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Best-selling writer George Pelecanos says his newest thriller, The Turnaround, is based on an incident that happened in his neighborhood when he was 15. At the heart of the book is the idea that people never outlive responsibility for what they do.

Soaring energy prices are expected to top the agenda as global finance leaders meet in Washington, D.C., Saturday. President Bush is pressing for increased energy production at home, as well as renewed efforts at conservation and improvements in research.

In New York this week, two unlikely groups came together: war veterans and modern dancers. Dancers kicked, twisted and jumped on and around retired airplanes from the 1930s and 1940s in a hangar at Floyd Bennett Field.

President-elect Barack Obama is reported to have picked CNN'S medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta to be the next surgeon general.

Called the "godfather of hip-hop," Russell Simmons has been credited with bringing rap to the mainstream. In the early 1980s, he helped found Def Jam Records, launching pad of legendary hip-hop acts like Run-D.M.C., the Beastie Boys and LL Cool J. (This interview originally aired Nov. 27, 2001.)

Virginia Woolf wanted to think about what it's like to think about ordinary things. Novelists, she said, should study life as it happens. That view suggests that while scientists probe and analyze questions, artists discover what questions to ask.

President-elect Barack Obama and two of his advisers were interviewed by federal agents investigating corruption in the Illinois Governor's Office. Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich is accused of trying to cash in on his power to appoint Obama's successor in the U.S. Senate. An internal review of the Obama transition team finds nothing improper about contacts with Blagojevich.

The Obama transition team releases a report on the Obama staff's conversations with Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. The governor is accused of — among other things — trying to benefit financially from appointing a Senate successor to the president-elect.

One of the biggest unanswered questions facing the Supreme Court is whether Chief Justice William Rehnquist, or any other court member, will retire this year. The 80-year-old Rehnquist is battling a serious form of thyroid cancer. NPR Legal Affairs Correspondent Nina Totenberg talks about who might succeed the chief justice.

In the 1950s, Mike Seeger sought out and recorded the traditional Southern music of the autoharp, a 36-string instrument small enough to hold in your lap. An expanded version of that collection is now out on CD.