On Thursday, the U.S. military successfully tested a new hypersonic missile. The missile flies at eight times the speed of sound with a range measured in the thousands of miles. That allows the missile to hit a target anywhere on earth in less than an hour. Guy Raz talks with Noah Shachtman of Wired.com about how the Army's Advanced Hypersonic Missile works.
Melissa Block speaks with our regular political commentators, E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post and Brookings Institution and David Brooks of The New York Times.
From NPR News, it's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Guy Raz.
MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
And I'm Melissa Block. President Obama arrived in Indonesia today, the latest stop in a 10 day trip across the Pacific. He's used the trip to send a message that the U.S. is shifting its attention to the Asia Pacific region, both for economic and security reasons. That includes the announcement yesterday that the U.S. will deploy 2,500 Marines to Australia.
When Barron Lerner was writing his book on the history of drunk driving in America — and efforts to control it — he carried out an experiment at home that involved a bottle of vodka, a shot glass and a Breathalyzer. He was the guinea pig.
"I was trying to figure out just how drunk you had to be in order to not drive safely," says Lerner, a professor of medicine and public health at Columbia University, who wrote One for the Road. He decided to drink and test his levels — but he didn't actually get into a car.
The ancient texts can be seen up close — right in the middle of New York City. There are some theatrics, but NPR's Margot Adler reports that the exhibit is happily understated.
Melissa Block checks back in with Jason Potteiger with the Occupy Boston movement. The recent college graduate was unemployed when we first talked to him last month. Now he's got a job, but he continues to work with the movement on various projects.
Jesmyn Ward's novel, Salvage the Bones, won this year's National Book Award in fiction.
When you live on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, stories of hurricanes are passed down through generations. For my parents the storm was called Camille, and on Aug. 17, 1969, it made landfall.
They were four guys out of Athens, Ga., with a three-letter name — and one hell of an impact on rock. R.E.M. was Michael Stipe singing lead, Mike Mills on bass and harmonies, Peter Buck on guitar and Bill Berry on drums, until Berry left the band in 1997.
"We never expected the thing to last any longer than a couple of years to begin with," Stipe says. "And then when it did, and we were making records and people were interested in it, the band started getting bigger and bigger and bigger."
Time now for a home video recommendation from movie critic Bob Mondello. This week he's looking back a half-century, to a ground-breaking musical that won ten Oscars, West Side Story.
