Michelle Obama chats with Jon Stewart. (8:56)

Tell Me More Stories:
Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee discusses the presidential debate between Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Barack Obama (D-IL). Alexander also talks about his own re-election campaign.
Some watching the presidential debate Tuesday night said they found the town hall-style format at times restrictive despite intentions for it to give voters a chance to set the agenda for the discussion. They also said that the candidates' answers were light on specifics.
The significance of the Latino vote in this year's presidential election is the subject of Latinos '08, a new documentary airing tonight on PBS. It gives a historic look at how the Latino vote has been courted by presidential candidates and how this year's election is playing out with Latinos.
Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan contributes to the Tell Me More series In Your Ear, when some of the guests who've dropped by share the music they listen to. Duncan shares the songs he finds inspiring and soothing.

Fresh Air Stories:
An internal Justice Department investigation has concluded that the controversial U.S. attorney firings of 2006 were of a partisan political nature. One of the seven fired attorneys, Iglesias discusses his book, In Justice, an insider's account of the affair
Last week, fliers went up in predominantly African-American neighborhoods of Philadelphia warning that people with outstanding warrants or unpaid parking tickets could be arrested if they show up at the polls. Zach Stalberg of the Committee of Seventy discusses this effort to discourage voters.
A new report issued by the nonpartisan advocacy group Common Cause gauges the voting infrastructure in 10 swing states. Tova Wang, the primary author of the report, discusses the findings
Much has been made of the effects the recent financial crisis will have on "Main Street." Linguist Geoff Nunberg Geoff Nunberg discusses how this term gained such popular — and presidential — usage.

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Fresh Air

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Daily Song

Politics
Rachel Maddow discusses John McCain's Kitchen Sink Strategy (10:57)


Television
Little Britain USA (2:18) -- probably NSFW


Movies
Breakfast with Scot (1:51)


Music Video

With the stock market roller-coastering daily, Paulson and Bernanke giving hourly updates on the state of the economy, Suze Orman traveling to every single show on television to try to soothe the panic out of everyday people, the causes and consequences of the bailout keep getting more and more confusing. We can and should blame Wall Street greed. We can can should blame the Republican worship of free market. But we also should be able to look at the the problem from a slightly different angle.

Over at the New Republic, Alvaro Vargas Llosa discusses how it all happened, for him, in "Myth Busters." He writes that University of Texas professor Stan Liebowitz "chronicles the long march toward what we could call the Mortgage State, starting with the creation of the Federal Housing Administration in 1934 and all the way to the norms that made Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae acquire substantial loans given to people with weak credit."

Again, it's difficult to undestersand exactly what's going on right now, but this gives us one more tool to aid our comprehension.

TV ratings. Heroes isn't doing all that well, apparently. I really want to like that show, but it's just not that good. The guys over at Popnography agree with me.

Sacha Baron Cohen still doing it like Bruno


Glowing jellyfish net Nobel Prize. And Physics Nobel awarded to three particle physicists.

La Daily reports Mr. Black closed. Seized for back taxes. Was that the same reason they closed last time?

Sarah Vowell at the Union Square Barnes & Noble tonight at 7:00.

Travis Barker talks to US Magazine.


Be very grateful that you're gay. If you were straight, you would have to dangle these glowing BrakeNutz from your car. And possibly win a Nobel Prize.

The Blackberry Storm, the newest touchscreen phone, gets a pretty great review.

Fish Living 5 Miles Down Caught On Film

Tennis writer Jon Wertheim's weekly Ad-in/Ad-out

Ryan Kwanten dances in his underwear on HBO's True Blood, created by Alan Ball, the guy who did Six Feet Under. I haven't seen True Blood, but now I sort of have to. I didn't know it was so gay.

Seed Magazine has a great article on how we evolve. Not just how we got to where we are, but where we're going and how we got pointed in that direction at all.

Benjamin Phelan writes:

When the previous generation of life scientists was coming up through the academy, there was a widespread assumption, not always articulated by professors, that human evolution had all but stopped. It had certainly shaped our prehuman ancestors — Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and the rest of the ape-men and man-apes in our bushy lineage — but once Homo sapiens developed agriculture and language, it was thought, we stopped changing . . .[but] the colossal amount of information suddenly available has spurred a revision of the old static picture that will render it unrecognizable. Harpending and a host of researchers have discovered in our DNA evidence that culture, far from halting evolution, appears to accelerate it.

Some of the ideas presented have a history of misinterpretation and misapplication, but the reseachers Phelan quotes are meticulous in pointing out the fallacies that might arise from a misunderstandng of the data. One of the more elegant sentences from Phelan, "High intelligence is to great apes as the wing is to birds." I love the transformation of a process into something physical. The full article is available over at Seed.

The Daily Show explains who voters really are.

CNN.com helps keeps the debate facts straight with its Fact Checker.

Gay candidates expected to do well nationally on November 4.

The Swiftboating author of "Obama Nation" arrested in Kenya.

A review of Brokaw's performance last night.


Gwen Ifill says, "Palin blew me off."


Hillary's Advice: "We need some adult supervision!"