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The Gardens of Remembrance, blocks away from the former site of the World Trade Center, will be designed by Dutch plantsman Piet Oudolf. NPR gardening expert Ketzel Levine speaks with NPR's John Ydstie about Oudolf's way with plants. View an online photo gallery of Oudolf's work at Talking Plants.

NPR's Michele Norris talks with Whitney Dow and Marco Williams, producers/directors of the POV documentary Two Towns of Jasper airing on PBS stations next Wednesday. Dow and Williams talk about how they each directed a separate film crew in Jasper, Tex., during the trials of three white men for the murder of a black man, James Byrd, Jr. He was chained to the back of a pickup truck and dragged to death in 1998. Dow's crew of white filmmakers only interviewed white residents of the town. Williams' crew of black filmmakers only interviewed black residents of the town. The deliberate segregation of the film crews allowed residents to speak with a candor seldom seen on camera.

In 1995, in the wake of two shootings at women's health clinics in Boston, a group of leaders from opposing sides of the abortion debate agreed to hold four secret meetings to prevent further acts of violence. The meetings continued for seven years. NPR's Margot Adler visits the women at the Public Conversations Project offices, located in a small home in Watertown, Mass., to talk about the effect of their conversations. Online, hear the women's stories and read more about the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

The 108th Congress goes to work with a number of fresh faces in the crowd. In an occasional series charting the course of Congressional "freshmen," NPR's Andrea Seabrook visits with Republican Thaddeus McCotter, representing Michigan's 11th District. McCotter's conservative pedigree goes hand-in-hand with his love of rock 'n' roll music -- see photos of family, staff and new Capitol office.

This past week, federal prosecutors indicted Joseph Massino, the alleged boss of New York's Bonnano crime family, on charges including racketeering and murder. Host Liane Hansen speaks with journalist Jerry Capeci, writer of the "Gang Land" column in The New York Sun. Visit Jerry Capeci's web site at http://www.ganglandnews.com.

Kathleen Edwards is a Canadian singer-songwriter who pairs stark lyrics with instrumentals that are sometimes surprisingly upbeat. Meredith Ochs reviews her debut album Failer.

Drugmakers spend billions of dollars each year trying to persuade doctors to prescribe their medicines. One company currently is in federal court, charged with illegally marketing its drug Neurontin for uses not approved by the FDA. And a family in Minnesota is asking why doctors prescribed the epilepsy drug to treat their son Dustin for manic-depression. NPR's Snigdha Prakash reports.

David D'Arcy reports on this year's Sundance Film Festival, widely regarded as the most prestigious showcase for independent films and documentaries, which opens tonight. One film features a handful of the 40,000 Cubans who left their island on rafts in the 1990s.

Autism is a disease that often drives people apart. It separates children from parents, and can leave parents feeling abandoned by researchers who offer no cure and little hope. But the MIND Institute, founded by fathers of autistic sons, is trying to change that by making parents key players in the search for a cure. NPR's Jon Hamilton reports.

He wrote the screenplay for the film Undercover Brother, which began life as a Web site animation. The film, now out on DVD, is an action comedy [that] pokes fun at black action films of the 1970s and racial stereotypes. Ridley's latest novel is A Conversation with the Mann, about a black comic in the civil rights era of the early 1960s. This interview first aired January 10, 2002.