State and National News

Dozens of young dancers in Shreveport/Bossier will audition Thursday to perform with the Moscow Ballet in its "Great Russian Nutcracker," at the Strand Theatre in downtown Shreveport. Christy Holden, owner of Power and Grace Dance Studio, said this year the Moscow Ballet will select 60 local dancers to be part of the production.

If you believe in magic, then this week's show is for you. See how well you know your creatures of the supernatural variety, play a word game based on Missy Elliott song lyrics and hear what happens when trivia meets TED talks. This week's Very Important Puzzler is podcast- and pop culture-maven Julie Klausner, who dishes on Real Housewives and her abiding love for The Monkees.

Doctors do make a difference when it comes to keeping children and teenagers from taking up tobacco. This may sound like a no-brainer, but until recently there wasn't strong evidence that anti-smoking efforts by pediatricians and other primary care doctors make a difference.

Got an idea for a classical cartoon or a reaction to this one? Leave your thoughts in the comments section.

Pablo Helguera is a New York-based artist working with sculpture, drawing, photography and performance. His new book is Helguera's Artunes. You can see more of his work at Artworld Salon and on his own site.

Back in May, several independent forecast groups predicted an especially active Atlantic hurricane season this year. But with August drawing to a close, we've yet to see a single one.

Dear Protojournalist,

Traveled from D.C. to Missouri in mid-August with "The Fishy Fleet" (an offshoot of anti-GMO protest group Occupy Monsanto). It was a convoy of 17 activists piled into a 1960s-era RV and 5 "fishy" cars with friendly looking frankenfood sculptures on top ...

Near Pittsburgh the fleet held up traffic when a toll booth attendant took a pix with her iPhone. One Ohio woman, who followed "Fishy Sugarbeet" into a gas station, proclaimed: "That's the freakiest thing I've seen in Perry County — lately!"...

Twitter isn't always the best place for big, thorny philosophical conversations. But it's a great forum for catharsis and taking the temperature of a popular sentiment. Sometimes, rarely, it's actually both.

On this week's roundtable podcast, we open with Lake Bell's movie In A World, which takes place in the world of voiceovers. We chat about the movie itself, and about Bell, but also about where voiceovers stand right now. Are they still important? As important as they used to be?

Then, we take a reader suggestion and talk about reconstituted bands — replaced singers, replaced drummers, and sometimes entire new versions of bands you thought you knew. This takes us into the story of Journey, the matter of The Beach Boys, and much more.

North and South Korea have reportedly agreed to resume reunions of families separated by the 1950-53 Korean War, picking up from where the emotional meetings left off when they were suspended three years ago.

"I didn't do this to do any hating on anyone. I did this to be funny. I did it to be a joke," says Tuffy Gessling, the rodeo clown behind a skit at the Missouri State Fair earlier this month that sparked outrage when a masked "President Obama" was chased by a bull that Gessling said was "gonna getcha, getcha, getcha, getcha!"