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It's often hard to tell where Nicholson Baker ends, and the characters of his novels begin. NPR's Jeffrey Freymann-Weyr profiles the author, who has a reputation for finding magic in the everyday moments of ordinary lives. Listen to Baker read two excerpts from his latest novel, A Box of Matches.

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.

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.

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.

Weekend Edition Sunday music director Ned Wharton reviews discs by Radio Zumbido and illy B Eats, better known as Billy Martin, the drummer from Medeski Martin & Wood.

In Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, a group of American fly fishermen and Russian scientists work to protect one of the world's last remaining strongholds of wild salmon, steelhead and trout. NPR's Elizabeth Arnold reports.

Puzzle master Will Shortz quizzes one of our listeners, and has a challenge for everyone at home. (This week's winner is Maureen Mills from Berkeley, Calif. She listens to Weekend Edition on member stations KALW and KQED, both in San Francisco.)

In 1992, the Academy Award for best documentary short subject went to Educating Peter, a film by producer/director Gerardine Wurzburg that followed a young boy with Down Syndrome through third grade in a regular class in his Blacksburg, Va. elementary school. Now Wurzburg follows up with Graduating Peter -- view clips from both of the documentaries, and learn more about Wurzburg.

Host Scott Simon remembers singer Janis Joplin, who would have turned 60 this weekend had she not died of a heroin overdose in 1970. Joplin was cremated and her ashes scattered at sea.

NPR's Julie Rovner reports that with Republican control of the federal government, abortion opponents are looking forward to several victories this year. The first issue expected to pass both houses and to be signed into law is a ban on late abortions, which abortion opponents call "partial-birth" abortions. Other issues that will be debated include proposed laws to protect fetuses injured during violent crimes against pregnant women; a law barring adults from taking adolescents across state lines for abortions; and a law that would make it easier for hospitals and providers to decline to offer abortion services.