Follow Homer To Find Your Way

On-air challenge: Categories are given based on the name "Homer," the name of a town in Alaska. Name something in the category beginning with each of the letters H-O-M-E-R. For example, if the category were "Chemical Elements," you might say Helium, Oxygen, Magnesium, Einsteinium, and Radon. You can give the answers in any order.

Last week's challenge: Name a geographical location in two words — nine letters altogether — that, when spoken aloud, sounds roughly like four letters of the alphabet. What is it?

Making The Switch: An American Woman's Journey To Islam

Each week, Weekend Edition Sunday host Rachel Martin brings listeners an unexpected side of the news by talking with someone personally affected by the stories making headlines.

Karen Danielson converted to Islam three decades ago, was she was 19. She was raised Catholic, and then later became a Baptist and enrolled in a Baptist college, where she picked up the Koran. Now, she's the director of outreach at the Chicago chapter of the Muslim American Society.

In Colombia, A Town Badly Scarred By Wartime Rape

El Placer is a remote hamlet deep in southern Colombia, on the edge of the Amazon. Founded half a century ago by farmers who found it fertile and bucolic, its name means "The Pleasure."

But for women and girls in El Placer who suffered years of sexual assaults after an illegal armed group stormed in, the name is only associated with unspeakable violence and murder.

Brigitte Carreño, 25, is among the women who suffered. A feared local warlord in El Placer raped her when she was 12, leaving her with searing memories that remain vivid and painful to this day.

Scheherazade: From Storytelling 'Slave' To 'First Feminist'

The stories of One Thousand and One Nights are among the world's most famous works of literature. They start with a king who discovers that his wife is having an affair. In a fit of rage, he has her executed. Lebanese author Hanan al-Shaykh explains what happens next:

"From that night, he decreed a law that he will marry a virgin every single day and deflower her at night, and then kill her at dawn," al-Shaykh tells NPR's Rachel Martin.

The killing continues until Scheherazade, the daughter of the king's vizier, offers herself as the king's bride.

Can't Stop The Beat: Three New Caribbean Artists Making Waves

If there is a musical lesson history has taught us, it's that you cannot stop a beat. People can be imprisoned, movements can be disbanded, but music — and the ideas embedded in it — will always find a way.

Turks Worry Leader's Response To Protests Hurt Economy

Turkey's protests come at a sensitive moment for the country's economy, long considered a regional bright spot.

If there is a jewel in the crown of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's decade in power, it's the enviable record of growth that has tripled the average Turk's per capita income and brought in a flood of foreign investment.

Tim McGraw: 'I'm Just Now Learning How To Be Good'

Tim McGraw has been a star long enough that he can look back on his early music and laugh a little bit. That goes for his hairstyles as well; ask him about the music video for "Indian Outlaw," and he'll tell you about what he calls "the mullet days." But that hit from his second album, along with the track "Don't Take the Girl," put his music career on a whole different trajectory.

If Employment Game Has Changed, Who's Teaching The Rules?

It still pays to earn a college degree. That is, if you get the right one. Georgetown University published a report Wednesday that looked into this dilemma.

"The labor market demands more specialization. So, the game has changed," says Anthony Carnevale, the report's co-author and director of Georgetown's Center on Education and the Workforce.

Carnevale says students probably aren't choosing the right degrees because they haven't been given the right guidance.

Chasing The Elusive American Dream

Nodding Syndrome: A Devastating Medical Mystery In Uganda

It starts with the nodding — otherwise normal children begin to nod their heads, pathologically. Then come the seizures. The children stop growing and stop talking. Ultimately, the disease wrecks the children, physically and mentally.

The strange and deadly illness known as nodding syndrome affects only children, and only in a small pocket of East Africa. It has affected more than 3,000 children since the late 1990s, when it first appeared in what was then southern Sudan. And for more than three years, the cause of nodding syndrome has eluded epidemiologists around the globe.

Keep Your I On The Prize

On-air challenge: Every answer is a made-up two-word phrase in which the letter I is inserted somewhere inside the first word to get the second word.

Last week's challenge: Think of a word starting with G. Change the G to a T and rearrange the letters after the T. The result will be a new word with the same meaning as the original word.

Answer: Giant; titan

Winner: Bonnie Kind of Germantown, Md.