The American job market is still a long way from healthy, but its pulse feels a lot stronger now that it did six months ago. The Labor Department says employers added 227,000 workers to their payrolls in February, a solid — if not spectacular — performance. It continues a trend that suggests a genuine recovery, not a temporary blip.

The unemployment rate held steady at 8.3 percent, even as nearly 500,000 people joined the workforce.

Improvement in the job market is a boon for President Obama as he tries to hold onto his own job in November.

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:

Ready for some creative competition? Weekends on All Things Considered is launching Round 8 of its Three-Minute Fiction contest. Here's what we look for: original, short fiction that can be read in less than three minutes — that's no more than 600 words.

The famous pack mules that carry supplies and people in and out of the Grand Canyon have back pain, as you might imagine. One man is on a mission to make the lives of these beasts of burden a little less painful.

When Rene Noriega retired a few years ago after a long career as a Border Patrol agent, he took what — for him — was the next natural step.

An Everett, Washington, man is excited for the U.S. premiere Friday of his documentary about last year’s devastating earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Japan. The first-hand account will also get its Canadian premiere in Vancouver, B.C., Saturday night, almost precisely one year after the disaster. Correspondent Anna King has his story.

Bald eagles are no longer considered threatened by the state of Oregon. The state's Fish and Wildlife Commission voted Friday to remove the iconic bird from the state list of endangered species.

RICHLAND, Wash. – There’s one less chemical weapons cache in the world today. The U.S. Army has certified to the international panel in The Hague that the Umatilla Chemical Weapons Depot is free of all chemical agents in compliance with international treaties. An end-of-operations celebration is planned for March 15. Correspondent Anna King reports.

Famously, Harold Camping, the founder of Family Radio, blanketed the country last year with warnings on bilboards and pamphlets that the world would end on May 21.

Campaigning in Mississippi on Friday, Mitt Romney took a pre-emptive swipe at a new 17-minute video about President Obama to be distributed next week by Obama's re-election campaign.

"The Road We've Traveled" was created by filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, who won an Academy Award for the 2006 Al Gore climate-change documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

Robert Siegel talks with 80-year-old director Mike Nichols, whose Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman premieres March 15. Over his more than 60-year career, Nichols has directed, written and produced for Broadway, TV and film.