NPR News

It's Thanksgiving time again, and while we're very sad to be without our pal Glen Weldon this week, we're happy to be joined by the lovely Barrie Hardymon.

We start with a discussion of Thanksgiving and pop culture — and, more specifically, why there's not as much Thanksgiving-themed pop culture as you might think, particularly compared to Christmas. We explore the turkey episodes of Friends and other comedies, but talk a little about the surprising dearth of Thanksgiving movies.

President Obama and congressional leaders from both major parties met at the White House this morning for the first of what will likely be many negotiations aimed at averting a plunge over the so-called fiscal cliff.

We watched for news from the key players — who include House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio — and updated with highlights.

News outlets in German and Sweden have been reporting for the past year that some of the products made in past decades for Swedish furniture giant IKEA were produced by political prisoners in Cold War-era East Germany.

Today, IKEA conceded that the reports are true and that some of its "representatives" were aware of what was happening.

At the beginning of What About Dick?, a stage performance released this week as a digital download, writer/performer Eric Idle announces that the audience will be witnessing "Aural Cinema." The story — a tangential, broadly comic yarn involving the decline of the British Empire and "the birth of a sex toy invented in Shagistan in 1898" — is to be performed in the style of a radio play, with the actors (Russell Brand, Eddie Izzard, Billy Connolly, Tim Curry and Tracey Ullman, to name five) reading their parts from scripts into