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President Obama ruffled conservative feathers when he bowed to the Japanese emperor during his trip to Asia. Bowing is the standard greeting in Japan, as it once was in the United States. Slate magazine's Andy Bowers explains the history of the gesture and why it feel out of favor in the U.S.

An exhibition at the Louvre in Paris explores the meaning of lists in arts, literature and culture. The exhibit and accompanying program were prepared with Italian writer Umberto Eco, an expert on the subject. He says humans attempt to grasp the incomprehensible through things like catalogs, dictionaries and museum collections. Eco's latest book is The Infinity of Lists.

Between trysts with various women and men, the British poet Lord Byron maintained a lifelong, spirited correspondence with a clergyman named Francis Hodgson. Now, a collection of their revealing letters is up for auction at Sotheby's.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) has proposed reading the 2,074-page Senate health care bill on the floor of the Senate. Floyd King, a veteran actor for the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, performs a dramatic reading of a section of the bill.

Through a striking art installation, actress Emma Thompson chronicles a naive 18-year-old from a small Eastern Europe republic who was caught up in London's sex trade. Her name is Elena, and her story makes its debut in New York on Nov. 10.

The new documentary One Fast Move or I'm Gone uses various artists to voice Jack Kerouac's novel Big Sur. Director Curt Worden and biographer Joyce Johnson discuss the beat poet's relationship with the California coast.

How do you photograph memory? It's a question that fine-art photographer Jennifer Karady is exploring. And not just any memory, but memories of war brought home by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Listeners have one day left to get in their stories for the current round of our "Three-Minute Fiction" contest. The four words that have to appear in each piece are plant, button, trick and fly.

In Columbus, Ohio, nonprofit arts groups are doing what U.S. businesses have done for decades: outsourcing. Financially beleaguered arts groups are handing over the "back office" to CAPA, an organization that handles finances, marketing, ticketing and fundraising ... stuff that artists don't really like doing anyway.

The winner of the latest round of our three-minute fiction contest will be announced Sunday. Listeners sent in nearly 4,000 short stories this round. Each story had to include these four words: plant, button, trick and fly.