NPR News

Fresh Air Weekend highlights some of the best interviews and reviews from past weeks and new program elements specially paced for weekends. Our weekend show emphasizes interviews with writers, filmmakers, actors and musicians, and often includes excerpts from live in-studio concerts. This week:

Host Scott Simon speaks with Val Castor, the senior "StormTracker" for News 9 in Oklahoma City, about what it's like to do the job in one of the most climatically volatile regions of the country.

NPR's Bob Mondello and Susan Stamberg read excerpts of two of the best submissions for Round 11 of our short story contest. They read Snowflake by Winona Wendth of Lancaster, Mass., and Geometry by Eugenie Montague of Los Angeles. You can read their full stories below and find other stories on our Three-Minute Fiction page or on Facebook.

Nearly 18 million tourists descend on our nation's capitol every year, and most of them are keen to spend time at the many free museums in Washington, D.C. But only about 100,000 people take the trip across the river to a museum of a different sort: the Pentagon. The Pentagon's exhaustive historical displays offer fresh insight into the range of the Defense Department's activities.

Host Scott Simon catches up on the week's sports with NPR's Tom Goldman.