Carrie Brownstein founded Sleater Kinney, the coolest band to come out of the Pacific Northwest. She now has another awesome band called Wild Flag. She's a writer, music journalist and the creator and star of the brilliant sketch comedy show Portlandia about Portland, Ore.

We'll ask Brownstein three questions about the famously rigid city-state of Singapore, the diametrical opposite of Portland.

She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally decided to walk through the door.

I sucked in a full exchange of air and my stupefaction began to lift.

Oh, God ... did she respond to my note? She'd been sitting there long enough, but my study-carrel stakeout afforded only intermittent glimpses beyond the long, dark hair that draped over the back of her seat.

Next Wednesday: the Craig Taborn Trio live in concert. But first, these news:

There is often a special bond between pitchers and catchers. They report for work first in spring training and share a secret language of hand signals to work their way through batters.

But the bond between this pitcher and catcher duo, each Yankee legends of different generations, began after their playing days.

When Yogi Berra, a three-time Most Valuable Player, now in his mid-80s, arrives in Tampa for spring training, he's picked up at the airport by Ron Guidry, the four-time All-Star and Cy Young Award-winning pitcher known as Louisiana Lightnin'.

The typical first-time mother takes 6 1/2 hours to give birth these days. Her counterpart 50 years ago labored for barely four hours.

That's the striking conclusion of a new federal study that compared nearly 140,000 births from two time periods.

One big implication: Today's obstetricians may be rushing to do cesarean sections too soon because they're using an out-of-date yardstick for how long a "normal" labor should take.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments this week over key aspects of President Obama's health care law, including the expansion of Medicaid and whether the court even had the right to hear the case. But the core of the challenge mounted against the Affordable Care Act hinges upon its individual mandate, which requires almost every American to have or buy health insurance.

Transcript

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GUY RAZ, HOST:

More than 6,000 stories came in this round of Three-Minute Fiction - 6000. Amazing. The challenge this time, the story had to begin with the sentence: She closed the book, placed it on the table and finally decided to walk through the door. It's going to take us several weeks to read through those stories and find a winner, but for now, here are a few samples of what some of you did with that sentence.

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