As You Know, Puzzles Are A Pastime

On-air challenge: For each given category, name something in the category where the first letter is also the first letter of the category. For example, given "Military Ranks," you would say "Major."

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?

Answer: Aegean Sea; Indian Cay

Winner: Terry Thacker, Greenville, S.C.

Dilruba Ahmed: An Outsider Turns To Poetry

April is National Poetry Month, and to celebrate, Weekend Edition is talking with younger poets about why they chose to write poetry and why it's still important in our everyday lives. This week, we spoke to Bangladeshi-American poet Dilruba Ahmed.

N. Korean Refugees Tell Tales of Ordinary, Desperate Lives

Sokeel Park sees the effects of North Korea's repressive government every day. He lives in South Korea, but works for an NGO named Liberty in North Korea. His job is to debrief those who've managed to leave the North and help them start new lives in the South.

Park says that with so much focus on the country's nuclear weapons and leadership, it's easy to forget about the 24 million people going about their everyday lives. Those lives are heavily controlled by the North Korean government, citizens are told where to work, where to live, and are not allowed to leave.

Xenia Rubinos: Adventures In Syncopation

Brooklyn-based keyboardist and vocalist Xenia Rubinos likes to play with syncopation. Her debut album, Magic Trix, is based around rhythms that sometimes are identifiable as Caribbean, and at other times veer into the experimental.

"It's something I have a lot of fun with — just taking one rhythmic figure and turning it around as many ways as I can," Rubinos says. "That's a huge part of my compositional process, just messing around with something very simple and seeing how far I can take it."

E-Cigarettes Bring Smokers Back Inside, For Now

Smoking used to be sexy. Look at Mad Men or Humphrey Bogart. But that was then. These days, Americans are buying fewer cigarettes. Just this week, U.S. tobacco companies released their first quarter earnings, and, unsurprisingly, cigarette sales were down from last year.

But that doesn't mean tobacco companies aren't still profitable. Smoke-free products like e-cigarettes are marketed as a less harmful alternative. And, for now at least, you can puff them indoors.

Conservative Shift Has Some Kansans Yearning For The Past

Kansan journalist Jason Probst says the Kansas he knows has disappeared.

"The great state of Kansas passed away on March 31, 2013 after a long and difficult battle with extremism," he wrote in an editorial for The Hutchinson News.

His faux obituary, lamenting Kansas' embrace of conservatism, went viral. Tens of thousands of people read it. Many were fellow Kansans who wrote to Probst to say they, too, were disturbed by their state's dramatic swing to the right.

Two Daytime Soaps Return, But Will Fans Follow Online?

In the final network episode of All My Children a year and a half ago, a drunken JR Chandler arrived at an engagement party holding a gun and bent on revenge. He fired, then the screen went dark without revealing a victim.

Hard Hits, Hard Liquor In 'The Summer of Beer and Whiskey'

The summer of 1883 proved to be a pivotal time for American baseball.

A brash German immigrant and beer garden owner, Chris Von der Ahe strode onto the scene to found a new franchise, the St. Louis Browns — a team that would later become the St. Louis Cardinals.

His motivation? To sell more beer. And while he made a fortune, he also changed the sport forever.

Karl Hyde, Underworld Music Maker, Surfaces

Karl Hyde is one-half of the English electronic dance duo Underworld. But he's also an installation artist, a painter and a composer. Last year, he collaborated with director Danny Boyle on the music for the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony.

Though he's been making dance music with Underworld for over 25 years, mixing his club beats with fragmented lyrics, Hyde wanted his first solo record to go deeper.

Fresh Air Weekend: David Sedaris And Matthew Weiner

Fresh Air Weekend highlights some of the best interviews and reviews from past weeks, and new program elements specially paced for weekends. Our weekend show emphasizes interviews with writers, filmmakers, actors and musicians, and often includes excerpts from live in-studio concerts. This week: