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The grainy, blurry portrait of Ran Blake on the cover of his album, Driftwoods, looks like spirit photography: the pianist as ghostly presence. His playing can be spooky, too. The CD radically transforms popular vocal standards from Billie Holiday, Hank Williams, Quincy Jones and more.

Eddie Argos, the 29-year-old leader of London band Art Brut, has made a career out of not growing up. On the group's latest album, Art Brut vs. Satan, that may be for the best, according to critic Robert Christgau.

Music critic Milo Miles reviews two new albums: Booker T. Jones's Potato Hole, and Allen Toussaint's The Bright Mississippi.

This year marks the 70th anniversary of Blue Note Records, whose roster once included heavyweights Thelonious Monk and Horace Silver. Singers were a rarity, but Sheila Jordan has outlasted them all.

Pianist Ben Folds has crafted a series of alt-rock hits over the past 15 years. For his pseudo-"greatest-hits" package, he's commissioned new arrangements of those songs from university a cappella groups across the country. Folds and host Jacki Lyden compare and contrast the various versions of his songs.

Each year, limber librarians compete for the coveted gold book cart at the annual Librarian Book Cart Drill Championships. With elaborate dance, athletics and performance art routines, they vie to show that librarians can be hip.

Panel Vice Chair Liz Cheney said the witness has yet to appear in the hearings and didn't take the call from the former president but alerted their lawyer, who told the committee.

Villages along the northwestern Alaskan coast are facing widespread erosion and flooding that not only threatens homes, but also artifacts and archeaological treasures clustered near the beach. From Alaska Public Radio Network, Gabriel Spitzer reports on efforts to save ancient dwelling places and artifacts.

As fitness goes high-tech, even your bathroom scale is going digital. One company went from making old-fashioned spring-loaded scales to scales that aren't just digital but use all sorts of high-tech applications to talk directly to your wireless device.

A week after Lil Wayne's latest album was released, it had sold a million copies. Robert Christgau says the phenomenal success of Tha Carter III, especially in these dismal times for the music industry, is due to the risky marketing techniques Lil Wayne employed and the playful way he treats traditional gangsta rap themes.