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Audie Cornish talks to Jon Ralston, host of the Nevada TV show Ralston Reports. He talks about the unprecedented number of political ads airing in Nevada this year. Many shows, including his, have been shortened to create more time for ads to run.

In coming months, Congress will begin an epic struggle to get the federal budget deficit under control. One tax break almost certain to come into play is the mortgage interest deduction.

Both President Obama and his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, have suggested ways to scale back the deduction's value for wealthy taxpayers. And many economists are cheering them on, saying that now — when interest rates are low — would be a great time to reduce or even phase out the deduction.

"If we are going to have a serious effort at reform, this will have to be considered," said Mark Luscombe, principle federal tax analyst with CCH Group, a tax services and software firm.

Annalisa Quinn is the Books intern at NPR.

During my senior year of college, I plowed through all 27,803 lines of the Iliad and the Odyssey in Greek, with a lot of coffee and a reasonable amount of crying in library cubicles.

I loved Homer. But the spare, plot-driven lines of dactylic hexameter left certain essential questions unanswered — was Patroclus cute? Was Helen good in bed? I had read Adele Geras' young adult novel Troy when I was 12 or 13, years before I touched Homer, and it had given me the lasting impression that ancient Greece was a smoldering pit of lust filled with golden-haired virgins. Disappointingly, in Homer, heroes tend to be simply "good," "noble" and, occasionally, "large." This meant that even as I translated the Greek, my head would supply snatches of Troy. I'd read about Zeus and pictured him with eyes "like liquid gold," per Geras' rapturous descriptions.

The Iliad is probably a better poem for never describing the size of Helen's breasts or the exact shade of Paris' hair (a "spun gold," if you believe Geras). But there is something immensely satisfying about the unabashed sentimentalism and lush prose of Geras's Troy after the cryptic sparsity of the original, in which the city falls only by implication, when its hero, Hector, dies. We never see it go down, which is both masterful and frustrating. But Troy provides us with flames, destruction and trysts among the ruins.

The novel follows various Trojan women during the siege and destruction of the city and features several love triangles, an unwanted pregnancy, and sometimes shockingly bad prose ("There's a fire burning in my body, and only you can put it out"). Xanthe and Marpessa are a pair of sisters in love with the same boy, the unsubtly named Alastor (Greek for "vengeful spirit"), and together they survive the deaths of Hector, Achilles, Priam and, eventually, the destruction of the city.

Troy is unrelated to the 2004 film of the same name starring Brad Pitt and his glistening abdominals, but in some ways the two Troys are kindred spirits, both far more focused on Eros than Ares and not above a certain amount of melodrama. That being said, Troy-the-novel has considerably more taste than Troy-the-film, although I feel confident that Geras could have captured the sinister pre-battle gleam of Achilles' hairless chest in prose better than anyone, had she so chosen. Instead, everything in Troy has a sort of vague erotic wash — never pornographic but always suggestive.

Homeric epic has spawned countless literary retellings, some magnificent (Vergil's Aeneid), some odd (Thomas Bridges' A Burlesque Translation of Homer), and some magnificently odd (Statius' Achilleid, a first century Latin mini-epic featuring Achilles in drag). But this soap opera of a novel will always be my favorite example of trashy Homeric fan fiction.

My Guilty Pleasure is produced and edited by Ellen Silva and Rose Friedman.

"I'm not crazy," the figure says, standing alone in a dark room, as if trying to convince himself.

"I'm not crazy?" almost a question this time.

"I'm not crazy. I'm not crazy. I'm not crazy!" he yells, finally making up his mind.

And, of course, he sounds crazy.

Meet Beeshu, an avatar of the embattled president of Syria, Bashar Assad, rendered in papier-mache and mounted on someone's finger. He's the star of the show Top Goon and the inspiration for its title.

The show — a darkly funny series about a group of Syrian characters rendered as finger puppets — was recently created and produced by Syrian activists and posted on YouTube.

But to this day, no one knows their real names.

That's because the regime in Syria is still standing, and those who want to bring it down face detention, beating, sometimes torture, and sometimes death.

An Underground Operation

In other words, the Top Goon team is totally underground.

Watch a few episodes, and you'll understand why. Episode 2, "Who Wants to Kill a Million?" is a clear reference to the tens of thousands of people who have died at the hands of the regime since the anti-government uprising began more than a year and a half ago.

YouTube

This episode of Top Goon featured the Syrian president on the left, a member of the security forces on the right, and a photo of the former president, Hafez Assad, who is the father of the current leader.