All Things Considered

Every few years or even months since 1917, Congress has voted to raise the national debt ceiling — the maximum amount the federal government is allowed to borrow.

"Basically it's served, for quite some time now, as a speed bump along the road," says Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget at The New America Foundation. "Which just means, government stops, looks at what it's been doing and says, okay, we're going to borrow some more, and they approve...an increase."

The British and Italian embassies in Tripoli were burned and ransacked Sunday after the Libyan government said a NATO missile strike killed the son of leader Moammar Gadhafi.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca has a big job. He's responsible for the country's largest local jail jurisdiction, which held over 160,000 inmates last year alone.

But Baca isn't interested in locking up criminals and throwing away the key; he wants to give them an education.

His Education-Based Incarceration initiative focuses on promoting intellectual growth in prisoners, he tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered. Baca wants inmates to use jail time to study for success once their sentence is up.

For the early MTV generation, there are few artists more iconic than Ric Ocasek, the frontman of The Cars. Pencil thin, shock of black hair, dark sunglasses, cigarette dangling from his lip — Ric Ocasek was new wave rock and roll. And if the good times stopped rolling for you around the time The Cars split up in the late 1980s, there's good news: Those times are back.

"You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees." Those were the words of Kaiser Wilhelm II in August 1914, as he watched German troops heading off to fight in World War I.

Many never made it home.

"It was a long, bloody stalemate that went on really for four-and-a-half years," author Adam Hochschild tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered.