Weekend Edition Sunday

This past week, politicians of all stripes blanketed the Midwest and the news. We wanted to balance the talking points and campaign speeches with the voices of ordinary people, struggling in this economy, so NPR's Andrea Seabrook drove south, out of Washington, D.C., filing stories from places that don't often make the news.

British author and math enthusiast Alex Bellos tells me he's got more than 30,000 responses so far to his survey, What's Your Favorite Number and Why? As I said in a recent blog post, people are writing him from the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia (Antarcticans, being mostly penguins, have shown little interest).

The arc of American culture can be found in the nation's music. Author Tom Piazza shares that story in his new collection of essays, called Devil Sent the Rain: Music and Writing in Desperate America.

Piazza starts with a meditation on the blues.

"Within that musical form, you'll find a series of strategies for dealing with, I guess you could say, hard times," he tells Weekend Edition guest host John Ydstie.

Often the lyrics focus on the hard times, Piazza says, but the music underneath the lyrics "is anything but downhearted."

On-Air Challenge: Every word is a compound word, or a familiar two-word phrase or name, with the consecutive letters L — E — S — T. Specifically, the first word ends in L-E and second part starts with S-T. For example, "activity in a seminary." The answer would be "BibLE STudy."

The deliciously chill beats and subversive lyrics of the lounge band Thievery Corporation have been a mainstay of nightclubs and lounges around the world for a decade and a half.