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U.S. soldiers are attempting to train new Iraqi soldiers outside Mosul, but threats of violence and anti-American sentiment make the job a daunting one. Some of the soldiers say few in the U.S. understand the complexities or the scale of the insurgency they're confronting. NPR's Philip Reeves reports.

Bill "Spaceman" Lee's new memoir is Have Glove, Will Travel: The Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond. The book picks up where Lee's previous memoir, The Wrong Stuff, left off in 1984.

As Americans view volcanic activity at Mount St. Helens with awe and unease, tourists are flocking to Indonesia and the site of one of history's most spectacular volcanic blasts. Hear NPR's Michael Sullivan.

In the second part of his interview with Linda Robinson, NPR's Steve Inskeep discusses the role of U.S. military Special Forces in the global war on terror. Robinson is the author of Masters of Chaos: The Secret History of the Special Forces. Robinson says Special Forces have a tenuous relationship with Pakistani soldiers in the mountainous border region with Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden is believed to be hiding.

Dubose is co-author (with Jan Reid) of a new book about House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. Delay's nickname — and the name of the book — is The Hammer. DeLay was a small-town Texas exterminator who rose to be the most powerful man in Congress. Dubose was the editor of The Texas Observer for 11 years. He is also co-author, with Molly Ivins of Bushwhacked and Shrub.

It's a new form of outsourcing: teachers in India are tutoring American children in math over the Internet. The Delhi-based company Career Launcher is one example: It contracts with a U.S. company to provide extra tutoring. The market has expanded since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act.

In Maryland, schools experiment with using comic books as learning tools. The program illustrates an ongoing debate: do teachers give students a challenge, or offer less difficult material that is more likely to spark their interest?

Patrick Radden Keefe is the author of Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping. For his book, Keefe researched the possibility that the United States has a planet-spanning surveillance network, known as Echelon. Keefe is a third-year student at Yale Law School and was a Marshall scholar and a 2003 fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

In the 1950s, composer William Bolcom began an ambitious project to set the 46 poems in William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience to music. A massive work, the result premiered in 1984. Now, a recording of Bolcom's work has finally been released. NPR's Jeffrey Freymann-Weyr reports.

NPR's Ari Shapiro talks with Maria Garcia, host of "Anything For Selena." The podcast tells the story of Selena Quintanilla's life and Garcia's childhood spent on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.