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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.

Somebody calling MTV "trash television" isn't exactly news. This time it's the Italian-American group UNICO, talking about the reality series Jersey Shore. Commentator Andrew Wallenstein says there's a reason we find stereotypes on TV.

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.

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.

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.

A 2007 scandal involving NFL star Michael Vick exposed the world of illegal dogfighting. Now out of prison, Vick has pledged to help end the practice; Dave Davies talks about the campaign with John Goodwin, Humane Society manager of animal fighting issues, and former dogfighter Sean Moore.

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.

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.

At the SXSW Film Festival, we profile the new film Lovers of Hate, hear how distribution will change in five years and attend Jeffrey Tambor's acting seminar.

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.