Weekend Edition Saturday

Transcript

JACKI LYDEN, HOST:

As London prepares for an Olympic influx, the world's athletes are not the only ones limbering up. Composer Tom Hunt is at work with members of a British team who compete in the equestrian sport called dressage. He joins us from the BBC studios in Salford.

Thank you for joining us.

TOM HUNT: Thank you for having me.

LYDEN: The music that you compose for the equestrian competition, tell us how the music and the horse work together.

In the Law of Dreams, Canadian writer Peter Behrens' first novel, an Irish immigrant, based on Behrens' grandfather, makes his way out of famine-starved Ireland to Canada. The novel came out in 2006 to wide acclaim and won Canada's Governor-General's award for fiction.

Now, Behrens has followed up with another multigenerational novel. The O'Briens opens in 1867, with teenage Joe O'Brien scratching out a living in Quebec after his father and mother have both died.

Ireland has launched some of the greatest writers in English literature, from William Butler Yeats to Oscar Wilde to George Bernard Shaw.

Though guitarist Moot Davis grew up a New Jersey rocker, he had an appreciation for country music thanks to his West Virginian parents. But it wasn't until he saw a certain cola commercial that he really turned a corner.

I hope it's not ungentlemanly to note that Junie Hoang is 40 years old. Her birth date appears in the Internet Movie Data Base, or IMDb, as does the fact that she has played a headless woman in Domain of the Damned and Ms. Fix-It in Voodoo Dolly.

She doesn't sound like a woman to cross.

Junie Hoang is going to court against IMDb, which is owned by Amazon, because they reveal her age in her entry. She believes that could cost her work.

This time last year, Col. Moammar Gadhafi was losing control of Libya. Scott Simon talks with Abdel-Rahim el Keib, the Libyan interim prime minister who took over in the wake of the country's uprising.

NPR's Ari Shapiro traveled with presidential hopeful Mitt Romney this week as the campaign swung through Mississippi and Alabama ahead of Republican primaries this coming Tuesday.

Think of them as political mushrooms, popping up on yards and street corners across the country every campaign season. They are yards signs, blaring the names of candidates. But do they work? Host Scott Simon speaks with Costas Panagopoulos, professor of political science at Fordham University.

Host Scott Simon reports on the other candidates for the Republican nomination for president: Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul. This week, they've been campaigning in the South and Midwest in the hunt for votes and nominating delegates.

Tom Goldman joins host Scott Simon to talk about the latest sports stories.

Transcript

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

We've been hearing the latest employment numbers show things moving in a positive direction, but the economy and jobs market are still weak. That's, of course, a major factor in an election year. Our friend from the business world, Joe Nocera, joins us. He's an op-ed columnist for the New York Times. Joe, thanks for being with us.

JOE NOCERA: Thanks for having me, Scott.

SIMON: As we heard, of course, the economy added more jobs in February than economists had expected. Is this a trend or true stability?

Japan's Miyage prefecture was one of the hardest hit by last year's earthquake and tsunami. There, the coastal community of Yuriage remains practically deserted. What was once a beautiful harbor filled with boats and a bustling community is now a desolate and deserted place, Doualy Xaykaothao reports.

NPR's Richard Harris talks with host Scott Simon about the Fukushima Dai-ichi reactors, one year after multiple meltdowns there spread radioactive materials across a swath of northern Japan. Huge technical challenges remain and prospects for resettling the area are uncertain.

Anthony Hopkins has been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, and has played Richard I, Richard Nixon, monarchs, statesmen, geniuses and heroes. He won an Academy Award playing one of the most notorious movie villains in history: Hannibal Lecter, the criminal cannibal with an affinity for Bach. Now, Hopkins is making his own music.

Carolina Chocolate Drops breathed new life into old-time music with the 2010 album Genuine Negro Jig, which put a contemporary spin on Southern string tools from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. That collection went on to win a Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album.

David Rohde is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and former New York Times reporter, who's now a foreign affairs columnist for Reuters and The Atlantic. He talks to host Scott Simon about what he calls the "Obama doctrine" in a piece that appears in the current issue of Foreign Policy magazine.

Transcript

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon.

Baseball has begun its spring training season. That used to be taken as a sign of spring. Is it now a sign of ka-ching in Major League Baseball? Jim Bouton, who pitched for the New York Yankees, the Seattle Pilots, Houston Astros, Atlanta Braves and about a dozen other major, minor, and semi-pro teams, the man who shook up baseball 40 years ago with his classic diary, "Ball Four," so widely quoted and reissued, joins us from the studios of New England Public Radio in Amherst.

Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, co-founder's of Ben & Jerry's ice cream, are part of a group of business leaders trying to raise money for Occupy Wall Street to help it regain its earlier momentum. Host Scott Simon talks with them about how they've already raised $300,000 and aim to raise $1.5 million more.

Ciaran Hinds seems to show up in every other movie you may have seen over the past decade, including There Will Be Blood, The Road to Perdition, Harry Potter and The Debt. He's currently starring in the hit television series Above Suspicion based on the Lynda La Plante novels. Host Scott Simon speaks with Hinds about his career.