All Things Considered

Alan Dugan, who died in 2003, is an engaging and entertaining writer, but do not call him charming. Charm can be an obnoxious quality in writing, when you can tell that the writer is trying to be ingratiating. Dugan, that amusing, soulful and engagingly nasty poet, sings the truth, often with a splash of high-grade vinegar, and if you'd like it a little sweeter, why, then, the hell with you.

Funny and haughty, radical and lyrical, Dugan's poems race nimbly between the vulgar and the classical, as in possibly his best-known poem, "How We Heard the Name."

After months of reading through more than 4,000 of your short stories, we have a winner in Round 6 of our Three-Minute Fiction contest.

That's our regular contest where we ask you to submit an original short story that can be read in less than three minutes.

For Round 6, we asked you to send us original works of fiction with two requirements: At some point in your story, one character had to tell a joke and one character had to cry.

Compton, Calif., was named the eighth most dangerous city in America last year. It's the city that put gansta rap on the map and turned Doctor Dre, Ice Cube and Easy-E into household names.

But in one little corner of the city, you're more likely to hear roosters crowing than the bark of a 9 mm. Welcome to the other Compton: Richland Farms.

It's a rural enclave in the middle of Los Angeles where people like Tomas Carlos raise chickens, goats and horses.

Vittorio Grigolo is a man in demand. From the Met to La Scala, the finest opera houses around the world clamor to have his voice resound through their halls, and he's one of the handful of rising tenors to have been touted as "the next Pavarotti."

The International Committee of the Red Cross reports that 800 bodies have been found in the western Ivory Coast town of Duekoue. Host Guy Raz talks with the BBC's John James about how the massacre fits into the post-election tension and fighting in the country.