All week, Tell Me More has been honoring conventional and unconventional fathers, whose big day is this Sunday. Some of our guests and contributors have been submitting essays that reflect the joys and challenges of being a dad.

Today's guest: Ben Elkin, an alternative energy developer, law school student and single dad caring for his 7-year-old son, Stash.

BEN ELKIN:

Maurice Jamal is the man behind the 2007 "Dirty Laundry"-- a black and gay-oriented family film that was one of the first such films released in theaters. As part of LGBT Pride Month, guest host Allison Keyes speaks with Jamal about his career and GLO TV, his Urban LGBT television network.

With the nation's Hispanic population topping 50 million, media outlets are racing to court audiences from this key demographic. When the National Association of Hispanic Journalists meets today for its annual convention, chief among the agenda items will be the issue of reaching Hispanics through English and Spanish-language media. Guest host Allison Keyes discusses the current state of Hispanic media with Monica Lozano, a panelist at the convention and CEO of Impremedia, the country's largest Spanish-language newspaper company.

Barack Obama coasted into his presidency largely thanks to many progressive Democrats who were energized by his campaign. This week boasts the largest annual gathering of progressives in the country, an event called Netroots Nation. To learn what's on the progressive agenda for the next election, guest host Allison Keyes speaks with Rep. Keith Ellison, co-chair of the Progressive Caucus in the House of Representatives, and Robert Borosage, founder of the Progressive Majority PAC.

Romance comics — those sappy, dramatic serials from the 1940s and '50s — were designed for girls who grew up craving honeymoons and marital bliss in the years following World War II. Michael Barson, a middle-aged pop culture writer from New Jersey, certainly wasn't the target audience for romance comic books, but in the early 1980s he found himself amassing a sizable collection of them.

The first Dr. David Ansell went into the men's room at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, he immediately ran out. "It was so bad, I couldn't use it," he says. "I ran across the street and had to use the bathroom there. It was quite an introduction to my first day at County."

Those of us in North America won't be able to see it happen "live," but if all goes well we can catch a webcast of what's going to be "an unusually long total lunar eclipse" today.

Basically, every continent except North America will get a view. On the timing and length, Space.com says that:

In our relentless quest to tabulate, rank and arrange everything in tidy little lists, we compulsive staffers at NPR Music have devised both a multi-genre collection of our favorite 25 records of the year (so far) and a giant ballot where you can cast votes for your own.

Massive stores of natural gas that lie underneath big portions of the United States offer a cleaner source of electricity to a country that relies heavily on coal, but producing all that gas also can pump lots of pollution into the air.

Even as the book and music industries do battle on a field somewhere between media and reality for the title of Most Lost Cause, books by musicians have been doing very well — more specifically, books by rock stars of a certain age, with the likes of Steven Tyler, Keith Richards, Patti Smith, Nikki Sixx and Sammy Hagar scoring recent bestsellers. It's testimony to fans' connection to the music they love, and also to the power of a particular kind of story: classic rags-to-riches romance pumped up with the pleasure/pain, creator/destroyer extremes of the late 20th century rock star.