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The Tavis Smiley Show bids music legend Ray Charles a final goodbye. On Thursday, a long line formed around the Los Angeles Convention Center where people paid their final respects to the music legend. We hear from Mable John, who wrote more that 52 songs for Ray Charles and served as lead vocalist and director of the Raylettes backup singing group.

We broadcast excerpts from a recent panel presented by The New Yorker magazine. On the panel were network news anchors Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather. They discuss the presidential campaign and network news. The panel was moderated by Ken Auletta, a contributor to The New Yorker who writes the Annals of Communications column for the magazine.

The Alexander Payne film Sideways follows two men and two women on a trip through California wine country. The story becomes a metaphor for their journey through life. Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan offers a review.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger, by Nigel Slater, and Lilla's Feat: A Story of Food, Love and War in the Orient, by Frances Osbourne.

Opera singer Robert Merrill died this weekend, at his home in New Rochelle, New York. The baritone sang with the Metropolitan Opera for over 30 years. He also helped introduce opera to a wider audience, with regular appearances on talk shows, and at Yankee Stadium, singing the national anthem. NPR's Jeffrey Freymann-Weyr has an appreciation.

For hundreds of years, only scholars and museum curators have had access to the "Quartos," the earliest printed editions of Shakespeare's plays. But the British Library has just put 93 Quartos on the Internet, leading to what NPR's Bob Mondello says is much ado about Shakespeare on the Web.

We talk with an editor from Encarta Webster's Dictionary of the English Language about new words that are being added to the dictionary.

Gretchen Berland uses experience from her previous career of making documentaries to compose video projects on health-care topics. She has won a $500,000 "genius award" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews a reissued book called Visa for Avalon by Bryher, the pen name of an Englishwoman named Annie Winifred Ellerman. Visa for Avalon is a political allegory first published in 1965.

The film Mean Creek, starring Rory Culkin, dives into the messy reality of teen life, combining sensitivity and teen themes in a plot with echoes of Deliverance. Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan has a review.