Commentary

Transcript

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

And I'm Melissa Block.

President Obama wins a second term. Democrats flip a handful of seats in both the House and the Senate, and Republicans begin a new round of soul-searching.

SIEGEL: It's only Wednesday but we have more than enough to talk about with our Friday regulars, EJ Dionne of The Washington Post and Brookings Institution and David Brooks of The New York Times. Welcome to both of you.

The Bark River is my backyard, childhood river. And yet, in a lifetime of travel, I'd never explored it.

I knew it carved the land from the Ice Age to settlement times, from the Black Hawk War of 1832 (in which young Abraham Lincoln appears) to the era of grist mills. But the Bark also flows past impressive Indian mounds. It nurtured poets, naturalists and farmers.

When former Marquette University professor Milton Bates published his Bark River Chronicles through the Wisconsin State Historical Society, I jumped at the chance to learn about the river with him.

Let me tell you about the day my husband bolted into the room and asked, "Are you free for lunch on Sept. 21?"

It was the middle of July, and I'm not Oprah. Usually, I can be booked for lunch at a moment's notice. But I played along. I flipped through my virtual calendar, scrolled down to the very date in question, and gave it a good stare.

'Yup, I'm open!' I told him.

"Good," Ken said, 'because I got us tickets to see Coach Saban."

Morning Edition commentator Sandip Roy is back home in India after spending years in the U.S. He finds some Indians are standing up to a very old problem they call "eve teasing."

I lost touch with that peculiar Indian euphemism "eve teasing" in the years I was away from India.

It sounds coy, like a Bollywood hero romancing the pretty girl as she walks down the street, and it can mean that. But it can also mean what happened to a teenager a few weeks ago in the northeastern city of Guwahati.

Transcript

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

For more on today's announcement and the rest of the week in politics, we turn now to E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post. Hi there, E.J.

E.J. DIONNE: How are you? Good to be with you.

BLOCK: And syndicated columnist Linda Chavez. Hi there, Ms. Chavez.

LINDA CHAVEZ: Good to be with you.