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Guy Raz reads listener reaction to yesterday's Thanksgiving Day story by writer Bailey White.

In his new book The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways writer Earl Swift looks at the history and people behind the world's largest public works project — the U.S. interstate superhighway system.

Some pumpkins just aren't meant for the pie pan. Robert Sabin has been growing "Atlantic giant" pumpkins for ten years and says they are more like children than fruit to him. He raises his pumpkins for competition--the heavier, the better.

In his book An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted, and the Miracle Drug Cocaine, medical historian Howard Markel tells the story of how Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, and Halsted, the acclaimed surgeon, fell under the addictive spell of cocaine.

The first stethoscope, invented by the French physician René Laennec, was simply a hollow wooden or ebony tube. Laennec named the device using the Greek roots stethos, or chest, and skopein, to look at or to observe. Medical historian Howard Markel discusses how Laennec came up with the invention. Unlike the stethoscope familiar to patients today, the original device was a simple tube.

When Catholics arrive at church for the beginning of Advent this weekend, they may find themselves stumbling over not only the words, but also the music. The Vatican has changed the English-speaking Mass to make it more faithful to the Latin. Some see that as a renaissance for composers and for the music publishing business.

Launched Saturday morning, the six-wheeled Mars Science Laboratory boasts a suite of high-tech instruments to study the planet's geology. It will land on the planet in August 2012, lowered gently to the surface on a cable by a rocket-powered helicopter.

With Paula Deen, it's not really about the butter, the mayonnaise or the fried cheesecake. For fans, it's about that feeling that you're sitting around the kitchen table with a friend.

Iowa voters catapulted the young senator from Illinois to victory in the state's leadoff caucuses four years ago. The president's campaign, which is gearing up in the early states ahead of next year's election, is counting on activists to stick with him in 2012.

More than 15 million women in the U.S. are gun owners, and 78 of them are in a new photo book. Photographer Lindsay McCrum says guns play a big part in some women's lives, but for very different reasons.