All Things Considered

I went looking for a bubble the other day. I'd heard that prices for American farmland were spiking – up thirty percent over the past year, and double what people were paying five or six years ago. It sounded like irrational exuberance.

I flew to Iowa, drove to the town of Colo, an hour north of Des Moines, and dropped in on a land auction. It was a great scene: A hushed crowd of farmers, an auctioneer with a voice made for opera, and a climactic duel between rival bidders, one of whom raised the price with a wink, the other with a slight nod.

Across the world, admirers of Apple Computers are constructing impromptu shrines outside Apple Stores. Guy Raz hears from people in Santa Monica, Calif., and Washington, D.C., about what Apple means to them.

Guy Raz, talks with Alexander Nazaryan about his rant in Salon.com, excoriating the American literary world. He explains that Americans don't deserve a Nobel Prize because their work is too interior. Nazaryan is on the editorial board of The New York Daily News.

Guy Raz talks to Joseph Alonso, head stonemason at the Washington National Cathedral, about the damage the building suffered from the Aug. 23 earthquake.

ESPN is parting ways with Hank Williams Jr. The network will no longer use his signature song "All My Rowdy Friends," to introduce Monday Night Football.

Radiohead's first hit, "Creep," was everywhere in 1993. The band could have reacted as many other modern-rock acts did in the '90s: by repeating the same old sound, album after album, before fading into the background. Instead, the group made each record a reinvention, from the spare and haunting Kid A to In Rainbows, which sounded, well, sexy. It's all helped make Radiohead one of the most inventive and important bands in the world.

Melissa Block talks with NPR's Don Gonyea about Sarah Palin's announcement that she won't run for president.

The future of the The Simpsons hangs in the balance as negotiations continue between 20th Century Fox Television, which makes the animated series, and the actors who supply the characters voices. How does a TV classic that's been on the air a record 23 seasons find itself at death's door?

Well, the cartoon Simpsons aren't rich, but the real people who bring them to life sure are. Six main actors are responsible for everyone from Homer to Lisa to bartender Moe, and you won't believe how much each makes to do voices for these characters. Try $8 million a season.

This summer I spent a month in Egypt doing research for the public radio program Afropop Worldwide. In October, Afropop will begin airing a series of programs looking at Egypt — past and present — through the eyes of musicians. In one episode Egyptians are asked to imagine how the revolution will affect their popular music?

Commentator Dennis O'Toole is a writer and improv performer from Chicago.

Today, Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam G. Riess won the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering that expansion in the universe is speeding up. That's great news for me, since I had Riess and Perlmutter in my fantasy league.

Honestly, I could have gotten Schmidt too, but I drafted Nathan Seiberg, mainly because he's worked with both supersymmetric gauge theories and with discrete light-cone quantization. That was a hedge.

When I was a kid, I assumed that in the future things would get better and better until we were all driving flying cars and playing badminton with space aliens on top of 500-story buildings. Frankly, I kind of counted on this happening. But now I don't assume that we'll just keep going up anymore.