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Saxophonist Branford Marsalis has performed pop music with Sting, hip-hop with Buckshot LeFonque, and jazz with a host of giants like Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock and Art Blakey. His new CD offers another challenge. Marsalis teams with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra on Creation - a collection of the works of various French composers. Liane speaks with Marsalis about his newfound confidence with classical performance and some of the lessons he learned along the way. (17:49) Creation is on Sony Classical

Host Jacki Lyden visits four families in Israel and the West Bank who have lost children in the bloody conflict in that region. Since the most recent violence began on September 28, almost two hundred children under eighteen have died, 164 Palestinians and thirty-seven Israelis.

Lisa talks with author Michael Chabon about the legend of the golem, the mythical man made of clay. Chabon researched the golem while writing his latest novel, Kavalier and Clay, which just won the Pultizer Prize for fiction.

NPR's Renee Montagne travels to Owensboro, Kentucky, to report on America's last public execution. In August of 1936, 20,000 people watched Rainey Bethea die by court order on the gallows.

The top of 14,000-foot Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano on the big island of Hawaii, is one of the last best places to do astronomy. But astronomers now have devised a way to make "the seeing," as they call it, even better. Join NPR's Christopher Joyce for a visit to Mauna Kea.

Host Lisa Simeone takes a tour of a new exhibition at the Smithsonian's Museum of American Art with curator Larry Bird, charting the birth and boom of the do-it-yourself art form called Paint-By-Number. She also has a hand in painting an outdoor banner on the Museum's facade, 40 feet up.

David Greenberger reviews a new CD called "Rigging the Toplights" by a Chicago trio called Pinetop Seven. While many of the lyrics onthis album are dark and fearsome, Greenberger hears a strangely hopeful message in them. ("Rigging the Toplights" is released by Self-Help/Atavistic(ALP310). For more information, visit www.atavistic.com.

Comments by a German Bishop on a talk show over the weekend have fueled debate about whether Pope John Paul II might retire his post before he dies. Robert talks with Father Thomas J. Reese, Editor in Chief of the Roman Catholic magazine America, and author of Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church. They discuss church canon, which does allow a Pope to retire if he feels he cannot fulfill his duties. Few have taken such a step. Reese explains what happens if a Pope becomes incapacitated before retiring. Reese's book, Inside the Vatican, is published by Harvard University Press, 1998.

NPR's Tom Cole sits down with blues guitar legend Eric Clapton to talk about his childhood in Surrey, England, his difficult relationship with his family, and why "reptile" is a term of endearment.

In 1966, Michael A. Baronowski of Norristown, Penn., took a tape recorder with him into combat in Vietnam. Lance Cpl. Baronowski was in the demilitarized zone when he captured sounds of jokes, songs, bombs, and bullets. He died later that year in an ambush in a village — but not before sending these recordings home. (Produced by Christina Egloff with Jay Allison.)