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Listeners sound off on the program's hottest conversations as editor Ammad Omar joins host Michel Martin for Back Talk. This week listeners respond to a study that says the U.S. tortured detainees after 9/11.

This week's explosion at the West Fertilizer Co. plant in Texas reminds us of the "cursed" side of the nitrogen that powers most of agriculture around the world. Through habit or necessity, we've come to depend on it. But there are costs.

With a manhunt underway for a suspect in Monday's bombings, the area in and around Boston has been virtually shut down. Transit isn't running, and most businesses and schools are closed. Most people are safe at home, but many are unnerved.

Laura Sullivan tells Robert Siegel that she has been learning more about the older suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. She's been talking with three women who knew him when they were in college — and they paint a dark picture.

With the capture Friday night of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 19-year-old surviving suspect in the bombings at the Boston Marathon, the story moves into a new phase — one of trying to answer critical questions. In particular, are there more bombs and are other people involved?

It's been a decade since Paul Chandler left the U.S. and headed to West Africa, having fallen in love with the region's music. Now Mali is his home, and he's teaching children at the American School in Bamako how to play the music of his adopted country.

Through the centuries, old songs known as the Child ballads have been passed down and tweaked to fit the times. More recently, they've been adapted by the folk revivalists of the 1950s and rockers from the '60s and '70s. Now, a duo of young songwriters is reviving them yet again.

Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott Simon remembers USA Today founder Al Neuharth, who died on Friday at his home in Cocoa Beach, Fla. Neuharth was 89.

He willed the nation's newspaper into life in 1982. And he insisted on some basic rules that sometimes get forgotten.

The bombing and its aftermath revealed a massive, highly coordinated homeland security apparatus that can organize a mass casualty disaster or lock down a major American city at a moment's notice. Or both.