Weekend Edition Sunday on NPR & Classical Music

Transcript

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Last fall, Abe Lincoln lost his sword. A copper blade went missing from atop President Abraham Lincoln's burial site in Illinois. Authorities eventually recovered it, but in two pieces. Now, as Rachel Otwell reports, the artifact has been replaced.

RACHEL OTWELL, BYLINE: Lincoln's tomb is at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois. It's a massive structure with statues of Union soldiers that reach far into the sky. Mikle Siere works at the historic site. He describes the statue the sword was taken from.

Host Rachel Martin talks with China scholar Perry Link about activist Chen Guangcheng's arrival in the U.S. Link has followed the lives of Chinese dissidents involved with the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

Out West Sunday, it will start getting dark earlier than normal, but just for a little while. A major solar eclipse, although not quite total, will spread across the skies in a 200-mile swath from Oregon into west Texas. Longtime Washington, D.C., meteorologist Bob Ryan has traveled the world chasing eclipses with his wife. He joins host Rachel Martin.

When a bookmobile broke down last winter in rural Vermont, patrons, especially preschoolers, really missed it. Then a donor, who heard an NPR story about the rolling library's demise, came up with over $100,000 for a replacement. The town can't believe its good fortune. Vermont Public Radio's Charlotte Albright reports.

If life is a ballgame, then NPR's Mike Pesca is the guy in the stands, carrying his own stat-sheet and searching out empirical evidence. Host Rachel Martin speaks with Pesca about what the numbers have to say about injuries.

When Egyptians go to the polls on May 23, many will be looking to celebrate the end of military rule that began some 50 years ago. Observers warn that it won't be easy to send a deeply entrenched military back to its barracks, and they point to Turkey's experience as an example. NPR's Peter Kenyon reports from Istanbul.

That song they play when a winner goes on too long at the Oscars? It has a name.

It's called "Too Long." Okay, not a creative name, but a name. Every conductor has a name for the get-off-the-stage music, and "Too Long" belongs to Bill Ross, who conducted the orchestra at last year's ceremony. And Bill wants you to know, it's not his call to interrupt speakers in what is possibly the best moment of their lives.

What does it take to turn a story told in one medium into a hit film? In the weeks ahead, we're going to explore that question with some of the nominees in this year's Best Adapted Screenplay category of the Academy Awards. Host Rachel Martin speaks to Sasha Stone, founder and editor of AwardsDaily.com.

Host Rachel Martin reads from listener comments about last week's show, including taking up an instrument as an adult and the 25th anniversary of Weekend Edition Sunday.

On-Air Challenge: Today's puzzle is "the pits." Every answer is a familiar two-word phrase or name in which the first word starts with "PI" and the second word starts with "T."