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Thirty years ago this month, millions of viewers watched a basketball game that would change sports forever. Earvin "Magic" Johnson and the Michigan State Spartans took on Larry Bird and the Indiana State Sycamores for the national college basketball championship title. It was, says author Seth Davis, the beginning of March Madness.

Tom Fontana is executive producer and writer of HBO's Oz, the realistic drama about life in an experimental unit of a maximum-security prison. Fontana also created Homicide: Life on the Street and the 1980s hospital drama, St. Elsewhere. The new DVD box set Homicide: Life on the Street collects the show's first two seasons, and includes special features.

The NFL found some two dozen players for the New Orleans Saints took part in a pay-for-hits program that paid bounties for knocking specific players out of games. Those involved likely face fines or suspensions. But lawyer Eldon Ham argues that doesn't go far enough, and proposes criminal charges.

Novelist Geraldine Brooks, poet Robert Hass, Western essayist William Kittredge: from critic Alan Cheuse, an array of books to keep winter's chill and the ever-earlier dark at bay — at least in the circle of light by the reader's chair.

Joan DeJean, author of The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafes, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour!, aims to prove that almost everything we think of as glamorous can be traced back to the 1600s and the tastes of French monarch Louis XIV.

The New Horizons Mission blasted off toward Pluto in 2006; it's on course to arrive in Pluto's neighborhood in 2015. Mission leader Alan Stern discusses the journey of the spacecraft, and why he thinks Pluto is still a planet. Plus, the mission to get Pluto on a commemorative stamp.

In his book The Omnivorous Mind: Our Evolving Relationship with Food, neuroanthropologist John S. Allen discusses the history of human eating, from foraged foods on the savannah to four-star meals cooked by celebrity chefs, and discusses why crunchy foods like tempura and fried chicken have universal appeal.

Creative cooking is not only for the restaurant chef, but for those cooking at home as well. NPR's Michele Norris speaks with Michael Lomonaco, author of Nightly Specials, a book that aims to inspire spontaneity in the kitchen.

May your days be as merry and bright as those in Blue Earth, Minnesota and McAdenville, North Carolina -- a pair of places where seasonal decorating is serious business.

The holiday shopping season brings with it a flurry of over-simplified personal finance lessons from the media, according to commentator Charles Jaffe. So, he has some advice of his own. (3:00)