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Kathleen Edwards is a Canadian singer-songwriter who pairs stark lyrics with instrumentals that are sometimes surprisingly upbeat. Meredith Ochs reviews her debut album Failer.

It's often hard to tell where Nicholson Baker ends, and the characters of his novels begin. NPR's Jeffrey Freymann-Weyr profiles the author, who has a reputation for finding magic in the everyday moments of ordinary lives. Listen to Baker read two excerpts from his latest novel, A Box of Matches.

The Gardens of Remembrance, blocks away from the former site of the World Trade Center, will be designed by Dutch plantsman Piet Oudolf. NPR gardening expert Ketzel Levine speaks with NPR's John Ydstie about Oudolf's way with plants. View an online photo gallery of Oudolf's work at Talking Plants.

He wrote the screenplay for the film Undercover Brother, which began life as a Web site animation. The film, now out on DVD, is an action comedy [that] pokes fun at black action films of the 1970s and racial stereotypes. Ridley's latest novel is A Conversation with the Mann, about a black comic in the civil rights era of the early 1960s. This interview first aired January 10, 2002.

NPR's Michele Norris talks with Kathryn Blume, co-founder of The Lysistrata Project, a coordinated schedule of world-wide readings of the play Lysistrata on March 3, 2003. The ancient Greek play tells the story of a woman who organizes a stand against war, getting women on both sides of a conflict to withhold sex from their husbands until the men agree to sign a peace treaty. She hopes the readings will mobilize an international theatrical voice against the Bush administration's war on Iraq.

Weekend Edition Sunday music director Ned Wharton reviews discs by Radio Zumbido and illy B Eats, better known as Billy Martin, the drummer from Medeski Martin & Wood.

In Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, a group of American fly fishermen and Russian scientists work to protect one of the world's last remaining strongholds of wild salmon, steelhead and trout. NPR's Elizabeth Arnold reports.

As the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade approaches, debate over abortion continues. Abortion rights opponents stress abstinence-only education and point to Uganda, where emphasis on abstinence has lowered a 30-percent HIV rate to 5 percent in a decade. NPR's Brenda Wilson reports.

In 1992, the Academy Award for best documentary short subject went to Educating Peter, a film by producer/director Gerardine Wurzburg that followed a young boy with Down Syndrome through third grade in a regular class in his Blacksburg, Va. elementary school. Now Wurzburg follows up with Graduating Peter -- view clips from both of the documentaries, and learn more about Wurzburg.

The Sundance Film Festival is going on through Saturday in Park City, Ut. Sundance has been widely credited with bringing independent films to mainstream audiences. Commentator Jake Tapper is in Park City this week, covering the festival for the Sundance Channel's nightly show. He says that one thing that distinguishes an independent film is that it is highly personal -- about the filmmaker's own revelation or catharsis. But just because an idea or subject is important to a filmmaker does not mean that the rest of the world will be moved by it.