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This week, we take a look at the city of Buffalo, New York, both past and present. The tour begins with the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, which heralded Buffalo as the city of the future, a place where hydropower made the widespread use of electricity possible. Mark Goldman, author of City on the Lake: The Challenge of Change in Buffalo, New York, serves as Liane Hansen's tour guide of present-day Buffalo. Their first view of the city is from Canada, where Goldman says you can see Buffalo's long history layed out before you. Next, they venture down Main Street, where we meet singer-songwriter Ani DiFranco, who has based her company, Righteous Babe Records, in her hometown of Buffalo.

Scott talks with Sister Dianna Ortiz, a Roman Catholic nun who was tortured in Guatemala in 1989. She is the founder of Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition.

NPR's Barbara Bradley reports on the four directors who have led the Federal Bureau of Investigation since J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI's most recent director, Louis Freeh, leaves a bureau clouded by scandal and accusations, but his predecessors didn't have an easy job, either.

One part hip-hop, two parts jazz and a whole lotta Philly — that's what happens when you mix three master musicians, unrehearsed jamming and a risk-taking producer. Scott Simon talks to bassist Christian McBride and producer Aaron Levinson of The Philadelphia Experiment about their experimental new album.

NPR's Linda Wertheimer spoke with Allan Langheinrich, a master tool and die maker and meteorite enthusiast who maintains a rock cutting and preparation facility at his workshop in Ilion, New York.

In the fourth installment of her series on favorite summers, NPR Special Correspondent Susan Stamberg talks with Andrew X. Pham about the summer he first returned to his homeland of Vietnam. Pham says that visiting the country 20 years after his family fled the Vietcong was painful and deeply cathartic. (7:37) {Book Information: Pham, Anderew X. Catfish and Mandala : A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999}.

Back in the seventeenth century, explorers told of seas teeming with giant marine creatures. A group of researchers concluded that these were an accurate account of life in the oceans at the time. As John Nielsen reports, these fabulous aquatic ecosystems collapsed as humans started to hunt these creatures.

Theaters no longer screen shorts before the features, and some of the Internet sites that many hoped would provide perfectly-suited forums for shorts are now defunct. Yet there is more than one film festival devoted to them. NPR's Howie Movshovitz reports on the future of short films.

NPR's Alex Chadwick continues the National Geographic-NPR Radio Expedition about the Tortugas Ecological Reserve near the Florida Keys. Chadwick talks with the scientists studying coral reef life in the underwater wilderness area, and tries not to get seasick.

We hear suggestions for President Bush's State of the Union address from several All Things Considered commentators including English Teacher Ray Salazar of Hubbard High School, Chicago, about education; Merrill Matthews, a visiting scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation in Dallas, about health care policy; Cincinnati City Beat Columnist Kathy Y. Wilson, about race relations; and Kurt Campbell, Senior Vice President at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, about foreign relations.