be resurrected by Microsoft as an Xbox exclusive. "And the only way you'll be able to watch," he says, "is on Xbox."

Giving still-grieving fans hope for new Xbox or Netflix episodes of their canceled darlings such as Caprica, Chuck or Firefly.

Even as President Obama was declaring that tornado-devastated Oklahoma would get "everything it needs right away," the state's most vociferous critic of federal emergency aid vowed that he, too, would push for assistance "without delay."

Republican Sen. Tom Coburn took a pummeling in the hours after the deadly tornado struck for initially suggesting he'd demand spending cuts before agreeing to federal help.

He did not refer to those offsets in a statement Tuesday morning, saying only that he had spoken to Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano about a response from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

"We still don't know the scope of devastation and won't for some time," Coburn wrote. "But, as the ranking member of the Senate committee that oversees FEMA, I can assure Oklahomans that any and all available aid will be delivered without delay."

His office did not immediately return a request for comment and further clarification on his position, reported by CQ Roll Call, on requiring budget cuts to finance aid to his state's tornado victims.

The issue of federal aid is a complicated one for Coburn and his fellow GOP senator, James Inhofe. Both have been consistent critics of FEMA spending and recently voted against aid to victims of Superstorm Sandy, which ravaged swaths of New Jersey and New York last year.

Three of the state's five members of the U.S. House also voted against Sandy aid; Republican Reps. Tom Cole and Frank Lucas supported the $60.2 billion aid package.

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Varied Uses

About 80 percent of the donations are carted away by textile recyclers, says Jackie King, the executive director of Secondary Materials and Recycled Textiles (SMART), a trade association for textile recyclers. She says that means about 3.8 billion pounds of clothing that is donated each year is recycled.

"Thirty percent of the materials are made into wiping cloths that are used in commercial and industrial use," she says.

About 20 percent of the donated clothes and textiles are converted into fibers that are then made into a variety of other products, including carpet padding, insulation for autos and homes, and pillow stuffing.

King says nearly half the donated clothes — about 45 percent — is exported.

At Mac Recycling on the outskirts of Baltimore, a forklift shuttles large pallets stacked with bins of donated clothes. A large section of the warehouse is packed with colorful 800-pound bales of clothing ready to ship out.

Robert Goode, the owner of Mac Recycling, says textile recycling is a huge international industry. He says his small warehouse alone ships about 80 tons of clothes each week to buyers throughout the world, including in Central America, South America, Asia, Africa and Europe.

"Pretty much you can pick any country and there's a market for these items," he says.

'Competitive Business'

Goode says when the shipment arrives overseas, a wholesaler will break down the bales and send the clothes into different markets. At each step along the way in this process, someone makes money from the donated clothes.

"It is an extremely competitive business. ... Items are bought and sold by the pound, and you can literally make or lose a deal over half a cent a pound, quarter of a cent a pound," Goode says.

The Picture Show

Are You Done With That? Photographing The Results Of Your Good Will

Over the past week, Pope Francis has launched a crescendo of attacks on the global financial system and what he calls a "cult of money" that does not help the poor.

The 2-month-old papacy of Francis — the Argentina-born Jorge Bergoglio — is shaping up as a papacy focused on the world's downtrodden. And in sharp contrast with the two preceding papacies, this one even contains echoes of the Latin American liberation theology movement that John Paul II and Benedict XVI had repressed.

The new pope's popularity is growing day by day. When Francis appears in St. Peter's Square, the crowd shouts his name in every imaginable language. Women hold out their babies to be kissed; everyone wants to touch him.

Vatican security guards are at a loss as Pope Francis gets off his popemobile to shake hands, to hug and to be hugged.

"Bergoglio wants to be the priest that everybody wants to have in his parish, as confessor, as spiritual director," says church historian Alberto Melloni. "And what we have seen in these few weeks is the start of a pastoral papacy."

Deeply Concerned By Inequity

Francis has shed some of the most pompous symbols of papal power. The ornate Renaissance vestments, the golden crucifix and red shoes dear to Benedict have been put away.

And Francis has shunned the papal apartment. He still lives in a communal setting in a Vatican residence where he delivers daily homilies at early morning Mass.

Benedict's focus on theology has given way to more concrete issues, like poverty, Francis' main concern.

Vatican analyst Massimo Franco says Francis is "a true global pope," adding that, contrary to his predecessors, whose worldviews were shaped by 20th century European history, Francis is steeped in the global issues of today and of the future.

"His focus on slums — megacity slums — and his experience as archbishop of Buenos Aires is very telling because naturally he is focusing on the poor of great cities," Franco says. "That is a non-state actor [who is] going to be a very powerful one in the next dozen of years."

Francis has long been deeply concerned by what he calls the negative aspects of globalization.

On May 1 — International Workers' Day — the pope referred directly to the collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh that killed more than 1,000 people. He expressed anger at their $50 monthly wages.

"This is slave labor," he said.

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Who Is Pope Francis?

Shoes off the rail, Tanner! The Boomerang took me three months!

Since I'd involved my best friend Oliver Allbless in the joke from the beginning, it was his voice I'd recorded, and he'd proven adept at mincing his tones into the huffy and judgmental.

The electronic device buried in the torso included twenty edicts and exclamations. Little had I known that my mischievous little handicraft would soon become a monster.

The Fletcher doll was an instant hit with our kids, to whom the mocking recordings of their father's oppressive decrees helped to endear their stepmother. Taking the teasing good-naturedly, Fletcher had been touched by the scale of my effort, down to engaging Oliver to design an updated digital technology. (Not much better than rubber bands, the governor belts that drove the plastic records and turntables inside the old Chatty Cathys from the 1960s had been prone to snap — which is why few of these collector's items still functioned.) Dinner guests never wearied of pulling the string. The following year, Solstice had begged me to fashion a similar caricature of her new boyfriend, whose incessant repetition of faddish expressions like "Good to go!" and "That's my bad!" was driving her crazy. I'd been reluctant. I was still running Breadbasket. To work the same magic, the doll would have had to capture the boyfriend's build and dressing habits. Sensing my hesitation, Solstice offered to pay. I cited a price high enough to put my sister off, but she attached photographs and a list of pet phrases to an email the very same day.

Word of mouth no longer depends on gabbing over a picket fence, and with the aid of the Internet the customized pull-string doll business went viral. By that year's end, I had folded Breadbasket, and Baby Monotonous — though thanks to Fletcher's goading misnomer some locals believed Baby Moronic was my company's real name — had headquarters outside New Holland and a full-time workforce. The formula was irresistible: ridicule paired with affection. And while expensive to make, the dolls were far more expensive to buy. Besides, they'd not have been so popular if they were cheap. Costing about the combined price of a KitchenAid mixer and a top-of-the-line Dyson, a Baby Monotonous doll had become a status item, one by popular accord more rewarding than the average vacuum cleaner.

Aptly for the last father-son interchange, the third time Cody pulled the doll's string it declared with exalted sanctimony, I want DRY toast! I want DRY toast!

Both kids fell about laughing.

"I'd like to know why that thing never stops being funny," said Fletcher.

"Doesn't matter why," said Tanner, struggling to stand up straight. "They're always funny, they only get funnier, and that's why Pandora is rich."

"We're not rich," I said. Leaving aside my stepson's inflated assessment of our family's circumstances, rich was a word for other people, and generally for those one doesn't like. "We're only doing okay. And be sure not to say anything like that around your uncle." I corrected with an eye roll, "Step-uncle."

"Why not?" asked Tanner.

"It's impolite to talk about money. And your uncle Edison seems to have fallen on tough times. You don't want to rub it in."

Tanner looked at his stepmother sideways. "You don't want him to tap you."

"I didn't say that."

"Didn't have to." Tanner may have overestimated his literary gifts. But he was pretty smart.

Driving to Cedar Rapids Airport, I wondered how four years could have passed, the longest Edison and I had been apart. We had talked on the phone — though more than once his number had been suddenly out of service. He was constantly shifting digs, and often away on tours of Europe, South America, or Japan. It was up to me to track him down by calling other musicians like Slack. Exasperation that my older brother didn't keep up his end of our relationship was pointless. He always sounded happy to hear my voice, and that's all that mattered to me.

In the flurry of ordering bolts of fabric and bales of cotton stuffing, maybe it was little wonder I hadn't seen Edison. While establishing my headquarters, hiring actors for the recordings, taking on yet more staff to handle orders and ensure that the portly doll with the hard hat that demanded, "Where's my grub?" went to Lansing, Michigan, and not to Idaho, it had been tricky to remain attentive to Fletcher, Tanner, and Cody, or even to fit in phone calls to family farther afield. Although one call three years back had sounded fractionally off-key.

My product had just begun to capture the popular imagination, and I was still excited; why, my pull-string dolls were apparently all the rage among the upper crust in my brother's own city, having just been the subject of New York magazine's lead story, "Monotonous Manhattan" — with inset scripts of Donald Trump and Mayor Bloomberg dolls. But the tone with which Edison congratulated me on my appearance on that cover had disinclined me to dial again soon. All the words were in the right place, and the slight sneering or testiness might have been in my head; you could never quite trust the phone.

Since then, for me Monotonous had become too successful — meaning, all that remained was for the enterprise to become less so. Only a tipping point awaited, beyond which orders would decline. It wasn't a "problem" with which I expected others to sympathize, but recently I'd been suffering from an insidious lassitude that derived from having everything — more than,

really — I had ever wanted. On the personal side, I had found Fletcher Feuerbach, to others tightly wound, but warmer and funnier behind closed doors than most suspected. (Stripped, he was a surprisingly handsome man, and he had once said the same of me: we were "stealth attractive.") I'd had none of my own children, but my adoptive ones were still speaking to me, which was more than could be said of the average teenager one had borne; I'd skipped the bawling-baby stage of childrearing, and gotten in on the best part. On the career side, I had never been ambitious, and suddenly I headed a thriving business of the most improbable sort: one with a sense of humor. I'd made just enough money that the prospect of making a little more left me cold.

Wise high-flyers kept this battle with the baffling flatness of success discreetly to themselves. Picture how bitterly hordes of the frustrated, disappointed, and dispossessed would greet any complaint about being too satisfied and too wealthy. Be that as it may, it really isn't a very nice sensation to not want anything. Thwarted hopes are no picnic, but desire itself is energizing. I had always been a hard worker, and this damnable repleteness was enervating. Without a doubt, there was only one solution to my growing torpidity, my Thanksgiving-dinner stupor writ large:

I needed a new project.

Brown with elegiac hints of yellow, cornfields drying for the October harvest slipped past my window. Overland electrical cables scalloped rhythmically by on creosoted poles, while globular water tanks on narrow stems glowed in autumnal sun like giant incandescent lightbulbs. The pastoral effect was blighted by big-box stores and strip malls — Kum & Go, Dollar General, Home Depot, and the recent explosion of Mexican restaurants, while as ever the Super 8 bannered in garish black and gold plastic: Go Hawkeyes, Support Our Team! Yet on pristine stretches the countryside expressed the timeless groundedness and solidity that had captivated me as a child on visits to my paternal grandparents: white clapboard, potato crops, the odd horse. Whatever foofaraw was roiling the rest of the country always seemed far away.

Since then, Iowa had changed. A wave of illegal immigrants had arrived to work in the pork-processing plants. State politics had grown a febrile right-wing fringe. Most family farms of the sort my grandparents tilled had long ago been sold or rented to agribusiness, so that numerous farmhouses, barns, and outbuildings along this route had collapsed. The crop already subsidized to the hilt, more than half of that corn would be converted to ethanol — netting still more lucrative federal subsidies and so slathering a whole second layer of corruption on a grain once a byword for wholesomeness and a hokey sense of humor. The subdued isolation that was soothing to me was soporific to modern young people, for whom the anonymity in which I wallowed was swallowing. Just like my father in his youth, my stepson was frantic to get out.

By contrast, Fletcher was born in Muscatine, and his never having moved from his home state didn't signal a lack of imagination; rather, a contented acceptance and even a certain profundity. "Iowa is somewhere," he said once, "and that's as much as anywhere can claim." The modesty of the Midwest, its secure, unpretentious self-knowledge, its useful growth of crops that people ate as opposed to the provision of elusive "services," appealed to us both.

Nearing the airport, I looked forward to having Edison around again — finally, company with appetite. My brother had been imbued with all the verve, the flair, the savoir faire that I lacked. Tall, fit, and flamboyant, he'd inherited our father's Jeff Bridges good looks without also assuming the oiliness that had always contaminated Travis. Edison's younger features were fine, almost delicate, and last I'd seen him the somewhat broader lines of his face at forty still hadn't buried the high cheekbones. He kept his dirty-blond hair just long enough to flare into an unruly corona around his crown. The manic keyboard of a smile glinted with a hint of wickedness, the predatory voracity of a big cat. In my early teens, my misfit friends were always smitten with my brother. He had an energy, an eagerness, a rapacity; even into adulthood, he never hugged me without lifting me off the floor. Edison was bound to breathe some life into that vast blank house on Solomon Drive, a residence that, since the advent of Fletcher's mad cycling and cheerless diet, had erred on the grim side.

For I was a homebody. I hated travel, and gladly let my brother act as my alter ego, catching red-eyes while I slept. I recoiled from attention; from childhood, Edison could never get enough of it. Aside from the obvious competition with our father, I was mystified why my brother wanted so badly for other people to know who he was. I could see coveting recognition for his talent, but that wasn't what made him tick. Ever since I could remember, he'd wanted to be famous.

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Lionel Shriver's Not-So-'New Republic'

It takes a lot of chutzpah to reduce one of the most powerful men on Earth to a pile of fruits and vegetables.

Luckily for art lovers, Giuseppe Arcimboldo had nerve to spare.

Arcimboldo created this unorthodox produce portrait of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II back in 1590. By that time, the Italian artist had been painting for the emperor and his powerful Habsburg family for more than 25 years, so presumably, they'd grown used to his visual jokes. (The emperor has "peachy" cheeks and "ears" of corn, get it?)

Though he also dabbled in the angels and saints that were the standard stuff of art in his day, Arcimboldo is best known for his "scherzi" or "capricci" — "meaning jokes or games," as David Brown, a curator at the National Gallery of Art, explains in this video.

"It's very clear that's how they were meant to be seen," Brown says. "They were a source of amusement or entertainment, because there was this element of surprise."

That they also often feature an element of fruits, berries or other foods is partly a reflection of the Renaissance blossoming of natural sciences, like botany.

"At a distance, they just look like heads in profile or three-quarter view," Brown says. "Up close, they look like an incredible variety of nature's wonders."

That talent for upending the viewer's expectations helps explain why Arcimboldo — whose work, Brown says, fell into "virtual oblivion" after his death — found new champions among 20th-century modernists. (Picasso and Salvador Dali were among his fans).

The latest to pay homage to this Renaissance man is American Philip Haas, an Oscar-nominated filmmaker (for Angels and Insects) and contemporary artist. This weekend, the New York Botanical Garden opened a new exhibit featuring Haas' giant, 15-foot-high fiberglass sculptures based on Arcimboldo's "Four Seasons" — winter, spring, summer and fall personified as people, crafted of foods, trees and other natural elements.

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In 1995, an unintended cult-classic trilogy was born with a film that centered on a simple, romantic premise. Two strangers in their early 20s spend a spontaneous night together in Vienna. The characters, Jesse and Celine, split ways in Before Sunrise, but they reunited nine years later for a sequel, Before Sunset.

In that sequel, Jesse and Celine, played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, find each other in Paris for another brief rendezvous. Even though both are now in other relationships, they can't shake their connection.

Now, another nine years have passed, and they're back together with a third film.

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Horror Confessionals, Personal And Professional

Margaret Cho told stories about her grandfather, the minister of a Korean Christian congregation who had a habit of praying ostentatiously — and, to Cho, embarrassingly — at restaurants.

Writer-director Larry Charles turned in an UnCabaret horror tale came from his professional life. A veteran of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, he also directed one hit movie — Borat — and another one that, well, didn't do as well.

Monkey See

Pop Culture Happy Hour: The Nature Of Suspense And Our Love Of Cover Songs

There was a time around 2003, before e-books and e-readers, when it seemed that everywhere you turned — in an airport, on a bus or anywhere people read — people were lost in The Kite Runner. An epic tale set in Afghanistan, the book sold more than 7 million copies in the U.S. and catapulted the author, Khaled Hosseini, onto the global literary stage.

Hosseini followed that success with another book about his homeland, A Thousand Splendid Suns, which also became a best-seller.

Six years later, Hosseini has written a third heart-wrenching tale, set in Afghanistan, California, Paris and the Greek islands. And The Mountains Echoed is a story about family — specifically the siblings Abdullah and Pari, separated at a young age. Early on in the book, a young Abdullah thinks that he would rather forget Pari than be haunted by her memory:

Abdullah would find himself on a spot where Pari had once stood, her absence like a smell pushing up from the earth beneath his feet, and his legs would buckle, and his heart would collapse in on itself ... Pari hovered, unbidden, at the edge of Abdullah's vision everywhere he went. She was like the dust that clung to his shirt. She was in the silences that had become so frequent at the house, silences that welled up between their words, sometimes cold and hollow, sometimes pregnant with things that went unsaid, like a cloud filled with rain that never fell. Some nights he dreamed that he was in the desert again, alone, surrounded by the mountains, and in the distance a single tiny glint of light flickering on, off, on, off, like a message.

Chris Hadfield went from feeling truly sublime to faintly ridiculous this week.

He landed after spending 146 days in space, most as commander of the International Space Station. But, he says, as soon as his Soyuz plonked down on the soil of Kazakhstan, "I could feel the weight of my lips and tongue and had to change how I was talking. I didn't realize I had learned to talk with a weightless tongue."

Chris Hadfield said that after nearly five months of floating, his feet had lost all cushioning and calluses, so on these, his first days back, "I was walking around like I was walking on hot coals."

Mr. Hadfield is 53, a slender and mustachioed former Royal Canadian Air Force colonel, and the first Canadian to command the International Space Station. He may never be mentioned in the same sentence as Yuri Gagarin or Neil Armstrong. But Chris Hadfield has become one of the best-known astronauts of contemporary times because he's shared what he's seen and felt with a Twitter following that's grown to almost a million, and he's used the bay of the International Space Station as a kind of celestial garage to put on a show.

Yahoo's $1.1 billion purchase of Tumblr could be considered a bargain compared to its other big-dollar bets. The company's history is dotted with pricey purchases of once-hot Web properties that had more promise than eventual purpose. A look back:

GeoCities, 1999: $3.7 Billion

When Yahoo! bought GeoCities for $3.7 billion in 1999, CNN Money called it a move that would "solidify Yahoo!'s position as a frontrunner in the online popularity contest." History shows us otherwise. Back then, GeoCities was the third most visited "site" on the Web. But it really served as platform for online communities and for users to create their own homepages on the Internet — much like what Tumblr does today.

Geocities never quite figured out monetization and scale.

"Sometimes it's market forces, sometimes the fire just gets snuffed out," said Scott Appleby, a tech industry analyst who was bullish on the GeoCities acquisition in 1999. "There was a thought then that everyone would have their own Web page, and they realized we don't really need that."

By the time Yahoo closed down the service, users had defected so widely to blogs, Twitter, and frankly, Tumblr, that the term "Geocities" became a verb for taking your website back in time to the way they looked in the late 1990s. (No, really. There is a Geocities-izer in which "you can give any site on the Web that straight-out-of-1998 look and feel.")

Yahoo has not yet responded to requests for an interview on the GeoCities history, or its other previous acquisitions.

Broadcast.com, 1999: $5.7 Billion

The search giant purchased the Internet video streaming service for $5.7 billion. It promised to "integrate multimedia services throughout the Yahoo! network." Today, it's no more. After the acquisition, Yahoo! split the services previously offered by Broadcast.com into separate music and video services — Launchcast and Platinum — but both have quietly folded. Key in broadcast.com today and it is a redirect to the main Yahoo site.

But the legacy of Broadcast.com can be considered long, depending on how you look at it. The sale helped make co-founder Mark Cuban $1 billion richer — and famous. He wound up buying the NBA's Dallas Mavericks for $307 million, investing in ventures like HDNet, and getting a whole storyline on HBO's Entourage.

Overture, 2003: $1.63 Billion

Overture is credited as a pioneer in the sale of advertising linked to online search results, but Yahoo struggled to absorb the once-thriving company into its larger culture. Overture's patent for a system to sell advertising displayed next to Web searches was at issue in a years-long legal battle against Google that ended in a settlement in which Yahoo received $365 million in Google shares. But in the decade following the settlement, Google went on to capitalize on paid search and become an industry behemoth while Yahoo's seen its users and its revenue sources dwindle.

Explaining the quiet shutdowns of once-thriving companies acquired by Yahoo, Appleby said, "Sometimes it's hard for these companies to grow and survive and thrive in a larger hierarchical company ... The only way for these [acquisitions] to make sense for a larger companies is for the large company to continue to grow and make money."

Flickr, 2005: $30 Million

The $30 million acquisition of what was then a leading photo sharing service seems paltry, but the history of what happened after the acquisition sounds similar to the bigger dollar purchases. Tech site Pando Daily writes:

"For the first couple of years, things were fine. [Flickr co-founder Caterina] Fake told Gizmodo that 'Yahoo was a good fit initially' and 'in the subsequent two years after the acquisition, Flickr blossomed.' Then Yahoo's Corporate Development department began to bleed Flickr dry, denying it resources because it didn't generate sufficient revenue. 'The money goes to the cash cows, not the cash calf,' as one anonymous Yahoo employee told Gizmodo. Instead of constantly innovating, Flickr management found itself in meetings defending the product."

The news that broke Sunday is now official.

Yahoo confirmed early Monday morning that it is buying Tumblr in a deal worth about $1.1 billion. "Per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business," Yahoo added.

In its statement announcing the deal, Yahoo says that:

"Tumblr can deploy Yahoo!'s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they'll love. In turn, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!'s media network and search experiences. The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance the user experience."

Microsoft hasn't exactly had a great couple of years.

Its new Windows 8 operating system was held responsible for the drop in PC sales last quarter. Sales of its Windows Phones lag far behind both the iPhone and Google's Android phones.

The light in the darkness for Microsoft has been the Xbox 360, which has been the top-selling game console for over two years — beating out both the Nintendo Wii and Sony's PlayStation. On Tuesday, Microsoft is expected to announce a new version of the Xbox.

The new Xbox will certainly have plenty to entice hard-core gamers. Analysts say it will be faster, have amazingly realistic graphics and as much as two terabytes of storage. Fans of Call of Duty have already been getting tantalizing peeks at the new version and undoubtedly they will learn more about the updated game at Tuesday's event.

But, the new Xbox is going to be about more than hard-core games. Microsoft wants to be the center of your living room.

It's a strategy that's been working well for the company. According Microsoft, last year people spent more time on Xbox Live (the company's online service) watching TV and movies than they did playing games. Analysts say the new Xbox is going to move the console further down that road.

Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities who follows the game industry, believes that a deal is in the works that will turn the Xbox into a cable connection. That means you could switch from playing Call of Duty to watching Game of Thrones without changing boxes. However, Pachter says he isn't certain if Microsoft will announce that at Tuesday's press conference.

Pachter says most likely Tuesday will be a preview. Microsoft purchased Skype, so we are likely to learn about how you'll be able to see and chat with your friends while you're watching Game of Thrones or playing Call of Duty. The Kinect, Microsoft's gesture computing device, may be integrated into the Xbox rather than being a separate device.

Microsoft is the last entrant into the next-generation console wars.

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Over the 60 years that Mel Brooks has been in the entertainment business, his name has become synonymous with comedy. He is the man who broke Broadway records for most Tony Award wins with The Producers (an adaptation of his own movie), who satirized Westerns and racism in Blazing Saddles, and who poked fun at monster movies with Young Frankenstein.

Before the films, there was his TV career: Brooks was a writer for Your Show of Shows, one of the most influential comedy series in television history and a precursor to Saturday Night Live, and he was the co-creator of the spy spoof series Get Smart.

Brooks, who is the subject of a new American Masters documentary, "Make A Noise," that premieres Monday, May 20 on PBS, says his penchant for spoofing genres was firmly in the tradition of poking fun out of love .

"I loved Westerns as a little kid, and I loved horror films," Brooks tells Fresh Air's David Bianculli. "I had fun with them, but I also saluted the glory of the Western and the glory of James Whale's Frankenstein and Dracula.

Brooks grew up in Brooklyn, raised by a single mother (his father died of tuberculosis when he was two) who was just scraping by. Going to the movies was his introduction to a larger world and his mother recognized this. Even though she couldn't afford it, she encouraged his enthusiasm, one time even asking a neighbor for the final penny to pay the price of a movie ticket. The neighbor acquiesced.

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Over the past week, Pope Francis has launched a crescendo of attacks on the global financial system and what he calls a "cult of money" that does not help the poor.

The 2-month-old papacy of Francis — the Argentina-born Jorge Bergoglio — is shaping up as a papacy focused on the world's downtrodden.

And in sharp contrast with the two preceding papacies, this one even contains echoes of the Latin American liberation theology movement that John Paul II and Benedict XVI had repressed.

The new pope's popularity is growing day by day. When Francis appears in St. Peter's Square, the crowd shouts his name in every imaginable language. Women hold out their babies to be kissed; everyone wants to touch him.

Vatican security guards are at a loss as Pope Francis gets off his popemobile to shake hands, to hug and to be hugged.

"Bergoglio wants to be the priest that everybody wants to have in his parish, as confessor, as spiritual director," says church historian Alberto Melloni. "And what we have seen in these few weeks is the start of a pastoral papacy."

Deeply Concerned By Inequity

Francis has shed some of the most pompous symbols of papal power. The ornate Renaissance vestments — the golden crucifix and red shoes dear to Benedict — have been put away.

And Francis has shunned the papal apartment. He still lives in a communal setting in a Vatican residence where he delivers daily homilies at early morning Mass.

Benedict's focus on theology has given way to more concrete issues: Francis' main concern is poverty.

Vatican analyst Massimo Franco says Francis is "a true global pope," adding that, contrary to his predecessors, whose worldviews were shaped by 20th century European history, Francis is steeped in the global issues of today and of the future.

"His focus on slums, megacity slums and his experience as archbishop of Buenos Aires is very telling because naturally he is focusing on the poor of great cities," Franco says. "That is a non-state actor [who is] going to be a very powerful one in the next dozen of years."

Francis has long been deeply concerned by what he calls the negative aspects of globalization.

On May 1 — International Workers' Day — the pope referred directly to the collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh that killed more than 1,000 people. He expressed anger at their $50 monthly wages.

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World War II remains a monumental event in the collective Russian mind. It's known as the "Great Patriotic War," and Russians believe no one made greater sacrifices than the Soviet Union when it came to defeating Nazi Germany.

The end of the war is celebrated with a huge military parade in Moscow's Red Square on May 9, commemorating the millions of men and women, military and civilian, who died during the struggle.

Any criticism of the Soviet war effort is rare. But even the rare comment has Russia's lower house of Parliament, the State Duma, looking for ways to control the narrative and make sure that the Soviet role is never portrayed as anything less than selfless patriotism.

The trouble is that World War II was fought under the leadership of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, and his repressive policies continued throughout the conflict.

In the latest flap, legislators in the Duma have called for an investigation into remarks made by an opposition deputy criticizing Stalin's wartime counterintelligence agency, SMERSH.

The agency's name comes from the abbreviated Russian phrase "Death to Spies." A fictionalized version of SMERSH appeared as James Bond's main foe in the early novels by Ian Fleming.

A recent program on Russian state television portrayed SMERSH as a heroic unit that fought Russia's enemies.

However, the opposition lawmaker, Leonid Gozman, wrote in an online column that SMERSH actually belonged in the same category as the German SS and the Gestapo.

He wrote that the name should "cause horror and disgust, but not be part of a headline for a patriotic movie."

Gozman said that's because SMERSH, at Stalin's bidding, took part in the repression of the Russian civilian population as well, resulting in the killing and deportation of thousands of Soviet citizens.

Such talk runs counter to President Vladimir Putin's call for more patriotic education for Russian children.

The Russian government is currently working on an initiative to establish a "canonical" version of Russian history that will be promulgated countrywide in a single set of textbooks.

Gozman told The Moscow Times that the Duma should also check the comments of revered Russian authors such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, "because they said the same thing long before me."

The head of the Duma's Security and Anti-Corruption Committee, Irina Yarovaya, said a bill addressing criticism of Russia's wartime history could be brought up for consideration soon.

Poverty has grown everywhere in the U.S. in recent years, but mostly in the suburbs. During the 2000s, it grew twice as fast in suburban areas as in cities, with more than 16 million poor people now living in the nation's suburbs — more than in urban or rural areas.

Elizabeth Kneebone, a fellow with the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, says this shift in poverty can be seen in Montgomery County, Md., right outside the nation's capital.

"Montgomery County is one of the wealthiest counties in the country," she says, noting the streets lined with luxury apartments, big homes and crowded restaurants. "But it also has a rapidly growing poor population."

Kneebone, co-author with Alan Berube, of a new book from Brookings, Confronting Suburban Poverty in America, says poverty in Montgomery County has grown by two-thirds since the recent recession. That means 30,000 more residents living below the federal poverty line — about $23,000 for a family of four.

That doesn't buy much in a suburban area with a high cost of living. By some estimates, a family of four in Montgomery County needs more than $80,000 a year to meet basic needs.

Suburban Poverty On The Rise

A couple generations ago, when older Americans retired they could rely on pension plans to support them. Then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, many companies switched their retirement plans over to 401(k) accounts. The security of workers' retirement savings suddenly became subject to the vagaries of the stock market.

Read Robert Hiltonsmith's Research

Underwriting Bad Jobs: How Our Tax Dollars Are Funding Low-Wage Work And Fueling Inequality

But two summers ago, they broke that gravitational pull. Chen took his family more than 3,000 miles away to Rdy, a small granite island jutting from the Norwegian Sea north of the Arctic Circle. Chen's wife, Kristin Botnen, was born in Norway. But she says the move wasn't about returning home — or leaving home, either.

"For us, this was not an escape. We really liked our lives. But we still wanted a year where we could just do something completely different," she says.

Completely different. Winston and Kristin and their two kids, 4 and 6, used the daylight that burns into the wee hours to explore the island of fewer than 200 residents. In their home videos, they discovered beaches so pristine, they looked tropical. Except — the water was really cold.

And they went out to fish for the big cod that roam the Barents Sea. They made chips by frying fish skin. They picked berries that bulged under the long Arctic sun and plucked eggs from seagull nests to cook for breakfast. It was wild, it was pristine. And then it got dark.

During the deep Arctic winter, the horizon held the sun down for months.

"I say the northern lights are the only consolation for the Arctic winter. Which is otherwise dark and stormy and cold," Chen says.

"I don't think the cold got any of us," adds Botnen. "But the darkness — I think that could make any stable soul a little bit shaky."

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Tesla Motors, the American maker of luxury electric cars, has been riding a wave of good publicity.

Its Model S sedan (base priced at $62,400, after federal tax credits) was just named Motor Trend Car of the Year. Reviewers at Consumer Reports gave the lithium-ion battery powered vehicle a rave.

And the company, headed by billionaire innovator Elon Musk, 41, posted a profit for the first time in its 10-year history — powered in part by zero-emission environmental credits.

But Tesla also finds itself, and its business model, under sustained attack by a formidable foe: the National Automobile Dealers Association, one of the most powerful lobbying groups in Washington with a strong network of state chapters.

The dealers say they have no quibble with the quality and allure of Tesla's products. What they object to is the Palo Alto-based manufacturer's efforts to sell the electric car directly to consumers rather than through independently owned dealer franchises.

Tesla's model is often compared to the one used by consumer electronics giant Apple.

"We want to cut out the middleman," says Diarmuid O'Connell, vice president for business development at Tesla. "We're a bad fit for the dealer system."

The dealers' response?

"Buying an iPad is not buying a car," says David Hyatt of the national association, which, along with member chapters, has taken their franchise fight to the courts and to state legislatures across the nation.

It's a battle between a deep-pocketed interest group, which last year contributed more than $3.2 million to candidates, and a fearless entrepreneur.

And it's just heating up.

Battles Emerge State By State

A bill being considered in North Carolina, where there are currently 80 Teslas on the road and another 60 expected, would prevent the company from selling vehicles online. In Virginia, the state denied the company a dealer license to open a store.

Texas lawmakers are expected to ignore an effort by Tesla to gain an exception to strict franchise laws that prohibit factory-owned dealerships. Last year, there were only 43 registered Teslas in the state.

In both Massachusetts and New York, legal efforts by franchise dealers to block Tesla's efforts were rejected — including attempts to shut down three Tesla stores and two service centers in New York.

Wrote New York Supreme Court Justice Raymond J. Elliott III: "Dealers cannot utilize the Franchised Dealer Act as a means to sue their competitors."

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Poverty has grown everywhere in the U.S. in recent years, but mostly in the suburbs. During the 2000s, it grew twice as fast in suburban areas as in cities, with more than 16 million poor people now living in the nation's suburbs — more than in urban or rural areas.

Elizabeth Kneebone, a fellow with the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, says this shift in poverty can be seen in Montgomery County, Md., right outside the nation's capital.

"Montgomery County is one of the wealthiest counties in the country," she says, noting the streets lined with luxury apartments, big homes and crowded restaurants. "But it also has a rapidly growing poor population."

Kneebone, co-author with Alan Berube, of a new book from Brookings, Confronting Suburban Poverty in America, says poverty in Montgomery County has grown by two-thirds since the recent recession. That means 30,000 more residents living below the federal poverty line — about $23,000 for a family of four.

That doesn't buy much in a suburban area with a high cost of living. By some estimates, a family of four in Montgomery County needs more than $80,000 a year to meet basic needs.

Suburban Poverty On The Rise

Gavalda liked it so much that she asked her editor to buy the rights, so she could translate it herself. And the book took off.

"My books sell really well in France," she explained, "so when all the other European editors saw that it was me who translated this book, they were all curious about why Anna Gavalda translated it, and so they all bought the rights."

Back in New York, Frank can only speculate as to why Stoner has so moved European readers like Gavalda.

"[Stoner] resonates I think, partly, because of the art with which the story has been told," he said. "So even as he sets the scene in Columbia, Missouri, at the same time, it could be anywhere."

NPR's Bob Mondello and Susan Stamberg read excerpts of two of the best submissions for Round 11 of our short story contest. They read Ten Ring Fingers by Tamara Breuer of Washington, D.C., and Ghost Words by Matheus Macedo of Winthrop, Mass. You can read their full stories below and find other stories on our Three-Minute Fiction page or on Facebook.

She found the first ring on a night that smelled of body odor and beer. The bar's last customers had finally given up hope of taking her to bed and staggered away, leaving her to clean the stains of their desperation. She mopped the floor as quickly as possible to escape the place that made her feel uncomfortable in her own skin.

A glimmer of gold caught her eye. She bent down and pulled the thin metal band from a pile of grime. It was the first time she saw a wedding ring devoid of a ring finger; she wondered where the naked finger was now, and whether it felt exposed or liberated.

The next day, a frazzled middle-aged man scurried into the bar and asked her if she had found his wedding ring. She remembered seeing him with a brunette woman the night before, a woman who wore no rings.

She smiled apologetically and promised to let him know if it turned up. As soon as he left the bar, she slipped the ring onto her finger. That night, no men lingered around and she closed the bar a half hour earlier than the night before.

She found the second and third rings later that week. One was wedged between the wall and bar counter and the other lay near the main entrance. This time, two women entered to claim them, wearing the same clothes as the night before. She gave them the same answer she had given the first man. They glanced down at the three rings piled on her finger and left without saying anything.

She had spent little time in her life thinking about marriage, but now it invaded her mind. Every time she found a stray ring, she cleaned it and pretended like it was brand new, made especially for her. She entertained fantasies of the handsome men who had given her these rings, and although they always had different nationalities and personalities, they shared their mutual adoration for her.

In a few months time, every inch of her fingers was adorned with wedding rings.

Serving beer with metallic hands proved to be an arduous task, as the glasses kept slipping from her grasp. She no longer bothered to peek inside the tip jar in between serving customers: she knew that it would be empty. Her manager politely asked her if she could remove her rings during work hours, but she could not bare the thought of losing Adam, Julian, Pablo, Manuel, Conrad, Griffin, Nadim and Alex.

She made the mistake of coming to work five minutes late on a Friday night and found her manager waiting for her with his arms crossed. It was the first time she had ever been fired and all she could think about was how happy she was to have the rest of the night alone with her dreams.

As images of blue eyes and well-defined cheekbones swirled about in her mind, she sunk into her bed and allowed her body to leave an imprint on the mattress. She felt as if her body was the same, and yet the outline of her hands had changed. The indentations of each ring left a pronounced mark on the bed, making the shape of her finger resemble a caterpillar or centipede. They wormed their way around her mattress and became their own separate entities, shedding the rest of her body completely.