NPR News

Eugene Peterson, the author of more than 30 books, including the best-seller The Message, is a poet, professor, scholar and pastor. But it's that last role that has defined and shaped his life in unimaginable ways, and it's the focus of his new book, The Pastor.

The book's subtitle is "Every step an arrival," and Peterson tells Weekend All Things Considered host Guy Raz the words are from a poem by Denise Levertov where she is talking about her vocation.

The space shuttle Discovery is set to land for the last time Wednesday at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It will then be sent off to the Smithsonian for retirement as NASA shuts down the shuttle program. Two orbiters remain — Endeavour and Atlantis — and museums all around the country are vying to score one of them.

One of the most appealing ways a museum can sell itself to NASA is to tell officials about the yellow school buses in the parking lot. The kids come in — their heads full of computer games — and they see actual airplanes and rockets.

The last 20 years haven't been kind to the American criminal.

In the great American crime decline that began in the 1990s, New York City's crime rate famously dropped 75 percent by 2001.

But there and elsewhere, few crimes have disappeared as dramatically as pickpocketing.

Silent movies are flickering, fragile, ephemeral creatures. Printed on flammable nitrate film stock, they're often lost in studio vault fires and anonymous dumpsters — or sometimes they just disintegrate quietly into nonexistence.

Only about 20 percent of movies from the silent era survive in America today. That number increased just a little bit recently, when the Library of Congress received 10 long-lost films found and preserved by archivists in Russia.

Libyan helicopter gunships fired on a rebel force advancing west toward the capital, Tripoli, along the country's Mediterranean coastline Sunday, and forces loyal to leader Moammar Gadhafi fought intense ground battles with the rival fighters.