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The Barbershop guys talk about which political party seems more bruised now that the battle over taxes has ended. They also guess who will be going down in the NFL playoffs this weekend. Guest host Celeste Headlee checks in with culture critic Jimi Izrael; sports writer Pablo Torre, NPR's Ken Rudin and former chair of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele.

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DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

Soul and gospel singer Fontella Bass, whose 1965 hit "Rescue Me" endures as one of the most recognizable soul records of the '60s, died last week on the day after Christmas. She was 72 years old. Despite the success of "Rescue Me," it was the number one R&B single for four weeks, it took years of litigation before Bass could claim her share of songwriting credit and royalties. In 1993, she sued American Express for using the song in a commercial and received what she said was a significant settlement.

This interview was originally broadcast on March 14, 2011. Frank Calabrese's father, the Chicago mobster Frank Calabrese Sr., died on Christmas Day.

When Frank Calabrese Jr. was a teenager, his father came home one night and took him into the bathroom for a chat.

Update at 2:17 p.m. ET. Passage In The Senate:

The Senate just passed, by unanimous agreement, a bill that injects more than $9 billion into the insurance program that will assist those hit hard by Superstorm Sandy last October.

President Obama had urged passage and is expected to quickly sign the bill.

Our original post:

UPDATED: 4:50 p.m. Looking for a little weekend reading? The Food and Drug Administration has just the thing. On Friday, the agency released two proposed rules designed to boost the safety of the nation's food supply, encompassing hundreds of pages.

Historian Gerda Lerner, a pioneer in the creation of women's studies as an academic discipline, has died in Madison, Wisc. She was 92.

A prolific feminist author, Lerner wrote texts that traced the history of patriarchy going back thousands of years to more modern topics, such as African American women's history. Her many books included a two volume work called 'Women in History': the first book examined the history of patriarchy and the second dealt with the start of feminist consciousness.

In 2012 the Higgs boson was spotted at CERN, private company SpaceX began supply flights to the International Space Station, and the world bade farewell to the Galapagos tortoise Lonesome George. A panel of journalists discusses the year's top stories in science.

The comet ISON, discovered by two amateur astronomers last year, will zoom past the Earth next fall. But where did it come from? Astronomer Andrew Fraknoi says a passing star could have flung the comet our way from the Oort Cloud, a distant realm of ice chunks at the outer limits of the solar system.

Catfish eating pigeons, water travelling uphill, a blue whale barrel roll — where can one see such things? The scientific journals! Flora Lichtman and Ira Flatow look back on the year's best moments in science cinema. What was your favorite science video of the year?

Cold-water fish, snow-dwelling bugs and some grasses have evolved natural antifreeze proteins to avoid turning to ice cubes. Peter Davies, a biologist at Queen's University in Ontario, discusses how these antifreeze substances work, and their applications for human problems--like keeping the ice out of ice cream.