Weekend Edition

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SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Thursday night, dispatches from a glum future began to appear on the Twitter account of The New Yorker magazine's fiction department - a science fiction story, told sentence by sentence, tweet by tweet, a story about Jennifer Egan titled "Black Box." It features a character from her 2010 novel "A Visit from the Goon Squad" which won the Pulitzer Prize.

That character, Lulu, is now a spy working for the government several decades later. Jennifer Egan joins us and in the spirit of the Tweet form we're going to conduct this interview in 140 seconds. Thanks for being with us.

JENNIFER EGAN: Thanks for having me on the show.

SIMON: Is this just a gimmick or a chance to experiment?

An estimated 125 million people are expected to tune in to Saturday night's final contest in Eurovision 2012. This year's song contest has provoked controversy over its host country, Azerbaijan, whose president is accused of human rights abuses. Vicki Barker has the story.

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Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate and Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren continues to be dogged by the question of if she has claimed American Indian heritage. Yesterday, in the wake of new allegations, Republican Senator Scott Brown accused Professor Warren of misleading Harvard about her Native American ethnicity. From member station WBUR in Boston, Fred Thys reports.

FRED THYS, BYLINE: A story in Friday's Boston Globe says that for six years, Harvard University reported to the federal government that it employed a Native American woman at the law school. In the past, Harvard has identified that woman as Elizabeth Warren. At Boston's Faneuil Hall yesterday, Senator Brown seized on the Globe story.

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New Orleans had endured so much - the Civil War, yellow fever, the Depression and a string of spectacular political shenanigans, but its award-winning daily newspaper, the Times-Picayune, has not been able to survive as a daily. Eileen Fleming of member station WWNO reports now on the diminution of a paper that's continued reporting during the darkest days of Hurricane Katrina.

EILEEN FLEMING, BYLINE: Ann Milling traces her New Orleans ancestors back centuries on her mother's side. For nearly five decades the 175-year-old newspaper has landed on her city doorstep every day of the week.

ANN MILLING: I'm passionate about the Times-Picayune and I'm passionate about New Orleans and I think that they go hand in glove.

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SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon. And I wait all week to say: time for sports.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

SIMON: The Stanley Cup finals are set - left versus right, a frequent flier bonanza. The NBA playoffs feature a thrilling matchup between Texas and Oklahoma, the Old Hands versus the Young Guns. And tennis, red, dusty and with a side of frites - the French Open opens. Here to talk about all of it, NPR Tom Goldman,

Morning, Tom.

TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: Good day to you, Scott, which is what they're saying in New Jersey today. Good day.

SIMON: Good day. Good day.

GOLDMAN: Good day.

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And if you're one of millions of motorists on the roads this holiday weekend, you may have noticed something unexpected and welcome. Gas prices are falling. This at the start of the summer driving season when gas prices usually spike. We turn now to Daniel Yergin. He's author of "The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World," and chairman of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates. He joins us from his office in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Yergin, thanks so much for being with us.

DANIEL YERGIN: Thank you.

SIMON: How far have gas prices dropped?

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As we just heard from Ari, early polling can do much to shape political campaigns, but voters who are just trying to follow the debate, polls and surveys can seem contradictory and confusing. To help us see through some of the fog of polling, we're joined now by Michael Dimock. He's the associate director for research at the Pew Research Center in Washington D.C. Thanks for being with us.

MICHAEL DIMOCK: Thank you.

SIMON: And J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer and Company, a public opinion and research firm in Iowa. Ms. Selzer, thank you very much for being with us.

J. ANN SELZER: Happy to be here.

SIMON: And let me ask you each, compared with a decade ago, how reliable are polls today?

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This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon. This week in Egypt, a nation that has been ruled for thousands of years by pharaohs, colonial rulers, military regimes and dictators held its first free election for a national leader. Egyptians went to the polls on Wednesday and Thursday, and though the official results are not yet in, the election is certainly a milestone in the democratic awakening known as the Arab Spring. Here's a selection of voices from Cairo in the week that Egypt voted.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: There'll be some ups and downs, I believe. But it's definitely better than what we've been through for the past 30 years.

A Quinnipiac University poll out this week found Mitt Romney with a 6-point lead over President Obama in Florida. That would seem to be very good news for the presumptive Republican nominee in what may be the biggest swing state this fall.

Except another poll, done at the same time by Marist College and NBC News, found Romney trailing Obama in Florida by 4 percentage points.