Our guest Scott Huler set out to follow all the wires, cables, pipes, drains, and sewers from his back yard to understand the grid of infrastructure that makes our lives possible. One of the things he found--surveyors have shaped your life even before your house is built, and three of the four Presidents on Mount Rushmore worked as surveyors. Huler's new book is "On The Grid: A Plot of Land, an Average Neighborhood, and the Systems that Make Our World Work."

Kaydon and Kameron Hayes are almost three months old and they're already at the center of an ethical dilemma. The twins are cared for in the neonatal intensive care unit at the University of Illinois Medical Center in Chicago. They are conjoined — sharing a liver and a malformed heart. We speak with Lisa Anderson Shaw of the medical center's Clinical Ethics Consult Service about the ethical questions the hospital staff is dealing with in caring for these children.

The Swedish chair of BP's board angered many Americans by saying he cared about the "small people" in the Gulf of Mexico, and CEO Tony Hayward has become one of the most hated men in America as a result of his comments about the company's gushing oil well, including saying "I'd like my life back" in a television interview. We speak with TJ Walker, CEO of Media Training Worldwide, about what's gone wrong in BP communications and how the company could improve its image.
http://www.vimeo.com/12118151

Some apologize, some claim their innocence, some even make jokes. Before Robert Alton Harris was executed in 1992, he said "You can be a king or a street sweeper, but everyone dances with the grim reaper," a line of dialogue from the film "Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey." Journalist Robert K. Elder included those words in his new book, "Last Words Of The Executed" and he joins us to talk about it.