This year's U.S. Open hasn't exactly been par for the course. Instead of the big names in golf dominating the leaderboard, a couple young breakout stars have been tearing up the green. Guest host Jacki Lyden talks with Ron Sirak, senior writer at Golf Digest to preview the final day of the tournament.

Bill Haast, a pioneering snake expert, died this past week at the age of 100. He was director of the Miami Serpentarium Laboratories, where he extracted venom from the world's most poisonous snakes for use in medical research. Guest host Jacki Lyden has a remembrance.

This past week marked the fifth consecutive week of falling U.S. gas prices. Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst with the Oil Price Information Service, explains the price decline and tells us whether the downtick will be sustained this summer.

Since last fall, the Federal Reserve has been providing support for the economy through a program known as QE2, short for Quantitative Easing, Round Two. That program is coming to an end, and there are concerns about whether the economy is strong enough to get along without it. NPR's Jim Zarroli reports.

I recently looked through diaries that my father wrote as a young man in New York in the 1930s, trying to get his start in life during the Great Depression.

The man in the diaries is not the man I knew: a middle-aged father of four who commuted from the New Jersey suburbs to a job he detested in Manhattan. Instead, the 20-something Robert Fessler was eager, passionate, full of hope. He dreamed of traveling around the world, maybe getting a job as a reporter. Just out of high school, he was trying desperately to mold himself into an interesting adult.

In the decade since the release of Ang Lee's blockbuster Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Chinese filmmakers have struggled to repeat its international success.

But the Quijang Film and TV Investment Group is hoping a new project might provide perfect fodder for a Hollywood hit. The Chinese government-owned company recently invested $30 million in hopes of making a movie that would both celebrate Chinese culture and turn a tidy profit.

For most of the world, Cary Grant was a Hollywood icon, but to Jennifer Grant he was simply Dad.

The screen legend retired from acting at 62 when his daughter was born in 1966. He went on to devote the last 20 years of his life to fatherhood, giving his daughter the kind of life only he could give with trips to Monaco and Christmas dinners with the Sinatras. But it was the quality of that life that left a mark.

Jennifer Grant chronicles her close relationship with her father in her new book, Good Stuff: A Reminiscence of My Father, Cary Grant.

Aramaic is the lingua franca of the ancient Middle East, the linguistic root of modern day Hebrew and Arabic.

"Once you understand Aramaic," says Karen Stern, "you can read anything. You can read Hebrew, you can read Phoenician. I always call it the little black dress of Semitic languages."

On-Air Challenge: The four rarest letters in the alphabet are J, Q, X and Z. You are given a familiar word and must change one letter in it to a J, Q, X or Z to get another familiar word. For example, given the clue "enact," the answer would be "exact."

The flea market day start long before the crowds stream in, says author Maureen Stanton. And that's when the real deals go down.

"The dealers are here, sometimes right at the crack of dawn," Stanton tells NPR's Laura Sullivan. "The antique dealers, generally, are 'picking' the other tables ... looking for the thing that they can resell for double or triple or 10-fold."

Stanton has written a new book about this growing subculture, Killer Stuff and Tons of Money: Seeking History and Hidden Gems in Flea-Market America.