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University of Notre Dame women's basketball coach Muffet McGraw has led her team to five NCAA Final Fours, is the reigning Naismith College Coach of the Year, and has a spot in the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame. On top of all that, she could almost certainly beat most NPR listeners at a game of H-O-R-S-E.

The only other Muffet we've ever met is the Little Miss, so we've invited McGraw to play a game called "So what exactly is a tuffet anyway?" Three questions about nursery rhymes and children's songs.

Consider how many synonyms there are for tedium: boredom, monotony, uniformity, dreariness, ennui, listlessness, each with its own subtle nuances. Perhaps it says something about our society that we must differentiate between the boredom of the office cubicle and of the traffic jam.

None of the authors below set out to write a book about tedium, but hovering always just behind the scenes is that debilitating affliction, sluggish and repetitious, playing a central role in their lives.

Anselm Kiefer was born in 1945, in the Black Forest of southwest Germany, just as the Third Reich was collapsing.

"I was born in ruins, and for me, ruins are something positive," Kiefer says. "Because what you see as a child is positive, you know? And they are positive because they are the beginning of something new."

That history is always present in Kiefer's sculptures and paintings. One of the major figures in post-World War II German art, Kiefer has works in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Australia, among many others.

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Comedian Bill Cosby has been in show-business for 50 years, and he celebrated on Comedy Central over the weekend with a stand-up special — his first in 30 years — called Far From Finished.

That earlier special, called Bill Cosby Himself, inspired one of the most popular sit-coms in TV history: The Cosby Show, starring Cosby as paterfamilias Cliff Huxtable. It was show that was really the first of its kind, capturing life in a highly educated upper-middle-class African-American family.

Cosby's 76 now, and he's got a room full of awards. But he shows no sign of letting up — and with his 50th-anniversary special, we thought it would be a good time to check in.

But I've got to tell you, I immediately lost control of the interview. He wrong-footed me at the outset, asking what I had to say for myself that morning. And when I hesitated, he ... well, he kinda took me to school.

"Mr. Greene," he said in that inimitable paternal baritone, "I think this is your program. And I'm sure that whatever professor you had said, 'For God's sake don't say, "Lemme <stutter mumble squeak...>"'"

But when I'd gotten my act together, and asked what moment he points to as the launching point of his long career, his answer took us back to the 1960s. Cosby was a student at Temple University in Philadelphia, and it was in class there that he noticed something that would become central to his comedy: the way his mind has a tendency to wander.

"I'm drifting!" he says. "I'm drifting ADD off of Professor Barrett."

And "the ability to drift," as he puts it, is key to his free-associative comedy.

"ADD people, they are the real — and this is my humor, but it's true — they are the real multitaskers," he says.

Jokes About Marriage, And Sober Truths At Home

Cosby's comedy, old and new, has always involved a heavy dose of domestic-affairs humor — jokes about the plight of the husband and the iron rule of the wife. He says his own wife, Camille Cosby, honestly loves his marriage jokes — actually edits some of them.

The two have been through a lot in their 49 years together: Cosby has admitted to a secret affair. He settled a lawsuit with another woman who claimed he'd drugged and sexually assaulted her.

And the Cosbys lost their son, Ennis, in 1997. The 27-year-old was shot and killed on a California roadside while changing a tire. His murder rocked the family, along with a public that, in a way, felt it had watched Ennis grow up on TV, in the character of Theo Huxtable.

In talking to Cosby about losing his son, something becomes clear: His wife is indeed the one who manages the family.

"I was told about Ennis," Cosby remembers. "And immediately, immediately after opening the front door and going into the house, the children were there, the daughters, and it was quiet. And I went to her, and she was warm, she was loving. And she mothered, she wifed. She human-ed — and helped me an awful lot."

Man work, woman cook? Not in Bill Cosby's world view.

"It's wonderful, and it's hilarious," he says. "It's hilarious because you and I, and our fathers and our grandfathers and our great-grandfathers are told, 'You will toil in the fields, and you will pick up the oxen and carry them and do all of this and that,' and she's supposed to be there in an apron boiling a pot of something.

"And we forget, the males:You. Are. Her oldest child."